I agree with your overall statement, but I want to modify it, for my personal take, at least a bit. Antonio Brown WAS a jerk before the hit. That's pretty well known at this point. The hit may have just sent it into another realm of what he already was, with the added affects of CTE.Anteaters wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 10:36 amThat's true. Some end up shooting themselves in the head.killer_of_giants wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 8:15 ambesides, he's not the only football player to ever receive a vicious hit. how come not everyone behaves like a total cunt?FantasyFreak wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 6:45 am So true. I really can't stand when people chalk it all up to that hit. It takes away a certain amount of responsibility for his own actions. AB had issues well before that, and people that point to that hit as the reason are just not well informed.
Two things can be true at the same time. AB might have been a jerk with mental health issues before the hit. And his mental health issues could have worsened after the hit.
A third thing can also be true. Maybe he took hits as a youngster that created his mental health issues in the first place. Maybe if he'd never played football and never had multiple shots to the head for 25 years, he'd be a guy whose behavior we never questioned. Just like some bodies aren't built for the brutality of football (Swift,) some brains react more harshly to repeated head shots.
Who knows? I sure don't.
Junior Seau, was, by all accounts, a great person and teammate. It's tragic what happened with him. AB's actions may be a sort of exponential affect of being a jerk and suffering from CTE, and we have no idea if he would have gone to these levels of depravity if he hadn't taken that hit, totally with you there, but make no mistake, he was a big problem personality before he was ever hit by Burfict.
The third thing seems pretty far fetched to me, but who knows. There's no way of disproving anything if we take that route. Why are so many other people that play football and take hits their whole lives, not like AB? Maybe he was a totally down to earth kid with respect for his elders and nice to other kids, and a few hits in pop warner made him a problem child, but not likely.
There needs to be a standard held to the actions of people, to some degree, I don't think the third is a likely reality. A few hits totally changed him into a total jerk, when he was before, a nice kid/person. It's more likely parental and peer influences had an affect more than getting his bell rung in pop warner, but we will indeed never know.