Contemporary Authors

• After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of Concussions, Loss, and the Faith That Saw Her Through Thomas Nelson (Nashville, TN), 2016

• Cyndy Feasel - http://www.cyndyfeasel.com/a-message-from-cyndy.html

  My book, which released November 15, 2016, is difficult to read and raw in many ways, but I want to put a human face on what can happen to an NFL player and his family long after the cheering has stopped.

  When my husband, Grant Feasel, played in the National Football League in the 1980s and early 1990s, we didn't understand that his helmet-to-helmet collisions opened the door to brain trauma that impacted his thought processes, accelerated his physical deterioration, and altered his personality.

  Those are important points because the Grant I fell in love with and brought three children into this world with was not the Grant I said goodbye to at the age of fifty-two. My husband was someone I adored and respected, a godly man of character who wanted to be the best at what he did—until he started down a lonely path that ultimately led to his early death and the devastation of our family.

  Now that After the Cheering Stops is coming out, I want to raise awareness for parents about the dangers of playing sports that produce concussions. I’m an art teacher at a private Christian school in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and each football season, a handful of my middle school students miss up to a week of classroom instruction because of concussions they received while playing organized football and soccer.

  While many think that concussions are synonymous with football, the head-butting sport of soccer produces the most concussive events by virtue of its popularity and the fact that both boys and girls play the sport. Lacrosse and ice hockey are other popular sports that produce a high number of concussions.

  Finally, I want to make this point: I know that Grant would not want his name to be remembered this way, but I also know that he would want me to warn others about the dangers of concussions and CTE. He always admired the way I could talk to anyone about anything, and he liked me to fill in the gaps for him with groups of people.

  I consider After the Cheering Stops to be a continuation of a relationship that started with such promise but ended so tragically.

• After The Cheering Stops - http://afterthecheeringstops.com/

  Cyndy Feasel was married for twenty-nine years to NFL lineman Grant Feasel, who was discovered after his death to have developed CTE—a progressive degenerative brain disease—from the concussions he received playing football. An art teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, Cyndy is committed to raising awareness of CTE and the dangers of repetitive head injury.

• Star Telegram - http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/northeast-tarrant/article129154289.html

  QUOTED: "I want people to understand that it’s a real disease. ... I think that there are certain people that still think that maybe this is just a random thing, that it’s made up. It’s not, it’s for real. I want athletes, administrators, parents, I want people to know that it’s real."

  BY JEFF CAPLAN
  jeffcaplan@star-telegram.com
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  NORTH RICHLAND HILLS
  On May 3, 2012, Junior Seau, a star linebacker with the San Diego Chargers for 20 seasons, shot himself in the chest and died. He was 43. Fifteen months earlier, Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, a four-time Pro Bowl selection, ended his struggle the same way at age 50. He left a note.

  Tormented, Duerson wanted his family to donate his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Boston.

  The autopsy of Duerson’s brain revealed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, now commonly known as CTE, the degenerative brain disease related to repeated blows to the head. Immediately it was speculated that Seau, one of the NFL’s most punishing players, had secretly been succumbing to CTE, too.

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  As Seau’s death reverberated across the league, two former NFL players — and likely many more — trapped within their own mysteriously deteriorating minds and coping as best they could with depression, sleeplessness, motor impairment, irritability, fits of aggression and dementia, suddenly realized the truth as sure as the white spots that flashed before their eyes after a jarring hit.

  “We were watching TV that night and he just said, ‘Man, you know, that’s what’s going on,” said Kim Bush, repeating the words of her longtime boyfriend and former Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler, who was hearing near-constant ringing in his ears.

  Bush said Stabler, who was later diagnosed with Stage 3 CTE, was “lucky” to die from prostate cancer in 2015 at age 69, before CTE could unleash its full horror.

  That same night, in a spacious Colleyville home, former Seattle Seahawks center Grant Feasel, once a mountain of man, 6 foot 7 and 278 pounds, sat as he usually did at this point, in a darkened bedroom, drinking, with a purpose.

  Feasel grew up in Barstow, Calif., and followed his older brother Greg to play football at Abilene Christian, married his college sweetheart Cyndy and delayed medical school as his NFL career unexpectedly flourished.

  But after hearing the news of Seau’s suicide, he would soon tell Cyndy, who divorced him only months earlier while on the verge of her own breakdown after years of struggling to make sense of his increasingly erratic and inebriated behavior: “You know, I think I’ve got what Mike [Webster] and Junior and Keli [McGregor] and all these guys have. There’s something wrong with me.”

  On July 15, 2012, two months after Seau’s suicide and one month after 62-year-old former Falcons star safety Ray Easterling shot himself, Feasel, 52 and a father of three, was dead.

  I THINK THAT THERE ARE CERTAIN PEOPLE THAT STILL THINK THAT MAYBE THIS IS JUST A RANDOM THING, THAT IT’S MADE UP. IT’S NOT, IT’S FOR REAL. I WANT ATHLETES, ADMINISTRATORS, PARENTS, I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT IT’S REAL.
  Cyndy Feasel, widow of former NFL player

  Cirrhosis of the liver was the official cause of death. But his ex-wife believes it only masked the true killer, the same one that drove Duerson, Seau and Easterling to pick up a gun.

