Junior Seau and life after sport

There's an excellent and heartbreaking article by Jill Lieber Steeg in the San Diego Union-Tribune about Junior Seau, the former NFL star who committed suicide earlier this year (part one and part two). What makes it stand out, amongst so much that was written after Seau's death, is that it is a carefully researched, fact-based piece, rather than conjecture.



Whether or not you are interested in the NFL, Seau's story is a poignant one, because it exposes the problems that retired sportsmen face, the things they lose when they retire: the structure to their days, the support network, the thrill of competition, the sense of purpose, the ability to earn money, the self-confidence. Then there's the need to live up to their public image, which seems to have weighed particularly heavily on Seau, and prevented him from asking for help, as well as the realisation that he had sacrificed family life for his career, and had no understanding of how to make amends for that that.

In May, the BBC aired Michael Vaughan's documentary, Sporting Heroes: After the Final Whistle, which attempted to deal with the same issues from a British perspective, but it was ultimately disappointing because rather than investigation and analysis, it offered a fairly soft series of anecdotal interviews with star names.

Lieber Steeg's article is far more incisive, and also raises the issue of the long term effects of head injuries, a pressing topic in the NFL and across American sports at the moment. It will be interesting to see whether or not Seau was suffering from years of undiagnosed concussions, but it would only be another in the long line of problems that faced a man who was perceived as not only one of the best players in the NFL, but one of the best people.