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It’s become increasingly difficult to ignore the well-documented risks that come with playing football for a living, as a study that was conducted at Boston University determined 91% of former players who donated their brains to science in the wake of their death exhibited signs of CTE.
That particular disease—which is known to severely hinder impulse control—has been painted as a contributing factor in the homicide perpetrated by Aaron Hernandez, who was diagnosed with one of the most severe cases ever documented for someone his age following his suicide in prison.
There’s also Phillip Adams, the retired cornerback who shot and killed five people in South Carolina before taking his own life, which led to the autopsy where a coroner discovered “unusually severe” evidence of the same ailment.
There are obviously plenty of players with CTE who haven’t decided to murder people, and it would be foolish to suggest brain trauma was the sole reason those two men decided to do what they did.
However, there’s no shortage of other examples that highlight the detrimental impact playing in the NFL can have in the long term—including the largely forgotten and fairly tragic tale of a former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman whose career (and, eventually, life) came to a fairly shocking end.
The positive drug test that led to Terry Long attempting to commit suicide
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I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume most football fans aren’t intimately familiar with Terry Long, an Army veteran who was recruited to play football at a junior college before taking his talents to East Carolina University, where he spent four years honing his skills as an offensive lineman.
The Steelers scooped up Long in the fourth round of the 1984 NFL Draft, and while the man who stood at 5’11” and tipped the scales at 272 lbs may have been fairly undersized for his position, he was able to hold his own and spent the bulk of his career as a starter on Pittsburgh’s offensive line.
While he started every single game for the Steelers in 1990, things essentially fell apart thanks to what transpired ahead of the team’s campaign in 1991.
In July of that year, Long was suspended for the first four games of the season after testing positive for steroids. Shortly after the news broke, the world learned an ambulance had taken him from training camp to a local hospital, which stemmed from his decision to ingest rat poison and sleeping pills in an attempt to take his own life after hearing the news.
While he would recover and return for his eighth (and final) NFL season, the Steelers opted to shift most of his previous workload to fellow offensive guards Dean Caliguire and Carlton Haselrig, and Long ultimately only started in three of the eight games he appeared in that year.
At that point, Long decided to retire and shift his attention to the various business ventures he pursued after hanging up his cleats. That included the poultry processing plant he operated before it mysteriously burned down in 2003, which sparked an investigation that led to federal prosecutors charging him with mail fraud and accusing him of setting the facility on fire to cash in on the insurance policy in 2005.
Less than three months later, Long was once again rushed to the hospital before he was declared dead at the age of 45.
While the initial autopsy determined he’d passed away from meningitis the coroner linked to the CTE that was detected further testing determined he’d consumed antifreeze to take his own life (although the medical examiner asserted the brain trauma had played a role).
While it would be nice to think we’ve reached a point where the NFL has figured out how to prevent stories like this from unfolding in the future, the sad reality is the league (and football as a whole) still has a long way to go.