  Cyndy kept a journal during their struggles with CTE, which evolved to the November release of her book, After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife’s Story of Concussions, Loss and the Faith That Saw Her Through. She also co-founded a new support group called Faces of CTE, and on Monday at the St. Regis hotel in Houston — in the shadow of Super Bowl LI — Cyndy and co-founder Kimberly Archie will lead a news conference to shed more light on football’s dark side. The group’s website, FacesOfCTE.com, launched Saturday.

  Dr. Ann McKee, the pioneering neurologist in the study of CTE at Boston University, who sliced into the brains of Duerson, Easterling and Seau before Feasel, and Stabler and many others after him, discovered that Feasel had Stage 3 CTE. Affecting the brain’s frontal lobs, key in governing impulse control, CTE almost assuredly made it near-impossible for Feasel to resist the urge to self-medicate with vodka.

  “I really do believe that if these individuals could see what was happening to them at the end of their lives, and see how it’s destroying their family, they never would have played football,” McKee said.

  Over the past decade, multiple concussion lawsuits have been filed against the NFL and NCAA. Thousands of former NFL players who have been diagnosed with brain injuries linked to repeated concussions will soon begin collecting on a $1 billion settlement with the league. The NCAA settled a $75 million lawsuit with former players providing medical monitoring.

  RELATED STORIES FROM THE STAR-TELEGRAM
  With $100 million from Rainwater family, brain research hits stride
  A Fort Worth law firm this month filed a concussion lawsuit in Indianapolis against the NCAA and Big 12.

  ‘He wasn’t the same person’

  Cyndy lost everything: Her husband, her house, the family savings and even her relationship with her three children, now ages 22 to 31. Her two sons and recently married daughter stopped speaking to her after she left their father and did not want to her write a book, which they contend includes some accounts that are not entirely true.

  An art teacher at Fort Worth Christian School, she lives alone in a duplex in North Richland Hills.

  FACES OF CTE CO-FOUNDERS WILL HAVE A NEWS CONFERENCE AT 1 P.M. MONDAY AT THE ST. REGIS HOTEL IN HOUSTON TO ANNOUNCE THEIR NEW SUPPORT GROUP.

  Until the brain autopsy revealed CTE, Cyndy was desperate to understand what was happening to the soft-spoken, intelligent and highly organized man she married in 1983. She wondered why Grant hid alcohol all around the house; why he had become increasingly verbally abusive and short-tempered; why he made one poor financial decision after another, eventually resulting in the foreclosure of their home and the loss of life insurance; and why he detached from friends and family and retreated to a darkened bedroom.

  “He wasn’t the same person,” Cyndy said. “He was sweet and kind. He was awesome. He was a Renaissance man. But slowly over the years we started getting this giant divide between us and I didn’t know what was in the house with us.

  “After a while, the alcohol started taking over his personality and just changing him. It seems so clear now that he had CTE, and I understand all the symptoms.”

  The CTE revelation in many ways unlocked her own prison door. In those final years, in which her own depression hit rock-bottom, she started keeping her journal. She also met Archie — who lost her son Paul at age 24 from effects of CTE caused by football — on Twitter after they started retweeting each other, and together they co-founded the support group.

  They’ll be joined at Monday’s news conference by Debbie Pyke, who lost her son Joe at age 25, plus Mary Seau, Junior Seau’s sister, who also heads the Mary Seau CTE Foundation.

  Faces of CTE is designed to show how the disease affects athletes of all ages — and not only NFL players — and to serve as a resource for families who have lost a loved one with CTE or who believe a family member has CTE. They also will announce the first CTE Awareness Day, which they will commemorate each year during the week of the Super Bowl.

  WHEN YOU GOT A CONCUSSION BACK THEN, NOBODY REALLY KNEW TOO MUCH WHAT THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS WERE. THE TEAM, THEIR GOAL WAS TO KEEP YOU ON THE FIELD AND PLAY.
  Dave Krieg, NFL QB, 1980-1998

  One of Feasel’s former teammates, quarterback Dave Krieg, described him as “very intelligent, witty, personable and smart.” He said during their playing days he never knew Feasel to be much of a drinker. Krieg said he does not experience symptoms associated with brain damage, though he admits sometimes if he’s feeling especially sluggish or fatigued, a moment of paranoia creeps in.

  “When you got a concussion back then, nobody really knew too much what the long-term effects were,” said Krieg, whose two sons play hockey and have each experienced concussions. “The team, their goal was to keep you on the field and play. And as a player, in order to get paid, you had to be out on the field. They don’t have the testing that they do now.”

  As a center and deep snapper over 10 seasons and 117 NFL games from 1983 to 1992, plus college, high school and before that, Feasel was literally a battering ram after every snap.

