Plaintiff No. 1 in NFL suit

given up driving at night, but now, suddenly, his dementia had turned a simple errand run into a murky maze. He was still aware enough to phone his wife, who then talked her man back home.

“That scared him,” said Easterling’s wife of 36 years, Mary Ann.

Three days later, Easterling, 62, committed suicide at home.

The first name on the first lawsuit against the NFL claiming that the league was negligent in protecting its players from the long-term effects of repeated concussions was dead. Last week, as attorneys in Philadelphia presented their plans for combining the complaints of more than 1,300 former players into a unified suit against the NFL, they invoked Easterling as a reason to hurry along the process. Get their stories on the record, they argued, before more players die as a result of their deteriorating mental state.

“There are other seriously injured players whose testimony should be preserved as soon as possible,” the players’ attorney, Gene Locks, told an organizational hearing in federal court.

Easterling, Bears safety Dave Duerson and Falcons lineman Shane Dronett are former players who took their own lives while struggling with what was believed to be football-related degenerative brain disease. In life, Easterling fired the first shot in the legal battle with the NFL. In death, Easterling “now becomes sort of the leader of these cases, one guy who clearly had been suffering,” said Atlanta attorney Mike Mcglamry, whose firm represents 175 former players.

The basic arguments of both sides have been framed.

The players contend the NFL knew, or should have known, of the potentially devastating neurological damage that repeated blows to the head could cause. This information was kept from the players, they claim, in order to keep them on the field.

The league, on the other hand, said it has made — and continues to make — player safety a priority and that it has never misled its players about the risks of their sport.

The legal parsing of these contentions — with a potentially huge settle- ment hanging in the balance — may take years yet.

Broken memories

On April 19, the impact of Easterling’s solution to his eroding mental state was immediate, profound and widespread.

Driving around Hilton Head, S.C., Garland Radloff took a call from Easterling’s wife that afternoon. She and her husband, Wayne, a onetime UGA and Falcons lineman, also are part of that original lawsuit.

“I had to pull over. I thought I was going to faint,” Garland Radloff said.

Her husband, 50, suffers from dementia and depression and reportedly has been coping poorly with the news of Easterling’s death.

In Woodstock, former Falcons linebacker Fulton Kuykendall, one of Mc- Glamry’s clients suing the league, was taking roll.

“My friends are dying here. Way too young. Some very good people. It’s just very sad,” he said.

Suffering from headaches, insomnia, an inability to concentrate, Kuykendall is not as bad off as Easterling was at the end. But any former player whose head is not working quite right has to wonder: Could that be me one day?

“God has ordained what’s going to happen to me; he knows my life from beginning to end,” Kuykendall said. “I hope I don’t get like that. I pray I don’t. But if I do, so be it. You have to take life as it’s dealt to you.”

In Newnan, where he lives and works as a Christian counselor, Brezina had a very vivid initial reaction.

“It was like somebody stuck a vacuum in my gut and sucked the air out of my lungs. I was stunned,” he said.

Then he began working on a eulogy.

A friend to Easterling since they roomed together at Falcons training camp, Brezina spoke at Monday’s funeral, delivering a message intended to help the family deal with the stigma of suicide.

“What I shared with the family was that there is no shame in Ray’s death,” Brezina said. “His brain was dying and decaying and parts of it were dead. And if your brain doesn’t work correctly, you’re not going to think correctly.”

No one questions the abuse Easterling visited upon his brain.

As a safety on the Falcons “Grits Blitz” defenses of the late 1970s, Ray Easterling fell easily into the culture of institutionalized mayhem.

Naturally driven to succeed — a workout allstar who always report- ed to camp with the lowest body-fat percentage of anyone on the team — Easterling was an eager and willing contributor to that unit’s reputation for delivering the big blow.

“He gave beatings to other people,” Brezina said. “We were coached to lead with our head. We were coached to punish people with our helmet. That’s what Ray did. Ray submitted to it and he would nail people. Wide receivers did not want to come inside on us.”

Jerry Glanville, a Falcons defensive back coach and later defensive coordinator during that period, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Slowly slipping away

A ninth-round draft pick out of the University of Richmond, Easterling fashioned an eightyear career with the Falcons, retiring after the 1979 season. He appeared in 83 games and had 13 interceptions.

After his retirement, he and Mary Ann returned to Richmond, where Ray rose to the rank of national sales director with the insurance-financial investment firm of A.L. Williams (now Primerica).

After leaving the company in 1989, Easterling struck out on a series of business adventures. He helped form a wellness health clinic in Richmond. He tried to start a football camp. He attempted to sell a preventative health program to area businesses.

As the years passed, it became progressively more difficult for him to see projects through to the finish. The once meticulously prepared player and businessman couldn’t seem to get organized.

“Besides the depression and the insomnia, he couldn’t keep it together to do presentations,” said Mary Ann.

“He was always late for appointments, and you’re talking about somebody who was always on me about being the late person. And he’d misplace things. Couldn’t find his watch, couldn’t find his computer.”

It wasn’t until last April that the Easterlings received the worst-case diagnosis — early onset dementia. Even as he had kept his body in tip-top shape, his mind was betraying him. Doctors told Easterling he had two to three more years of quality life left. “When doctors gave predictions of how long they thought he’d be lucid, he didn’t believe it. He was skeptical of the rosy predictions,” Mary Ann said.

His condition seemed to accelerate after the diagnosis. He and his wife could sit down and compare a brain scan from the time of the diagnosis to one seven months later and see parts of his brain “shrinking significantly,” Mary Ann said.

“His brain was retreating from his skull. It was like we were looking at a different brain,” she said.

Now, when Ray would call his friend, Brezina often put the phone down and just let him ramble on for 10, 15 minutes at a time.

They last spoke on the phone April 13, when, Brezina said, his friend seemed enthused about the prospect of the various lawsuits being consolidated and “that he was the poster child for this thing.”

His thinking changed between then and April 19. Easterling left behind a suicide note. The contents have not been made public, Brezina only saying that much of it was incoherent.

Yet to be written is Ray Easterling’s legacy. That slowly will reveal itself in the coming years, as the NFL and its players sort through the consequences of their violent game.