Just the facts, man: Corey Linsley, who was placed on the injured reserve list last season with a non-emergent heart-related issue – a dilated aortic root – is retiring after a decorated, decade-long career as an NFL center.
That’s the load-bearing pillar of truth in the center of the room, the unmovable fact of the matter – though I suppose, like anything, how you perceive even the most self-evident of truths depends on where you’re standing.
What’s impressive about Linsley is that no matter what angle he takes, he seems to be seeing it the right way. So it’s no shock when Dr. Eugene Yim, the Chargers’ head physician and sports medicine specialist with the Hoag medical group, tells me he’s “one of the most thoughtful and sophisticated athletes I’ve ever worked with.”
The at-the-end-of-the-day deal is this: The 32-year-old Linsley just had the thing he loved doing – the thing he was really good at doing, and very well-compensated for doing – yanked unexpectedly away from him.
And he’s reportedly agreed to restructure his contract, reducing his salary from $11.5 million to the minimum for the 2024 season, giving the Chargers – for whom he played for the past three seasons – about $10 million more in cap room to work with.
And, yes, Linsley is “happy” about this. “Relieved.” And why not? He’s got four kids, so he’s thinking mostly of the benefits of the diagnosis, more than what it cost him. And it boils down to this: “This is more beneficial to my family than any contract would’ve been,” he said last week.
FAMILY is EVERYTHING pic.twitter.com/YPyi0dNYiq
— anna linsley ☮️ (@aelinsley) August 18, 2023
But still. Come inspect this turn of events from right up close, feel him when he says he’ll miss it, football having been a heavy part of his life for so long. So it also feels fair for him to say: You know what would have been really bad …
“It would’ve been tragic,” he said, “if this…
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