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One of the Most Badass NFL Players Ever Says "I Feel Like a Child"

nick-buoniconti 1960

SI.com on Patriots and Dolphins Hall of Famer Nick Buoniconti - Buoniconti doesn’t explain that he can’t figure out how to knot a tie or towel his back. He doesn’t speak of his increasingly useless left hand, the increasingly frequent trips to the emergency room or how, just a few days earlier at his home on Long Island, he hurtled backward down a staircase and sprayed blood all over the hardwood, screaming afterward at [his wife] Lynn, “I should just kill myself! It doesn’t matter!” He doesn’t mention the three staples subsequently crimped into his scalp, doesn’t explain that just yesterday—in a fit of unexplainable pique, and against his own doctor’s orders—he had another physician come to his hotel room and yank those staples out.

“You know,” Buoniconti says. …

He talks about how even the most familiar routines have become confounding, how he wakes up in his own bed wondering, Am I in a hotel? “And I’m 55,” he says. “I don’t know what I’ll be like at 59 or 65.”

“At 55 I was very normal,” Buoniconti says. “I’m not normal anymore. …

“I feel lost,” he said. “I feel like a child.”

I debated for a while whether to even blog this. Not because it’s not important, but because it’s maybe too important to do it justice in the middle of our blogs about baseball and celebrity sex hijinks and Trump. This is another part of that conversation America isn’t having. That we basically are refusing to have. Even five years after Junior Seau committed suicide. Arguably the best, most charismatic, most well adjusted and universally admired NFL player of his generation, he chose a bullet over living another day with the pain and confusion that pro football caused him. Since then, it seems like we can’t go a month without hearing about another ex-player losing his faculties. And still I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring the problem.

It’s hard to put into perspective how great Buoniconti was. But he was the best Patriots player of the 1960s. And a case can be made he was the best pre-Brady Patriot of all time (with apologies to John Hannah). He was only the 102nd pick in the draft because of his size. But two games into his rookie season he won the starting middle linebacker job and never missed a start over the next five seasons and only one in the sixth. In the seventh, he missed six games, and the Patriots, being the Patriots of that era and not today, stupidly decided his undersized body was finally breaking down so they traded him to the Dolphins for practically nothing. All Buoniconti did in Miami was be the heart and soul of The No Name Defense that won two Super Bowls and be captain of the only undefeated team in history. Eventually he did prove the Patriots right by having to retire. Seven years after the trade.

Now it’s gut-wrenching to think that a guy withstood all that punishment from much bigger guys, manning the middle of a great defense at a time when virtually no amount of violence was off limits, would start to pay the price so soon.

And that doesn’t even begin to mention what he’s done with his post-football career. When his son Marc was paralyzed playing for Citadel, Nick started the Buoniconti Fund, which has done nothing less than raise $450 million for paralysis research. And counting. Full disclosure, I’ve done stand up at a Buoniconti Fund comedy fundraiser, but I can’t claim to know anyone in the family. I’m saying this strictly on behalf of anyone who loves NFL football and feels a piece of their soul die any time one of the men who made it great suffers because of it.

Obviously we all hope it’s not to late to help the Buonicontis. Though that’s being naive. Just like it’d be naive to think we won’t get a lot more stories like this before we figure out a way to stop them. But we have to, no matter what that entails. We owe it guys like this.

@jerrythornton1