Sports

John Jaso knew he wanted to retire, so he started shopping for sailboats. It was the 2017 season, and Jaso, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ first baseman, would spend his downtime at home browsing on boat websites. And when the Pirates visited a team near a body of water, he would wander the marinas and imagine himself on the open water.

One June morning in Baltimore, before a 7:10 p.m. first pitch against the Orioles, Jaso rented a car and drove to Annapolis, Md. There, he found the boat he’d been looking for: a 2014 Jeanneau 44 DS. He had it surveyed, bought it and had it shipped to his off-season home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He made it back to the stadium in time to go 2 for 4 with an R.B.I.

Four months later, when the Pirates’ season ended without a playoff berth, a handful of reporters wandered over to Jaso’s locker and asked him what his plans were. He had reached the end of his two-year, $8 million deal with the team and was set to become a free agent. He told them that his next destination would be somewhere in the Caribbean. He was retiring.

“I have a sailboat,” he said, “so I just want to sail away.”

Five years later, as pitchers and catchers began flooding into spring training camps in Arizona and Florida on Monday, Jaso, the last catcher to have caught a perfect game, has no regrets about having sailed off into the sunset. “Sometimes I’ll just be out on the boat bobbing in the water, not sailing or even fishing, and I’ll think to myself: ‘There’s nowhere else on the planet I’d rather be than right here,’” he said. “It’s been the perfect fit for who I am.”

Jaso’s baseball journey was never quite as good a fit. Tampa Bay selected him in the 12th round of the 2003 draft, and he made it to the majors near the end of the 2008 season. In his nine-year career, he was traded three times and switched to first base from catcher after sustaining multiple concussions. But he had plenty of highlights too: He caught Félix Hernández’s 2012 perfect game for the Seattle Mariners — there hasn’t been one in M.L.B. since — and hit for the first cycle in PNC Park history when he was with Pittsburgh in 2016. His long dreadlocks toward the end of his career made him almost instantly recognizable. And he pulled in career earnings of more than $17 million, according to Spotrac.

But he found the M.L.B. life to be unfulfilling in some unexpected ways. “Baseball set me up for life,” he said. “I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: ‘You might be walking away from millions of dollars!’ But I’d already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?”

Boating filled the void in his life. He familiarized himself with every foot of the ship. He took a class for diesel motor mechanics and installed solar panels and a wind generator. He devoured hours of YouTube videos about the electronics and made sure he knew what every wire did. “If anything goes wrong in the open ocean,” he said, “I’m the only one out there to fix it.”

All that was left to do: Learn how to sail.

He found an ad for a sunset tour on Craigslist and emailed the captain, offering a few hundred bucks for a crash course in commanding a boat. After a few hours, he felt comfortable enough to go it alone. “It was like learning to hit a fastball and lay off a slider,” he said. “You can hear coaches talk about it all day, but you’ll only learn how to do it if you face it in a game.”

Jaso named his boat Roaming Rose and started taking day trips into the Gulf of Mexico in early 2018. One day that spring, he was working on his boat when he was struck with a sudden and strange sensation. “I thought, something feels really weird right now,” he said. “Like I was forgetting something. And then it hit me: I should have been in spring training. I started laughing because I realized: I didn’t miss it at all.”

He took his first big voyage a few weeks later. He sailed south to Key West and stayed on the boat for three weeks before departing for the Abaco Islands in the northern Bahamas, anchoring down in a protected bay for the better part of a month. He took off when he heard about a major storm making its way across the Atlantic. He avoided most of the winds and rain on the five-day sail home, but on the final night, he said he encountered violent winds and lightning.

On the deck, he kept one hand on the wheel and one on his go bag. His life preserver was strapped on tight in case he was thrown overboard. He watched the lightning marble the sky and felt its surges shake the boat. He alerted the Coast Guard to his position and called his brother as a backup. After a few hours of white-knuckling, he was back on dry land.

“In the moment, you’re terrified, and you want to be as far away from danger as possible,” he said. “But once it’s over, you appreciate where you’re at more. There’s this euphoria that comes over you when the storm clouds part. It’s like holding your breath underwater and then coming back up to the surface and taking that first gulp of air.”

When Jaso described the experience to Fernando Perez, a friend and former teammate, Perez wasn’t surprised in the slightest. “Playing professional baseball is a kind of drug,” said Perez, who is now a video analyst with the San Francisco Giants. “When you retire, you have to find another high. The drug that John found was being in the middle of nowhere and keeping himself alive. That first storm didn’t scare him away. He liked getting caught in it.”

For the first two years after retirement, Jaso spent about six months of the year on his boat. For the rest, he was based in St. Petersburg. Although he said he does not follow baseball anymore, he does try to catch a game or two every year. In 2018, during a Rays win over the Boston Red Sox, he tried to go down to the dugout to say hello to some former teammates. But an usher saw his tie-dyed, sleeveless T-shirt and his lack of a ticket and waved him back up to the cheap seats. Eventually, another usher recognized him and let him down.

He has also taken several trips to Europe, discovering a passion for exploring his father’s ancestral land in the Basque Country of northern Spain. And he has driven a camper van around Australia and Indonesia. But the boat has been his biggest pleasure. “I want my life to be simple, and it doesn’t get simpler than being on a sailboat,” he said. “You treat the boat right, and she treats you right. That’s all there is to it.”

Before the pandemic, he docked Roaming Rose in Turks and Caicos. With travel restrictions, it was stuck there for almost two years. When he was cleared to come back and collect the boat in 2022, he brought along his girlfriend, Jayden Davila, for a three-month sail around the Caribbean. They docked in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.

“John is a pretty peaceful person in general,” Davila said. “But there’s another level of peace and happiness for him when he’s on the boat. Even when there are issues — and something is always going wrong — he liked dealing with it. When things are calm, sometimes he’ll just randomly grab his guitar and start playing. It’s really a beautiful existence for him out there.”

