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ommunication is a huge key to substantive change in the quality of the lives of former NFL players, specifically players’ doing away with the macho notion that they keep depression and anxiety to themselves. One of the flash points in the awareness of brain trauma and depression in former players was the 2012 suicide of Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, whose friends claim to this day that they didn’t see any outward signs that he was ready to take his own life. The fact is that the tougher a guy appears to be, the less those around him think he needs help. Seau obviously needed help in the worst way possible. “Junior Seau embodied an otherworldly level of toughness,” said Taylor, who was a teammate of Seau’s in San

Diego. “I knew he had issues; I took him to A.A. meetings with me. His death really shook people up.” If there can be a positive pulled from the fire of a tragedy like Seau’s death, though, it is indeed the resulting attention to the plight of bruised and battered retired players, and that the tide seems to have turned for them in their fight for resources and help after their careers. There is most assuredly still more work to do. On the NFL Players Association side of things, Myers believes more communication with players during their athletic careers on post-player planning is a necessity. “We need to come up with any program we can to communicate to guys and make them knowledgeable about finances and life after football while they’re playing,” said Myers. “I’ve even thought about a program that communicates this to guys before they get into the league.” Even with the enhanced post-career preparation programs available to players, there will always be a degree of trial and error when it comes to guys’ identifying their optimal career paths. Anderson flirted with a radio career before settling upon graduate school and his current employer (although he jokes that he would still rather just “roller-blade all day in a Speedo and spend the rest of [his] money”). Upon sobriety, Taylor backpacked through Europe for a couple of months as an active way to figure out his purpose in life. He thought it would be as a teacher, until ABC called to hire him as a college football analyst in 2002, a position that he now holds with CBS. Myers is moving his family to Philadelphia later this year, into a brand-new dream home that ten years in the NFL allowed him to build. He is still adjusting to life after football and for now appears to have taken a liking to coaching, specifically training NFL draft prospects, but he’s still figuring things out. Winston might come back for another year with the Bengals, but either way, his tenure as president of the NFLPA has given him a crash course in finding that post-NFL purpose. “It’s allowed me a glimpse at the future while I’m still playing,” Winston said. “I’ve learned a ton about running a business. Understanding, learning, it’s been out of sight.” The NFL has never been more popular and more lucrative than it is at this very moment. Every financial metric says the game is healthier than it’s ever been. It would stand to reason that the most important employees, the ones who truly are the product, would have a chance for similar health after they’re done playing, so there don’t need to be any more Junior Seaus and so that the 78 percent of retired players who are bankrupt, divorced or chemically dependent within two years dwindles to a much smaller number. There is an old, morbid saying that football players die twice — once when they retire and again when they actually die. It encapsulates the abyss of despair players have tumbled into for decades upon retirement. Going forward, Winston would like to see that metaphor turned completely on its head, and tell every retired player: “You climbed the mountain one time; you can do it again.”

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“Even the most well-adjusted guys struggle, and it’s strange: The longer they play football, the less qualified guys feel they are to do anything else,” said Winston. “Guys don’t realize, though, how unique it is that they’ve worked 12- to 15-hour days constantly for years, and how that stacks up when they’re working with regular people. Football players bring something unique to the table.“ Convincing and communicating to NFL players that their workplace, with its average career of a little more than three years and an average annual salary of $2 million, can somehow actually facilitate normalcy after they retire is a massive but necessary step. As much as we all enjoy our fantasy football drafts and our Sundays in the fall, it’s pretty eye-opening that the transition of the average NFL player to regular society probably best mirrors the transition of paroled prisoner Red in Shawshank Redemption, in which the character actually wishes he could go back to prison because he misses its mindless routine and draconian structure. On a related note, in that aforementioned Newsday survey from 2015, 61 percent of former players said they found it difficult to adjust to daily life after their NFL careers, and 89 percent said that, despite the medical and emotional difficulties they were experiencing as a result of football, they would do it all over again. When it comes to explaining the transition to life after football, Aaron Taylor prefers an analogy in which he sees every NFL player driving toward a cliff, and that cliff is retirement from the NFL. “We are all going to drive off that cliff, but some will do it with more velocity,” Taylor explains. “That velocity is generated by money, by resources. Guys like Drew Bledsoe, with their health and tens of millions of dollars in the bank, will go off the cliff at a high speed, fly far and land softly. Other guys, with less money, less resources, less velocity, they’ll plummet straight down and land hard. “Most guys in the league land hard,” Taylor conceded. While the removal of structure and interpersonal camaraderie with the other players is a huge reason retired players tumble emotionally, Taylor believes the biggest reason is that, unlike with other jobs, when players are fired from football, they are fired from the industry permanently. “Think about it. If you’re a banker or a chef or nearly any other occupation, and you get fired, there’s always another bank or restaurant or whatever,” said Taylor. “But there’s only one National Football League, and when you’re asked to leave, it’s forever. It’s hard to put into words how frightening that is for guys.”

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