This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's College Football Preview issue. Subscribe today!
The link to the new Steve Gleason documentary sat in my email for three days before I opened it. People told me I'd love it. The reviews of the film, which won acclaim at Sundance and is now in wider release, are uniformly positive and talk about the spirit of life and hope laced through his journey. That didn't matter much. I didn't want to watch someone die of ALS in front of my eyes. I know Steve and his wife, Michel, a little, spending time with them for a story, and even that brief interaction showed me enough of their struggles to know that there wouldn't be some Hollywood ending.