Jaso still lives primarily in St. Petersburg, where he manages some investment properties. But he’s rarely in one place for long. This winter, he’s been snowboarding in Colorado and Wyoming. By the spring, he’ll be back on the boat.

“When you’re sailing, you’re going back to something primitive,” he said. “You’re removing yourself from the material world — this concrete, electronic world. And you’re returning to this sense of wonder. It’s the same sense you get when you’re holding a newborn baby, looking into their eyes, and feeling the world disappear around you.

“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we all come from the same place. When you’re out there on the water, you remember.”

When the North Korean men’s soccer team took the field for two 2026 World Cup qualifying matches this month, close observers noticed an important roster change.

Han Kwang-song, a high-profile striker, was back, more than three years after vanishing from public view for reasons beyond his control: United Nations-imposed sanctions on North Korean nationals over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Mr. Han’s story is a rare case of North Korea sanctions reverberating through professional soccer. It also shows how enforcement of U.N. sanctions against individuals varies by country.

The government in Italy did not deport Mr. Han, now 25, while he was playing professional soccer there. But once he moved to Qatar, the Qatari government did.

“The basic story makes sense; the surprising part is that Qatar complied with the U.N. resolutions,” said Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korean sanctions and executive vice president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

A prodigy with ‘superhero’ status

Mr. Han’s early success was partly a product of North Korea’s push to cultivate soccer talent. After attending a prestigious soccer school founded by the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Han trained in Spain before turning pro in Italy.

He quickly made an impression in Europe as a speedy forward with an eye for goal. Back home, North Korea’s official news agency praised him after a 2019 Asian Cup qualifier as “the player that experts and enthusiasts paid the most attention to.”

“In North Korea, he’s a superhero,” said Kim Heung-Tae, a professor of sports science at Daejin University in South Korea who follows the North’s soccer program.

But in 2017, as punishment for the North’s sixth nuclear weapons test, the United Nations Security Council ordered all North Korean nationals working abroad to be repatriated by December 2019 — a strategy for preventing financing of the North’s military.

Mr. Han, one of several North Koreans playing overseas in professional soccer leagues at the time, was among the targets.

Sanctions meet reality

But the Italian authorities did not repatriate Mr. Han by the 2019 deadline, United Nations Security Council reports show. Instead, Juventus, the Italian club where he had been earning more than half a million euros a year, struck a deal in early 2020 to send him to Al-Duhail, a soccer team in Qatar, on a five-year contract worth about 4.3 million euros, about $4.7 million.

Though a Security Council panel of experts on North Korea contacted Italy and Qatar immediately after that transfer, it was not canceled, and Juventus accepted a transfer fee from the Qatari club, according to the U.N. The panel said in a report that it later “reiterated to Qatar the relevant resolutions concerning the case.”

That summer, Mr. Han stopped appearing for Al-Duhail. In January 2021, Qatar’s mission to the United Nations said in a letter to the U.N. panel that Mr. Han had left Qatar after having his contract “terminated” by the club — and that Qatar’s actions reflected its commitments to Security Council resolutions about North Korean nationals who earn income abroad.

At the time, the coronavirus pandemic was raging, and North Korea’s borders were sealed. Qatar said in its letter, a copy of which was included in a U.N. report, that Mr. Han had left the country on Qatar Airways Flight 131 — a nonstop flight to Rome.

‘He’s probably been training all along’

Details of Mr. Han’s movements since leaving Qatar, including the timing and circumstances of his return to North Korea, remain scarce. According to Transfermarkt, a website that tracks soccer players and their contracts, he has not played for a professional club since July 2021.

Also unclear is whether any of Mr. Han’s earnings ever made it back to the North Korean government.

Mr. Han signed an agreement in 2020 with a Qatari bank, where he had an account at the time, pledging not to transfer any money to his home country, according to a U.N. report. Still, Professor Kim said, North Korean agents had most likely accompanied him everywhere he went overseas and restricted how he spent his earnings.

Neither FIFA, the governing body of soccer; nor the Italian or Qatari Foreign Ministries; nor North Korea’s soccer association or the Asian Football Confederation immediately responded to requests for comment. Nor did Al-Duhail, Juventus or Cagliari, another team that Mr. Han played for in Italy.

Mr. Han’s return to competition this month was reported earlier by CNN and the website NK News, among other outlets.

Professor Kim said that the pandemic had probably curtailed many athletic events in North Korea, where the long-lasting border closing crippled the nation’s economy. But soccer is the country’s most popular sport, and Professor Kim said that domestic competitions had probably been held regularly in recent months.

As for Mr. Han, Professor Kim said, “he’s probably been training all along.”

Rather than joining another professional league abroad, Mr. Han is likely to focus on preparing for the 2026 World Cup, Professor Kim said. He added that North Korea was competitive in its region and had a good chance of qualifying, in part because FIFA has nearly doubled the number of slots for Asian countries at that tournament, which will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Max Canzi, who coached Mr. Han in Italy for Cagliari’s under-19 team, told CNN that he was “very happy” that the striker had returned to international competition for the World Cup qualifying match against Syria in Saudi Arabia on Nov. 16.

As Mr. Han resumes his career, Mr. Canzi added that he was “very curious about the level of his performance after being out for so much time.”

Mr. Han was substituted at halftime in the Saudi Arabia match, which North Korea lost, 1-0. But five days later in Yangon, Myanmar, he contributed to a 6-1 win over the home country with a signature headed goal.

When Hsieh Su-Wei walked on the court to play doubles at the Miami Open in March with her partner, Elise Mertens, she wasn’t burdened by a cumbersome tennis bag holding half a dozen rackets, an assortment of snacks and multiple changes of clothes and shoes.

