Jeff Herrod feels forgotten: ‘No one acknowledges the work we did’ - The Athletic
Earlier this season, albion said he didn't think anything could make him give up watching football. Honestly, articles like this push me a little closer each time. The price some of the players pay is just so damn high. Having a limp or other physical aches and pains seems like a cost that players go in knowing they will have to pay. But I don't think most of them imagine having to live like a hermit because everything sets you off and having a migraine for 15 straight years. It really makes me question whether I can continue to watch the sport. I think at some point, I may try to get my football fix only out of video games and avoid watching the real thing.
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His dress clothes hang idle inside the closet of his north Florida home, a dozen suits collecting dust because he can’t slip them on. Not by himself at least. He settles for athletic clothes most days, the best he can manage without his wife’s help.
He rarely takes off his sunglasses, even when he’s inside, because light makes his 15-year-old headache scream even worse.
“You know what it’s like living with a migraine 24 hours a day, seven days a week?” he says.
He’ll have dreams he’s still playing, still punishing whatever poor sap happened to line up across from him, and then he’ll wake up, seething and soaked in sweat, growling like a lion before the kill, pissed that it’s over and has been over for 25 years. All he’s left with is a body that’s falling apart and a mind that’s slipping away.
He’ll have fits of crying. He’ll throw up out of nowhere. He’ll hear a horn or a siren or a buzzer and want to turn around and slug someone. He’ll scream at his wife if she cooks with the wrong colored spoon.
When the neighborhood boys tell him they want to play football, and they want to make it all the way to the NFL — just like he did — he chuckles. “That’s because you haven’t seen my hands,” Jeff Herrod will tell them. He’ll watch them shudder after they get a glimpse of his fingers darting out every which way but straight.
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