The Price of the Game
When news broke that former NFL All-Pro Tre’ Johnson died at 54, mainstream outlets, including The Independent, framed it as a personal tragedy, 'sudden and unexpectedly.' This language, while expressing sympathy, deliberately sidesteps a well-documented crisis: the alarmingly high rates of serious health issues and premature mortality among former professional football players. This is not an
isolated incident but a chilling echo of past neglect. In 1993, Hall of Famer Walter Payton died at 45 from a rare liver disease often linked to steroid use, which was rampant and unaddressed in his era. More recently, in 2021, fellow NFL lineman Vince Biegel passed away at 48 from heart failure, a common killer among players whose bodies endure immense stress and often carry excessive weight for
their profession. The NFL’s own 2012 concussion settlement, which has paid out over $1 billion for brain injuries, acknowledges the long-term, devastating health consequences of the sport, yet these individual deaths are still presented as anomalies. The media narrative consistently frames these deaths as personal misfortunes rather than predictable outcomes of a brutal business. It mirrors the
historical sanitization of other dangerous industries, from coal mining to manufacturing, where occupational hazards were reframed as individual health choices. Johnson’s reported cause of death remains undisclosed, but the pattern of heart conditions, neurological disorders, and chronic pain among ex-NFL players, often requiring extensive, costly healthcare their pensions frequently fail to