Despite being No. 1 in the world in doubles, Hsieh, 38, wore an outfit that she bought off the rack and that bore none of the logos associated with lucrative sponsorship deals that many of her colleagues on the WTA Tour have. Until recently, Hsieh had no manager, requiring her to sell herself to sponsors. Her efforts so far have been unsuccessful.

“It’s not an easy job dealing with the sponsorship when the people are not sure if they are going to have you or not,” said Hsieh, who typically competes with just two rackets, which she said was no problem since she had never broken one and could not remember the last time she even popped a string. “I don’t want to waste the time to do it. I just want to focus on my tennis.”

Hsieh has never been consumed by the trappings of her sport, preferring to travel her own circuitous path. An accomplished singles player, she ranked a career high No. 23 in 2013 but has never gone beyond the quarterfinals at a major. She first ascended to No. 1 in doubles in 2014, winning Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014, both with Peng Shuai. She won her second Wimbledon in 2019 with Barbora Strycova and her third with Mertens two years later.

After leaving the tour for nearly 18 months at the end of 2021 to heal a nagging muscle strain in her leg that had her contemplating retirement, Hsieh returned in April of last year and has now won three of the last four majors, each with a different partner. At last year’s French Open, she paired with Wang Xinyu, who is nearly 16 years her junior, to win the championship. Hsieh then captured Wimbledon with Strycova.

Last fall, after Strycova retired following the U.S. Open, Mertens messaged Hsieh and asked her to join forces for this season. The two promptly won the Australian Open in January (Hsieh also won the mixed doubles title with Jan Zielinski) and the doubles title at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells in March. That win helped her regain No. 1.

“We really feel each other on the court and we have a lot of communication,” Mertens said. “It’s rare to find someone where you build toward each other and can also think, ‘Let’s improve together.’”

Hsieh, who retired from singles play this spring, knows that her time on tour is running out, but she is not consumed by that fact. Nothing much bothers the native of Taipei, Taiwan, whose style of play, like her personality, is at times precise, explosive and crafty. Sometimes even she doesn’t know what shot she’ll hit and when.

She hits with both hands off both sides, a style necessitated by her slight frame when she started playing with her father at age 5. She glides effortlessly to the net and perpetually eyes opportunities to sneak in and knock off volley winners. Her tour mates call her Wizard for her confounding shotmaking.

Hsieh no longer has a steady coach, though Paul McNamee accompanies her to the majors, including this French Open. At home in Paris, where she has lived for almost a decade, she often practices with her boyfriend, Frederic Aniere, occasionally at Roland Garros. On the road she is sometimes joined by her brother, Hsieh Cheng-peng, and his tennis-playing children. She finds that having different voices in her ear helps keep the game fresh.

Hsieh would love to represent Taiwan in the Paris Olympics this July, something she has not done since 2012 when she lost in the first round in singles and the quarterfinals in doubles.

“Winning the Grand Slams is the first priority for me,” she said. “But I always want to win a medal for Taiwan. For me, that would be something special.”

After traveling the world for nearly a quarter of a century, Hsieh was asked what kept her going. She let out a laugh.

“That’s a good question, because I’m asking myself what I’m doing here,” she said. “I just try to enjoy first and the answer will come out someday. I’m not in a rush.”

Page 68 of Boston University’s Hope Study questionnaire asks, “Have you ever injured your head or neck in a fight or been hit by someone?”

For Chris Nilan, a simple yes could never convey the whole story.

The answer stretches out over 300 bare-knuckle fights as a professional hockey player, and countless other brawls on the street corners of Boston beginning in his childhood. Most times, Nilan was the one dispensing the punishment. But hockey fights almost always involve mutual, bone-crushing blows, fists jackhammering from powerful shoulders, sometimes fracturing bones, tearing tissue and rattling brains.

The Hope Study, run by B.U.’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, has been measuring the brain health of living subjects with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias since 1996. Nilan, curious about the condition of his brain after years of furious on-ice battles and eager to help with the research, turned to B.U., where participants return each year to repeat extensive testing, and eventually donate their brains. C.T.E. can only be diagnosed posthumously, but the Hope Study’s testing can provide valuable clues while patients are alive.

One of the key elements of the research is the background questionnaire, where subjects detail any history of brain impacts.

Nilan had played only a few N.H.L. games when, one night in 1980 as a rugged rookie for Montreal, he dropped his gloves and fought Boston’s Stan Jonathan and Terry O’Reilly, two of the most feared pugilists in league history. The bouts came in consecutive periods — hockey’s equivalent of boxing Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson within an hour of one another.

Nilan, who was labeled Knuckles before he even turned pro, survived that night, plus 12 more seasons of fighting and scoring goals (118, including the playoffs). He won a Stanley Cup in 1986 with Montreal and was named an All-Star in 1991. Over his 13 years in the league, he fought an astonishing 316 times, the third most in N.H.L. history, according to the N.H.L. Fight Card database.

All of it was followed, coincidentally or not, by years of agonizing drug addiction, alcohol abuse and anger issues before Nilan settled into a quiet life in a Montreal suburb. An engaging, humorous sort with a Boston accent thicker than Chahles Rivah sludge, Nilan now hosts the “Raw Knuckles” podcast, fishes, cooks, reads every day — mainly books on military history — runs addiction recovery groups and spends quiet time with his fiancée, Jaime Holtz.

But if there was ever a high-risk candidate for C.T.E., the degenerative neurological disease associated with repeated impacts to the head or a body blows harsh enough to rattle the skull, Nilan would seem to fit the category.

Researchers have long suggested that the more hits to the head someone receives, including subconcussive ones, the more likely they are to develop cognitive and neurological problems later in life. A study earlier this year of football players’ brains suggested that the cumulative impact of multiple hits can also play a role.