  “I want people to understand that it’s a real disease,” Cyndy said. “I think that there are certain people that still think that maybe this is just a random thing, that it’s made up. It’s not, it’s for real. I want athletes, administrators, parents, I want people to know that it’s real.”

  ‘It makes you angry’

  Cyndy said she would love for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to attend Monday’s news conference, but she knows he likely won’t. She said the league has been informed of the press conference, but no one has made contact. Two NFL spokesmen this week did not reply to emails sent by the Star-Telegram requesting comment.

  Families of CTE victims want the NFL to be consistent in acknowledging the correlation between repeated blows to the head and brain disease.

  Last year, the NFL cut funding to Boston University’s research into diagnosing CTE in patients before they die. Currently, CTE can only be detected in a brain autopsy after the player dies, and a family member must donate the brain.

  The NFL has long been accused of withholding information regarding brain injuries. The PBS documentary League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis makes the case that beginning in the late 1990s, the NFL ignored mounting evidence about long-term dangers of concussions and attempted to rebut emerging science with questionable research of its own.

  Just a year ago at a news conference during Super Bowl week in San Francisco, a member of the league’s head, neck and spine committee, Dr. Mitch Berger, would not acknowledge a link between repetitive hits to the head caused by football and CTE.

  244 concussions suffered by NFL players in 2016, according to the NFL’s annual injury data results that was released Thursday. The league says concussions are down from 275 in 2015, but up from 206 recorded concussions in 2014.
  His comments came the same week that it was announced that CTE was found in Stabler’s brain. Chris Nowinski, co-founder of Concussion Legacy Foundation and who has engaged with Stabler’s longtime partner Bush, Mary Seau and Cyndy on CTE awareness efforts, was there and became enraged.

  “It’s outrageous,” said Bush, who was in San Francisco last year during Super Bowl week waiting to hear if Stabler would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. (He was, six months after his death.) “I remember talking to Chris and going, ‘Can you believe this bulls---?’ It makes you angry and, again, the league has done a very good job of slip-sliding around it and trying to push it under the rug. But it’s too late now.”

  On Thursday, the NFL released its annual injury data results and reported 244 concussions in 2016, including preseason and regular-season games. The league says concussions are down from 275 in 2015, but up from 206 recorded concussions in 2014.

  The NFL’s count can be taken with some skepticism. On Wednesday, the league announced that its concussion protocol wasn’t strictly followed by the Miami Dolphins after quarterback Matt Moore was treated for a hit to the chin and mouth in a wild-card playoff game. The concussion protocol is an evaluation process designed to ensure that a player does not re-enter a game if he exhibits signs of a concussion. Moore re-entered the game and said afterward he felt fine when he returned.

  Bush recalled a game Stabler told her about in which he got hit so hard on the previous play that when he broke the huddle for the next play he was facing the wrong way. But Bush insists, as do concussion experts, that the danger is not just about concussions, but the accumulation of blows — sub-concussive hits — to the head.

  “And that is where the damage occurs, and that is the whole point of this movement and what has to be done,” Bush said. “It’s the repetitive blows. They are not giving the brain time to recover from a blow and you go back in and it’s just insult to injury.”

  ‘It’s very depressing’

  The most current data from researchers at Boston University confirmed CTE in the brains of 91 of 95 deceased former NFL players tested. McKee said researchers are working to develop a test for CTE for players still living. That could come in the “next few years,” she said. The next goal is coming up with ways to treat CTE.

  She said more brain donors are needed — especially the brains of deceased NFL players who did not show symptoms of CTE.

  I, FOR ONE, DON’T WATCH FOOTBALL ANYMORE BECAUSE I CAN’T. I CAN NO LONGER SORT OF RECONCILE WHAT I’M SEEING AT MY WORK AND WATCHING THE GAME ON TELEVISION.
  Dr. Ann McKee, neurologist specializing in the study of CTE at Boston University

  Even as the scientific side makes significant progress, McKee fears the numbers of players who will have CTE will spike dramatically as recently retired players and current players grow older.

  “We’re seeing a lot of it in our brain bank, and even though it’s not representative of the general population, the number we’re seeing is really getting quite disturbing,” said McKee, a former NFL and Green Bay Packers fan. “I, for one, don’t watch football anymore because I can’t. I can no longer sort of reconcile what I’m seeing at my work and watching the game on television.

  “It’s been a long road, and it’s depressing,” McKee said. “It’s very depressing.”

  The same can be said for the family members living with a loved one suffering with destructive symptoms of CTE.

  “I noticed in the last five years of his life when I attended family barbecues or get-togethers, I saw much more sadness in his eyes and I couldn’t figure it out,” Mary Seau said of her brother. “And now I know it was part of his depression. This is what they go through — they’re trying to kill whatever is going on in their mind. It’s where the alcoholism comes in, and then there’s just times where they want to drive off the freeway.”

