Elijah Glover

Elijah James Glover was my eldest son. He was captivating and determined. He was not easily swayed and believed deeply in the love and commitment of family. Even as a young child he showed great appreciation for those he loved. I remember him working at yard sales and cutting grass for money to buy me birthday and Christmas gifts. He was funny, clever, intelligent, and wise beyond his years. And though he was bigger than the other kids, he was never aggressive and didn’t get into fights.

Elijah mastered everything he attempted and played with his whole heart. Elijah played baseball, wrestling and basketball, but his heart was in lacrosse, and his spirit simply embodied football. Elijah started little league football the summer of his fifth birthday. He practiced diligently and played at maximum potential. I was such a proud mom watching from the stands, in awe of his abilities. The onlookers shouting his number, “25” and his name, “E” was exhilarating. I felt a sense of pride and honor at who Elijah became when he put the stick in his hand or when he broke from the team huddle and they yelled, “Down! Set…”

Elijah suffered many blows to the head we now realize were concussions. I wondered if they would have a lasting effect on Elijah’s brain. I started comparing the impact sustained by football players to those of boxing contenders and champions. I remember Elijah’s last hit to the head in 2015 after a lacrosse game when he was 17 years old. He reported seeing stars, feeling nausea, and requiring some assistance off the field. The concussion concerned me enough to make an appointment with a concussion clinic near our home in Baltimore, Maryland.

Shortly after the injury in 2015, I noticed remarkable changes in Elijah’s mood. He was usually reserved and calm, but he became irritable, constantly pushed boundaries, showed outward signs of aggression, made poor choices, and started smoking marijuana. Elijah forgot family memories and even when prompted by photos he simply could not remember they happened. He no longer went out with friends and became unmotivated. He was depressed and shared dark thoughts and feelings. He preferred to be asleep over being awake. Our relationship, which had always been as strong as a rock, deteriorated.

Elijah began an uphill battle with addiction. He was diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder and was prescribed medications which he often abused, compounding his issues. After further consideration and research, I realized Elijah’s symptoms mirrored CTE. I vehemently disagreed with the mental health diagnosis and recognized his new, destructive behaviors aligned with CTE.

During his most recent stay in treatment, it looked like Elijah was going to turn things around. But unfortunately, he left us on April 17, 2022 due to a heart attack, stemming from an enlarged heart. He was just 24. Based on everything I learned before his death, I made the decision to donate his brain for CTE research at the UNITE Brain Bank and am currently awaiting the results.

Elijah is my son. I speak of him in the present because he will always be my beautiful, sweet boy. I was there for the two most important moments of his life – the day he was born and the day he transitioned. I worry I will forget his face, forget what his voice sounds like and forget the powerful force he was on the lacrosse and football fields. I worry he will be forgotten by all who encountered him.

I want more minorities to be properly informed and educated about the impact of too many concussions early in life. I know parents may believe their child’s success is the only way to make it out of their circumstances. But it is unfair to look for the child to save his family at the cost of their brain and, in my son’s case, their life.

Some parents may not want to tell all of this information to the world. It might make them feel like they are ruining their child’s image. But I don’t share that feeling. I know Elijah and he would want to selflessly give to somebody else if it meant he could save their life. I am telling Elijah’s story to help parents make informed decisions about their children’s future. Unfortunately, it took Elijah’s experience to change my perspective on what sports kids should play. Elijah’s two younger brothers did not and will not play contact sports.

Football is great but it is crucial to know the many risks of playing the sport, especially before a certain age. My son was unrecognizable at the end; I didn’t even know who he was. You don’t want to have a memorial wall of all his trophies and accomplishments and not have him.

Yes, children need to play sports to stay out of trouble. But I challenge all parents to find a healthier way to keep their children productive – whether it’s safer sports like flag football, or other activities like coding. Please think of the long-term and consider how their life will turn out in the future.

Patrick Grange

 

Grange will never be confused with the soccer greats Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, and Ribery who converged on Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, but his impact is felt nonetheless. A high school soccer star in Albuquerque, N.M., Grange played at the collegiate and semi-professional levels. Like many soccer players, throughout his career he often headed the ball. At the age of 28 Grange was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and in 2012, at 29, he died. When researchers examined his brain they found surprising evidence that could have long-term implications for soccer. E:60’s Jeremy Schaap chronicles the life and death of Pat Grange, and his unintended legacy to the game he loved.

Peter Grant

The Damage Done

Peter Grant ’83 played interhall football for Notre Dame’s Grace Hall. Dave Duerson, a classmate and casual acquaintance of Grant’s from the dorm, was an All-American defensive back and an 11-year NFL veteran who won two Super Bowl rings. Their athletic careers could not have been more different.

But Grant and Duerson were alike in competitive passion. They played hard. And in the end, the game did not distinguish between them. It turned their intensity into an insidious, mysterious disease. Years removed from their last athletic collisions, they suffered a toll far worse than aching knees or arthritic hips, a loss impossible to repair or replace. They lost themselves and, within days of each other last February, their lives.

 

Collisions

Spero Karas ’89, the Atlanta Falcons team physician, talks about the intricate, delicate calibration of the brain in a way that suggests he keeps his in fine working order: “Brain cells communicate through ion channels, a normal flux of sodium and potassium and calcium, and then less implicated, of course, magnesium. There’s a fine balance of these as cells communicate with each other in the brain.”

To explain how a high-speed collision can jostle that communication into incoherence, Karas reduces it to a layman’s image: think of the brain at impact, he says, as a racquetball bouncing around a court. “You can imagine those cellular processes going haywire during a blunt-force trauma.”

That’s how someone suffers a concussion. When a collision generates g-forces strong enough to interfere with brain-cell functioning, the immediate effects are familiar: wooziness, confusion, slurred speech. “There’s still no treatment for it, there’s still no medication, there’s still no really firm diagnostic tool,” Karas says. “There’s very much still that we don’t know.”

Doctors do know that a player should never return to competition until the symptoms have subsided and an objective level of neurological functioning has been restored. Computerized testing before an injury occurs, now common at all levels for athletes in high-impact sports, establishes their baseline level of cognitive ability. After a concussion, they must return to that level before receiving clearance to play. This method identifies subtle variations in memory, orientation and reaction time that observation alone might miss, which helps prevent debilitating injuries to vulnerable brains that can occur if players return too soon.

But there’s another hazard, more difficult to identify, and possibly more dangerous: the cumulative effect of hit after hit after hit that never causes a diagnosed concussion. “Linemen might take a thousand, fifteen-hundred hits to the brain every season. That’s the nature of the position,” says neuropsychologist Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy — the “brain bank” that investigates trauma-induced disease. “They may not complain of any symptoms, or few symptoms, or irregular symptoms.”

Nothing, in other words, that keeps a player off the field. Yet each collision could be contributing to the development of a degenerative condition with far worse consequences. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is the contemporary term for the disease forensic pathologist Harrison Stanford Martland identified in 1928 as dementia pugilistica. Punch drunk.

Repeated blows to the head can lead to this mental state that causes symptoms similar to — and, Stern says, often diagnosed as — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease or the more general term, dementia.

Neuropathologist Ann McKee examines brains donated to the research center, which now has more than 70 from deceased football and hockey players, boxers, and military veterans who experienced combat trauma. On thin slices of the brain stems, McKee identifies the pathology that distinguishes CTE from those comparable diseases. An accumulation of the protein tau inhibits brain-cell function. The condition progresses slowly, but nothing can detect CTE in a living patient. More and more cells die and, depending on the areas of the brain affected, memory loss, mood or behavioral changes offer the first indication of a downward spiral that no treatment can prevent.