Thirty years after retiring from an uncompromising, violent and successful career, and with the encouragement of the widow of a fellow enforcer who had the disease, Nilan signed up for the Hope Study.

“I don’t worry about having C.T.E.,” Nilan said. “But sometimes you wonder.”

Ten years ago, there might have been more concern. Nilan’s past substance abuse and outbursts of rage mirror some of the behavior exhibited by other hockey enforcers following retirement, players like Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Wade Belak, Todd Ewen and Steve Montador. All of them were diagnosed with C.T.E., which can only be detected after death.

More than a dozen hockey players have been diagnosed with C.T.E., and not all of them fighters. The most recent was Henri Richard, a small, skillful center for the Canadiens who died in 2020, the kind of player Nilan was paid to protect.

Nilan is 65 and sober now, still with a sharp wit and a vivid memory of a tumultuous and violent life that intersected closely with some of Boston’s most infamous figures, including James Bulger, the murderous crime boss, known as Whitey, who was Nilan’s father-in-law.

A Family History of Dementia

On April 17, Nilan entered the Hope Study. He and Holtz answered background questions from their home over a video conference call with researchers, who asked about Nilan’s family and behavioral history, his moods, his memory, his mother’s dementia and his career on the ice.

A few weeks later, he went to Boston for the cognitive and medical testing, and a month after that he received results that can give participants a snapshot of their brain health at that moment.

Nilan went into the study feeling healthy and robust, perhaps even a bit lucky. He empathizes with players who suffered from the same dangerous work that he did, but points no fingers.

In 2013, a group of former players sued the N.H.L. for not doing enough to address head injuries. Nilan was asked to join but declined, believing the sport did not cause his past substance abuse issues, and he does not regularly suffer from depression.

But because of his nearly unmatched history of fighting in hockey, Nilan has emerged as an important subject for researchers studying the effects of repetitive brain impacts and ways to detect it before death.

Even if he does not have C.T.E. or show signs of cognitive impairment, researchers will want to know why not, and what can be learned from it.

“That’s huge,” said Dr. Michael Alosco, the co-director of clinical research at Boston University’s C.T.E. Center. “Why do some people get it, and some don’t? What is different about them? It could be very informative for treatment and prevention.”

‘A Window Into the Brain’

A year ago, Dani Probert was a guest on Nilan’s podcast. They discussed her husband’s career and the time he tangled with Nilan on the ice. They recalled how Nilan and Bob Probert had become good friends after hockey, Probert’s addictions and his death in 2010 from a heart attack, at 45 years old.

Dani Probert explained that when she donated her husband’s brain to B.U.’s C.T.E. research center, she had difficulty answering an accompanying questionnaire about her husband’s life and career. She knew Probert was considered hockey’s heavyweight champion. But she did not know the details of every brutal punch, every check into the boards or fall to the ice.

She urged Nilan to answer those questions now, while he still could. A year later, Nilan joined the Hope Study and pledged to donate his brain.

“It’s vital to get athletes like Chris to participate,” said Chris Nowinski, the co-founder of B.U.’s C.T.E. Center and of the Concussion Legacy Foundation.

Over a day and a half in Boston, Nilan underwent a battery of medical, cognitive and neurological exams designed to help researchers learn the causes and effects of repetitive head impacts that can lead to C.T.E., and perhaps one day design a test that will detect it in living patients.

Nilan had his blood and spinal fluids drawn and was scheduled for magnetic resonance imaging of his brain. He tackled cognitive and memory tests involving word games, number sequences, short stories and mazes. One of the key tests is a lumbar puncture to draw spinal fluids that Dr. Alosco calls “a window into the brain.”

There are more than 400 participants in the program now, and about one third have been exposed to repetitive head impacts. Originally it focused on Alzheimer’s disease, but in recent years its C.T.E. research has expanded.

During the first day of testing in Boston, the city of his youth, Nilan had lunch with Dr. Alosco, who was curious about Nilan’s career and upbringing. Dr. Alosco asked if Nilan fought in college hockey and in high school. Nilan did not, but he casually mentioned some street fights. Asked how many, Nilan replied, “Oh, gosh, I couldn’t even tell you.”

More Than an Enforcer

In some ways, Nilan’s contribution to the study was an opportunity to do in retirement what he loved most as a player, defending teammates.

“If what I do now can help them figure out ways to detect C.T.E. earlier,” Nilan said, “maybe guys in the future can be forewarned and saved from further damage.”

On the ice, if an opposing player dared jam a stick blade into Guy Lafleur’s ribs or throw an elbow at Guy Carbonneau, they or their own enforcer answered to Nilan. When the other team was stocked with notorious tough guys, Nilan was the one expected to drop the gloves, absorb the crunching pain, and then weld someone’s eyes shut with his infamous knuckles.

“You’d go into Philly or Boston and you could see there were guys before the game who were scared,” Nilan said. “But I couldn’t be scared. I was the one they looked to blow the bugle, carry the flag and charge in there.”

Nilan accumulated 3,584 penalty minutes over the regular season and playoffs, the fifth-most in league history, and he played almost 300 fewer games than the top four offenders. He twice set the Canadiens record for most penalty minutes in a season: 338 in the 1983-84 regular season, and 358 the following year.

“I was a menace,” he said.

He was also one of the Canadiens’ most popular players, as much for his energetic goal celebrations as his fists. More than just a fighter, Nilan could play. In opposing arenas, he was the target of hatred and boos, even in Boston. But those who played alongside Nilan adored him.

“Chris Nilan was one of the absolute best teammates I ever had,” said Tony Granato, who played 13 years in the N.H.L., including his first two with Nilan on the Rangers, from 1988 to 1990.