  Seau did just that in 2010, careening off a cliff. He survived and later told his sister in the hospital that he had simply fallen asleep at the wheel. She had her doubts, but she also had no basis for understanding that Seau’s brain was gradually turning on him.

  Cyndy once knew every noseguard her husband went up against. She also once thought that him getting a concussion was better than a broken leg — at least he’d be able to play the next week.

  Now she watches football with one eye closed, she said. Unable to bear the thud of crashing helmets, her lone mission on Sundays is to document head injuries on her Facebook page.

  “When I look back on it and the facts that I know now and the science that I know now, repetitive hits to the head cause brain trauma,” Cyndy said. “It’s just scientific evidence now and for people to sit and watch the games every week and act like this is not happening, that’s a joke.”

  Jeff Caplan: 817-390-7705, @Jeff_Caplan

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  What Is A Concussion?

  Learn exactly what a concussion is and why it is so important to allow your brain to fully recover. Traumatic brain injuries contribute to "a substantial number of deaths and cases of permanent disability" each year, according to the CDC. In 2010, 2.5 million TBIs occurred either as an isolated injury or along with other injuries.
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  Junior Seau suffered from CTE and committed suicide after a long career in the NFL. Cyndy Feasel, who watched her husband’s slow deterioration in his final years, wants people to understand the dangers of head injuries from playing football. Grant Feasel, who played for the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL, died at age 52 after battling alcoholism and other issues due to CTE, she says. Grant Feasel played center for the Seattle Seahawks and died at age 52 after battling alcoholism and other issues due to CTE, his widow says. Grant and Cyndy Feasel are shown as a young couple, long before he struggled with CTE and alcoholism. He died at age 52. Cyndy Feasel has co-authored a book called "After the Cheering Stops" about her late ex-husband, Grant Feasel, who played in the NFL and died at age 52 after battling alcoholism and other issues due to CTE. Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler was helped from the field after a hard tackle against the Steelers in 1976. After retiring from the NFL, Stabler was diagnosed with Stage 3 CTE, but was “lucky” to die from prostrate cancer in 2015 at age 69, according to his longtime girlfriend, Kim Bush. Junior Seau suffered from CTE and committed suicide after a long career in the NFL. Cyndy Feasel, who watched her husband’s slow deterioration in his final years, wants people to understand the dangers of head injuries from playing football. Grant Feasel, who played for the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL, died at age 52 after battling alcoholism and other issues due to CTE, she says.
  Cyndy Feasel, who watched her husband’s slow deterioration in his final years, wants people to understand the dangers of head injuries from playing football. Grant Feasel, who played for the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL, died at age 52 after battling alcoholism and other issues due to CTE, she says. Rodger Mallison rmallison@star-telegram.com

• For Fairness in Sports - http://advocacyforfairnessinsports.org/player-rights/the-story-of-an-nfl-wife-an-interview-with-cyndy-feasel/

  QUOTED: "I knew that he was drinking more and more. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was trying to be a detective the way we do. I would see all the prescriptions. He always had prescriptions for painkillers. You know, you go to the dentist, it’s controlled substances now and not given as freely, but I still blame the drug companies and the doctors for giving a lot of medication that is unnecessary and never asking if they’re addicts."
  "He was so far from who he had been in the beginning. . . It was like something happened in his mind where he just wanted—I think he just wanted to die. I mean, he was on a path to die, a path of destruction. He was drinking a fifth of vodka, sometimes two, a day by the time he died."

