https://goo.gl/fFJkx6
It’s not a headache. It’s not “getting your bell rung.” You don’t have a bell. It’s a traumatic brain injury. Every single concussion is a new traumatic brain injury. In addition to the torn ACLs and MCLs, in addition to all of the horrible broken bones, the NFL diagnosed at least 281 traumatic brain injuries this season. And no document has ever quite displayed the horror of it all like “Concussion Protocol,” a film by Josh Begley and Field of Vision.
Too many of us are OK with this violence, on a conscious or subconscious level, because we don’t know these men.
The next day, I received the first of what would eventually be hundreds of messages from then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick asking me to break down these incidents, then later others, for him. Kaepernick’s brilliance showed in his insightful questions. He had not yet taken a knee or publicly protested during the national anthem — that was still a few weeks away — but the injustices were already eating at his soul.
And it was not just Kaepernick. In those summer weeks before the NFL season began, dozens of players reached out to me. They wanted me to explain the details of police violence against African-Americans and advise them on what they could specifically say or do about injustice and police brutality in America.
It was those moments, before Kaepernick took a knee, before any player raised a fist or took a seat, that everything about how I watched the NFL began to change.