"Borland has complicated, even tortured, feelings about football that grow deeper the more removed he is from the game. He still sees it as an exhilarating sport that cultivates discipline and teamwork and brings communities and families together. "I don't dislike football," he insists. "I love football." At the same time, he has come to view it as a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it.

"Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you're fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing," he said during a series of conversations over the spring and summer. "It's like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you're the actors in it. You're complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it's a trivial thing at its core. It's make-believe, really. That's the truth about it."

Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada from ESPN: http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13463272/how-former-san-francisco-49er...