  The Story of an NFL Wife – a Conversation with Cyndy Feasel
  Cyndy Feasel Interview
  Sheilla Dingus
  March 1, 2017
  Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live a fairy tale dream come true? And then see it unravel thread by thread? This is Cyndy Feasel’s reality. Cyndy was married to Grant Feasel who was center and long snapper in the NFL from 1984 – 1993, and was a starter for most of his career. I caught up with her recently and we discussed her experiences.
  Grant and Cyndy
  Grant and Cyndy at Abilene Christian
  Cyndy met Grant in college; they were both students at Abilene Christian University, a small college in West Texas. “I was a Texas girl and he was from Southern California. He was a California kid in the way that he looked and dressed, and it was unusual because my people didn’t. . .he had that California look. He mesmerized me all around,” Cyndy said, adding, “And he was the tallest, most handsome man I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
  While Cyndy was obviously enamored of Grant’s looks, it was his intelligence and demeanor that drew her ever closer to him. “I had no idea that he was this smart,” she told me. “He was academic and athletic. So it was a great combination. He was 4.0. He was an academic all-American since he was in college. He won every award that there was to win. He loved music; I love music. He loved poetry; I loved poetry. I just thought, wow, I had found somebody that there was nobody else like him.”
  wedding
  Cyndy and Grant’s wedding
  Cyndy and Grant married while they were still in college and her admiration and love for him continued to increase. “He mesmerized me all around. He was a great, great guy and organized, well put together, soft spoken. I mean, really, if you looked at all the characteristics of somebody that you would want to spend the rest of your life with, he had all of those characteristics.”
  I figured that it had to be an exciting time for Cyndy and Grant when they learned he would be participating in the NFL Draft. I wondered if it was something they expected or came as a surprise. Cyndy responded, “Well, it was interesting because Grant was going to be a dentist. He had been on a pre-med plan all through college, and I was going to be a teacher. And so, that was the life plan that we thought we were going on until the senior year and scouts started coming around and looking at him and talking about being drafted more than we had ever thought about. So when he was drafted by the then Baltimore Colts, not the Ravens but the Baltimore Colts back in 1983, it was, wow! We were twenty. So who wouldn’t be mesmerized by that and think it was the most awesome thing that could happen. Even though he was accepted to dental school in the State of Texas and that was definitely a priority for him, we both decided one percent of the people in the world get to play professional football. Why wouldn’t we want to be that? This was a no-brainer. Every boy’s dream, one of those things.”
  Cyndy put her teaching plans on hold and the couple moved to Baltimore. “And that’s where we started with the NFL,” she said, “We traveled around, met a lot of great people. He also went to the Minnesota Vikings and ultimately ended his career with the Seattle Seahawks. I would say those were the good years. We made a lot of friends, traveled, made money. It was good.”
  Grant Feasel
  Grant experienced numerous injuries throughout his career, but always found a way to “tough it out” and stay in play.
  “And what brought about his decision to retire? Injuries?” I asked.
  “Yes,” Cyndy responded, “Injuries, and he played 117 games continuous. And so, he had some major injuries along the way that I would have thought would have been career ending but a lot of times people just keep pushing past the point. I don’t understand that. When I’m in pain, I stop. I remember, in terms of serious injuries and a serious staph infection that the doctor said if we don’t get this under control, he could lose a leg. And so, he continued to play. And then at the end of the ten years he said, ‘you know, it’s time,’ because he was really doing — he just realized that he was at the end of it anyway. So rather than be cut, he decided he just wanted to retire.”
  “So at the end of the career, after he had this really serious staph infection, he started complaining more and more about just everything hurt, using ice packs. I know that you get this,” she said to me, “but the normal person out there, they lose something in their brain that makes them forget that this is a human being. This isn’t a robot in this job; it’s a person. There is not another profession that you use your body as a vehicle, as a means to make your money. It wears and tears on your physical being.”
  Like the majority of NFL players, Grant was caught up in the NFL’s tough-guy, return to play culture, aided by a host of NFL supplied painkillers to numb the injuries so they could be dealt with another time. That day didn’t com for Grant didn’t until he left the NFL. Players are heavily motivated to play through pain, often at the prodding of their coaches, NFL doctors and trainers. Players are acutely aware that someone’s waiting to take their jobs if they’re out for very long, and they’re also aware that they have a short time to make the most of the NFL’s opportunities. While it would seem that each player has his own reasons for staying in the game, some old notes found in Grant’s desk after his passing, and published in a Seattle Times article, appear to reveal his motivations:
  Training Camp Goals for Vikings 1985
  Be Tough
  Don’t Be Hurt
  Don’t Get Tired or Dizzy
  Do it for Cyndy & The Baby
  Seahawks Training Camp Goals 1988
  Cyndy and Sean are all that Matter
  Finance your Education
  Sean will be Proud of my Effort
  Cyndy and Sean Will Always Love Me
  Seahawks Training Camp Goals 1990
  Tough & Quiet
  Thankful (Realize Opportunity)
  Teach Sean
  He did it. He accomplished his goals. He was an exemplary player, husband and father. But his long (for the NFL) career took its toll.
  “He started having a lot of aches and pains and taking pills,” Cyndy said. A former player once told me that while you’re playing, “you don’t feel your body,” it’s after you retire that everything starts catching up with you. This seems to have happened with Grant at a rapid pace. “The knees were hurting, the neck was hurting, the back was hurting. He was having trouble getting comfortable to sleep because everything hurt and throbbed.” Cyndy didn’t know what to do.
  “Again, that was in, let’s see, the eighties still,” she explained, “I mean, there wasn’t such a thing as going to pillfinder.com on the Internet. So I didn’t really know what all those were. He said ‘don’t worry about it, just something to help with the pain. . . As long as you realize . . .” I interrupted Cyndy because from other stories I’ve done and conversations I’ve had, I was all to familiar with the rabbit hole she was describing. We discussed the NFL’s painkiller culture and the effect it has on those who play the game. “I know that. I lived this life, and I know he didn’t feel any pain during the game, and he couldn’t stand up afterwards,” she affirmed. “Those are the things, in my opinion, that drove him to become an addict. I think he got hooked on these things in the NFL, and those are the things that ended up destroying him ultimately, along with the brain damage that we knew nothing about because in the eighties who was talking about CTE.? Nobody.”
  What Cyndy said reminded me of research that I read about recently, linking concussions to increased vulnerability to addiction because head trauma affects the brain’s ability to regulate impulse control. “With so much damage to that region [frontal cortex] of his brain,” Boston University researcher Dr. Ann McKee said of another player who like Grant had substance abuse problems and also CTE, “[he] may have been more inclined to abuse prescription pain medication and other harmful drugs.” Cyndy and I discussed at length how this “toxic combination” of concussions and drugs and/or alcohol often turns deadly. Compound this with the lack of knowledge in this regard, even less than a decade back. “It was so astounding to me when Grant died, again, we didn’t know anything about CTE,” she repeated, seeming incredulous to the lack of information available. “I followed the free fall. We were navigating in the darkness our entire lives.”
  In retrospect, in view of what she’s learned it all makes sense to Cyndy now. She thinks of changes that occurred as Grant’s career progressed. “He was doing weird things already before he even quit playing in the NFL. He was bringing bags of alcohol in a bag, or he stopped by the liquor store, and he’d drink them all and put them back in the bag and throw them out in the dumpster.” I asked Cyndy to elaborate.
  “Yeah, I would love to go back and talk about that, she responded. “These were the things that started happening at the end of his career in Seattle and, the bottles of Jack Daniels. That was not normal behavior, either. We’ve never even had a bottle of Jack Daniels in our house.” Cyndy had told me previously that Grant never drank in college; it was a habit that he acquired while playing in the NFL. She continued, “So he also one night brought me a small package. He retired from the NFL. We were giving each other gifts. He gave me a small package, and I knew it was a ring. When I opened it up, and it literally took my breath away. I said, ‘This is the same one you gave me last year on our anniversary.’ He was sitting in this overstuffed chair, and I’ll never forget what he looked like, and he said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yes.’” At first she thought he’d “gone and gotten the ring and rewrapped it,” and then by his reaction realized otherwise. “I mean, that’s how odd it was. It was the same identical ring. And I’m telling you . . . in the very beginning of our conversation about how organized and smart he was, does that sound like the same person?”
