More than 40 current or former professional players over the age of 50 have fallen since 2021. The number is staggering. But that doesn’t explain the desperation of their peers.
Marques Harris’ television flashed with images of the sport he had devoted nearly two decades of his life to, and now he felt pangs of nostalgia. So he did what hardened men are too often reluctant to do: He let his friend know he missed her.
As the former Chargers linebacker watched the Bills and Chiefs face off in the 2021 AFC Championship Game in January, one of his first NFL friends came to mind. Harris entered the league with San Diego in ’05. along with receiver Vincent Jackson, and now their longtime teammate, defensive lineman Jacques Cesaire, was helping the Bills, who were one win away from a trip to Super Bowl LV in Tampa. If that happened, Harris thought, it was time for a long-overdue reunion, after the pandemic had torn them apart—Jackson in Tampa, where he finished his career; Harris in Colorado; and Cesaire so often on the road. If Buffalo wins, I’ll come to Tampa Bay, Harris texted Jackson. I would like to see you.
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Jackson, a quiet man who leads by example, with an iron body and an intellect to match, was among the teammates Harris admired most. The two shared a locker room for five seasons in San Diego, and Jackson attended both Harris’ bachelor party and his wedding. So Harris wasn’t particularly upset when his old friend didn’t immediately respond. He knew Jackson was busy with his children, his foundation, his real estate and restaurant growth.
Harris, however, didn’t know he was texting a man who by then had been holed up in a hotel room outside Tampa for two weeks as a semi rumbled down I-75 outside his window. He did not know that his 38-year-old friend’s frontal lobes had shrunk. Or that the damage caused forgetfulness and paranoia. Or that Jackson suffered from depression in the six months after his 12-year NFL career ended in 2016. Or that the only cure he found for his loss of identity and mental acuity was at the bottom of the bottle, and that drinking brought Jackson and his wife Lindsey, to protect their four children from his deterioration by directing him to that lonely hotel room.
Harris, when he sent the message, had no idea that Jackson was alone, drinking himself to death. All he knew was that he missed his friend.
The Bills, in the end, lost. Texts were not returned. For Harris, a father of five, life has moved on. For Jackson, it didn’t. On Feb. 13, three weeks after that playoff game, housekeepers walked into his hotel room and thought he was asleep when they saw him hunched over, motionless, on the sofa. The next day they thought the same. On the 15th, an overcast Monday, they found him in the same position and called 9-1-1. Jackson’s blood alcohol level, an autopsy later revealed, registered at 0.28%, about the time most people pass out.
The news devastated Harris not only because he lost a friend, or because that friend seemed better prepared than any player Harris has known to find light in the void that often follows a career’s final whistle. Harris was frustrated because Jackson was the sixth former football friend to either kill himself or die of despair — a list that includes Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam and pro football Hall of Famer Junior Seau, both of whom ended their lives with a bullet.
Weeks passed after Jackson’s death. Eventually, the grief began to subside – but Harris couldn’t escape the emotions that crept in.
Seau moved on when Harris, 92, arrived in San Diego. For the Chargers, this was the era of Vincent Jackson, another tragic NFL figure.
In 2022, Charles Johnson, a former receiver who went to two Super Bowls and later said he suffered brain, head, spine and neck injuries, died by suicide at age 50. Bears died at the age of 38 from heatstroke after a long series of mental problems. Colts and Ravens defensive tackle Tony Siragusa fell asleep at age 55 and never woke up. (The immediate cause of his death remains unconfirmed.) Shane Olivea, a linebacker for the Chargers and Giants, succumbed at age 40 to heart disease after battling an addiction to prescription painkillers. William White, a three-team safety, succumbs to ALS at age 56.
In April 2021, Phillip Adams, a journeyman, fatally shot six people and then himself. He was 32 years old. Demaryius Thomas, who won a Super Bowl with the Broncos, has died at age 33 of complications from a seizure. Geno Hayes, a linebacker for the Buccaneers, Bears and Jaguars, died at the same age from liver disease, which he attributed in part to a career spent taking over-the-counter painkillers. For 49ers and Saints linebacker Parys Haralson, it was a stroke, at 37. And Greg Clark, a 49ers tight end, shot himself in the head after showing myriad symptoms of CTE. He was 49 years old.
In all, 44 current or former NFL players age 50 or younger have died since the start of 2021, according to Pro Football Reference. Although professional football players tend to live longer than the general population (thanks in part to their fitness, wealth and access to first-class health care), they are more vulnerable than their counterparts in other sports to neurodegenerative or cardiovascular diseases. And they are more likely to die by suicide.
The root causes of football’s unique impacts are well documented, from repetitive head trauma to chronic pain, etc. Often overlooked in these dark titles, however, are the players who can’t help but see themselves in every fallen peer.
