Chris Johnson spent this week putting his own career on the permanent record — not as an accusation against the NFL, but as a question he’s leaving his four kids to answer once the science catches up.
Johnson’s ALS diagnosis became public on June 29, when he told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. On September 10, he went further, publishing an open letter through the Players’ Tribune to his four children: Honey Buns, CJ, Kaden, and Lee.
The letter traces it back to March 2025, when a water bottle felt unusually heavy on a road trip. Tests initially flagged “Possible Anterior Horn Cell Disease” before doctors confirmed ALS.
What Johnson does with that timeline is the actual story. He cites a study showing former NFL players are nearly four times as likely to develop and die from ALS as the general population. Then he stops himself. “I’m not an expert,” he writes, adding that “anybody can get ALS.” He raises the connection to his career and declines to make it for you.
That study is real, though less exact on ALS than the letter suggests. Researchers at Boston University, Mass General Brigham, and the Concussion & CTE Foundation tracked 19,824 former NFL players from 1960 to 2019 and found players roughly four times more likely than the general population to die of neurodegenerative disease overall (ALS grouped in with dementia and Parkinson’s, not broken out on its own), with the risk roughly doubling again for careers of five years or longer.
Johnson still won’t say the two are connected.
That’s the part worth sitting with.
Years after his career ended, a player who ran for 2,006 yards in 2009 (the sixth back ever to clear 2,000, while breaking Marshall Faulk’s yards-from-scrimmage record with 2,509 total yards and winning AP Offensive Player of the Year) still doesn’t have a definitive answer for what caused his diagnosis. Neither does the field studying it. The NFL has spent years fielding the same question about the sport itself: a quarter of dead NFL players had confirmed CTE in brain studies, and causation for the neurodegenerative diseases sitting alongside it is still treated as unsettled.
Johnson’s restraint here isn’t him hedging on the truth. It’s him being accurate about how little anyone actually knows.
I read that paragraph of the letter twice before I registered what he wasn’t saying.
The rest of it isn’t about football at all. Johnson tells his kids that in ordinary moments, throwing a ball around, sitting at the dinner table, “you just see me,” not the disease. He tells them to play football themselves if they want to, says the game is safer now than when he played it, and says he wouldn’t trade his own career for anything.
https://x.com/ChrisJohnson28/status/2098063220380504324
He’s also said he waited too long. Johnson has described feeling shame after the diagnosis and sitting on it before going public, and says now that he regrets the delay — the response since, including friends reviving the Ice Bucket Challenge on his behalf, is the kind of support he needed sooner.
The timing lands either way. The Titans induct Johnson into their Ring of Honor on Sunday, at halftime of their opener against the Jets — their 20th honoree, at age 40, in a ceremony the team announced back in July, weeks before this letter existed. A career that used to get measured in broken records now gets measured in what a decade in the league actually costs a body, and Johnson is the one doing that math in public, for his kids, ahead of anyone who can actually hand him the answer.
He gave the league everything he had. It still owes him an answer.
