Ex-49er Chris Borland says rookies are encouraged to find criminal 'fall guys'
Five months removed from his stunning decision to retire from professional football after just one season, former San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland continues to make waves by speaking out against the NFL.
Borland shared a disturbing anecdote from the NFL's annual rookie orientation in a profile by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada of ESPN The Magazine for their Aug. 31 NFL Preview Issue. Borland says he and other first-year players received advice at orientation from "two prominent retired players."
From ESPN:
"Get yourself a fall guy," Borland says one of the former players advised. The former player, whom Borland declined to name, told the rookies that if they ran into legal trouble, their designated fall guy would be there to take the blame and, if necessary, go to jail. "'We'll bail him out,'" Borland says the former player assured them.
Borland was appalled. "I was just sitting there thinking, 'Should I walk out? What am I supposed to do?'" he recalls. He says he didn't leave the room because he didn't want to cause a scene, but the incident stayed with him.
Borland also says the NFL asked him to take a random drug test a month after his retirement. He cited concerns over head trauma as his reason for walking away from the game.
While the NFL reserves the right to test all players, even those who have retired, Borland felt like he was being set up.
He still agreed to submit a urine sample, but he also paid a private firm $150 to test him independently and said both tests came back negative.
"I don't trust the NFL," he said.
Borland makes it clear in the article that he loves the game, but not enough to continue playing it and promoting it.
"Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you're fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing," he said. "It's like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you're the actors in it. You're complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it's a trivial thing at its core. It's make-believe, really. That's the truth about it."