Motivation: While my husband watches football I'm usually doing other things, but will occasionally catch a player getting injured... which made me wonder if any pro football player has ever died during a game. I don't really care about arena league or anything, just NFL. But if the answer is no, I might expand my query.
Answer:
Apparently this is a popular topic because as I typed it into google search, it came up quite quickly under suggestions.
"...the only time a player actually died on the field, nobody touched him.
It happened {41 years ago}. A routine NFC Central showdown turned into the darkest day in NFL history. With just more than a minute left in the game, Detroit wide receiver Chuck Hughes dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 28."-- AOL News
Apparently he collapsed on the field, was taken off by a stretcher and boom, that's all she wrote.
I then found a very nifty wikipedia link that gave me a list of football players who have died and how. It was very interesting and even included players that had left to go into active military and died... very tragic.
But it did give a couple names that said (in-game) behind them, so of course I clicked on those players (besides Chuck Hughes) to see what information it gave me. And I do want to point out that there was a Minnesota Vikings players named Korey Stringer, whom it said died of heat stroke during practice. But that wasn't specifically what I was searching for, so I didn't look into it.
So the two other names were Stone Johnson and Howard Glenn.
"On August 30, 1963, the rookie Johnson, a sprinter in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, suffered a fractured vertebra in his neck in a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders in Wichita, Kansas. He died 10 days later, on September 8 at the age of 23."
"In 1960, the AFL's inaugural season, Glenn joined the AFL New York Titans as an offensive guard. Glenn sustained a broken neck in the first half during a game vs. the Houston Oilers on October 9, 1960 at Jeppesen Stadium and died later that day."
"On August 30, 1963, the rookie Johnson, a sprinter in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, suffered a fractured vertebra in his neck in a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders in Wichita, Kansas. He died 10 days later, on September 8 at the age of 23."
"In 1960, the AFL's inaugural season, Glenn joined the AFL New York Titans as an offensive guard. Glenn sustained a broken neck in the first half during a game vs. the Houston Oilers on October 9, 1960 at Jeppesen Stadium and died later that day."
Rumination: In summation, yes, ONE NFL football player has died during a game... but not in the way I was wondering about. He died of a heart attack. The information about Stone Johnson and Howard Glenn was interesting in that they both died from injuries SUSTAINED during a game. So I would say that is pretty impressive that despite how injurious professional football seems to be, it's not a death sentence. I'm sure lots of players have lasting effects from injuries they received during their careers, but no instantaneous deaths. I'm very surprised by this information!
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