Dr. Matthew Garver was a star athlete at Wayne Community High School in Iowa. He participated in the Shrine Bowl and went on to play college football at Kansas State University where he graduated in 1990 with a doctorate in veterinary medicine. As an offensive lineman, he faced repeated head trauma on the field at every practice and game.

Dr. Garver was determined and kind. He was a leader in his community and an amazing dad. He built his veterinary clinic from the ground up and made it a flourishing practice. Often, it seemed as though there was nothing that he could not accomplish.

But later in life, Dr. Garver began experiencing early symptoms of CTE, including erratic emotions, impulsive decision-making, and eventually memory loss. After his death in 2021 at the age of 55, he was diagnosed with stage 2 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) at Boston University’s CTE Center.

Dr. Garver’s family’s wish is that his story brings attention to the disease and makes others aware they are not alone.

Matt Gee won. Habitually.

He set national records in high school. He won two Rose Bowls in college. He married the girl of his dreams. He ran a successful business. He once entered a raffle to win a car at his son’s high school football game and guaranteed his wife he would win the prize. And he did.

As a kid in small town Arkansas City, Kansas, Matt dominated in whatever he tried. He played both ways as a fullback and linebacker on the football team. He wrestled. He played varsity basketball and baseball. In 1987, he threw the javelin a nation-leading 243 feet and one inch.

A five-star talent, Matt intended to stay close to home to play for college football powerhouse Oklahoma University. But on a track invitational at the USC’s Memorial Coliseum, the USC football coaching staff approached Matt about playing football and throwing javelin there. He was hooked and enrolled at USC in the fall of 1987.

Matt thrived in Los Angeles. He was one of two freshmen to make USC’s travelling roster for the Trojans’ 1988 Rose Bowl team. The other was USC’s wunderkind freshman quarterback Todd Marinovich.

Matt had a magnetic personality and did just as well socially at USC as he did in football.

“He would walk into a room and it would be like Norm on Cheers,” Alana Gee, his eventual wife said.

Matt’s sophomore season ended with another Rose Bowl victory for the Trojans. He met Alana over homecoming weekend that year.

“I instantly liked him,” Alana said. “He was kind. He was sweet. He was just genuine.”

Alana had graduated from USC the previous year and was weary of dating someone five years her junior. But Matt’s persistence won out and the two were inseparable from then on.

Matt was named one of USC’s captains his senior season in 1991. He led the team in tackles and had his eyes set on playing in the NFL. But an injury late in the season held him out of invitational games and lowered his draft stock. He made camp with the Los Angeles Raiders but was one of the team’s last cuts.

He lost his shot in the NFL. But even when Matt Gee lost, he kept winning. An insurance agent recruited Matt and several other college football players to work for him out of college. Matt adjusted to a new industry as easily as he did everything else in life.

“He looked at business as a competition,” Alana said. “He was a disciplined leader and hard worker.”

Matt’s success led him to start Matthew Gee & Associates, his own insurance agency in Simi Valley, California, in 1993. He and Alana married the same year. Their son Tucker was born in 1994, then Tanner in 1996, and Malia in 2000.

The business flourished but there was always enough time to pour his heart into his kids’ activities. Coach Gee made sure everybody played, had fun, and learned their sports’ fundamentals. He was known to wager buzzing his hair off if the team could accomplish a major goal.

Tucker was born with Asperger syndrome and had different interests than the rest of the family. Matt adapted and took Tucker on trips to museums across the country.

Matt and Alana were co-pilots in marriage. They completed each other’s sentences. Alana imagined a future with Matt taking Tucker around the world and enjoying life as grandparents.

“I would say to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m living this life. I’m so fortunate,’” Alana said. “Because he was such a good man.”

Matt Gee rode a remarkable winning streak for his first 44 years of life. But he was about to enter a fight he had already lost.

He started playing tackle football when he was in third grade. Matt made 210 career tackles at USC, including 97 in his senior season.

Alana remembers Matt coming home from practice at USC often detailing how he got his “bell rung” but felt like he needed to fake being alright to maintain his standing on USC’s loaded depth chart.

