Timothy Hughes
Chris Borland is working with other advocates to raise awareness of the threat of head injuries.
The beginning of the end of Chris Borland’s football career came as he sat on the sidelines and witnessed the University of Wisconsin Badgers blow a two-point-conversion attempt late in the 2011 Rose Bowl, en route to a 21-19 defeat by Texas Christian University.
The former UW linebacker had suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in September 2010, which gave him plenty of time to think about the potential physical and mental ramifications of the game he had played since freshman year at Archbishop Alter High School in Kettering, Ohio.
Football consumed his life. But, he wondered, at what cost?
Borland went on to play three more seasons for the Badgers after redshirting that 2010 season, and he ranks sixth on the school’s all-time list for total tackles (420) and is tied for eighth in sacks (17). He set a Big Ten record with 15 forced fumbles, became the first Wisconsin linebacker since 1951 to earn first-team All-America honors and won the most Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week awards in conference history.
The San Francisco 49ers were paying attention and made Borland’s dreams come true, picking him in the third round of the 2014 National Football League draft.
“I wanted all that more than I cared about my health in college,” Borland says now. “And I knew I was going to pay a price.”
Eventually, the burden of that potential debt became too great.
In training camp last summer, Will Tukuafu — at the time a 290-pound fullback with the 49ers — plowed into Borland during a full-contact practice. “He hammered me,” Borland remembers. “There’s a difference between what a football player considers a concussion and what a neurologist considers a concussion; I had a neurologist’s version of a concussion.”
The thoughts that first entered his mind on the sidelines of the Rose Bowl three and a half years earlier returned. “I was the type of guy who played through anything,” Borland says. “And I started feeling like that might be really unwise.”
So unwise, in fact, that Borland shocked just about everybody when he announced in March his retirement from professional football after playing only one season with the 49ers, citing concerns about potential head injuries. With that move, one of the NFL’s top rookies in 2014 forfeited most of a four-year contract worth almost $3 million and pledged to return three-quarters of his $617,436 signing bonus.
Five weeks later, following a major media tour in which the 24-year-old made appearances on both ESPN’s Outside the Lines and CBS’s Face the Nation, he was in Madison — meeting with UW athletic director Barry Alvarez and the UW football coaching staff, guest-lecturing at his alma mater in Sean Dinces’ “Sports, Recreation and Society in the U.S.” history class, and sitting down for an exclusive 80-minute interview with Isthmus.
Borland, who still lives in Mountain View, Calif., appeared fit and chiseled, looking much more like someone who could run the 100-meter dash in under 12 seconds (as he did at Archbishop Alter High) than the 250-pound linebacker he was in the NFL.
Former Green Bay Packers offensive tackle and Isthmus co-owner Mark Tauscher sat in on the interview session, which provided the opportunity for two former NFL players from two different eras to swap stories. (Here is an excerpt of Tauscher’s head-to-head conversation with Borland.)
Borland, who has been officially diagnosed with two concussions, says he shared his concerns about head trauma with select San Francisco teammates. “The term one of them used to describe a career in football is ‘occupational hazard,’” he says. “If you are a construction worker, you may cut off your thumb. That’s a fair point. But I think the difference is that head trauma in football isn’t incidental. It’s instrumental. I missed calls or made bad errors on the field because I got my bell rung.”
When Borland wasn’t practicing, he put his UW history degree to good use by reading lots of books — including League of Denial (a scathing indictment of the NFL’s longtime aversion to recognizing the game’s dangers), Is There Life After Football? (an examination of the post-NFL lives of hundreds of former players) and several titles by Michael Oriard, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University who also played four seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs and writes about the business and culture of football.
Borland also studied chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease that can only be diagnosed upon death and is typically found in individuals with a history of multiple concussions. Football and hockey players, wrestlers and boxers are CTE’s most common victims.
Mike Webster: Patient zero in the concussion discussion.
Patient zero in the national concussion discussion is Mike Webster, a Tomahawk native who played center in the NFL from 1974 to 1990 and earned the nickname “Iron Mike” for not missing a single game in 10 seasons. After retirement, Webster suffered from amnesia, dementia and depression, as well as acute bone and muscle pain. He became a vagabond, traveling aimlessly between Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; Webster died in 2002 at age 50.
Webster also was the first former NFL player diagnosed with CTE. Since then, researchers at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy have examined the brains of at least 61 other deceased NFL players and diagnosed at least 59 of them with CTE. Among the more famous names are former All-Pros Dave Duerson (safety) and Junior Seau (defensive linebacker), who both died from self-inflicted bullets.
“At night, after getting back from studying film of our opponent that week, I was researching CTE in guys who shot themselves in the chest,” Borland says. “So I had to dig really deep to motivate myself for games. I thought about walking away earlier than I did, but I signed a contract that I was going to potentially be in breach of, so I told myself to at least finish one year. Had I not finished my first year, I would have considered it quitting and turning my back on the people who drafted me and took a chance on me — which, maybe, some people think I still did. Which is fine.”
Other players are taking their concerns to court and seeing some results. Last month, U.S. District Judge Anita Brody granted final approval of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought against the NFL by more than 5,000 former players, claiming serious physical and mental conditions associated with repeat head trauma. The agreement provides up to $5 million per retired player and applies to those who retired or died on or before July 7, 2014.
Additionally, the NFL will pay $75 million for baseline medical exams for retired players, plus $10 million for concussion research and education. All told, the settlement is expected to cost the league an estimated $1 billion over the next 65 years — “an amount on par with what it earns during a single season in sponsorships alone,” PBS’s Frontline reports.
Chris Borland, thanks to his newfound fame beyond the football field, intends to help people understand how certain activities might cause head trauma. And he’s not only focused on athletes.
“I got introduced to a world that I didn’t know existed,” Borland says, citing potential involvement in a variety of advocacy activities, including military initiatives that link concussions with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also might work with George Visger, a defensive lineman for the 49ers in the early 1980s who underwent nine brain surgeries. Visger launched a traumatic brain injury consulting organization with an emphasis on raising awareness of such injuries among football players, military veterans and pediatric groups.
“There are so many things in that community that I’m going to be involved in, because I just feel it’s so important,” Borland says.
He’s apologized to the 49ers, too. “They draft players who want to play and assume those players are going to do everything they can to play for as long as they can,” Borland says. “They didn’t deserve to be undercut, and in some ways I feel I did that to them. But I had to do what’s best for my long-term health.”
Meanwhile, part of Borland’s initial plans — to attend graduate school, possibly in Madison, which he calls “the greatest city I’ve ever lived in” — have been put on hold. He’s had no time to take the required standardized Graduate Records Examination test.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” he admits. “I was looking at grad schools and was going to try to fit in the last GRE opportunity. I missed that, and now I don’t know if grad school makes sense for me. I’m still discovering a lot, and I’m going to do that until I think I know what I want to do. And then we’ll see where this wild ride takes me.”
One thing, though, is certain: “I won’t be watching a lot of football.”
Borland says that many of his former teammates from the Badgers and 49ers understand his decision and haven’t taken it as “an affront to their career.”
As for those who hide behind social media user names and blog posts to take shots at Borland? “It’s a decision unique to me,” he says. “I’ve experienced things that other people haven’t. I don’t judge anyone, and I prefer if I weren’t judged.”
Borland probably will be judged, though — wrongly or rightly — no matter what he does going forward. No, he’s not out to ruin the NFL. And yes, he realizes there are plenty of players who played pro football for years and show no signs of head trauma.
“I don’t want to mount a crusade and wave a banner for anything,” Borland says. “But this is a complicated issue, and it deserves to be talked about more. Let’s talk.”
