When Nick Buoniconti walked off the

pro football field for the final time in

1976, he got down on his hands and

knees and kissed the turf at the Or-

ange Bowl in Miami.

The future Pro Football Hall of Fame

linebacker had won two Super Bowls

and had broken a lot of bones by then.

By his own estimate, Buoniconti, who

died last week at 78, absorbed more

than a half-million hits to the head

during his playing days before and

with the Miami Dolphins.

Still, he “thanked God that I’d never

gotten seriously hurt,” Buoniconti told

Sports Illustrated years later. “Four-

teen-year career? I could’ve been

maimed.”

For Buoniconti, the fearless leader of

one of the N.F.L.’s most feared de-

fenses, the more enduring pain came

years later.

In 1985, his son Marc severely in-

jured his spinal cord while playing

linebacker for The Citadel. The injury

left him paralyzed from the neck down.

For decades afterward, his father

helped raise hundreds of millions of

dollars for spinal cord and brain re-

search and the Miami Project to Cure

Paralysis.

Thirty years later, football again

caught up with Nick Buoniconti. Doc-

tors said that he showed symptoms

suggesting dementia, Alzheimer’s

disease and C.T.E., or chronic trau-

matic encephalopathy, the degenera-

tive brain disease linked to repeated

hits to the head. C.T.E. can be diag-

nosed only in an autopsy, so Buoni-

conti, again eager for a cure, agreed in

2017 to donate his brain to researchers

at Boston University.

Many star athletes live dual lives as

the glory and adoration of their playing

days gives way to new chapters as

businessmen, entertainers and philan-

thropists. Buoniconti, who worked as a

lawyer, a player agent, a corporate

executive and a sports television host,

was all of those things and more. But

few players have taken so much out of

football and had so much taken away

by football.

“The triumph and tragedy of his life

was almost Shakespearean,” said Bob

Costas, the television announcer and a

friend of Buoniconti. “He was an ex-

ceptionally accomplished and char-

ismatic man, and toward the end, his

understanding of the gap between

what he had been and what he now

was, was almost too much for him to

bear. It’s hard to imagine a family to

whom football gave more and from

whom football took more away.”

As of 2017, Boston University’s C.T.E.

Center had found the disease in 110 of

the 111 former N.F.L. players’ brains it

had examined. If doctors find that

Buoniconti had C.T.E., he will join a sad

and growing list of Hall of Fame foot-

ball players who had the disease. Mike

Webster. Junior Seau. Ken Stabler.

John Mackey. Frank Gifford.

Buoniconti’s death is another re-

minder that, as the N.F.L. celebrates

the start of its 100th season, the game

has come with sometimes devastating

consequences for the players who

turned the league into a juggernaut.

The league has tried to make the game

safer by changing rules and putting in

place procedures to protect concussed

players. But those are too late for

players of Buoniconti’s generation,

who were led by coaches who used

them as battering rams and scoffed at

their injuries.

“We were all in the same boat, and

linebackers tend to be at greater risk

because of the head-on contact,” said

Dick Anderson, Buoniconti’s teammate

on the Dolphins’ “No-Name Defense”

that went to the Super Bowl three

consecutive years. “In those days, the

doctors worked for the head coach, and

when you got hurt, they yelled to put

you back in. The protocol they have

today, where the doctor shouldn’t

report to the head coach, means you

have a far better chance of getting

healed.”

Buoniconti, though, was a fighter,

and while he embraced everything

good that he got out of football, he also

confronted the calamities that football

caused. He didn’t just get one or two

old teammates to attend a golf event to

raise money for spinal cord research.

He rented a ballroom at the Waldorf

Astoria Hotel in New York and brought

together the biggest names in sports —

Muhammad Ali, Willie Mays, Magic

Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, Mario An-

dretti, Joe Namath — for the Great

Sports Legends Dinner benefiting the

Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis.

