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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/OnlyMamaKnows on 2023-12-09 17:12:03.
But when past winners line up to welcome a new member, they will do so as one of football’s grim realities breaches their club’s inner sanctum. Four Heisman winners have been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative and often devastating brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
Many of the winners’ wives, often their husbands’ caretakers and support beams, find it increasingly difficult to ignore the changes that afflict their friends — and the challenges their peers have learned to live with or ignore
It was enough to get her through the weekend because, especially in this gilded setting, she didn’t want the other wives to know that Charles invited his NFL teammates to their daughter’s birthday party but no-showed it himself. Or that, in 1987, police found him outside a warehouse, high on cocaine and wielding a trash can lid, convinced someone was trying to kill him. Or that sometimes Charles was so volatile that Judi checked herself and the kids into a hotel near Disneyland, waiting for him to turn back into himself.
“Then come back,” she says, “and pretend like nothing ever happened.”
Eventually Charles’s problems became so severe that Judi just stopped making plans. They stopped going to the Heisman ceremony in part because the man in the oil painting — smiling, chiseled, the adonis Judi had known since they were teenagers — was slipping away.