Chris Borland suited up for just one season in the NFL. The former San Francisco 49ers linebacker decided to call it quits following the 2014 campaign. This despite the fact that his career was seemingly headed on the right trajectory.
The reason for Borland’s abrupt retirement? He simply didn’t want to risk the potential of long-term injuries resulting from continual blows to the head.
It was a surprising decision — on that pretty much placed the NFL back on the front burner as a dangerous sports entity.
Now, more than a year removed from his retirement, the Wisconsin grad is speaking out against both the National Football League and the union that was once tasked with protecting him as a player.
“Ten thousand dollars in union dues and I don’t get a phone call,” Borland told Bleacher Report. “If I were running a union and a player walked away because of the most pressing medical need of my workforce, I would pick up the phone.”
Borland then went on to indicate that it was “complete silence” after his retirement. The union did not reach out once to a former member — one that exhausted $10,000 of his hard-earned cash to represent him as a player.
Though, it surely doesn’t seem that the union is the entity that Borland is so jaded with. Instead, that falls on the footsteps of the NFL’s headquarters in New York City.
It’s a league that the former linebacker believes isn’t really prepared to spread the truth regarding severe brain trauma and its correlation to football.
“They’re so far from owning it. There are a million things they could do. I don’t know if you look to the coal industry to address black lung appropriately. You’re not going to look to sugar to address diabetes,” Borland continued. “The NFL will never fully, willfully dump all the information on the public.”
As Bleacher Report pointed out in the all-encompassing piece, over a dozen players walked away from the game shy of their 30th birthdays this past spring. Those players included Calvin Johnson and Marshawn Lynch, two likely Hall of Famers.
Much like Eugene Monroe seems willing to shed some light on the NFL’s dependence on painkillers, it’s pretty clear Borland wouldn’t have an issue acting the part of a whistle-blower here.
A year prior to the release of the controversial PBS documentary League of Denial, the NFL was set to release a 94-page report to its players. The report itself was going to detail the long-term impact of concussions.
“It was too damning,” the former linebacker said. “It revealed too much. The whole intent was to inform players…and players don’t see it.”
Borland went on to indicate that he received and read a copy of the report following his retirement, at which point he became “incensed.”
This is an issue that’s not going away anytime soon. And as players of every different ilk walk away from the game, it will continue to remain in the front burner.
That’s only magnified when both former and current players speak out on the hot-button topic.