Two Ex-Jets Have Moved On, but Concussion Effects Linger
They were standout players who became known as well for how their careers ended as for how they played.
Today Chrebet and Toon live full and prosperous lives. Toon, the father of four and a co-owner of Olson Toon Landscaping, lives with his wife in Wisconsin. Chrebet, a financial analyst for Morgan Stanley, lives in New Jersey with his wife and their three sons.
Both former players continue to carry the game with them — in memories and awards, but also in aftershocks.
“I do have some residual but nothing significant,” Toon, 48, said in a phone interview from his office. “Nothing I care to talk about in public. I’m able to live a happy life.”
Chrebet, 38, was also reluctant to get into specifics about the lingering effects of his concussions except to say they exist.
In an e-mail he wrote: “While I have never spoken about what I’m going through today because of this, I can say that I am proud of the way I played, and new rules or old ones there was a good chance that the same thing would have happened to me. I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong sometimes and I paid for it. And boy it felt great. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
During an interview at Giants Stadium in 2007, Chrebet gave a more graphic glimpse of what he had to contend with. He talked about the limitations imposed by the concussions: not being able to engage in activity that forced blood to rush to his head or working out in a certain way.
“Sometimes, you don’t want to get out of bed,” he said at the time. “Sometimes, the sky is blue and everything smells good. There’s just no rhyme or reason to it. Some days are worse than others, and you just hope for the good days.”
During a phone interview last week I asked Chrebet whether he still had these challenges. “There’s some that have gotten better, some that have gotten worse,” he said. “It is what it is and I’ll deal with it.”
Since Toon and Chrebet retired, the N.F.L., shamed into taking action after disclosures about the devastating effects of concussions, has put in place practices designed to lessen their ravaging impact. One of the most significant steps was taking the decision to go back into games away from players, as was the case when Toon and Chrebet entered the league.
For a player like Chrebet, an undrafted free agent, the answer was always, “I’m O.K.”
“When you’re fighting for your job every day and have to put food on your table, there’s a lot of pressure to get back out there,” he said. “Most did. I did.”
Now, Chrebet said, with doctors making the call, players do not have the pressure to decide whether to return to play. “And I’m glad for that,” he said. “If they took it out of my hands, there’s nothing I could do about it.”
With the safety measures, escalated penalties for certain types of hits and baseline testing for players before the season, the million-dollar question is whether the game is safer than it was when Toon was forced to retire in 1992 and when Chrebet retired in 2005.
Toon said some things in the games are handled better, but “I wouldn’t say the game is a whole lot safer.” Players can deliver more devastating hits, he said.
“The players are getting bigger, faster, stronger, so the impacts are more significant, and I don’t know that the equipment can keep up with the force of the blows,” he said. “When I was playing you didn’t have a defensive tackle running downfield making tackles 15 yards downfield. That wasn’t the norm, that was the exception.
“Now it’s the norm. So you’ll have a 275-pound guy running a 4.7 or 4.6 running downfield making a tackle on a 220-pound running back. You’re dealing with more impact, you’re dealing with more athletic individuals. So that is inherently more dangerous.”
Toon has a personal stake in the safety of the game because his son, Nick, is a star wide receiver for Wisconsin — Toon’s alma mater.
Given his own experience with concussions and the violence of the game, I wondered if Toon worried about his son.
E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com