  “No,” I agreed. “No. So this was already happening at the end of his career,” she, reiterated, her mind seeming caught for a moment in a distant time and place. Cyndy collected her thoughts and told me about an incident that happened a few years later.
  “Then we moved back to Texas, and I’m putting in folded clothes in the closet, and I feel something in the tee shirt. Of course, I’m looking to see what it is. I pull out a giant bottle, and I mean one of the biggest bottles of Crown Royal that you can get, and I was stunned. I remember having a rapid heartbeat and asking, ‘what is this and why?’ and all the questions that go through your mind. She continued her recollection. “I set it out on the cabinet, and I said ‘What is this?’ And he said, ‘Well, don’t worry about it; it’s not a big deal. I keep it back here in the bedroom so at night when I go back to bed, I pour some of it, and it helps me through.’”
  As Cyndy was telling her story, it caused me to think how many times I’ve heard it. Former players, both in conversation and deposition testimony that I’ve read, as well as other NFL widows have confirmed that for many retired players, searching for pain relief is a full-time and completely consuming job. “It’s so sad,” was the only response I could muster.
  “Yes, it’s terrible because he was so smart. And you’re a smart woman. You know that he could have stopped playing earlier on and gone to medical school. He even ended up taking the MCATs, seeing how well he did on that, and he did so well that every medical school in the State of Texas accepted him as well. So he was accepted in every dental school and every medical school in the State of Texas.”
  Cyndy, paused for a moment to think about what could have been, “Yet, he kept playing football after all these terrible injuries. And he could have made the same amount of money or twice the amount of money being a doctor or a dentist.” Sadly Cyndy is right. While there’s no doubt players are paid well, the mega contracts are the ones the public tends to focus on; most don’t see nearly the amount the “stars” receive, and as Cyndy pointed out, could earn equivalent money in other professions without the risks.
  After the Cheering Stops
  Cyndy’s Book:
  After the Cheering Stops
  But most love the game.
  And often “after the cheering stops” that love turns bittersweet or even destructive.
  Cyndy says it destroyed her family. “I mean, it destroyed everything!” she exclaimed. “And so, these were the things that were starting to happen. I knew that he was drinking more and more. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was trying to be a detective the way we do. I would see all the prescriptions. He always had prescriptions for painkillers. You know, you go to the dentist, it’s controlled substances now and not given as freely, but I still blame the drug companies and the doctors for giving a lot of medication that is unnecessary and never asking if they’re addicts or if they had a history of injuries or anything because Grant had an ongoing prescription of some sort of painkiller.”
  Cyndy went on to tell me that after he retired from football he found employment with a medical supply company. This gave him access to the drugs that the NFL no longer provided as he tried to mask his pain as he’d done throughout his football career. “And he sees the doctors, he relied on doctors that knew friends. He needed to have knee replacements; he probably needed a hip replacement. He needed surgery on his back. He needed surgery on his neck. He never did any of those things.” He tried to cope as he’d done before; deflecting, masking and eventually trying to drown his injuries.
  As Cyndy watched helplessly as Grant spiraled downward, she didn’t understand. She said she didn’t know the gravity of what was taking place before her eyes. “We didn’t have the Internet back then,” she noted.
  Grant did elect to have one surgery after his retirement; Cyndy looks back, understanding now what she didn’t at the time. “He went and had one surgery . . . his nose had been broken so much in football but he decided a couple of years after he retired that he wanted to have it fixed. . . and he got five prescriptions. And I remember him saying, ‘Fill them all.’ I don’t even take an aspirin. I remember saying ‘Do we really need all of these?’ ‘Yes, fill them all. If I need them, I’ve got them.’ So that was the only surgery he ever had done his entire life.”
  I found it remarkable that Grant only had the single surgery after the many injuries he sustained.
  “He suffered through them,” Cyndy said. “He drank.” Then her thoughts shifted toward the NFL. “I say they don’t care. I firmly believe they do not care. It’s all about greed. It’s all about money. I don’t care if you’re a first-round draft pick or a fifth-round draft pick like Grant was. They’re going to use you, and Grant Feasel said this: ‘They use you. They flush you down the toilet like a dead goldfish when you’re done with your career, and you’re as good as your last game, and that’s it. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
  I asked Cyndy if Grant ever tried for disability under the NFL plan.
  “No. . . never even dreamed of it. We never even talked about it. Grant was fortunate, and I talk to so many other of these women. At this point, he was able to work. Grant had a job until he died, and he made good money. But he couldn’t keep anything else together. He couldn’t keep that together in the end. He ended up getting fired.”
  “So I’m saying, he was constantly doing things that weren’t consistent to the brilliance that I believe he had. He didn’t understand what was going on, either,” she explained. “And at the very end of his life, it was before I left, was getting a divorce, seven months prior to him dying because I was trying to get his attention. He didn’t care what anybody did. He didn’t care what I did. He was drinking around the clock. He became unmanageable. Again, there’s more stories in the book about the things he did, physical things he did, mentally abusive things that he did. He was so far from who he had been in the beginning. . . It was like something happened in his mind where he just wanted – I think he just wanted to die. I mean, he was on a path to die, a path of destruction. He was drinking a fifth of vodka, sometimes two, a day by the time he died.”
  obit
  Grant Feasel
  1960-2012
  “It’s heartbreaking,” I told her, “when I read about players that can’t take it anymore, and they shoot themselves in the chest so that their brain can be examined and somebody can figure out why did this happen to me, maybe stop it from happening to somebody else.”
  “I know,” she replied. “And I believe Grant knew at the end of his life, I think I have what Junior Seau had. I didn’t know, of course, anything about it. And in the throes of all of life’s ways, you don’t sit down and say, hmm, I think I’ll check this out. I really didn’t. I heard of CTE. One of his good friends that played with him in Seattle and ended up having a really weird, something happened with his heart, and he had a heart attack and died suddenly. And Grant was already way, way into the addiction and already completely blacked out. And I remember him saying that he had CTE. And Grant was like, CTE? That’s what I have.”
  At the very end, things were starting to make more sense, but tragically it was too late for Grant, Cyndy, and their family. “So all of a sudden, I was saying to him that’s what he had and also realized it is too late for him. He couldn’t have gotten a liver transplant if he wanted to. He was having liver failure, kidney failure. He couldn’t stop drinking. He had been to rehab time and time again. And he would say every time he went to rehab all he would think about was coming home and drinking.”
  I asked Cyndy about the impact on their children, and she declined to say much in that regard. In fact, her voice broke when I asked her. Suddenly she became very guarded, as if she was trying to suppress the worst pain of the entire ordeal.
  “It doesn’t take a real brilliant person to understand that when you have addiction, it does not do well with the family. And you know what addiction causes. And it rips and tears the families. It’s a family disease.”
  She seemed to summon her thoughts and determination, and through tears she told me, “I want to say this, that there was the possibility of being a huge co-dependent because I didn’t have any resources, didn’t have any coping skills, until I got into therapy probably, oh, ten years before he died. And I didn’t have any clue until then what — I didn’t understand why my kids were acting the way they were.” She told me that the kids didn’t understand and that she purposely omitted the family stories from her book. “I’ll just say that those are their stories and their memories.” She told me he was a good father. “Grant did the best he could being a brain-damaged addict. He was a good dad. He loved the kids. He tried to be the best dad he could be. I was — we tried to give the kids the best lives possible under the circumstances.”
  Cyndy and her children haven’t spoken since Grant’s death. He passed away on July 15, 2012. I found an article dated March 14, 2014, that was written shortly after the autopsy that revealed Grant had been suffering from CTE.
  children