On May 2, 2012, Matt and Alana were at breakfast in Simi Valley. His phone was blowing up. Junior Seau, Matt’s teammate for two seasons at USC, and a family friend of Alana’s, had died by suicide. The news rocked Matt in a way few things ever had.

Neither of them could understand. What happened to the sweet, spirted Seau they knew?

In January 2013, Seau’s family announced he had been diagnosed with CTE. Around that time, Gee slowly became a stranger to his family. He was now irritable, angry, and prone emotional outbursts.

For their first 25 years together, Matt and Alana were peas in a pod. Now, Alana’s mere presence in a room could set Matt off.

Alana had firsthand experience with anxiety through managing Tucker’s challenges with Asperger’s. She could not believe it when easygoing Matt was now noticeably anxious.

“I’m not right,” he often said to Alana.

His personality changes coincided with declining physical health. He was born with Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome which gave him a large port-wine stain birthmark on his left arm and caused issues with his circulation.

During this time Matt became increasingly impulsive. He could no longer control how much he ate or drank. The increased consumption exacerbated his many afflictions.

Matt’s health problems were compounding on him and confounding to Alana.

“What really got me was he could do anything he put his mind to,” Alana said. “If he wanted to be the best athlete, he was the best athlete. If he wanted to be the most successful businessman, he could do that. But he couldn’t stop the drinking.”

One year, Matt was in the hospital for a total of 152 days. Giving up on Matt was never an option, but with three children in three different schools, Alana needed help. She hired someone to stay with Matt 24/7 and relied on her family to help with the children.

Matt’s cognition was slipping too. He struggled remembering things and appeared delusional at times. Initially, Alana rejected the notion that Matt’s severe downturn could be related to CTE. CTE can only be diagnosed after death and Alana was focused on finding more immediate solutions.

“I was always the fixer,” Alana said. “I couldn’t help him because I didn’t know what was going on. It was horrible.”

Around 2017, Matt started to show progress. His drinking was under control and he was regularly going to therapy. But on days where he appeared out of sorts, Alana would test Matt to see if he had been drinking. He was completely sober every time.

In December 2018, Alana followed through on a longstanding promise to take Tanner skiing. This would mean leaving Matt alone for the first time in years – a daunting proposition, but he had been sober and in good physical health of late. While she was away on the three-day trip, Alana received a call from Malia that something was off with her father. Before Alana could make it back to Simi Valley, Matt Gee died in his sleep on December 31, 2018. He was 49 years old.

Coroners found Matt had alcohol in his blood when he died. When they called Alana and asked to release his body, she demanded his brain be studied for CTE at the UNITE Brain Bank.

In addition to Junior Seau, two of Matt’s USC linebacker brethren and dear friends died in their 40’s. Their brains were not studied for CTE, but Alana saw an opportunity with Matt’s brain to provide answers for not just her tragedy but others as well.

“I know that’s what Matt would have wanted me to do because he was such a helpful, loving guy,” Alana said.

In March 2020, Brain Bank researchers told Alana that Matt was diagnosed with Stage II-III (of IV) CTE.

“I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe,” Alana said. “It was like five years of relief after knowing in my heart that wasn’t him.”

The news also relieved the Gee children, who now had an explanation for what happened to the devoted father they grew up with. The symptoms of CTE help explain the 180-degree turn Matt’s cognition, behavior, and mood took in his last five years.

Two years after Matt’s death, Alana takes solace knowing she left no stone unturned trying to support Matt’s health. Looking to the future, she has a set of wishes to protect other families from experiencing what her family endured.

Chief among them is a way to identify CTE in living people. Diagnosing patients in life would open the door for research on treatments and a cure for the degenerative brain disease.

As researchers work toward a diagnosis, her second wish is for a protocol for physicians to manage the symptoms former contact sport athletes may experience at every stage of the disease if they do in fact have CTE. If Matt’s doctors considered his possible CTE from the beginning, they could have been better equipped to manage his impulsivity and addiction.

