With the enormous stress that professional athletes are under, it’s no doubt that, eventually, it all catches up to them. This season, the NFL has faced many tragedies that have brought fans and teams together.
It was just a few weeks into the NFL regular season the son of Andy Reid, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, overdosed on drugs, and threw the already fast-falling Eagles team into turmoil. The team rallied around their head coach, and supported him throughout the ordeal.
As the season went on everything seemed to calm down, there were a few minor fines here and there, but, except for those, there was little drama. Then, on Saturday, December 1, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend, drove to Arrowhead Stadium, and took his own life in front of numerous coaches. “They said the player was actually thanking them for everything they’d done for him,” said Kansas City police spokesman Darin Snapp. “They were just talking to him and he was thanking them and everything. That’s when he walked away and shot himself.”
Despite the tragic events that took place that Saturday, the Chiefs decided to play their game against the Carolina Panthers. The Chiefs defeated the Panthers 21-27 in a game filled with emotion and heartache. After the game, Brady Quinn, the Chiefs quarterback, delivered a powerful statement not only about the killings, but about life as well. “I know when it happened, I was sitting in my head thinking what I could have done differently. I mean, when you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?” Quinn then moved on to talk about whether we are losing the ability to maintain in person relationships. “We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us,” Quinn said. “Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”.
The emotions were running high all weekend, as the football world tried to comprehend why Jovan did what he did. Not only did he kill his girlfriend, he left their infant daughter without a mother or father. The NFL later released a statement saying she will receive around 1 million dollars in Life insurance, a retirement account, and an annual stipend if she goes to college.
Then, as the NFL and its’ fans tried to move on, yet another tragedy struck the league exactly one week later. On Saturday, December 8, two Dallas Cowboy players were involved in a wreck in which newly signed linebacker Jerry Brown Jr. was killed. The next day, the driver of the car, Josh Brent, was arrested on charges of intoxicated manslaughter that alleged he was “drunk, speeding &
flipped his car, killing teammate Jerry Brown.” Brent has since been released on bail and attended the funeral for Brown. Josh Brent was also removed from the team’s active roster, meaning he won’t be playing the rest of the season.
The tragedies that have unfolded in the past couple of weeks in the NFL seem to have awakened people to the fact that these athletes are people too. As the League attempts to move on, the teams hit most by the tragedies will finish their seasons with broken teams, and perhaps, something bigger to play for.
