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This intimate biography of the NFL icon by a veteran sports reporter sheds light on his singular life and the controversy surrounding his tragic death. Tiaina Baul “Junior” Seau is widely considered to be among the best linebackers in NFL history, a ten-time All-Pro, a twelve-time Pro Bowl selection, and a first-ballot entrant into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But in 2012, just two years after retiring from football, Junior Seau committed suicide. Studies of his brain by the National Institutes of Health concluded that Seau suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease often caused by repeated hits to the head. Seau’s suicide spawned numerous investigations into the brains of deceased NFL players, and many were found to have CTE. Drawing on exclusive access to Seau’s family as well as Seau’s never-before-seen diaries and letters, Jim Trotter paints a moving and revealing portrait of a larger-than-life sports star whose achievements on the field were rivaled by his personal demons. “Few people knew Junior Seau like Jim Trotter . . . he took a sports book and artistically crafted it into a lyrical narrative about dreams, love, and, ultimately, heart-wrenching loss.”—Lars Anderson, author of The All Americans
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.
Profiles the personal life and football career of the hard-working linebacker for the San Diego Chargers who helped his team get to Super Bowl XXIX.
Perseverance, courage, and the personal will to succeed are the qualities that bind the athletes profiled in this new series of authorized sports biographies for children. The athletes come to life in a plentiful assortment of action, portrait, and full-color photos that take them from childhood to the playing fields and arenas of their greatest accomplishments. Includes timeline, career stats, glossary, and an index.
After nine NFL seasons, many experts consider San Diego's Junior Seau to be the best linebacker in football today. He has started 140 of 141 regular season games during his career, and is averaging 119.8 tackles per season. He has been named to eight consecutive Pro Bowls. Seau also established The Seau Foundation, a charitable organization to benefit San Diego youth programs. In 1994, Seau's charitable endeavors were recognized when he was named the True Value Hardware NFL Man of the Year.
Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award “Everything that’s rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle football is encompassed in Tropic of Football. . . illuminating.” —Newsday How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more players—from Troy Polamalu to Marcus Mariota—for the NFL than anywhere else in the world, by an award-winning sports historian Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots—high school and youth travel program—are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. Jesse Sapolu, Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and Marcus Mariota are among the star players to emerge from the Samoan islands, and more of their brethren suit up every season. The very thing that makes them so good at football—their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image—makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries. Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck travels to the South Seas to unravel American Samoa's complex ties with the United States. He finds an island blighted by obesity, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incurring far more neurological damage than their stateside counterparts and haunted by Junior Seau, who committed suicide after a vaunted twenty-year NFL career, unable to live with the demons that resulted from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Tropic of Football is a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be football's last frontier.
Born in American Samoa, Junior Seau moved to California and starred in high school sports. After his junior year at University of Southern California, he was drafted by the San Diego Chargers and proved himself to be an aggressive linebacker feared by quarterbacks around the league.
Profiles the personal life and football career of the hard-working linebacker for the San Diego Chargers who helped his team get to Super Bowl XXIX.
Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cockiness, a false sense of superiority. The athlete is a noble figure with a proud lineage. The jock is America at its worst. When Mark Edmundson’s son began to play organized football, and proved to be very good at it, Edmundson had to come to terms with just what he thought about the game. Doing so took him back to his own childhood, when as a shy, soft boy growing up in a blue-collar Boston suburb in the sixties, he went out for the high school football team. Why Football Matters is the story of what happened to Edmundson when he tried to make himself into a football player. What does it mean to be a football player? At first Edmundson was hapless on the field. He was an inept player and a bad teammate. But over time, he got over his fears and he got tougher. He learned to be a better player and came to feel a part of the team, during games but also on all sorts of escapades, not all of them savory. By playing football, Edmundson became what he and his father hoped he’d be, a tougher, stronger young man, better prepared for life. But is football-instilled toughness always a good thing? Do the character, courage, and loyalty football instills have a dark side? Football, Edmundson found, can be full of bounties. But it can also lead you into brutality and thoughtlessness. So how do you get what’s best from the game and leave the worst behind? Why Football Matters is moving, funny, vivid, and filled with the authentic anxiety and exhilaration of youth. Edmundson doesn’t regret playing football for a minute, and cherishes the experience. His triumph is to be able to see it in full, as something to celebrate, but also something to handle with care. For anyone who has ever played on a football team, is the parent of a player, or simply is reflective about its outsized influence on America, Why Football Matters is both a mirror and a lamp.