By Phil Sheridan
Philly Inquirer Sports Columnist
They are the men the NFL would like us to forget, the limping and debilitated and destitute legions we cheered on Sunday afternoons. Truth be told, they are the men we’d like to forget, too.
The NFL and its media partners market and celebrate the violence of football. The thing about those bone-rattling hits is that they really do rattle bones, really do tear flesh and leave permanent damage. It is bad for business if fans know too much about the toll the game takes, linger too long on the long-term impact of all that impact.
And fans don’t want to dwell on that, either, for the same reason consumers like their meat clean and neatly wrapped in plastic with no sign of its source. It would be hard to enjoy those high-speed collisions if we had to think too much about the price being paid by the men in the pads and helmets.
So the story of Sam Rayburn in today’s Inquirer is more than a tale of one young man making poor decisions in an effort to cope with the pain left over when the football career ended. When Rayburn tells my colleague Mike Jensen that the path he was on led to “jail or death,” he was not being melodramatic. READ MORE
Transition to Life After NFL Tough for Many by Mike Jensen