A fog

Before she got to know him, Dave Duerson’s future wife, Alicia, feared him. He played with such ferocity that she couldn’t imagine him acting any other way. Their first meeting dispelled that notion, and they stayed together for more than 25 years. “He was so sweet and kind,” Alicia told The New York Times. “He could leave the game on the field and go back to being Dave.”

For more than a decade that included Super Bowl titles with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, he left the field and went back to being a loving husband and doting father to the couple’s four children. But sometimes just getting home after games was a challenge. In interviews after his death, Alicia recalled driving him because he felt too foggy to be behind the wheel himself.

Tregg Duerson ’08 doesn’t remember much about his father’s “Double D” football persona but recalls him “sleeping like a whole day” to recover from the physical punishment of NFL games. To Dave Duerson, the symptoms — dizziness, nausea, headaches — were routine. With some rest, he was ready to go again.

One report estimated that Duerson suffered 10 concussions, a number that sounds low to Tregg, given his dad’s aggressive reputation and the era when he played. “I think it was a much different culture than today.” And that number doesn’t even account for the untold number of normal hits that he just slept off.

Questions

Repeated blows to the head — whether or not they are severe enough to produce concussions — are a known cause of CTE, but those collisions alone are not enough to trigger the disease. Otherwise every former athlete in a high-impact sport would be debilitated later in life.

A growing body of research, especially the identification of CTE in 14 of the 15 deceased professional football players who donated their brains to Boston University’s study, has stirred public concern. And it’s not just pros, the people who exposed themselves to the risk for decades dating back to youth football. At age 21, University of Pennsylvania defensive end and team captain Owen Thomas committed suicide. His parents donated his brain, which had the telltale buildup of the protein tau associated with CTE. An anonymous, deceased 18-year-old high school football player is the youngest person ever shown to have the disease.

Stern notes that the prevalence of CTE among his center’s subjects reflects, in part, a self-selected group whose mental problems gave them or their families an incentive to seek a posthumous explanation. Still, 14 out of 15 professional football players is a startling statistic, especially for a condition all but absent among the general population. Although the victims have a history of repeated head trauma in common, the underlying susceptibility — why them and not their teammates? — remains a mystery.

“Are some people genetically more prone to developing the disease? Is it things like the age at which someone starts getting their head hit, or the overall duration of the exposure to brain trauma? Or the repetitiveness without rest in between hits?” Stern says. “We just don’t know any of those answers.”

Multiple hits

Katie Grant ’11 can only imagine her father as a high school athlete. If Peter Grant played football and hockey anything like he competed against his son, Zachary, “I’m sure he was very intense,” Katie says with a laugh.

He must have been. By his own account, Grant suffered seven concussions, including two that put him in the hospital. Once he was carted off the field, unconscious.

The specifics of the injuries — the circumstances, the severity, the length of recovery — have been lost in the retelling and the vague recollections of family and friends. “We also don’t know,” Katie Grant says, “if he took the full amount of time to heal after them.”

That’s a crucial piece of information. Using an individual’s baseline results, doctors today determine when players can return based on computerized, objective measurements. In the late 1970s, when Grant played high-school sports, identifying how many fingers a trainer held up might have been enough. “Now what’s important is screening, avoiding a second injury to a compromised brain,” Karas says. “That’s where the catastrophic, irreparable damage occurs.”

It’s possible that Peter Grant suffered that kind of irreparable damage before he even graduated from high school.

Long-term fears

Tim Ridder ’99 remembers his concussion and its aftermath the way most people might recall their 4th birthday party. “Remembering,” he says, “is kind of a funny word to throw in there.” From a video of his sideline evaluation and recollections of family and friends — but not from memory — he has cobbled together an account that has become the story.

During a preseason practice as a ND freshman offensive lineman in August 1995, Ridder suffered a concussion on one play and, unaware, returned to the line of scrimmage for the next. After the snap, he never moved from his stance. Assistant coach Joe Moore barreled toward him, raging. But when Moore got there, he found Ridder dazed and in tears, and summoned the doctor.