Alana took over Gee & Associates. As hard as she fought for him in life, she now works diligently to preserve Matt’s legacy through the agency he built and by sharing who he was before and after symptoms of CTE interrupted his life.

“Matt’s good was beyond good,” Alana said. “There are a lot of guys out there with CTE that are being blamed for a lot of things. They need vindication.”

After Matt’s diagnosis, Alana spoke to Sports Illustrated for a story on Matt and other fallen USC linebackers in the hopes her tragedy would help someone else. You can read that story here.

William “Bill” Geisdorf III came home from his second straight day of testing at the Sarasota Memory Clinic. He was completely dejected. Bill was a retired history teacher known for his rigorous current events assignments but was now struggling to complete the alphabet. He was once the life of the party but now was withdrawing from social situations because he couldn’t communicate like he once could. The man who dreamed of captaining his own fishing boats was now lost at sea.

“I felt like we were being robbed,” his widow, Donna Geisdorf said. “Our happily ever after was not to be.”

Bill and Donna attended Drexel University in Philadelphia in the 1970’s after Bill spent a year at Valley Forge Military Academy. Bill played football for the Dragons. Before they met, Donna couldn’t help but notice his good looks and cool demeanor from afar.

“He was just the person you wanted to be around,” Donna said.

Donna and Bill were introduced through mutual friends on spring break in Miami Beach in 1971. They were inseparable ever since.

They shared a love for live music and saw countless shows in Philadelphia. They went to the requisite number of Grateful Dead shows to earn “Deadhead” status. Among their many favorite concerts were Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jimmy Buffett, James Taylor, and several of Bill’s favorite Motown groups.

Donna never cared for football, but she took notice whenever the sport injured Bill. She remembers a couple of Bill’s concussions, including one where he woke up in the hospital afterwards.

The two married in 1975 and moved to a rural section of Sarasota, Florida, in 1977. They had three children together, William “Will” Carl IV, Rachel, and Emma.

Bill was a world history teacher and a football coach, first at Cardinal Mooney High School, then at Riverview High School in Sarasota. Students adored Mr. Geisdorf for his lessons, classroom theatrics, and his readily available life advice. Players loved him for his ability to command authority without ever being mean or condescending.

Donna describes Bill as a wonderful father who had unique relationships with each child. He loved wrestling and playing with Rachel, who was born with Down Syndrome. He coached her Special Olympics basketball teams as passionately as he coached his high schoolers.

“His family was his whole world, the center of his universe,” longtime friend Con Nicholas said about Bill. “He was such an outstanding husband and father.”

Bill and Donna retired simultaneously after 33 years of teaching in 2010. In 1996, Bill obtained his captain’s license. Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, he frequently fished with his father and had a lifelong affinity for the sea. He dreamed of spending some of his retirement as a charter fisherman.

“Land sucks,” he would often joke to whoever shared a boat with him as they returned from a day of fishing.

But a year after Bill left the classroom, he began repeating the same questions to Donna multiple times a day. The repetition was infrequent at first and Donna thought little of it. But Bill’s confusion soon crossed the point of concern.

During a doctor’s appointment, Donna handed Bill a pen to sign a form. He looked down at the paper and then back at Donna. He shook his head. He couldn’t remember how to write his name.

“That was shocking for me,” Donna said. “I can remember feeling devastated for him, for both of us.”

After some researching, Will thought football may have something to do with his father’s rapid decline. Bill thought the same while he was still cogent enough to research CTE. He raised the possibility of having CTE to Donna in the early 2010’s.

Losing parts of Bill saddened and angered Donna. Knowing Bill’s problems were potentially due to repetitive head impacts from football only increased her frustration.

“He was checking all the boxes for CTE the more I read about it,” Donna said.

Donna quickly and unexpectedly became Bill’s caretaker. She learned plenty of “hacks,” as she calls them, for managing life with Bill. She learned not to argue with him. She learned the importance of a short leash. Through an Alzheimer’s Disease support group, she learned for instance that on trips to see her family in upstate New York, she needed to wait to use the restroom until she was on the plane with Bill. Telling Bill to wait outside the terminal restroom may have proved disastrous.

