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Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute (SLI). Like many other players with NFL medical claims, Boyd worries that the group’s work might be compromised by its research affiliate, Boston University, accepting a $1 million NFL grant. “When SLI honored [NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell with its Impact award, that really ticked me off,” Boyd told me. “Money can buy anything.”
    On Dave Duerson, Boyd summed up, “He spent years denying the concussion claims of other players. Then when the same symptoms started closing in on him, he killed himself. What does that tell you?”
    25 February 2011..........
    Writer Rob Trucks interviewed Dave Duerson, three months before he committed suicide, as part of an oral-history project on life challenges at age 50. Deadspin.com, the provocative sports news site, published an excerpt this week. It’s a valuable and timely document that everyone should read. 3
    I have a number of problems with this piece, starting with the title “You Have to Accept My Pain.” It took some desperate cutting and pasting to make that line the headline of the article. Far down in the interview, we finally get to the P-word:
    I do hold myself to a higher standard. I do. But the flip of that is, every one of us has things in their life they regret. For instance, I’m a Trekkie. And it wasn’t the series so much as the movies, the Star Trek movies. I remember a scene from one of the latter ones with William Shatner. This guy, Spock’s cousin or his brother, he could hug you and take away your pain. And he says, “Come join with me, and let me take away your pain.” And Dr. McCoy and everybody else is like, “Jim, you’ve got to do this. It’s wonderful.” And Captain Kirk tells him, “I need my pain, because it defines who I am.” And so in that regard when people come up to me and they tell me, “Man, I wish I were you,” I tell them in the same breath that in order to be me, you have to accept my pain.
    The first reaction to this loopy snippet is “Huh?”
    The other is that Duerson’s “pain” turns out to be defined as ­second-hand kitsch. That’s of a piece with the interview as a whole, which is narcissistic — painfully so. The locutor not only can’t seem to take responsibility for something as simple as being a Star Trek fan. He also can’t take responsibility for having wanted to be a football player, or for his arrest for domestic violence, or for watching late-night TV. We pay no honor to the real accomplishments of Duerson’s life — his NFL career and his once-prosperous food-supply business, which employed hundreds — by pretending otherwise. A good guess is that brain damage from thousands of athletic blows had taken their toll.
    As a reader with four kids himself, let me just say that it is profoundly disturbing for this man either to have had all along, or to have developed, an active fantasy life based on dying at 42. Death wishes are not admirable things, whether issued from jihadism or from the “Die Young, Stay Pretty” wing of rock and roll.
    In addition, as someone who joined my sister in burying our father and mother, respectively seven and six years ago, I find dreadfully self-pitying the way Duerson dwelled on the deaths of parents in his middle age and their old age. That is the circle of life. Now, parents burying their children , as is happening with a generation of totally pointless casualties in sports and sports entertainment — that’s a different story.
    Duerson called his 2005 arrest for beating his wife, which cost him his position as a trustee at his alma mater, Notre Dame, a loss of control “for three seconds.” I don’t know about that. The county prosecutor in Indiana filed two counts of battery and two of domestic battery. The police report said Duerson struck his wife and then shoved her out the door