Longtime Notre Dame sports-medicine specialist Dr. Jim Moriarity went to work, with a camera recording the examination for teaching purposes. In addition to answering Moriarity’s questions, Ridder follows the doctor’s finger with his eyes, touches his nose, and wobbles trying to put one foot in front of the other like a drunk driver failing a field-sobriety test. “I think at that point I told them I had won the Blue-Gold game on my own,” Ridder says, “and I had never even been a part of the Blue-Gold game.”

He hadn’t even officially enrolled as a student. Freshman orientation was the next day, but instead of attending the event, he somehow ended up on the other side of campus, where a friend found him. Over the next week, he called home four times to tell his parents he had suffered a concussion. Not only were they aware of the injury, but Ridder’s father was at the practice when it happened.

Now 34 and a middle-school principal in Leadville, Colorado, Ridder thinks about the potential long-term effects of his “one and only” diagnosed concussion that kept him out about six weeks. All the hits from a football career that included two years in the NFL already reveal their residual aches in his knees and shoulders. He can live with those things. “I don’t want my brain to be the thing that happens early,” Ridder says.

Even that threat — memory loss, dementia, mood or behavioral changes — comes with a sense of culpability. “I did this to my body,” he says. “I had a lot of fun doing it; I knew what I was getting myself into.” Then he reconsiders the thought. “Maybe not completely,” he says, but common sense suggested what science has begun to establish — the correlation between repeated hits and mental decline later in life. Ridder remembers a professor telling him that if men were meant to play football, they wouldn’t have to wear an exoskeleton.

He thought more about the physical consequences then, conscious that his body could absorb only so much punishment without retaliating. That awareness shaped the message he delivered to children about the importance of education: “I’d say, ‘Your body falls apart, but your brain doesn’t. Take care of your brain because that’s what you’ll have going for you long after your body breaks down.’”

Moving forward

After he retired from the NFL, a champion with a charitable heart who had received the league’s Man of the Year award for humanitarian work, Duerson’s professional success shifted to a new arena. His business aspirations were at least as grand as anything he pursued as an athlete — and he paid his dues like a rookie to achieve them. After retiring from football in 1993, he became a McDonald’s franchisee, which requires months of training that includes working in a restaurant. “A year before that, this guy was in the NFL,” Tregg Duerson says. “That’s saying something. He was very hard-working no matter what he did.”

After owning three McDonald’s franchises, he bought a majority stake in meat-supplier Fair Oaks Farms and later started Duerson Foods. He remained involved in NFL labor issues and became a Notre Dame trustee. In business, he was the same ambitious, charismatic success story he had been in football. Even then, whether he recognized it or not, the damage already had been done.

Crash test

Helmets don’t help. Not enough, anyway. Most current models are not designed to protect against concussions at all. They are meant to prevent skull fractures — and they do. “But the head still moves around inside the helmet,” neuropsychologist Stern says, “and the brain, more importantly, still moves around inside the skull. That’s what causes brain trauma.”

A Virginia Tech study — sort of a crash test for football helmets — released a star-rating system in May, the first comprehensive consumer safety information ever published on the industry. As if to illustrate how little had been previously known, the NFL’s most widely used helmet — the league does not mandate what players wear — finished next to last in the study.

There have been improvements. New helmet models absorb more g-forces before they reach the brain; this could reduce the number of concussions. But no current technology can prevent them. Says Stern, “Equipment is not the answer — or it’s not the sole answer.”

As Stern and others continue to pursue research breakthroughs, they know this much: Eventually, some of the people exposed to the thwack of helmet on helmet, over and over again, will get sick. “The key to how to help prevent CTE, or at least decrease the risk,” Stern says, “is to reduce the overall exposure.”