They took walks at Benderson Park by their home in Sarasota. There, Bill’s love of the ocean came through when he would fill his pockets with the shells that lined the park’s walking path.

They visited Rachel at work at Goodwill. Donna always allowed Bill to buy one thing whenever they went. Eventually, he began choosing picture frames. In all their time together, Donna never knew Bill to like arts and crafts. But suddenly, he was ornately gluing his collected shells to the picture frames from Goodwill.

Despite having lost so many of his faculties, Donna saw a different Bill whenever he worked on the frames. He loved gifting the frames to his friends, family, and doctors. Donna thinks he felt fulfilled by creating an attractive product for others and that the crafting improved the quality of his life.

“Creating these beautiful frames was comforting to him,” Donna said. “He would just relax and let go with it.”

But the frames became less and less tidy as time went on. Bill eventually lost the concept of what a frame was for when he glued shells over the glass.

Bill was diagnosed with dementia when he was just 62 years old. No longer able to care for him, Donna had to move him into a memory care facility nearby. He soon earned a reputation for running around the facility’s square concourse. He possessed much more physicality than most of the other residents who were 20-30 years older than him. Bill’s physicality and increased agitation eventually became problematic and resulted in injury to other residents. After 11 months, the facility asked Donna to find a better fit for Bill.

By the time he moved in to his second facility, Bill had lost most of his communication skills, causing his nurse to put him on hospice care. For most of his life, Bill was a sturdy 6’0” and 190 pounds. By the time he was at his second facility he was down to just 120 pounds.

He was rapidly deteriorating in every capacity, but the right song could bring a glimpse of the old Bill out again. Donna ensured Bill’s iPod was playing 24/7 at both facilities. Hearing The Temptations, The Four Tops, Buffett, or any of his old favorites could move Bill to dance, as best he could, much to the delight of his nurses.

Bill died on April 22, 2019. He was 69 years old. After his death, Donna arranged to follow through on Bill’s inquiry about his own CTE by donating his brain to the UNITE Brain Bank.

Dr. Ann McKee conducted the pathology report on Bill’s brain. Dr. McKee told Donna that Bill’s brain had undergone tremendous atrophy. The severely reduced size of Bill’s brain indicated to Dr. McKee that Bill was severely impaired when he died. Dr. McKee diagnosed Bill with Stage IV (of IV) CTE, severe Alzheimer’s, and some developing Lewy Bodies that may have affected his mobility.

Given the concurrent diagnoses, Donna asked Dr. McKee an important question. If not for football, would Bill have developed Alzheimer’s Disease?

While Dr. McKee couldn’t definitively answer the question, she informed Donna how CTE can often open the door for other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Will spoke at his father’s funeral to an audience that included many of Bill’s former players, teammates, and coaching buddies. Donna was proud of him for offering a referendum on youth tackle football and for sharing the horrors of his dad’s twilight years.

“If your kids insist on playing high risk sports like football,” Will said in his eulogy. “At least make them wait until high school.”

“I know it was hard for a lot of them to hear,” Donna said. “A lot of them are thinking, ‘Oh, wow. It happened to this guy. It could happen to me.’”

Bill loved football. But after he learned about CTE, Donna believes he would have pushed children towards individual sports and away from tackle football until they were old enough. Will’s son and Donna’s only grandchild is six years old and is quite the golfer.

She keeps in close contact with many of the women whom she attended Alzheimer’s support groups with when Bill was alive. Like Donna, many of them are now widows. Donna knows support groups aren’t for everyone but strongly recommends them to anyone whose partner is suffering from possible CTE.

“I really enjoyed going to support groups,” Donna said. “Because I always came away with a new perspective or I would come away feeling like I had helped somebody else.”

Donna still lives on the land she and Bill purchased in 1977 and in the community where Bill was a fixture. Frequently, a cashier will take a second look at her credit card before handing it back to her.

They ask if she’s related to the Mr. Geisdorf.