Seven-year NFL veteran Eugene Monroe announced his retirement from the league Thursday on The Players’ Tribune. In a blog post, he cited concerns that the game was affecting his brain and mental health as the main reason for hanging up his cleats at the age of 29.
“My wife used to joke about the ‘little things I forget,’” wrote Monroe, who played left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens for his final three seasons. “Things like that were just a joke around the house until this past winter, when my four-year-old daughter said, ‘Daddy you don’t remember anything!’”
By retiring due to mental health concerns explicitly, Monroe joins a growing list of former NFL players who put their brains before their money, including Buffalo Bills linebacker A.J. Tarpley and San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland. The primary fear of these players is developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease cause by repeated hits to the head, which can only be diagnosed after death. According to Boston researchers, the disease was found in 87 of the 91 deceased former NFL players that were tested.
“The last 18 years have been full of traumatic injuries to both my head and my body,” Monroe wrote in The Players’ Tribune. He attributed those injuries to a “never-ending cycle” that seems to be the norm for most players in the NFL: “injury, shake it off, ‘recover,’ repeat.”
Monroe admitted that his decision might be perplexing to many people, but added, “I am thinking of my family first right now — and my health and my future.”
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