That means less hitting in practice, a precautionary tactic beginning to gain traction. The new NFL collective-bargaining agreement limits contact in offseason workouts and regular-season practices. At the college level, the Ivy League has imposed the most stringent hitting restrictions yet. The rule, implemented this season, allows tackling, or contact of any kind, only twice a week. Current NCAA regulations permit five full-contact practices.

Loving life

There is a history of depression in Peter Grant’s family. In his early 20s, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he managed for decades with medication. He was open about his condition with his wife and three children, but it was controlled so well that nobody else would have known. “He was always his usual self,” Katie Grant says.

Outgoing and active in his West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, community, Grant chaired the town finance committee, served on the Bridgewater Savings bank board and coached kids’ sports. An accountant with an undergraduate degree in business, he built a career in finance and operations for The Boston Globe and later worked as a media consultant. “He loved his job and the media business in general,” Katie Grant says.

She describes all her father’s interests that way. He loved to talk, he loved to read, he loved to travel. He especially loved Notre Dame. That influenced his daughters. Katie graduated in May and younger sister, Chrissy, is a senior. (Their brother, Zachary, is in high school.) The memory of her dad’s animated campus visits makes Katie laugh. “It was almost too much.”

A sporting chance

Tim Ridder’s torn. He believes safety should be a priority, equipment and medical treatment should be state-of-the-art, and athletes should have as much information as possible about the risks of participation. On the other hand, he loved playing football, and he would hate to see the sport suffer if reasonable precautions could be put in place. “We have to make sure we’re not creating another Rome,” Ridder says, “where there are gladiators dying on the field depending on whether Caesar gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

Some former players believe that’s how they were treated. Claiming the NFL mishandled concussion treatment and concealed evidence for decades about the long-term effects of head injuries, in July a group of 75 former players sued the league. The NFL vowed to fight the suit, but its approach to head-injury awareness has changed in recent years.

A league medical committee formed in 1994 produced reports downplaying the ramifications of multiple concussions. A 2007 pamphlet informed players that “current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is treated properly.”

The message shifted before the 2010 season with locker-room posters describing the threat of depression and dementia, new rules about concussion treatment, and a $1 million donation to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. “It is the hot-button item in the NFL,” Karas says. “It’s probably what we spend the most time on in our disability meetings. What is the NFL but a large corporation that employs thousands of people? And being able to characterize the amount of injury and potential disability and getting these guys back safely is the number-one medical issue in the NFL.”

Duerson’s fall

Duerson understood football-related disability as well as anyone could without medical training. And he knew the horror stories all too well.

Part of a six-member panel that evaluated retired players’ disability claims, Duerson heard about the suicides and the substance abusers. He listened to stories about wild personality changes — violence, irritability, depression.

Duerson could sense himself unraveling in similar ways. At first, he made offhand comments about his brain, expressing concern over symptoms he already felt and fear of how they might progress. His children never knew about those worries. “He was a very prideful man,” says Tregg Duerson, who had never heard of CTE before his father died. “He would not have had that conversation with me.”

But unmistakable changes in personality and judgment altered the course of Duerson’s life. The patient man and prudent executive his family knew began to lash out in profane explosions and make bad business decisions that led Duerson Foods into financial peril. “He always had a very strong temper,” Tregg Duerson says, but in retrospect, he can see how the disease intensified that trait. “I think toward the end of his life, his temper was more quick — he was easily agitated.”

Duerson’s personal problems splashed into the newspapers in 2005, when he was arrested after pushing Alicia against a wall at the Morris Inn on the University campus. He pleaded no contest, resigned from the Notre Dame board, and soon he and his wife were divorced. Everything seemed to be falling apart because his personality had changed in cataclysmic ways that he feared with chilling prescience.

Mental collapse

In December 2009 something changed. Medication that had controlled Peter Grant’s mental illness for more than two decades stopped working. He became lethargic and withdrawn. Depressed.

