Ann McKee Quotes

A child who plays a game of football for one season without any documented concussion - several months after that season, if you subject his brain to sophisticated psychological testing and radiological testing, functional MRIs, there is evidence of brain damage.

[Referring to Jack Kemp:] … a football player who has played too much without his helmet.

It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

I'm concerned about the future of football, because we have paid a lot of attention to concussions. We are more aware of concussions. But it's really the repetitive minor injuries, the ones that are asymptomatic that occur on almost every play of the game, the sub-concussive hits: that's the big problem for football.

In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.

Dementia pugilistica was discovered in 1928... And we still have boxing. Football will continue.

The way football is being played currently, that I have seen, it's dangerous. It's dangerous and it could impact their long-term mental health. You only get one brain.

They're on the right road, but there's a long way to go on concussions, not only in the NFL, but college football, high school football and all football.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

When people say that you kind of just get - you know, just feel like a little buzzed or dazed or had your bell rung - they consider that a concussion. I wouldn't. But if that is considered a concussion, I would say any football player at least records 50 to 100 in the course of a year.

When I first started playing football, a headache was called a 'headache.' And now it's called 'a concussion.'

Athletes, coaches and parents today are increasingly aware of the danger of concussion, and this awareness influences decisions about buying new and reconditioned football helmets.

People get hurt all the time in the game of football, it's part of what we do.

When I played for the Steelers and I got my bell rung, I'd take smelling salts and go right back out there.

Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.

To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game's respectability rested.

He played football too long without a helmet.

You always want to see the NFL try to protect the players.

Concussions happen. If not on every play, then they happen like every other, every third play, you know.

I know if I don't look after myself, I will be talking to you in a couple of years' time mumbling my words and slurring. It won't be because I am drunk: it will be the fighting, taking blow after blow to the brain. That scares me. I don't worry about being killed in the ring; it's losing my mind that I fear.

I forget a lot of things sometimes. I'm not one to sit here and complain. While I did not know the severity of what continuous head traumas could do to an individual and the mind and so forth, I'm not going to sit here and complain.

My father was an NFL running back, so I feel like I might be more susceptible, genetically, to CTE.

I've had concussions, and I'm still here. I still love the sport.

I've had knee trouble, and I worry about my shoulder, but I think my weakest link is my head. A helmet can only do so much, and I have seen the effects of brain injuries. That is a big fear. I think everyone's weakest link is their brain because it's their most fragile link.