PHOENIX -- Matt Hasselbeck took some nasty hits to the head during his 17-year NFL career, four years at Boston College and a childhood full of sports, but the quarterback seems to have emerged from more than two decades of collisions relatively unscathed, enjoying middle adulthood with his wife and three children.
The 50-year-old knows that some of his friends and former teammates haven't been as lucky.
That's why the three-time Pro Bowl selection recently spent two days at Boston University, going through a battery of scans and tests to determine how much all those collisions affected his brain. The hope is that it will be a small step toward a goal that has eluded doctors: diagnosing chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the living.
"They need guys like me. They need people who are feeling good to step up to the plate and volunteer," Hasselbeck said. "I played quarterback, so I didn't take some of the hits that a lot of my teammates took.