The Curse of the Super Bowl Chargers

Are the 1994 AFC Champion San Diego Chargers a cursed team, or just a reflection of a growing trend toward chronic disease and early death in America?

Led by running back Natrone Means and linebacker Junior Seau, the 1994 Chargers won the AFC West with a record of 11 wins and 5 losses, and beat the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers to reach the Super Bowl.  The 53 players on the active roster averaged 26 years of age.

According to 1995 life expectancy tables, a 26 year old male could expect to live to the age 75.

But when 42 year old Lew Bush – a linebacker on that Super Bowl team – died on December 9, 2011, he was the 7^th member of the team to die more than 30 years prematurely.

Source:  ESPN Official 2011 Roster Information

There is talk that these 1994 Chargers are cursed.  The first player to die, linebacker David Griggs, was 28 when his car slid off an expressway ramp in Ft. Lauderdale and crashed into a pole in June, 1995.   The second, running back Rodney Culver, died in a plane crash in 1996.  He was 26.

Young people most often die of injuries.  So those two deaths, while untimely and tragic, didn’t make anyone think “curse.”

The third one did. In 1998, linebacker Doug Miller, also just 28, died when he was struck twice by lightning while on a camping vacation.

For the next decade, “curse” talk faded as the surviving 50 players went about their lives and careers.

Then, in 2008, two more Chargers died.  Center Curtis Whitley was 39 when he died of a reported drug overdose, and defensive lineman Chris Mims was 38 when he died of heart failure.  Mims – a relatively svelt 288 pounds for a six foot, five inch lineman in 1994 – was reported to weigh 456 pounds when he died.

Defensive lineman Shaun Lee was the sixth to die, on March 1^stof last year.  He was 44 when he lost a battle with pneumonia.  He was reported to weigh over 300 pounds and suffer from diabetes at the time of his death.

And when Lew Bush died of a heart attack in December, these seven men together had lost 280 years from their expected life spans when they played in their Super Bowl – the equivalent of nearly four full lifetimes. 

Are the untimely deaths of these young men a curse or a reflection of what causes premature death in America?

According to the NFL Players Association, the average life expectancy for an NFL football player is under 60 years.  Traumatic football injuries, such as concussions, are blamed for this.  They are a factor, but the common conditions of life in America today – including obesity, chronic disease, and non-football injuries – have been the “curse” of the Chargers.

Even if all 46 remaining members of the team now live to their normal life expectancy, the team as a whole will still have lost 5.3 years of life per player to premature death. 

NFL football players don’t have a life expectancy that is approximately 20 years less than the norm just because they played football. 

Like many other young people in our society, their lives are being claimed before their time by the cardiovascular diseases, behavioral illnesses, and other chronic conditions that result from poor diets, stress, and unhealthy habits.

This problem is real, and isn’t going to go away on its own.

The average weight of the 44 linemen, excluding tight ends, on the 2011-2012 AFC Champion New England Patriots and the 2011-2012 NFC Champion New York Giants is 306 pounds.  They are a year older than the 1994 Chargers were.  But they also weigh an average of 17 pounds more than the twenty Chargers who played the same positions in 1994.

To what do they have to look forward as they age?  If you believe the NFL Players Association, they will be walking advertisements for premature death.

They are not the only ones. 

According to AHRQ data, 60% of all Americans have at least one chronic condition, 38% have two or more, and 16% have at least three.  In this one way, we are all just like the Chargers.

Like most Americans, I enjoy watching the Super Bowl and celebrating this unique American holiday.  But we should embrace not just the game, but the light it can shed on the real curse that affects us all.  That is the curse of both men and women dying young for reasons we could have, and should have, prevented.

Update:  When Junior Seau died on May 2, 2012, he became the eighth member of the 1994 Chargers to die before the age of 45.  His death was an apparent suicide. There is widespread speculation as to whether the suicide was brain trauma related.  Suicide is also commonly linked to mental illness - another significant cause of premature death in America, known to reduce life expectancy by over 25 years.

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