The New York Times International - 05.08.2019

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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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