A goal scorer, Granato recalled a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1988 when he almost engaged in his first fight. When he returned to the bench, Nilan slid over hard and lectured him never to drop his gloves again. If there was a problem — with anyone — he should tell Nilan, who would take care of it. Nilan did the same for Brian Leetch, the star Rangers defenseman.

“There is guilt on my part for all the punishment he and those guys had to take for us,” Granato said. “But that was their job, and they took pride in it. No one did it better than Knuckles.”

Memory, Now and Five Years Ago

Chris Nilan is a quintessential Bostonian of a certain time and demographic, the kind they make movies about: A tough, working-class hockey player of Irish descent, hundreds, if not thousands, of local kids yearned to be just like him. He was born on Feb. 9, 1958, at the Faulkner Hospital in West Roxbury, Mass., the son of Henry and Leslie Nilan, a hard-working, blue collar couple who raised their four children in a strict household. Chris still found his way into scraps as a kid, and soon discovered he was a capable and fearless fighter. Often, he said, it was in defense of others. Later, he mixed it up with groups of kids and young adults on the streets and in the bars of Boston.

He met Karen Stanley at Northeastern University and they fell in love. When people asked about Bulger, Nilan would point out that he married Karen, not her stepfather. He described their 1981 wedding, with Henry Nilan’s Green Beret buddies on one side, Bulger and his cohorts on another and Nilan’s hockey pals up the middle.

“We could have invaded a small country,” Nilan said with a laugh.

Several years later, Bulger was photographed with the Stanley Cup after Nilan’s Canadiens won it in 1986. Nilan stresses he was never aware of Bulger’s criminal activities, but described tension between Bulger and his own father, an honest, taxpaying working man who disapproved of the then-reputed gangster’s “lifestyle.”

Once, when both sets of parents were visiting Montreal, Bulger bought Nilan’s mother an expensive fur coat, which upset Nilan’s father. Bulger adored Nilan’s fearless and pugnacious demeanor.

Waking In The Night, Punching or Kicking

At 6 feet, 205 pounds, Nilan was shorter and lighter than many of his opponents, like the 6-foot-5, 225-pound Dave Brown, whom he fought six times. Nilan relied on his remarkable stamina and developed a kind of rope-a-dope technique, tucking his head into one shoulder to protect his face and head and pouncing when the other fighter tired or allowed an opening. He quickly emerged as one of the most courageous and terrifying players in the league, willing to trade blows with any heavyweight.

Fighting is far less common in today’s N.H.L. than it was in the 1980s and ‘90s, as the league has ushered in rules modifications and a faster style of play, even though Gary Bettman, the league commissioner, still denies a link between fighting and C.T.E. Nilan opposes a ban on fighting, but acknowledges being sickened when a player is knocked unconscious in a fight.

It never happened to him, but in his later seasons, after he was traded to the Rangers and the Bruins, the fighting secretly wore him down.

“I fought right to the end, but it was getting harder on me,” he said. “Fight one guy and then fight another guy the next period or next shift. I’d come back to the bench and tell myself, ‘I’m losing that little edge,’ which you can never own up to. So you hide it.”

In the years after his career ended, his hands, knees and back throbbed from 13 years of pounding and too many surgeries. Nilan began ingesting Percocet, a prescription pain killer, and then became addicted to Oxycodone and alcohol, a familiar combination for many retired enforcers.

He eventually found heroin and took it intravenously. In 2015 his mother had a stroke and Nilan went to visit her at Faulkner, the hospital where he was born. He asked a drug dealer to meet him there and he snorted up in a maintenance closet. The next thing he knew, he was on a gurney with a nurse calling his name, yet another overdose victim.

Had he gone outside to find the dealer that night, instead of insisting they meet at the hospital, Nilan likely would not have survived.

He does not hide from the harrowing memory, or others, like the time decades ago when he savagely beat a young man who had hit his teenage daughter and was arrested in the assault. He grapples with the anguish he has inflicted on others, on himself, his family and Holtz.

And yes, he still wakes up, perhaps three or four times a year, throwing punches at the air in reaction to a nightmare, usually that he is being carjacked.

Problems With Anger

Nilan met Holtz in rehab and she has been his stanchion, guiding him out of relapses and back to recovery. The researchers asked Holtz about Nilan’s memory and moods and if he displayed moments of rage. She explained that several years ago, she told Nilan that if he did not get his anger under control, she would leave him.

“He would lose his temper for the smallest things,” she said. “Chris acknowledged those issues in his life and is completely different now. All of that has changed. He faced some hard truths and emotions and dealt with them. Growing up, that is how he was raised.”

Nilan adored his father, who died in 2021, and is immensely proud of him. Henry Nilan was a Green Beret in the Army reserves and a draftsman at Draper Labs in Cambridge, Mass., and he worked hard to provide for his family. He also hit Chris as punishment, sometimes in the chest, sometimes a slap to the back of the head, sometimes a punch, until Chris was about 16 and finally threatened to run away.

Growing up in that environment, he says, led to much of his anger and propensity to violence, not his career as an enforcer.

Have You Had Any Concussions?

Concussions are a concern, but not a prerequisite for C.T.E. Rather, the condition is believed to result from repeated impacts to the head.

“With C.T.E., concussions have been overemphasized,” Nowinski said.

Nilan recalls four possible concussions. One was from an opponent’s shoulder during play that left him dazed. Another time, as a fight wound down, Nilan’s opponent fell on top of his head as it struck the ice. Nilan saw stars. A third time was during a street altercation in Boston when he was struck in the head with a full bottle of beer and was, “out on my feet.” Lastly, several years ago he rolled his car into a ditch and was ejected out the back window, unconscious.

“I never felt any long-term symptoms,” he said. “I never had problems with light, or noise, or sleeping.”

‘Are you ready to hear the results?’

Nilan and Holtz sat in Nilan’s podcast studio in their home on June 8 and listened to Dr. Alosco and Hannah Bruce, a fellow researcher, present the findings. Nilan was eager to hear the results, and was also looking forward to interviewing Jim Montgomery, the Bruins’ head coach, for the podcast before heading out for a round of golf.

Holtz was nervous.

The results cannot rule out C.T.E., but they were very good for Nilan. His cognitive, memory and motor tests showed he was well within the normal range for his age, gender and education. In most he was above average. Had there been any reason for concern, Dr. Alosco would have recommended clinical care for diagnosis and treatment, which he did not consider necessary at the time.

“I kind of thought,” Nilan began, then paused and shook his head. “Look, I’m a special case.”

Everyone on the call laughed, but it could be true. Dr. Alosco said Nilan is in a very high-risk group and urged him to remain vigilant with his sobriety and a healthy lifestyle. He also asked him to return for the yearly research follow-ups, and Nilan said he would.

At the end of the meeting, Dr. Alosco stressed that researchers want to know the factors that have made Nilan appear resistant so far to degenerative neurological disease, whether genetics, medical history, the types of head impacts, his lifestyle or other factors.

“That’s why your data might be so valuable to answer who is resilient to these long-term effects of repetitive head impacts,” Dr. Alosco told Nilan.

Nilan was upbeat afterward, as he prepared to head out of the house. But not because of the results.

“Either way,” he said with a clap of his hands, “I was going to play golf.”

Audio produced by Kate Winslett.

Seventy-five years ago this past week, Sam Snead won the Masters Tournament and became the first champion to receive one of Augusta National Golf Club’s green jackets.

Until he died in 2002, the jacket was his to wear every time he returned to Augusta. These days, it is a sartorial symbol of how, beyond a freighted history and marvelous azaleas and golf’s geopolitical machinations and gallery roars that ripple from Amen Corner to the clubhouse, Augusta National is more enchanted by champions than most places.

Since the start of the month, Lottie Woad has captured the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Eight children were named champions of a junior golf competition after playing at Augusta. More than 30 past Masters winners gathered for dinner to honor Jon Rahm, last year’s champion, and Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson hit tee shots to start this year’s tournament. Many of their brethren played afterward, because they are allowed to for life. On Sunday, Scottie Scheffler, who was already familiar with the locker room reserved for past champions, won the 88th Masters.

There may be no place in men’s golf where hope, dazzle and ambition are as abundant as Augusta.

But this past week, all of the possibilities seemed to be on greater display than usual. There was the solar eclipse on Monday, when fans peered skyward, just as Ben Crenshaw and Nick Faldo did here, too. Later on, Tiger Woods, 48 years old and two years removed from the last time he finished a major tournament, made his record 24th consecutive Masters cut. But he faded on Saturday.

Higher up the leaderboard during the third round, players like Ludvig Aberg, Nicolai Hojgaard, Max Homa and Xander Schauffele hunted for their debut major title, while Bryson DeChambeau, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Smith looked to build on the magic that had made them champions elsewhere not all that long ago. Scheffler occasionally stumbled, but on Sunday, he dominated and locked down his second Masters victory before the birth of his first child.

Golf enthusiasts often regard a trip to the Masters as the stuff of dreams. It certainly is for players. The Masters represents a shot at becoming one of those champions written into history, with the green jackets and the possibility of forever enchanting Augusta.

Three days after LeBron James Jr. collapsed during a basketball practice, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said on Thursday that he “has been discharged home, where he is resting.” His father, LeBron James, said on social media that his family was “together, safe and healthy.”

And in a signal of the family’s optimism and relief, LeBron was back in the gym on Thursday, working out with another young basketball star.

The younger James, known as Bronny, who was recruited to join the U.S.C. basketball team in the fall, suffered cardiac arrest on Monday while working out at the university’s Galen Center. He was treated in intensive care initially and had been at Cedars-Sinai since Monday.

The Los Angeles Fire Department on Thursday released a redacted portion of a 911 call made Monday morning from the Galen Center.

In the call, an unidentified individual urgently requested medical assistance.

“Listen, listen, listen, listen,” the caller said. “Get an ambulance here — now.”

A dispatcher asked the caller if a doctor or registered nurse was on the scene, and the caller said there was not a doctor around.

“Help is already on the way,” the dispatcher said. “We’re already on the way, sir. Fire department, paramedics are already on the way.”

Bronny was treated by U.S.C. medical staff and then taken to Cedars-Sinai.

LeBron James’s workout with a young prospect had been scheduled for Wednesday before being postponed after Bronny, 18, collapsed during a practice.

The young star whom LeBron James worked out with on Thursday was AJ Dybantsa, the highly touted 16-year-old from Brockton, Mass., who was in Los Angeles with his father to meet with agents, including representatives from James’s agency, Klutch Sports.

“I felt for the man,” Ace Dybantsa, AJ’s father and a Boston University police officer, said of LeBron James by phone following his son’s hourlong workout Thursday. “After what he’s been through, he showed up, put on a good face and worked with the kid. I had chills, man.”

For AJ Dybantsa, a 6-foot-8 forward who has transferred to Prolific Prep in Napa Valley, Calif., from St. Sebastian’s in Needham, Mass., the workout was the latest in a series with N.B.A. superstars.

When asked what it meant that James showed up after what happened to Bronny, AJ Dybantsa said, “he cares.”

He continued, “Didn’t know what was going to happen to his son, but even though it took him an extra day, he still showed up and worked out.”

Bronny James and his family also received well wishes from Ohio State Coach Chris Holtmann. In September 2022, during Bronny’s senior year at Sierra Canyon School in Los Angeles, Bronny and his father visited Ohio State for a football game against Notre Dame. The fans chanted, “We want Bronny.”