Among the young and dead: Barber, who led the Cowboys in rushing three times in the 2000s.
Damian Strohmeyer/Sports Illustrated
Players like Harris. In the months after Jackson’s death, Harris, now 41, began visiting a medical facility outside Denver that specializes in brain health. There, he participated in a four-week program designed to combat the onslaught of growing and unfamiliar feelings: anger, memory loss, lapses in concentration. For one exercise, Harris strapped a gyroscope to an amusement park, whose tilting and turning trained his brain to respond to stressors without causing fear or anger. Second, he tapped the lights on the wall in front of him, with the goal of improving his balance and reaction time. Harris was desperate to revive the nerve pathways he had grown increasingly concerned about withered — and when test results four weeks later showed improvement, he clung to them as a lifeline.
Motivated by Jackson’s death — and Seau’s and Salaam’s and all the others — Harris sought to spread the word to any former teammates who would listen. Check each other out. Seek psychological help. Don’t suffer in silence. He feared that if his former teammates—some of the strongest men he knew—couldn’t escape the game’s most dire consequence, maybe no one could.
“I don’t want to just sit back and wait for something to happen,” Harris says. “It’s definitely scary.”
When Junior Seau took a bullet to his chest in 2012, Jackson was among a legion of NFL players upset by the news. So was Ray Crockett, who retired a decade before Seau’s suicide, and who had long counted the quarterback as a friend.
Crockett, who won two Super Bowls with the Broncos in his 14 years at cornerback, saw Seau at a charity golf event just a week before his death. The two would often meet in San Diego, where Seau lived and owned a restaurant, and where Crockett owned apartments. And that day, Crockett remembers, the boisterous linebacker was “full of energy and smiles.” (Two years earlier, Crockett had dined in Las Vegas with former Bears tight end Dave Duerson, the two veteran defensive backs discussing their latest business ventures and future ambitions. Months later, Duerson killed himself in the same manner as Seau, pointing to suicide note that he wanted his brain preserved and studied.)
It was around the time of Seau’s death that Crockett says he began having trouble falling asleep. He would catch himself staring out the window. He would worry about the strange noises he would hear when he knew his house was empty. He says he has been diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Later, when reports began to leak about Seau’s insomnia and mood swings, and Duerson’s headaches and memory fading, Crockett says he was overcome with fear. “I’ve just been diagnosed,” he thought, “with the same team—they killed themselves.”
Harris and Crockett were deeply affected by the manner and circumstances of Seau’s death.
Crockett’s spiral — his divorce and poor financial decisions, along with drug and alcohol abuse, much of which he attributes to the sense of identity he lost when his career ended — reached a point where he said in 2013 that he found himself sitting alone for hours on end. on the floor of the closet one night, with a gun in his lap. He couldn’t escape the shadows cast by Seau and Duerson. He was convinced that his own end would mirror theirs.
“I had the same thoughts [as them],” he says. “Are these headaches worth it? Are these feelings worth it, not understanding what the hell is going on with me?
“I’ve never been emotional. I never needed a hug. “I’ve always been the hottest guy, the smartest guy,” Crockett says. “Now I’m forgetting s—. I can’t find my keys. They don’t remember words. All kinds of things I’ve never experienced.” So Crockett spent the loneliest night of his life on the closet floor, clutching his gun and sobbing.
Eventually, Crockett says he realized the bullet he hoped would silence the noise was stuck in the chamber. The breakdown left him more time to struggle with himself and the memories of his peers. He says he thought about Seau’s four children, then his two sons and what their lives might be like without their father. “And [I] couldn’t let that be my family,” he says.
Crockett decided that night that he would instead try to keep the delusions and depression at bay. Today, he sees a therapist and a psychiatrist and attacks every day, he says, as if he were pressing the phone on the battle line, afraid to let the dark thoughts go.
An NFLPA representative during his playing days, Crockett looks around the league now and says the offerings for retirees — both from the players’ association and the league — have improved in recent years, but he resents how long it took to get to the point of helping an aging cohort that help most needed. What’s more, he believes those improvements (including the introduction of The Trust in 2013, a powerful program designed to help retired players address a range of needs from career counseling to financial planning to mental health) were driven not by charity but by necessity, citing a 16 settlement in which the NFL eventually provided roughly $1 billion to help former players “diagnosed with certain neurological disorders.”
“Let’s be realistic,” he says. “That’s because they’re fucking dying. You get sued and lose [all that money] – I think that would make me do [things] a little differently too.”
Football brought Crockett both joy (here, with his son, after Super Bowl XXXII) and pain.
When Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped and he collapsed on the field during the Monday night game on Jan. 2, shock waves of fear went through current and former players. However, it was not the first time this season that the players were shaken by what they witnessed. In the second quarter of a Week 4 scrimmage in Cincinnati, 340-pound Bengals defensive tackle Josh Tupou grabbed Dolphins quarterback Tuo Tagovailoa by the waist and threw him to the ground. The 24-year-old caller’s head hit the turf, the impact sending his hands into a clutch and his fingers curling like pretzels as he lay unconscious. Al Michaels, rarely one for words, mustered only a dazed “Uh-oh” as the Amazon Prime show zoomed. The light fell on the crowd, and Tagovailoa was carted off the field — no rote thumbs up, no subdued applause — to the waiting ambulance.
That incident happened just four days after Tagovailoa, in a game against the Bills, fell awkwardly on his head, staggered and had to be supported by his teammates, also in front of a television audience of millions. The net effect of the two incidents was a public outcry — and a private one. After the scene played out in Cincinnati, NFLPA president JC Tretter, 31, a former center for the Packers and Browns, watched as his phone began to flash with messages from active players. See what happened? How did this happen? This can’t happen again. They were looking for answers. Protection. Protocols. And hidden in those pleas was concern about the invisible line connecting the 24-year-old quarterback, who lay unconscious on the field, and Vincent Jackson, who sat dead in a highway hotel room for three days.
The messages on Tretter’s phone lacked the acute fear of, say, Marques Harris, but they called for actions to help keep that kind of fear at bay, allowing players to feel protected — by rules and enforcers — while playing an extremely violent sport.
So Tretter led conversations that evening and the following days about how to better hold teams, the league, even players accountable for all the evolving concussion practices shaped by the ever-evolving science.
When Tagovailoa went down (again) in September, Tretter heard from panicked voters around the league almost immediately.
Treter, during his eight years in the league, has become accustomed to playing through deep pain. He says NFL players in general are used to going to a “really dark place” to stay on the field. Because NFL careers are so short — average length: three years — and because opportunities are so fleeting, he says most players will put themselves at enormous personal risk unless the rules force them to the sidelines. And the night Tagovailoa was carted off, Tretter realized he and the players he represented needed to erect stronger guardrails, in many cases to save the players from themselves. (Tagovailoa, it’s worth noting, entered the NFL’s concussion protocol twice this season — after the Bengals game and after another incident in Week 16 — and missed six games.)
Tretter has yet to lose a former teammate to CTE or suicide or heart disease, but whenever he reads about the death of another young player, he says he turns inward. “You may not have met that person, or known the person, or played with them — but they’ve been in your shoes and done the same things as you,” he says. In those moments, it always led to “some private self-reflection, thinking about my decisions and the choices I’ve made.”
Treter, at his age, says he doesn’t worry about the future yet, but it’s never far from his mind. He knows that linemen are most vulnerable to repeated blows to the head, which studies have shown leave players more likely to suffer from CTE or other neurodegenerative diseases, and which correlate with a shorter life expectancy.
“It’s not like I’m immune to the problems that other players have faced,” he says. “You have to be fully aware of how you feel mentally.”
The men who gathered every fall in the Chargers’ receiver room 20 years ago developed a bond that transcended free agency, retirement or relocation. One group of players—Jackson, Keenan McCardell, Greg Camarillo, Kassim Osgood, Malcom Floyd and Eric Parker, as well as their position coach, James Lofton—maintained a long-running text thread where they’d check in on each other, trade jokes and, occasionally, have fun in the news that one of them has become a husband or a father. McCardell, whose career was winding down when Jackson first walked into that room in 2005, took pride in mentoring the new guy, watching him grow and thrive on and off the court, where Jackson graduated from college, launched a successful commercial . real estate company and started a foundation to help military families.
McCardell remembers sharing a drink with Jackson just a few years before Jackson’s death, toasting their shared prosperity. Camarillo saw Jackson at an NFLPA convention around the same time, and recalls running into a businessman in a suit who seemed to have mastered life after the NFL. Jackson, they say, offered no indication of his deep personal crisis, either in those meetings or in their text thread. He did not cry out for help to those with whom he shared a dressing room and lasting friendships. So when news of Jackson’s death eventually hit the thread, “I was frozen,” McCardell says. “There were some guys that were really hurt.”
That hurt prompted the old friends to tell each other, basically: If you need help, reach out. “Football players are good at hiding [pain],” Camarillo says. Jackson’s death “created a way for us to open up. ‘Vince struggled. I’m sure other people struggle. Well, it’s okay to talk about it.”
Floyd, 80, shared a receivers room and later a text thread with Jackson, 83. Neither offered any indication of Jackson’s future.
Kirby Lee/Image of Sports/USA Today Network
In the end, it was Harris — their defensive teammate in San Diego and Jackson’s longtime friend — who put those feelings into full effect. Harris reached out to another old Charger, offensive tackle Roman Oben, who today serves as the NFL’s vice president of football development. “Roman,” he asked, “what can we do?”
