Thanks to the ham-handedness of the National Football League’s Hall of Fame, the inane “deflategate” scandal, which has been the dominant N.F.L. headline this off-season, was pushed to the sidelines this weekend and replaced by a genuinely important issue facing the country’s dominant sports league and its players. That issue is the serious cognitive impairment that appears to affect so many former professional football players.
The embodiment of that impairment was Junior Seau, the perennial All-Pro linebacker who was inducted, posthumously, into the Hall of Fame on Saturday. Three years ago, Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest.