Football can get as aggressive as it can be, which may sometimes lead to neurodegenerative diseases like CTE, ALS, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease as well. But that doesn’t mean players will stop playing it. The perspectives, however, may change. When asked whether she’ll allow her son to play football, Travis Hunter’s wife, Leana Lenee, straight up said “No,” because she and Hunter are scared of CTE. But if you ask the Super Bowl champion, Ryan Clark, the NFL legend would rather choose football than being safe.

“I think as parents start to think about who their kids are going to be going forward, as young men make decisions about what they want to be, the question is, and it’ll always be for me, would I have allowed fear to steal my destiny? I am 100% sure that the heart God gave me was to do what I did for a living,” Clark said on The Pivot Podcast.

“It’s now been able to propel me into a second career where now I get to impact people in different ways. But I am 100% sure that who I was made to be was meant to strap on pads and wear a helmet and run into people in ways that other humans weren’t willing to. And if being safe meant that I never got to experience that high, then I don’t want to be safe.”

Ryan Clark’s statement surfaced weeks after former NFL running back Chris Johnson revealed that he was diagnosed with ALS. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects a person’s brain and spinal cord. It can lead to an inability to walk, swallow, and breathe. Unfortunately, Johnson’s condition grew rapidly, and he’s now using a speaking device to communicate.

That doesn’t mean every NFL player will develop conditions like CTE or ALS after retirement. But recent studies have made the long-term risks more concerning, especially given the number of hits players absorb to the head. According to a recent study done by Boston University and Harvard University, NFL players have a four times higher risk of developing dementia than the general population.

“We had a study yesterday. It’s unfortunate news, but hopefully it helps people take this issue more seriously,” neuroscientist Will Nowinski explained on the Ross Tucker Podcast. “And that’s a study that we partnered with Boston University and Harvard University, where we looked at the death certificates of ALL NFL players from 1960 through 2019 and confirmed, in a very small sample, that they’re dying of dementia at four times the rate of the population, including things like ALS, which Chris Johnson went public with last week…If you combine that with previous studies on when we look at the brains, what’s going on in there, it really is driven by CTE.”

The study further revealed that the deaths related to all-cause dementia and Parkinson’s disease were over 3 times higher than in the general population. The players who have spent over 5 seasons in the NFL, meanwhile, are more likely to develop such conditions than those who have appeared in fewer seasons. Chris Johnson, meanwhile, spent a decade in the NFL taking hits while racking up over 11,000 scrimmage yards.

However, Ryan Clark has a different opinion. He believes risk is a part of life. And if given the choice between playing in the NFL and avoiding the risk of CTE, he’d choose the former every time.