PHILADELPHIA — The neuropathology report, dated Jan. 19, 2018, contained within its data and its jargon the duality of Max Runager’s life and death. Runager — the punter on the Eagles’ 1980-81 Super Bowl team, later an NFL champion with the San Francisco 49ers — had died on June 30, 2017. Three weeks later, on July 19, the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, at the permission of Runager’s family, received his brain for examination. It weighed exactly 1,350 grams, just shy of three pounds. Dr. Ann McKie, the center’s director, discovered “alcohol-induced neurodegeneration,” including “severe loss of Purkinje cells,” the tree-shaped neurons in the cerebellum that control motor coordination. McKie also found “scant perivascular clusters of neurofibrillary tangles” in the frontal and parietal cortex, which, along with other evidence, led her to conclude that Runager was stricken with mild Stage II CTE.
Of those cold facts, the last was a comfort, perhaps the only comfort, to Runager’s son Kolby. Max died at 61 from a blood clot while sitting in his black Honda Accord, and though he had drunk too much for too long, though he would borrow thousands of dollars from his friends and never repay the debts, though Max had divorced his wife and lost his job and moved back in with his parents, at least Kolby could finally know that the pain that defined his father’s final years wasn’t fully his fault.
“I was actually relieved, honestly,” he said by phone recently, when he called, unprompted, to share Max’s diagnosis. “My dad was just a shell of the man I knew, and to know there was something going on in his brain helped. How much that played a part in his behavior is a kind of mystery, but to know there was something else going on was a relief.”