Ohio State was the school that LeBron, an Ohio native, had said he likely would have attended had he gone to college rather than jumping straight to the N.B.A. as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2003 draft.

Holtmann said that he and his staff had been genuinely interested in landing Bronny.

“It was a situation where we just were really open about making sure it fit what they were looking for and vice versa,” Holtmann said by phone on Wednesday. “We knew it was going to be an experience where he may not be in college very long, so you want that experience to be a great one.”

Bronny James would be eligible for the N.B.A. draft after his freshman year; there has been speculation that he will jump to the N.B.A. in 2024, when LeBron will turn 40.

As a senior at Sierra Canyon, Bronny averaged 14 points, 5.5 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.8 steals. He was named to the McDonald’s All-American game in March, where he scored 15 points on 5-of-8 shooting from the perimeter while adding 4 assists and 2 steals.

The U.S.C. men’s basketball team is scheduled to leave for a 10-day exhibition tour to Greece and Croatia on Aug. 5, but it remains unclear if the team will still travel, or if Bronny will make the trip.

Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.

Michael Locksley was helping coach Alabama to a national championship in 2017 when his 25-year-old son, Meiko, was shot and killed.

Meiko was a standout high-school football player who bounced between college programs as his mind and life slipped into darkness in his early 20s.

His father is now the head coach at the University of Maryland. Michael Locksley has mourned Meiko’s loss, in part, by leading discussions about mental health and trying to destigmatize it among the young men he coaches.

One thing he has not said publicly, until now: Meiko had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head and often associated with football.

C.T.E. can only be diagnosed, with certainty, posthumously.

“I always thought, like, how do you go from a normal 21-year-old Division I football-playing person to, literally six months later, saying you hear people in the basement of an apartment where you lived on the eighth floor and you don’t have a basement?” Locksley said.

He continued: “That didn’t make sense to me. So I just always would go back to saying, ‘Maybe it had something to do with these concussions.’”

Locksley said that he did not know the precise role that C.T.E. played in Meiko’s decline, and he is right. Researchers cannot make direct links, either. Were Meiko’s severe symptoms and mental-health issues caused by, exacerbated by or unaffected by C.T.E.?

A direct and personal — deeply personal — link to C.T.E. would be the most inconvenient of truths.

Locksley still coaches, leading a major program in a major conference. And he has another son, Kai, playing professionally in the Canadian Football League. He justifies his continued role in football with a risk-vs.-reward calculation.

“I want to be able to teach it and present it as safe as possible while still allowing this great game to give the rewards that it’s given to so many families that I’ve seen over the 30-something years I’ve been coaching,” he said.

“My goal is to walk that thin line very truthfully,” he added.

Is it the view of a man who has suffered the incalculable loss of a son, but also has more to lose?

The brain of Meiko Locksley is one of 152 belonging to contact-sport athletes under the age of 30 that were donated between 2008 and 2022 to the UNITE Brain Bank and studied by researchers at Boston University.

In a paper published Monday in JAMA Neurology, the researchers reported that 63 of the athletes, or 41.4 percent of them, had C.T.E. Most were football players who never played past college, sometimes not past high school. One was 17.

That does not suggest that nearly half of young football players will get C.T.E.; the donations were made by mourning families desperate to find answers, most often after a suicide.

“This study clearly shows that the pathology of C.T.E. starts early,” said Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of Boston University’s C.T.E. Center.

What came to be known as C.T.E. was first diagnosed decades ago in “punch-drunk” boxers. Symptoms can include memory loss, erratic behavior and depression.

These days, despite discoveries in contact-sport athletes and military personnel of all kinds, C.T.E. is most often associated with aging football players. Junior Seau, Ken Stabler, Mike Webster and Dave Duerson are some of its most famous victims.

Researchers reported earlier this year that 345 of 376 donated brains of deceased N.F.L. players had C.T.E.

But there is a growing subset of young people, too, like the 63 in the latest study, whose lives, deaths and C.T.E. diagnoses are hidden in relative anonymity.

One was the son of one of the top football coaches in the country.

From ‘Few Bad Days’ to ‘Shoot Me Now’

On the kitchen wall where Michael and Kia Locksley live is a framed piece of wood that reads, “Home is wherever football takes us.”

Below it are 11 hanging wooden slats, one below another, listing all the coaching stops. Towson. Navy. Pacific. Army. Maryland. Florida. Illinois. New Mexico as a head coach. Maryland again. Alabama. Maryland as head coach.

They almost reach the floor.

“I don’t know if I have room for any more stops,” Locksley said.

Meiko Locksley was born on April 24, 1992, at the start of that chain. His mother was in college. His father was an assistant football coach at Towson, where he had played safety, making $12,000, he said.

Michael Locksley had one son already, also named Michael. The Locksleys had two more children after Meiko: a boy named Kai and a girl named Kori.

Meiko was reading at 4 and finished his first Harry Potter book at 6. Kia insisted that he balance athletics with art, so he took piano lessons; he played “Here Comes the Bride” for a wedding at 9. He did some child acting and modeling. He wrote poetry and rap. He got good grades. He laughed easily, danced routinely.

“He had very few bad days as a child,” his father said.

Meiko began playing tackle football at 7. It was the late 1990s. Concerns over concussions almost didn’t exist, especially for children.

“They were 7 and weighed nothing,” Kia Locksley said. “And the hits, it almost looked like they just bounced off each other.”

She is haunted by her carefree attitude. She remembers Meiko being knocked out on the field in middle school. Moments later, he seemed OK.

“Everything that I looked for at that time was in place: He was walking, he was talking,” Kia Locksley said. “But I look back now with the information, definitely, I should have had him evaluated then and taken precautions then.”

