“I could literally go into a store and 30 minutes later come out and not know where my car is parked.” That is how Larry Johnson, the former Kansas City Chiefs running back, describes his memory at 46.
Johnson says he believes football did it. He first said publicly in 2017 that he thought he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and he is saying it again this week. He has no diagnosis, and none is possible while he is alive: CTE can be confirmed only by examining brain tissue after death. Johnson has not donated his brain, and he describes lapses and disorientation behind the wheel.
His workload is a matter of record. The Chiefs drafted him 27th overall in 2003. In 2005 he touched the ball 457 times, the second-most in NFL history for a single season. Across 2005 and 2006, both Pro Bowl years, he had 752 carries and 74 receptions.
The test Black retirees had to clear
Johnson’s account lands in a league that has already had to answer for how it measured Black players’ brains. The NFL’s roughly $1 billion concussion settlement scored dementia tests with a race-based formula, known as race-norming, that assumed Black people start from a lower cognitive baseline. That made it harder for Black retirees to show the decline football caused, and so harder to get paid.
The scoring came to light through a 2020 discrimination lawsuit by former players Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry. Senior U.S. District Judge Anita Brody in Philadelphia approved a deal on March 4, 2022 that ended race norms and let Black players who had been turned down have their tests rescored or file again. Nearly 650 men were rescored automatically, and all of them had initially failed to qualify because of the race-norming.
The numbers explain the stakes. About 70% of active NFL players are Black, and more than 60% of living retirees are, according to figures reported when the fix was approved. Dementia awards averaged about $600,000, and the league had paid out more than $800 million at that point.
The settlement has never been a test of whether a player felt something was wrong. It asks for a clinical diagnosis of a qualifying condition, such as dementia, and CTE in a living player is not one a doctor can make. It is not publicly known whether Johnson has filed a claim.
What is known is that the men who built the league’s highlight reels are now old enough to be asking what it cost them. Johnson turned 46 this year. He says he is afraid of what comes next, and the only certain way to learn what football did to his brain is the one he is not ready to take.
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