Grant’s doctors adjusted the dosages, to no avail, and searched in vain to explain alarming mood changes. Home for Christmas that December, when her father’s new symptoms surfaced, Katie Grant thought he was preoccupied with work. When he visited Notre Dame two months later for Junior Parents Weekend, she recognized the depth of his depression.

His usual enthusiasm for a trip to South Bend vanished. “He just sat in the hotel room, didn’t want to do anything, didn’t even want to walk around campus,” Katie says. “It was a 180-degree transformation from anything I had ever seen.”

Through the summer and into the fall of 2010, it got worse, still without explanation. He had manic episodes — not sleeping, running around, talking incoherently. “Really sort of out of his mind,” Katie says. One episode in October left him hospitalized for two weeks. After his release, he remained unstable. Alternately manic and depressed, Grant would claim to be feeling all right on his better days, “but it was a lot worse than he was letting us know.”

There was no violence or anger, just withdrawal and forgetfulness. A dinner conversation would disappear in the fog of his mind, and when the subject came up again a day or two later, he would be upset that he hadn’t been told about it before.

That change was especially jarring for Grant’s family, who counted his intelligence and sharp attentiveness among his most notable characteristics. He was always on top of things. The difference could not have been lost on Grant himself, either, and they imagine that the frustration of his prolonged mental descent took an untold toll.

“I definitely think he felt hopeless,” Katie says, “that he just wasn’t going to get better.”

Duerson felt the same way. His financial problems reached their nadir in 2010, when he filed for bankruptcy and Alicia sued to collect unpaid child support, seeking assets that included his NFL Man of the Year award. By then he lived in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a family vacation destination where he moved full-time. In retrospect, he might have moved there to retreat from life as he felt his ebbing. Duerson’s friend Ray Ellis told the Miami New Times, “He didn’t want to crumble in front of an audience.”

Legacy

On February 8, Peter Grant committed suicide. Nine days later, Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, a report that reverberated around the country because of the reason he did it that way: to preserve his brain for CTE research.

Both the Grant and Duerson families donated the brains. Grant’s showed a mild level of CTE, Duerson’s much more advanced. Announcing the findings in Duerson’s case, the neuropathologist McKee displayed slides showing extensive damage to areas that affect “judgment, inhibition, impulse control, mood and memory.”

There’s solace in the CTE diagnosis for both families, insight into the torment that led Grant and Duerson to take their own lives. Beyond the emotional comfort, Stern says, their donations establish a legacy of medical evidence that transcends their own tragedies. Uncertainty still surrounds the disease. Players are left to wonder whether they will suffer a similar fate, or if hints hidden in the brains of previous victims will reduce the impact.

Jason Kelly, a former sports columnist for the South Bend Tribune, is an associate editor of the University of Chicago Magazine. His most recent book is Shelby’s Folly: Jack Dempsey, Doc Kearns, and the Shakedown of a Montana Boomtown. Email him at [email protected].

Evan Granville

Evan Granville of Hamburg, NY, entered into rest on March 31, 2022 after a courageous battle to live. Evan was known for his easy-going personality, forever smile, great sense of humor and most of all, his love of family. He lived life to the fullest and was a very accomplished athlete in many sports.

Evan, throughout his life, had an insatiable appetite for history. His favorite period of time was the Civil War, especially the Battle of Gettysburg. Evan could share his education, life experiences, and research of Gettysburg, in detail. Turning the facts into a mystical journey.

He was in his glory when debating his professors and enlightening many around him. But most of all, just sitting around the campfire, chewing the fat with soldiers during his numerous attendances at the battle reenactments.

Evan travelled with his parents and siblings during his childhood and adolescent years to every Civil War battlefield. To illustrate his passion for those 3 days in July, 1863, he pleaded with his dad at the ripe age of 12 to get a tour guide. Finally, after his father relented, he asked, “Evan, why a tour guide?” Evan responded, “I want to see how many mistakes he would make!” In his 20’s and 30’s, Evan and his posse heard many of his debates and challenges and enjoyed many free libations at various establishments.

