My son was a goalkeeper in soccer, and he luckily never had much

The words of Ann McKee rise from both a mother’s heart and a scientist’s wisdom: “My son was a goalkeeper in soccer, and he luckily never had much head trauma. He never had any concussions or anything. I really wanted him to play football, but now I’m thankful he didn’t.” Here is a confession born of love, regret, and revelation. McKee, who devoted her career to studying the effects of repeated head trauma on athletes, speaks not only as a scholar of the body but as one who has carried the tender fear of a mother watching her child play. Her gratitude is not abstract—it is born from the knowledge of how fragile the human brain is, and how countless others have not been as fortunate.

To be thankful he didn’t play football is to acknowledge the hidden dangers of a game long celebrated for its glory. For generations, football was exalted as the proving ground of strength and courage. Parents dreamed of sons taking the field, of victories won beneath stadium lights. But McKee, after examining the brains of athletes broken by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), saw another truth: that beneath the applause lay unseen wounds, blows to the head repeated until the mind itself unraveled. Out of this knowledge, her gratitude grew—not for fame or achievement, but for her son’s preservation from harm.

History offers parallels of parents and leaders who, after wisdom gained, turned away from former desires. Think of King Priam of Troy, who once longed for his sons to bring glory in battle, only to mourn as he watched them fall. Or of Abraham Lincoln, who carried his grief for a son lost to illness and who, in that sorrow, spoke often of the preciousness of children spared. McKee’s words stand in this tradition: they remind us that what we once desired for our children may, through experience and knowledge, transform into relief that they were spared.

Her mention of goalkeeping in soccer is not without meaning. Even in that role, danger lingered. Yet fortune spared her son from the kind of repeated conc