Football's toll on one man's promising life

 

Depression, memory loss and mood swings:

Zac Easter’s teenage years revolved around football. In an extract from his latest book, Reid Forgrave looks at how the sport has impacted one family

Reid Forgrave

 Zac Easter was 24 years old when, in December 2015, he took his father’s shotgun and turned it on his own chest. For years, Zac had been in a downward spiral that he blamed on the many concussions he’d suffered while playing football from youth through high school in small-town Iowa. He came to believe – correctly – that he was suffering from the same degenerative brain disease that had pushed many longtime NFL players to suicide.

After he died, his parents found Zac’s journal as well as an autobiography he had written that detailed his demise. The story of Zac Easter is a deeply painful tragedy of a young man’s descent, but it’s also a story about vital topics in today’s America: About parenting, about violence, about mental health, about toxic versus traditional masculinity - about what it means to be a man in 21st-century America.

With his memory failing him, Zac figured writing things down in a journal could only help. At times, the journal seemed like his best friend – the only one other than his girlfriend Ali he could open up to. One night in the spring of 2015, he pulled out a pen and at 9.40pm started scrawling on the lined pages of a black spiral-bound Five Star Mead notebook.

For hours at a time, starting that senior year of college and going into the summer after graduation, Zac would go online and research the post-concussion symptoms that he thought were wrecking his life. He wondered whether this nightmare was the price of playing football, the sport he’d loved his entire life – the sport that, let’s be honest, he still loved, even if it contributed to his ruin. He kept reading about this scary-sounding degenerative disease of the brain that presented like Alzheimer’s but appeared in ex- athletes from contact sports decades before Alzheimer’s would typically set in. It sounded like a scientific word salad: chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He couldn’t even spell it correctly, but the symptoms all sounded familiar: Memory problems. Personality changes. Mood swings between depression and aggression. He read about former NFL stars who’d been diagnosed with this terrifying disease, but only after they died, often by suicide. Zac watched a PBS documentary about NFL Hall of Famer Mike Webster, who was essentially Patient Zero in the developing public health crisis surrounding this brain disease among former football players.

From there, he laid it all out: He was quitting his job because he needed to focus on his health. He was often tired and dizzy and nauseated. He got headaches all the time. Sometimes while driving, he’d go into these trances; he’d snap out of it when he drove his car into a curb. Panic attacks came without warning. He had started writing down a long list of questions for his doctor; one of them was “Do you think I’m showing signs of CTE or dementia?” In fact, he already knew the answer to that one. He had just visited a doctor who specialized in concussions and who told him that, yes, he very well might have CTE.

His parents were stunned. They knew some things were off. Sometimes on the phone it sounded like Zac was talking with marbles in his mouth. And they’d noticed that his bank account, which they still had access to, was suddenly hemorrhaging money. But mostly, they just assumed their son was a young man grappling with the growing pains of adulthood and independence.

Now, though, he was telling them that he might have a mysterious brain disease that afflicted NFL players, haunting them for decades after their careers had ended. One psychologist even told Zac that he would end up penniless, homeless, and in a mental institution. Not could. Would. Zac had walked out of that guy’s office terrified.

Now, though, he was telling them that he might have a mysterious brain disease that afflicted NFL players, haunting them for decades after their careers had ended. One psychologist even told Zac that he would end up penniless, homeless, and in a mental institution. Not could. Would. Zac had walked out of that guy’s office terrified.

• From Love, Zac by Reid Forgrave ©2020 by Reid Forgrave. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/sep/09/zac-easter-reid-forgrave-love-zac-football-concussion