In 2012, Evan was to meet his “life partner,” Jenny White. In the following 10 years, they enjoyed many precious moments together. Traveling to places like Key West, Sandals, Naples and many more. Some of their excursions were even just trips to Ellicottville and the “Ridge.”

On September 3rd, 2019, their miracle happened. They would be blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Kennedy Fiona Granville. This commissioned a whole new journey as the three of them were inseparable. Evan enjoyed one of the simplest things in life such as their daily strolls to Haak’s Cakes.

After many memorable moments and hundreds of pictures. Evan got his birthday wish on July 2, 2021, to travel once again to Gettysburg. Here he shared his many points of interest of Gettysburg with the 2 ladies in his life.

The picture up above is Jenny and Evan’s favorite. Dad holding his “Pumpkin” at his favorite place, “Little Round Top”!!

Evan is survived by his soulmate Jenny White, dear mother of his precious Kennedy Granville. Son of Patrick and Priscilla (Weathers) Granville. Brother of Ryan (Melisa) Granville and Amy (Derek) Grove. Loving uncle to Kelly, Zach, Brennan and Grace. Grandson of the late Lawrence and Marjorie (Miller) Weathers and the late John and Agnes (Bohen) Granville. Also survived by many aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.

 

Eric Grigsby

Eric Clifford Grigsby, age 49 of Lenoir City, TN, passed away on Sunday, May 23, 2021, at the Loudon County Hospital in Lenoir City, TN. He was born August 9, 1971 in Harriman, TN. He was a loving, caring, Christian husband and son. He tried to help everyone he came into contact with.

Eric played offensive guard throughout his football career at Harriman High School and continued through his college career at Carson Newman College and then at Tennessee Technological University. While attending college he started his own business for 19 years known as “Grigsby Militaria.” After graduating college and continuing his business he started to realize something wasn’t right with his health. He needed help but didn’t know what kind of help. As time went on the last two years of his life, a doctor told him he had symptoms of what is known as CTE and he also had PTSD. Eric was put on medications that helped but didn’t cure the problems. After his death he became one of the Legacy Donors at the UNITE Brain Bank. He wanted to still be able to continue to help people.

John Hacker

We fell in love with John at first sight on March 25, 1980, and that will always be. We thought we had the perfect family and the perfect life.

We lost our beautiful, gifted son tragically 39 years later leaving us to somehow piece together an inexplicable puzzle. We never dreamed CTE would be our story, but we are grateful to the UNITE Brain Bank team for their knowledge and compassion as we travel this path. They have given us some answers to our questions we believed had no answers.

Our son John was a joy from the beginning. He wore a mischievous grin and twinkle in his eye that earned him lots of love and many friends.

From a very early age, he excelled in music and sports. He played violin and piano for us and he passionately played anything with a ball and friends for himself. That passion and intensity never changed with the many teams for which he played.

John played sports year-round, both at school and with travel teams. He always played at full speed whether it was practice or for a championship. We filled our summers with many trips, awards, and friendships. He also loved to run, and he was fast, holding the record in Missouri in the 50 and 100-yard Hershey Meet. The performance won him a chaperoned spot to compete nationally where he placed third two years in a row.

John loved varsity sports and was named captain of his baseball, basketball, and football teams his senior year in high school. He was recruited for college programs in each sport. He was plagued by injuries throughout his athletic career breaking both feet his senior year and, of course, numerous head injuries. Because of his history of injuries, he decided to play D1 baseball at Missouri State rather than the riskier offer of football at MU. We applauded that decision and felt a sense of relief as we hoped for a more injury free future.

John also did well academically. He had been placed in gifted education in elementary which he did not particularly enjoy. He was glad to rejoin his friends as soon as we allowed him to drop out of the program in middle school. He made high honor roll every quarter throughout his academic career and was named All-State Academic and Scholar Athletic Award in high school. He also loved to sing and was in honor choir and earned state vocal music honors. He was named Bolivar High School Outstanding Bass. His life looked so bright.

