I love the game. I love to watch. I watch it with my kids. I'm able to divorce the beauty of the athletics from the corporate entity that is the National Football League.

I'd followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.

I love writing in compressed time periods because the act of survival in the midst of panic and fear, that's where true heroism comes. If you have a uniform, and you're expected to do things, it's a sort of incremental heroism.

I played football the whole time I was growing up, and through two years of college. I think it's a beautiful game in many respects, one that allows you to follow a player from boyhood through manhood.

It's a good idea in principle because the kids round here love football.

Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive.