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Junior Seau's family tells why they're fighting NFL
By Dan Wetzel
Yahoo Sports
Even as far back in the early 1990s, during the initial years of Junior Seau's brilliant two-decade NFL career, the linebacker would complain to his then wife Gina of searing headaches.
"When he would come home from games, he would go straight to the room," Gina told Showtime's "60 Minutes Sports" in an episode that airs this week. "[He'd] lower the blinds, the blackout blinds, and just say, 'Quiet, my head is, is burning.'"
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Family members of Junior Seau attend a ceremony to retire Seau's No. 55 jersey in San Diego. (AP)
After Seau retired in 2010, his children slowly watched their dad's famously charismatic personality grow distant. He began slipping away from them. The post-NFL life they all envisioned became a nightmare.
"I saw a man that right before my eyes [wa] changing," son Tyler Seau said. "He wasn't that happy, go-lucky guy anymore."
"It was hard," daughter Sydney said. "Because we were all reaching for someone that wasn't exactly reaching back, even though we know – we knew that he wanted to."
Seau committed suicide in 2012 via a gunshot wound to his chest in a spare bedroom of his California home. He was 43. His death served as a final shock for any reasonable mind to recognize the devastation of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain injury that is prevalent in football players.
Read more: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/on--60...why-they-re-still-fighting-nfl-222142045.html
By Dan Wetzel
Yahoo Sports
Even as far back in the early 1990s, during the initial years of Junior Seau's brilliant two-decade NFL career, the linebacker would complain to his then wife Gina of searing headaches.
"When he would come home from games, he would go straight to the room," Gina told Showtime's "60 Minutes Sports" in an episode that airs this week. "[He'd] lower the blinds, the blackout blinds, and just say, 'Quiet, my head is, is burning.'"
.
Family members of Junior Seau attend a ceremony to retire Seau's No. 55 jersey in San Diego. (AP)
After Seau retired in 2010, his children slowly watched their dad's famously charismatic personality grow distant. He began slipping away from them. The post-NFL life they all envisioned became a nightmare.
"I saw a man that right before my eyes [wa] changing," son Tyler Seau said. "He wasn't that happy, go-lucky guy anymore."
"It was hard," daughter Sydney said. "Because we were all reaching for someone that wasn't exactly reaching back, even though we know – we knew that he wanted to."
Seau committed suicide in 2012 via a gunshot wound to his chest in a spare bedroom of his California home. He was 43. His death served as a final shock for any reasonable mind to recognize the devastation of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain injury that is prevalent in football players.
Read more: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/on--60...why-they-re-still-fighting-nfl-222142045.html
