Chris Borland Quotes
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Obviously, football and soccer seem to clash a lot, but soccer was great for me. It's a game that you play with triangles. You make a pass thinking that the person you pass the ball to is going to make the next pass.
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As far as what it takes to play football, I've got all it requires.
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I don't consider football fun. It's not like a water park or a baseball game.
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There are Hall of Famers at 5'11'' and 5'9''.
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Pat Tillman is a hero of mine.
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Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you're fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing.
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I don't do interviews without a collared shirt.
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I just want to live a long healthy life, and I don't want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise.
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My breadth of football experience, my injury history, and my all-or-nothing goal to become one of the best linebackers in the NFL, combined with all I'd been learning about the game's neurological effects on the brain, convinced me I'd be wise in choosing another career.
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A piece of my heart will always be in football, but my mind ended it.
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I've thought about what I could accomplish in football, but when you read about Mike Webster and Dave Duerson and Ray Easterling, you read all these stories, and to be the type of player I want to be in football, I think I'd have to take on some risks that, as a person, I don't want to take on.
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I think it's unfair to punish players for inherent faults in the game.
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I wanted to fulfill my dream of playing in the NFL.
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Football is an elective. It's a game. It's make-believe. And to think that people have brain damage from some made-up game.
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The 49ers drafted me assuming I wanted to play more than one year. At the time, I did, too. Things changed. They didn't deserve to be undercut. And I didn't want that to happen.
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I would never call myself anti-football. I think I'm pro-information, pro-people making informed individual choices, pro-health, so for that reason, personally, I'm apathetic towards football. But at the same time, I think we can retain some civility, and I understand why people support and love it.
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In places where people read hardcover books and eat sushi, they're not signing a five-year-old up to tackle another five-year-old.
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I've got a wide variety of interests.
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It would be ill-advised to compare war and a sport, but I don't think the brain knows the difference. With post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries in blasts with veterans, we see a very similar and somewhat unique issue with repetitive brain injuries in football.
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Sometimes men and women have trouble with just being vulnerable.
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About 10 percent of the time, I miss 3 to 5 percent of the game. I look back, and I'm happy that I played. I'm not wistful. You miss big games. I miss the locker room camaraderie. Sometimes I miss the lifestyle.
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I loved playing in the Big Ten, where it's three yards and a cloud of dust.
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Folks who blithely disregard the benefits of football likely haven't played or are being intellectually dishonest. The game, perhaps more than any other, requires absolute dedication and teamwork. Yes, I ultimately quit, and if I ever have a son, he won't play, but I'll always cherish the lessons I learned from football.
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I couldn't really justify playing for money, and I think what I wanted to achieve put me at too great a risk, so I just decided on another profession.