Chiefs’ Jim Tyrer belongs in Hall of Fame on merits and evolving comprehension of CTE
When pro football historians John Turney and Frank Cooney applied a point system based on honors won to rank 60 senior nominees for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2025, former Chiefs left tackle Jim Tyrer towered like a colossus above the rest.
Decorated with distinctions such as the AFL All-Time Team and having been a consensus six-time first-team All-Pro while he was a mainstay of three franchise AFL titles and the Super Bowl IV championship, Tyrer’s 74 points far surpassed the other two senior finalists: Maxie Baughan (42) and Sterling Sharpe (32).
For that matter, Tyrer’s credentials eclipse the 15 modern candidates: None was a first-team All-Pro as many times as Tyrer, who at 6-foot-6, 280 pounds and agile was a glimpse of what the vital position would become.
“He was the prototype of today’s tackle,” former Chiefs coach, and Hall of Famer, Hank Stram told The Star in 1980.
These impeccable feats explain why Tyrer deserves to be enshrined in the PFHOF.
Especially since its bylaws — in contrast to the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s criteria that include integrity, sportsmanship and character — stipulate that only a player’s on-field achievements are to be weighed:
“Off the field or away from the game contributions and/or situations (positive or negative) are not to be considered, and Selectors are prohibited from including them in presentations or discussion. If a Selector violates the above rule, he/she would be warned, and if repeated would be prohibited from further comments during the meeting and a possible future removal from the Selection Committee.”
So technically speaking his should have been an open-and-shut case when the 49 selectors (including me) gathered last week via Zoom to cast two different sets of votes:
One for the group nominated by subcommittees featuring three senior candidates, a coach (Mike Holmgren) and contributor (Ralph Hay) — of which a maximum of three will be named to the Class of 2025.
The other to select up to five of 15 modern-era candidates, including former Chiefs Jared Allen (who played four of his 12 NFL seasons here) and Terrell Suggs (who played in five games for the Super Bowl-winner Chiefs in his 17th and final season).
But the very fact this was the first time Tyrer’s cause has been heard by the full committee in 43 years reflects how much more intricate his candidacy has been than what the rules of order could mandate.
No one among us can pretend they aren’t acutely conscious of the 41-year-old Tyrer murdering his wife, Martha, and killing himself in 1980 and effectively having been blacklisted since.
It would be intellectually dishonest to act as if that didn’t, or even shouldn’t, loom over the proceedings. Directly contradicting the bylaw, in fact, some of our group previously indicated they won’t vote for Tyrer, per ESPN’s Mark Fainaru-Wada, because of the events of 1980.
But here’s the reason I wanted Hall of Fame administrators to enable, even encourage, the real discussion — which was a confidential matter:
Because as much light as possible needs to be cast on what should be an inflection point in several ways:
A debunking of the demonstrably false narrative about Tyrer. And further reinforcement of the realities of the ravages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head trauma known to cause aggression, mood swings, depression and paranoia.
While CTE still can only be diagnosed with certainty by autopsy after death and didn’t begin to be acknowledged and studied in earnest until 2005, that hardly means it didn’t exist before just because no one knew what to call it.
Through the enormous amount of research and interviewing he’s done over the last five years for a documentary about Tyrer, in fact, journalist Kevin Patrick Allen has come to see him as “Patient Zero” of CTE because of the profound change in personality in his final years.
By any logic looking back now, Tyrer incurred debilitating brain damage through more than a decade of pro football in the Jurassic Era — when helmets still were relatively flimsy, offensive linemen basically were taught to headbutt and their counterparts routinely employed headslaps and forearms to the head.
Even before they could try to put a name to it, the surviving family understood the monster that did this wasn’t their father.
“My dad was just a great guy, an all-around great guy; he didn’t cuss, he didn’t drink, you never saw him raise his voice at my mom, ever,” Brad Tyrer, one of the four Tyrer children, told me in a 2020 phone interview.
“It was just that something snapped. And that wasn’t him. … It was somebody else who did that.”
Thanks in large part to the devout efforts of Allen, who is following up an earlier version of the documentary with a yet deeper soon-to-be-released film to be called “Beneath The Shadow,” we’ve learned so much more about the nature of that.
Through the family, Allen engaged a doctor, Doug Paone, treating their father just days before his death.
Between his own observations and Martha’s despairing words about his headaches and memory lapses and simply not being “the same person that I used to know,” Paone told me last month, today he is certain Tyrer was in the throes of CTE.
“If it walks like a duck, it quacks, it has webbed feet and water goes off its back, it’s not a zebra: It’s CTE,” he said in a phone interview. “(Tyrer) would be the poster child for CTE.”
There’s plenty more that indicates Tyrer was afflicted with CTE, which was found present in 91.7% (345 of 376) of the donated brains of former NFL players — including Tyrer’s former teammate Ed Lothamer.
CTE also was found in the brains of former NFL players who committed suicide, including Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Aaron Hernandez.
Pathologist Piotr Kozlowski in 2014 reported that the brain of former Chief Jovan Belcher revealed findings consistent with CTE. His study was done after an exhumation of the body requested by the family of Belcher, who in 2012 murdered Kasi Perkins before killing himself in the parking lot of the Chiefs training facility.
It’s unclear whether that study ever was independently corroborated.
But the case of Tyrer is clear to Chris Nowinski, the co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Federation.
In a recent phone interview, he reiterated his belief that Tyrer was 95% certain to have had CTE based on conversations he’d had with Brad Tyrer and his broader understanding of the disease.
Speaking generally but coincidentally aptly to the HOF vote, Paone told me he understands some will question the assumption of CTE and see it as a means of justifying what Tyrer did.
“Well, I would just say, ‘Why did he do that?’” he said. “Because he gave his entire life to football and damaged his brain. And the brain damage led to what he did.”
He added, “I’m sure that if he never had played offensive line, or had never been a football player, for that matter, he would never have killed his wife and himself.”
Some of my fellow voters stated to ESPN that they wouldn’t vote for Tyrer on moral grounds or because of the slippery slope admitting him into the Hall of Fame might create in the future.
Those are reasonable and understandable stances.
But I like the point that Allen made on X (Twitter) the other day when a reader urged me not to rationalize Tyrer’s actions: “It’s admirable to fight for morality and character. But sometimes framing things as character/morality issues is a way of avoiding complex and difficult issues. He was the poster child for brain trauma — a moral man with a broken brain.”
Despite the Hall of Fame rules against considering off-the-field actions, the very fact that the senior committee made Tyrer a finalist for the first time since 1981 certainly reflects an emerging and hopefully prevailing wave of understanding of the horrors of CTE.
And that’s also added an element to this story that I can’t say doesn’t have an impact on my judgment: a certain vindication for the family.
If the Tyrers had a different view on this, I imagine I would have found it impossible to vote for him even knowing the guidelines. But here’s what Brad Tyrer told me just days before his father made the cut to three:
“As far as history goes right now, my dad is not a good guy; he’s been viewed for the past 44 years as a very bad person,” he said, choking up and pausing. “We just feel like if he gets in, and his story is retold and people revisit Jim Tyrer as a man, that the true legacy of him will be out there. Not what it is today.
“That’s what’s meaningful to us.”
And if it’s meaningful to them, Nowinski said, “it’s meaningful to me. And if his children can forgive him, then I think we as a society can forgive him.”
And we as a selection committee should induct him ... even beyond the reasons we are supposed to be bound by.
This story was originally published January 14, 2025 at 7:00 AM.