John dropped out of MSU baseball his sophomore year for a variety of reasons including another injury. He also had a tentative plan to attend law school and knew he needed to buckle down. He was accepted as a student at the Creighton University School of Law and graduated from there 3 years later. He enjoyed both his undergrad and law school experience, again making many friends that valued him for his kindness and sense of humor. He continued to maintain these friendships until his death. John never left a friend behind and they came by the hundreds to his memorial service; friends from his youth sports, high school athletics, college players and many of his fellow attorneys. He was beloved by everyone.

I’m not sure when we began to notice John changing. I do remember he came home from law school unexpectedly, citing depression. We did not take it as seriously as we should have. We cheered him up and sent him back. It was just so hard to believe that a guy that seemingly had everything was depressed. Our hindsight is clear. It was the beginning of traces that we would much later attribute to CTE.

John graduated from Creighton Law School and passed the bar exam on the first try and was hired by a well-known firm that he had interned with in college. Eventually, he started his own practice and married a lovely girl. Together they had two children that were the center of their lives. His family meant the world to him and they were loved and adored. Most days looked good from our perspective, but we now know John was very adept at hiding symptoms. He was not one to draw attention to himself and he did not want us to worry. We did begin to see signs of a struggle as his health declined. We sought a variety of medical help with no definitive answers.

John was well known and respected in the legal field and was honored to receive the Equal Access to Justice Award. It was evidence he believed all people deserve legal representation, and he took many cases with little or no fee. While representing such a case two years prior to his death, John suffered a seizure while in court and was hospitalized for several days. The seizure was the turning point in all of our lives. We began to seek answers in earnest. John suspected he could be experiencing symptoms of CTE. When he told us, we wanted it to be anything else, knowing the prognosis. CTE can only be diagnosed postmortem so at this point we didn’t have answers, but the possibility was frightening.

The following years were filled with both good and bad times. The bad days became more frequent as time took its toll. John somehow managed to continue with his law practice, coach Jack and Annie’s teams, and hang out with friends although we were all very worried. He was hospitalized several times, again never with any real answers or help.

The second week in November 2019 John disappeared after a visit to our lake home. He had not been well and came to our house for a few days of peace and quiet. He was depressed, somewhat confused, and had a severe headache. As the week passed, he felt better and planned on coaching Jack’s game on Saturday morning. When we woke up that morning, John was gone. He was reported missing and after an exhaustive 4-day search, he was found in shallow water, lakeside. We do not know exactly what happened that night. We did not see any cause for alarm. We will always think it was another seizure. Maybe not.

After John’s death, we sought the help of the Concussion Legacy Foundation because of John’s sports related concussions and his own opinion that something was terribly wrong in his head. We needed definitive answers and had nowhere to turn so we decided to donate his brain to the UNITE Brain Bank where researchers diagnosed Stage I CTE. With the encouragement and support of CLF, we have spoken out on our local tv channel as well as our newspaper in an effort to arm other parents with the information of the danger of playing contact sports at an early age. We believe this is what John would have wanted. If only we had this information sooner, we would have made very different decisions.

We will forever miss and love our beautiful son who we believe suffered and died because of early participation and injuries suffered in contact sports. His life was a blessing. His death destroyed us.

John was diagnosed with CTE even though he stopped playing contact sports after high school. In hindsight, John suffered a lot of head trauma while he was in high school and before that could have been avoided. The very first play of junior high football in seventh grade he was knocked unconscious on the field.

Knowing what we do now, we wouldn’t have taken the risk. We want other parents to understand that letting children play contacts sports is exactly that, a risk.

The Flag Football Under 14 campaign is the Concussion Legacy Foundation’s awareness and education program designed to help parents make informed decisions about youth tackle football. The Concussion Legacy Foundation strongly recommends that parents wait until age 14 to enrolling children in tackle football. Learn why.