  The article was painful to read. It was evident that hurt flowed in every direction in the Feasel family – Grant’s brother, his children, and a wife who loved him but no longer knew how to cope. The article contained emotional recollections from the entire family, including Cyndy.
  "It ruined our lives"

  That was then. Fast forward to 2017, and not a great deal has changed, except that Cyndy has become more resolute and has found her voice.
  “This is what I want you to understand,” she said. “This disease that the NFL brought onto my husband – it ruined our family. . . It’s horrible. It’s a terrible disease, and it ruins everybody. It killed Grant. It killed the love of my life. It killed my husband, and it took away my family. I not only lost my husband, I lost my three children. And it’s just terrible to say because they’re so wounded. I mean, it’s just, it’s terrible. These years have been so terrible without Grant. We had family years, where we had Christmases. It breaks my heart. I have zero communication with my three kids. None. It’s like they all died when Grant died.”
  Though it was a difficult decision, and her children were opposed, Cyndy wrote her book. She did so because she doesn’t want others to have to experience what she and her family did. “I am passionate about telling this story so people hear it.” She wants the public to “at least look at the evidence of what in the world can happen when you put your head in a head-banging sport. It caused our family to have so much pain. I don’t want any other families to go through what we lived through.”
  We talked about the evidence, those who deny it, and those who simply choose to ignore it. We discussed what it will take to bring about meaningful and lasting change and concluded that it’s going to take talking about it until everyone gets it.
  And that is Cyndy’s mission – educating and talking about the shadowy dangers of concussions, addiction, and the NFL’s refusal to put people over profit. “I plan on doing it the rest of my life, she said. “I mean, what do I have to lose? I lost my house . . . Grant didn’t pay bills . . . I’ve been teaching for seventeen years now. I want to teach – I was an art major, and I got a job to teach art when my baby went to kindergarten. And I taught so I could pay the bills that we had. . .It’s just hard to believe that you could be left, after making money, left with nothing. And these other women that I’ve talked to that this has happened to their family, there’s nothing left. Nothing.”
  Sadly I’ve heard far too many of the same stories.
  Cyndy realized that Grant had become an addict, but “It wasn’t until after Grant died that I started researching what CTE was,” she said. She found the symptoms, and at last she knew:
  difficulty thinking
  short-term memory loss
  sexual abuse
  motor impairmentimpulsive behavior
  difficulty planning and carrying out paths
  irritability
  trouble with smelldepression
  emotional instability
  aggression
  dementia
  a
  a
  a
  a
  “Grant had all of those. When I was looking on my laptop, I just bawled, screamed. I literally screamed. I just can’t believe that my journals are filled with stories of these things that happened in the course of our lifetime. It made me so mad, and there’s nothing – the NFL doesn’t care about me. They don’t care about anybody. They’ve even cut out – half of the people that have died of CTE aren’t even going to get any money.”
  Cyndy is of course referring to the NFL’s Concussion Settlement that is slated to pay out over $1 billion over the next 65 years. In settling the NFL never admitted liability, underwent discovery, and worst of all, excluded awards for CTE. It remains to be seen how much any of the players and their families will receive after attorneys’ fees and prior Medicare payments are deducted. The NFL’s insurers now want to know what the NFL knew about concussions – they don’t feel they should be on the hook for a settlement they never agreed to – especially if the NFL was complicit in failing to address the concussion danger with its players. But that will have to play out in the courtrooms.
  In the meantime, Cyndy has a story to tell. And she will continue to share it. One day, at some point in the future because of her bravery, football will be better, and safer. And hopefully no more families will be crushed because the league prioritizes profit over players. And hopefully – one day – a fractured family will be healed.
  You can find out more about Cyndy’s book “After the Cheering Stops” on her website, or by using the Amazon link on the sidebar.
  Cyndy’s interview was transcribed by Copley Court Reporting.

QUOTED: "Though not deeply introspective, Feasel's memoir offers a searing moment-by-moment recounting of the horrors of codependency, domestic violence, and ... addiction."

After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of
Concussions, Loss, and the Faith That Saw Her Through
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of Concussions, Loss, and the Faith That Saw Her Through
Cyndy Feasel, with Mike Yorkey. Thomas Nelson, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-7180-8830-9
Feasel, the wife of former Seattle Seahawks center Grant Feasel, recounts her husband's descent into alcoholism and chronic traumatic
encephalopathy (CTE), in this disturbing story of what happens when the lights go off and the cheering stops. Grant Feasel played pro football
from 1983 to 1992. During that time, it seemed as if Cyndy Feasel led a charmed life. She was a traditional Southern Christian woman married to
an NFL center and long snapper. She joined NFL wives during games, wore a mink coat, and owned a lovely, but modest, house in Texas. But
beneath the lights and glamour, Feasel's life descended into an isolated domestic nightmare, shaped by her husband's addiction, domestic
violence, and CTE. Linked to the helmet-tohelmet collisions players experience in the NFL, CTE is a degenerative brain disease associated with
aggression, impulse-control problems, and depression. Feasel's tale is a stark analysis of the high cost of fame: hours-long pregame taping and
rehabilitation rituals, frightening slams on the field, and drinks and painkillers back at home. Though not deeply introspective, Feasel's memoir
offers a searing moment-bymoment recounting of the horrors of codependency, domestic violence, and the ways addiction ravages the soul.
(Nov.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of Concussions, Loss, and the Faith That Saw Her Through." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016,
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