From that conversation came an impromptu — and, for the NFL, seemingly unprecedented — set of meetings during the spring and summer of 2021. Working with the Chargers, Harris and Oben questioned old teammates who played between 2000 and ’10. a series of regular Zoom calls where they could share their sadness, fears and frustrations with an empathetic audience.
About two dozen former Chargers (along with the team’s psychologist of the past 17 years, Dr. Herb Martin) gathered for the first call in March 2021, just one month after Jackson’s death. At first they reflected on Jackson, sharing how his loss shaped their own thoughts and feelings of pain and confusion, but eventually opened up about the issues that might be driving them down a similar path: financial worries, marital strife, mental and physical struggles.
The raw honesty expressed in those conversations encouraged Martin, who has spent two decades dealing with men trained to mask pain and obscure fear. Old teammates, he says, “were able to share how they felt in a real way, unencumbered by the things we do as men in terms of protecting [emotions]. … It’s important for the general public to understand that [players] are very vulnerable. They are human, just like us.”
Those meetings lasted monthly, until August 2021, and each drew as many as 20 former players. Now Martin wants to take the reunions offline, in person, and the Chargers are on board. Presumably those meetings could help address common grievances among former players.
“One of the biggest things I hear,” Harris says, “is, ‘I’m done [playing] and the team doesn’t care about me.’ Or: ‘I won’t be invited to the games.’ Or, ‘No resources.’ To be honest, I’ve had those feelings in the past.”
“[We were] literally the same age — we came into the league together,” Camarillo says of his old teammate. “If [Jackson] had CTE, then we all could, and that’s scary.”
Harris, after retiring in 2009, remembers not being able to watch football for two years, such was his struggle with the loss of identity and structure after two decades in the game. He shared as much about the Chargers’ calls, and while most of those conversations focused on day-to-day struggles — finding new purpose or mending relationships — the specter of CTE loomed large.
McCardell mostly cares about his brain, though he tries not to dwell on it. For Camarillo, the fear is more acute, especially after Jackson’s death and subsequent diagnosis of Stage 2 CTE, characterized by mood swings, memory loss and headaches. Camarillo hasn’t yet encountered problems like Jackson’s, but he understands they could be lurking. And he knows: No amount of camaraderie or support on a Zoom call will ever fix it. “[We were] literally the same age—we came into the league together,” he says. “If [Jackson] had CTE, then we all could, and that’s scary.”
Just as Keenan McCardell served as a mentor to Vincent Jackson in San Diego years ago, Jackson played teacher when a tall, talented rookie named Mike Evans entered the receivers room late in Jackson’s career with the Buccaneers in 2014. Evans , indicated former teammates, he entered the league averse to fitness exercises; but he was assigned a locker next to Jackson, who trained constantly to keep his tall frame lean and strong—and Jackson seemed to get the better of the rookie. In addition to a rigorous fitness routine, Evans also noted the attention Jackson paid to his real estate and restaurant businesses. Says Evans: “He was the guy everyone wanted to be.”
On a date with his wife in Tampa during the Bucs’ 2021 run to the Super Bowl, Evans happened to drive by Jackson’s restaurant, Cask Social Kitchen. It was late and the restaurant was about to close for the evening, but Evans still took a moment to call his old mentor in hopes that he might be able to catch up with him. Jackson, who had been spending nights at the Homewood Suites until then, did not answer. He never answered. A few weeks later, back home in Texas, Evans found out why.
The two men shared a position. Split reps. Played in a similar style. Their bodies have taken a comparable toll from their sport. Yet despite those parallels, Evans refuses to let fear of the future get in the way of the present. For a 29-year-old in his relative athletic prime, the manner of Jackson’s death seems like an abstraction rather than a destination, even if the experiences of Jackson’s Charger contemporaries suggest that perception may change over time. “I’m fine,” Evans says. “I don’t think about it happening to me, but I’m hurt by what happened.”
Of Jackson’s death, Evans, 13, says, “I don’t think about it happening to me.” Others feel more connected to Jackson’s fate — and more concerned.
Cask Social Kitchen is not your stereotypical sports bar endorsed by some famous athlete. The restaurant’s exposed brick walls and concrete floors suit any chic new restaurant in a trendy pocket of the city. Which was all by design. Jackson’s football career should have been the starting point. He wanted to succeed on his own merits in the next stage of life, not by slapping a recognizable name on the marquee. It’s not unlike Ray Crockett’s aspirations to create a real estate empire and watch his sons grow old. Or Marques Harris’ desire to build communities of men who support each other. Or JC Tretter’s goal to put his college degree in industrial labor relations to good use after his days in the trenches.
Their ambitions go beyond the field of play. They never planned to give their lives to football. But as they reflect on the deaths of Jackson and Barber, Adams and Thomas, Hays and Clark, those who walked similar paths are often left to wonder if they may have already given up on the game.
