More than 40 current or former pro players aged 50 or younger have fallen since 2021. The number is staggering. But it doesn’t account for their peers’ despair.
Marques Harris’s television flickered with images of the sport to which he’d dedicated nearly two decades of his life, and now he felt pangs of nostalgia. So he did what hardened men are too often reluctant to do: He let a friend know that he missed him.
As the former Chargers linebacker watched the Bills and the Chiefs clash in the AFC Championship in January 2021, one of his first NFL buddies sprang to mind.