ESPN to air 'Outside the Lines' report on former Hawkeye Tyler Sash
Tyler Sash, the former Iowa football star who died last September, is the subject of a special report that will air this weekend on ESPN’s “Outside The Lines.”
The first airing is set for Sunday at 8 a.m. central on ESPN and 9 a.m. Sunday on ESPN2.
Mobile users can tap here to watch the clip.
Sash was found dead at his home in Oskaloosa, at age 27, due to mixture of drugs. An examination of his brain showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (commonly known as CTE).
His mother, Barney, told ESPN reporter Steve Delsohn that she wonders how things might have been different had her son decided to pursue basketball as a passion.
“One of the things she says in the piece is, had he played basketball instead of football, he’d be alive today,” Delsohn told The Des Moines Register.
“They have mixed feelings. They’re not like ‘I hate football,’ but they’ve been devastated by CTE and the pain killers (Sash was taking). So they’re kind of reconsidering their feelings about the sport.”
Delsohn visited Oskaloosa and talked with Sash’s girlfriend, Heather Dickinson, his brother, Josh, and also interviewed Spencer Paysinger, a former teammate with the New York Giants, now with the Miami Dolphins.
The most poignant comments, however, came from Barney Sash.
“They were super gracious,” Delsohn said of Sash’s family, “but it was very difficult for everybody involved.
“The piece is really driven probably by emotion, but also kind of an inside look at his loved ones and how they dealt with it.”
Sash played defensive back for the Hawkeyes before entering the NFL draft in 2011. He was selected by the Giants in the sixth round and was part of New York’s Super Bowl XLVI championship team.
“They (Sash’s family) haven’t spoken in this kind of detail about the changes that they saw in Tyler as he started to feel the symptoms of CTE,” Delsohn said. “I think it was really mystifying and disturbing to see him undergo this transformation and not understand what was going on.”
