I was talking to a friend of mine the other day.  Her mother had told her when she was young that she was never to date a football player or a firefighter, because they both are going to die young.  But especially not a football player, she was told: chances are they'd take you out even sooner.

Current and former NFL players seem to be a murderous, abusive lot, as a rule.  Honestly, with all the ugly news around football players these days, my love and enjoyment of the NFL leaves a deeply uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.  If you're interested, the U-T San Diego newspaper has kept a database of NFL player arrests since 2000:

http://www.utsandiego.com/nfl/arrests-database/

What makes me even uneasier is the gloss that the league and its networks put on the criminal element in the league.  I remember one Pittsburgh game last season when the announcers were talking about all the off-field "adversity" that Ben Roethlisberger has overcome in his career.  Right - he didn't beat two rape charges by tampering with witnesses, he "overcame adversity."  And hence the spin machine turns an incredibly violent game whose violence very often spills off the field into what I refer to as "NFL Disney."

I've grown pretty jaded about it all.

The spin machine may not have been in place back in the 1970s the way it is today, but in the research I've done on players from that era - and I've done a lot - there are just as many gruesome stories to go around.

One that's been on my mind a lot recently is the story of Deacon Turner.  He will probably never get a writeup for one of these awards, but you may know him as a backup running back for Cincinnati.  In 2011, he was shot dead in by two sheriff's deputies in Bakersfield, California outside a convenience store.  He was buying beer for some teenage boys, and upon being confronted by the two cops outside the store, he swung the bag he was holding at them, whereupon they opened fire.

There's the story of Mike Current, too, who was a pretty good offensive tackle over 13 seasons for Denver, Miami, and the legendary 1976-77 Bucs.  Current was coaching midget football in the Denver area, but in 2012 was charged with sexual assault of three victims age 14 or under between 2004 and 2010 after luring them with pornographic photos and videos.  On January 18th, 2012, Current's body was found dead of a shotgun blast to the head at a scenic overlook high in the Rocky Mountains during a frigid snowstorm.  The overlook was fourteen miles from the nearest point of civilization and there was no vehicle found at or near the scene.  Nonetheless, Current's death was ruled a suicide and the case was closed.

Darryl Stingley was brutally paralyzed by Jack Tatum, who refused to apologize because he was just doing his job.  Ottis Armstrong can't walk today; neither can Conrad Dobler.  Joe DeLamielleure and Tony Dorsett have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disease that killed Mike Webster at age 50 (and that caused Junior Seau to shoot himself to death).  Boobie Clark, Norris Weese, and Doug Kotar all died of brain issues before terms like CTE existed.

Harry Carson says he was smart enough to do something else.  He wishes he'd never played football, and said he would never allow his grandson to step onto a field.

It's all gotten to me to the point where I hope Bernard Pollard is right - not about a player dying on the field, but that fans will just get fed up with it, and that the league won't exist in 20 or 30 years.

And then there's Matt Blair.  He takes photographs. Flowers, mountain ranges, animals.  Take a look:

You can check out more of his work on his Web site:

http://www.mattblair.com/photo.html

It's nice work by a person who, from all accounts, seems to be a genuinely stand-up guy.

Did he have to overcome adversity?  Sure he did.  He was a military kid who moved around a lot - born in Hawaii, lived in Alaska, Spain, Idaho, Texas, Kentucky.  With all that instability, it's probably understandable that he struggled somewhat in school.  During his senior year of high school in Dayton, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati recruited him, but told him that his grades weren't good enough, so he'd need to attend a junior college

After winning a NJCAA national championship, Blair chose to go to Iowa State to play under Johnny Majors.  Majors told him he'd start on the fourth team and have to work his way up, and that's what drew Blair to ISU.  He liked the idea of having something to work for, some self-imposed "adversity," if you will.  Even now, Blair makes lists of his goals for each day, so that when he marks the items off, "that means I did what I was supposed to do" he said in an interview with cyclones.com in 2013.

Blair was inducted into the Vikings Ring of Honor back in 2012 after not only an outstanding career that featured six consecutive Pro Bowls from 1977-82, but also years of community service and outreach that lasted long beyond his playing days.  It all started in his rookie year when "Mr. Eller" (that's what Blair continues to call elder statesman Carl Eller to this day) encouraged him to visit children with multiple sclerosis.  Blair has continued to live in St. Paul since his playing days were over, and has had a long history with numerous charitable organizations. 

Another thing that started in his rookie year were his photographs.  That's when he bought his first camera.  His earliest photos were of his teammates.  "I always thought it was cool to capture images when you walk through life, especially when you see something and may never see it again... Taking pictures and stopping time is something I've always enjoyed doing." 

So there you have it: a nice guy.  A really nice guy.  And, when you start looking into the lives of NFL players, you just don't see a lot of that. 

Blair wasn't nice at all to the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 8, though.  He was on a tiger hunt, as he notched 13 tackles.  He forced a fumble.  And, if that wasn't enough, he took an interception 69 yards for the game-winning touchdown in a 14-7 win for a Vikings team that, surprisingly, finds itself in first place in the NFC Central at mid-season.