Speaking of short lifespans for NFL players...

There's also this long and devastating piece in GQ about the growing evidence regarding football players and the staggering levels of brain damage incurred by many during their careers. The kicker (no pun intended) of course is that the NFL, like any other kind-hearted billion dollar organization, has been up until very recently been taking it upon itself to do all it can to downplay any connection between head injuries and their devastating long term effects.

Even when the connection is obvious--as it was in the case of legendary former Steeler and Hall of Famer Mike Webster--they still put the screws in ways that would make tobacco executives proud:

As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury—the kind he’d seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.

“Please help me,” Mike Webster said.

It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.

Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.

Fitzsimmons said, “Oh, please.” He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was “total disability, football-related,” reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, “Four doctors—all with the same diagnosis!”

The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster…and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.

The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.

Fitzsimmons said, “You have got to be kidding me.” He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.

And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster didn’t qualify for full disability.*

And for all my righteous indignation, I will continue to consume football as much as the next schmo, thus rendering the league's response completely appropriate. What a country.