Warren Sapp said he he will be donating his brain for concussion research to help make the NFL a "better" game than the one he left after a Hall of Fame career, said ESPN.
He said his own memory had taken some hits from 13 seasons while playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders before retiring in 2008. He was a seven-time Pro Bowler.
Sapp, 44, said in a video posted on The Players' Tribune on Tuesday that he will donate his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
"We're playing in a macho league and we're talking about Hall of Famers now who are immortalized forever, made busts and everything. Legends of the game," Sapp said in the video. "There's no way any of us wanna really admit that we can't remember how to get home or a grocery list that the wife has given us or how to go pick up our kids to the school, or whatever it may be.”
"You try to [say], 'All right, I'm gonna get a little more sleep – maybe it's something I did last night, maybe something I drank,' or whatever it is. You try to find a reason that it's not that it's my brain, that I'm not deteriorating right before my own eyes."
Sapp said the hits he took and dished out during training camp were all about toughness.
"I remember the month-long training camps where we just banged and banged and hit, and it was 'who’s tough?' It was bad, it was Neanderthals, we were dinosaurs," Sapp said.
The Hall of Famer proposed in the video that tackle football should be eliminated until players get into high school, noted ESPN.
The Concussion Legacy Foundation said on its website that 91 of 95 former professional football players studied at its brain bank have been diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.
CTE is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes (and others) with a history of repetitive brain trauma, including symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head, said Boston University's School of Medicine's CTE Center.
CTE has been known to affect boxers since the 1920s, but more recently has been confirmed in retired professional football players and other athletes who have a history of repetitive brain trauma.
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