They were drawn to “this beautiful

story between a father and a son,

where you see this monster of a legend

be humbled to a point where he is

giving of his own life to help his son,”

Marc Buoniconti said of his father’s

ability to pull so many people together

to help find a cure for paralysis. “Peo-

ple could see his genuine pain but also

his genuine pride, and his desire to

help his son. We went from a perfect

life to one with a lot of challenges.”

Indeed, players like Buoniconti knew

there were risks to playing football yet

had to block out those fears. Cris

Collinsworth, a Pro Bowl wide receiver

on the Cincinnati Bengals and broad-

cast partner of Buoniconti’s on HBO’s

“Inside the N.F.L.,” was reminded of

the risks every time he stepped out of

the locker room.

“As an athlete, there’s always this

thing in the back of your mind,” he

said. “So a lot of the athletes who show

up to this event have this, ‘for the

grace of God’ feeling. It struck all our

hearts that it could have been us.

There’s a real element of luck in sur-

viving this game.”

But Buoniconti, who lived his life like

a linebacker charging forward to stop a

running back, “never believed that age

or anything else would catch up with

him,” Collinsworth said. “It’s the fight-

er’s mentality.”

Marc Buoniconti said his father took

that approach to his own illness, which

crept up on him over several years and

left him in a wheelchair, his once boom-

ing voice halting. His determination

was in full view in November 2017,

when he publicly declared that he was

suffering from dementia and other

ailments, and that he was donating his

brain to science.

“It’s not hard for me to go public like

this because so many others depend on

getting out there and not to be

ashamed,” Buoniconti said. “I never,

never, never dreamed it would happen

to me. We just hope this will pave the

way for thousands of others who are

out there and in denial and can come

out now.”

Triumph and tragedy of a Hall of Famer’s life

On Pro Football

B Y KEN BELSON

Left, Nick Buoniconti with his children in 1967. Marc, on his lap, then 1, was paralyzed playing college football. Right, Buoniconti, with the ball, intercepted a pass in the Miami win over Washington in the 1973 Super Bowl.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

“People could see his genuine

pain but also his genuine pride,

and his desire to help his son.

We went from a perfect life to

one with a lot of challenges.”

..

12 | MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports

Every four years since he was tasked

with assembling U.S.A. Basketball ros-

ters, Jerry Colangelo has maintained his

own quadrennial tradition.

As reliably as the Olympics them-

selves, Colangelo, as the program’s

managing director, emerges to make the

same plea on behalf of the team the

United States will send to the FIBA

World Cup.

“I would like to keep the focus on who

is there, not on who’s not there,” Colan-

gelo said in a telephone interview last

week.

Because of a format change by FIBA,

basketball’s world governing body, it

has been five years since the sport’s last

world championship. The tournament

returns Aug. 31 in China.

Colangelo’s messaging, by contrast, is

essentially unchanged from the glass-

half-full proclamations he made going

into this competition in 2010 and 2014.

Amid a steady stream of pullouts by a

slew of top American players, he insists

that the United States will be repre-

sented by a 12-man squad capable of

winning a third consecutive FIBA title

— no matter how pedestrian the group

looks on paper.

“I think we’re going to be fine,” Colan-

gelo said.

As the Americans prepare to open

training camp Monday on the campus of

Nevada-Las Vegas, under new coach

Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio

Spurs, there is no shortage of naysayers

prepared to challenge Colangelo’s view.

No other basketball-playing nation will

shed a tear for the United States, given

the depths of the talent pool in this coun-

try, but the fact remains that the dozen

players who ultimately earn a seat on

the plane to China will comprise the

least-decorated team the Americans

have fielded since Colangelo and the

previous coach, Duke’s Mike

Krzyzewski, took charge in 2006.

Of the 11 Americans who occupied the

15 slots on last season’s All-N.B.A. team,

only one will be in Las Vegas: Boston’s

Kemba Walker. Of the 20 Americans

who earned All-Star status last season,

only two are currently available to

Popovich: Walker and Milwaukee’s

Khris Middleton. That number

stretches to three if Toronto’s Kyle

Lowry, who recently underwent thumb

surgery, can recover in time — but also

only if Lowry resists joining the nine es-

tablished players who have dropped out

just since U.S.A. Basketball announced

its preliminary 20-man roster on June

10.

The Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Da-

vis, Houston’s James Harden and Eric

Gordon, Cleveland’s Kevin Love, Port-

land’s Damian Lillard and C.J. McCol-

lum, Detroit’s Andre Drummond,

Philadelphia’s Tobias Harris and Den-

ver’s Paul Millsap all withdrew in July. A

variety of individual reasons have been

cited, but the underlying justification is

a familiar one: N.B.A. stars are reluc-

tant to surrender six weeks of their off-

season for a tournament that, in Ameri-

ca’s basketball culture, drastically pales

in significance to the Olympics.

Winning a World Cup in basketball

simply carries little cachet on these

shores. The fact that N.B.A.-crazed

China is often cited as a fertile market

for players interested in brand-building

clearly hasn’t changed that sentiment —

not with less than two weeks of recovery

time from the Sept. 15 final in Beijing un-

til N.B.A. training camps open.

For China, the United States is down

to a modest foursome at center to

counter the might of Serbia’s Nikola Jo-

kic: Milwaukee’s Brook Lopez, Indi-

ana’s Myles Turner, Miami’s Bam Ade-

bayo and Jokic’s Denver teammate Ma-

son Plumlee.

“We understand that some people out

there feel we’re vulnerable,” Colangelo

said.

On-the-rise players like Utah’s Dono-

van Mitchell, Boston’s Jayson Tatum

and the Lakers’ Kyle Kuzma are ex-

pected to land roster spots alongside

Walker and Middleton — and younger

outsiders from a “select” practice

squad, like Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox

and Atlanta’s Trae Young, could also

make the leap given that speed and ath-

leticism at the guard spots often rank as

the key difference makers for the United

States. But future M.V.P. material ap-

pears to be in short supply.

The surest source of star wattage will

be found on the U.S. bench, with War-

riors Coach Steve Kerr and Villanova’s

Jay Wright enlisted as assistants to

Popovich alongside Atlanta Coach

Lloyd Pierce. Popovich has also invited

Krzyzewski, who posted a record of 88-

from 2006 through the 2016 Olympics, to

spend part of the Vegas camp embedded

with the new staff.

Yet you can safely give Colangelo this

much: What he is too diplomatic to say

is that the Americans, for all the recent

fretting, are actually only as vulnerable

as the competition dictates. No rival na-

tion has managed to do anything mean-

ingful to close the gap since the two

Olympic gold-medal game scares that

Spain inflicted on the United States in

2008 and 2012.

Spain (led by Toronto’s Marc Gasol)

and France (led by Utah’s Rudy Gobert)

continue to be classified as dangerous

but are realistically not as strong as they

once were. Australia and Canada have

rosters filled with N.B.A. names but lack

the winning pedigree possessed by their

European counterparts. The most ac-

complished player in the bloated 32-

team field can be found on Greece’s ros-

ter, but it remains to be seen how much

Greece can really put around Milwau-

kee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Serbia thus looks like the strongest

threat to the Americans, with a number

of quality players (Bogdan Bogdanovic,

Milos Teodosic, Boban Marjanovic,

Marko Guduric and Nemanja Bjelica)

likely to flank Jokic and a considerable

continuity edge over Popovich’s potluck

squad. Yet it must be noted that Serbia

was the Americans’ opponent in the last

two major finals — losing by 37 points at

the 2014 World Cup in Spain and by 30

points at the 2016 Summer Olympics in

Brazil.

9 U.S. stars skip world tourney

Americans still favored

to win despite absence

of marquee N.B.A. talent

BY MARC STEIN

Utah’s Donovan Mitchell, left, and Boston’s Jayson Tatum are two of the young players

expected to make Team U.S.A. thanks to several prominent veteran dropping out.

RICK BOWMER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Serbia is likely to be the biggest

threat to the American team.

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