In choosing to go public with his ALS diagnosis, former NFL running back Chris Johnson chose not to focus on the link between the disease and football.
At one level, it didn't really need to be mentioned. The connection has been established. For example, ALS is one of the specific conditions (along with Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, early and moderate dementia, and certain cases of CTE diagnoses after death) that automatically qualified retired players (as of July 7, 2014) for no-questions-asked compensation from the NFL's unlimited concussion settlement fund. And, in 2021, a study of all "19,423 NFL athletes who debuted between 1960 and 2019 and played 1 or more professional game" resulted in a finding that the risks of developing ALS "were nearly 4 times as high as those of the general population."
At another level, it was more than a bit awkward that the segment on Good Morning America didn't mention the ties between ALS and football, either during or after the Johnson interview was televised.
It came close, a couple of times. Johnson's wife, Brittany, explained that she believed his initial symptoms (weakness in his right hand) may have been the result of a pinched nerve from playing football. And Michael Strahan's narration of the piece addressed the belief that Johnson has a case of "sporadic ALS," which happens with no family history of the illness. Given that, as Strahan said, 90 percent of all ALS cases are sporadic and basically random, the connection to football makes it not quite as random as it would be for someone who didn't play.
Via Sean Keeley of Awful Announcing, Jeff Pearlman teed off on the failure to mention the link between ALS and football. (Here's Pearlman's full video.)
At one level, it didn't really need to be mentioned. The connection has been established. For example, ALS is one of the specific conditions (along with Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, early and moderate dementia, and certain cases of CTE diagnoses after death) that automatically qualified retired players (as of July 7, 2014) for no-questions-asked compensation from the NFL's unlimited concussion settlement fund. And, in 2021, a study of all "19,423 NFL athletes who debuted between 1960 and 2019 and played 1 or more professional game" resulted in a finding that the risks of developing ALS "were nearly 4 times as high as those of the general population."
At another level, it was more than a bit awkward that the segment on Good Morning America didn't mention the ties between ALS and football, either during or after the Johnson interview was televised.
It came close, a couple of times. Johnson's wife, Brittany, explained that she believed his initial symptoms (weakness in his right hand) may have been the result of a pinched nerve from playing football. And Michael Strahan's narration of the piece addressed the belief that Johnson has a case of "sporadic ALS," which happens with no family history of the illness. Given that, as Strahan said, 90 percent of all ALS cases are sporadic and basically random, the connection to football makes it not quite as random as it would be for someone who didn't play.
Via Sean Keeley of Awful Announcing, Jeff Pearlman teed off on the failure to mention the link between ALS and football. (Here's Pearlman's full video.)
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