Reading about the demise of brain-damaged Mike Webster and Dave Duerson was at once a clinical exercise of sad curiosity and grim acceptance -- two NFL warriors and middle-aged martyrs whose suicides bracketed a cruel decade in which at least a half-dozen retired players violently took their own lives.
They were stories of physically and psychologically broken men found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative disease recalibrating how we regulate, celebrate and tolerate America's greatest sports and entertainment product.
Watching Hollywood portray their tragedies in the forthcoming movie, "Concussion," is devastating. Sharing the moment with Ben Utecht, the former Gophers and NFL tight end whose career and memory were ruined by repeated concussions, was sobering.