What makes C.T.E. especially tricky is that it is caused not just by obvious concussions, researchers say, but by the cumulative effect of subconcussive hits — all the smacks and jolts that might barely register at the time.

While Michael Locksley was offensive coordinator at Illinois, Meiko became a star high school quarterback. When his father was offered the head job at New Mexico, Meiko played for a high school in Albuquerque.

He went to college to play at Youngstown State. It was about then that his parents noticed worrying changes.

Meiko had discipline problems and stopped going to class — uncharacteristic for Meiko and embarrassing for Michael, who presumed that his son was merely running with the wrong crowd.

Meiko transferred to New Mexico to play for his father, moving from quarterback to safety. Kia Locksley was in graduate school there. She and Meiko would meet on campus for coffee.

“He started talking about how he was depressed,” Kia said. “And that was very new.”

The Locksleys got Meiko into counseling, and Michael had “guardrails” to keep him on the right path — as coach, he could monitor class attendance and request drug tests. Meiko’s behavior seemed to stabilize.

But Michael Locksley was fired early in their first season together. Meiko stayed. He sustained a concussion that kept him out of several games because of severe headaches.

Meiko transferred to a Pennsylvania junior college, then to Towson. His parents were nearby. Michael had become offensive coordinator at Maryland.

Meiko’s mother noticed he had a growing inability to understand simple conversations.

“I would be on the phone with him for so long about little things, and I just didn’t understand,” Kia said. “I was confused, like: ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you unable to process this?’”

He was moody and easily agitated. He lost a worrying amount of weight and became less concerned about how he dressed and looked. He got into an off-campus fight and was kicked off the football team. He argued routinely with a girlfriend.

Then he began hallucinating.

“I got a call in the middle of the night, and Meiko was on the other end and his girlfriend had left,” Kia Locksley said. “She went back to, he thought, New Mexico, but he told me she was still here. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he goes: ‘She didn’t leave. She’s in this closet.’”

Meiko played what he said was a recording of her, but it was completely silent. “I heard nothing. But he heard her voice,” Kia Locksley said.

Kia Locksley thought it was a mental breakdown, signs of an illness. Michael Locksley suspected drugs.

Neither considered C.T.E. or the impact of football.

The Locksleys felt lucky to have money and connections. Meiko went through a string of therapists and medications. He went to Florida for a brain scan that turned up “hot spots” (damage from concussions, presumably), but offered no real answers.

He was ultimately diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

Once, at home, Meiko became enraged and smashed a window. Police were summoned.

“And that’s when I heard him say,” Kia Locksley said, “‘Why is this happening? I didn’t ask for this disease. Why do I have this? Just shoot me now. Just kill me.’ He went for the police officer’s gun. He wanted to die as opposed to dealing with the mental illness that he was struggling with.”

Kia Locksley learned to care for Meiko by “emotionally detaching” from her expectations of him.

“I remember praying one night and just crying,” she said. “I had to release and let go of who I wanted him to be, who I thought he was going to be, all the dreams that I had for him.”

Michael Locksley coped with his son’s decline differently.

“I kept wanting to knock the wall down to say, ‘Come on out of here, man,’” Locksley said. “It felt like he was a prisoner in his own brain.”

Then came the night of Sept. 3, 2017.

An Unresolved Death and a Diagnosis

The season opened the night before Meiko died. No. 1 Alabama played No. 3 Florida State in Atlanta.

Michael Locksley, an offensive coordinator for Alabama under Nick Saban, traded text messages with Meiko before the game, then called him after the Crimson Tide won, 24-7.

“I can remember him saying, like, ‘Dang, Pops, man, y’all killed those boys,’” Locksley recalled.

Locksley cried while retelling the conversation.

The next night, Sept. 3, Michael and Kia were at their Alabama apartment. They were awakened by police officers at their door.

Meiko had been shot in the chest in Columbia, Md., near where he lived. He died at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Circumstances were unknown that night, and the case remains unsolved, six years later. Michael Locksley sometimes goes to the scene and sits in his car, hoping someone might recognize him and tell him what happened to his son.

It was Michael who recommended the brain donation. By 2017, C.T.E. had received a lot of attention, and football coaches could not feign ignorance about concussions.

Locksley had seen the 2015 film “Concussion.” A year before Meiko’s death, the N.F.L. admitted C.T.E.’s link to football.

“I really wanted to know if the concussions played any part in the connection with his deteriorating mental health,” Locksley said.

The results came in a conference call with researchers. Meiko had C.T.E.

The damage to his brain was deemed to be Stage 1 of four stages, like 38 others in the under-30 study. Another 21 brains were classified as Stage 2. The remaining three — one N.F.L. player, one college football player and one rugby player — were Stage 3.

The news of C.T.E. swamped Kia Locksley with regret.

“My God, I could have done something differently,” she said, tearing up. After a pause, she added: “A little guilt.”

Michael Locksley found unexpected comfort in the diagnosis. It was not drugs, he was relieved to know.

But he was now a football coach with a conundrum. He has spent years separating Meiko’s mental-health struggles from his C.T.E. diagnosis.

He frequently talks about “mental health” and his program’s open-door policy for players experiencing personal problems. He has spoken at length about Meiko’s struggles.

It is natural to wonder, knowing the C.T.E. diagnosis, if “mental health” is a convenient euphemism, if not a bit of strategic misdirection.

“I continue to differentiate between the two,” Locksley said. “I’m a layman, and my layman’s mind-set is that they weren’t really connected, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe they were. I don’t know.”

Football ‘Changed the Lineage of My Family’

Michael Locksley has rebuilt Maryland’s football program, winning back-to-back bowl games for the first time in nearly 20 years. He is paid several million dollars a year. He has a large home, drives nice cars and oversees a program with shimmering new offices and football facilities.

It is his dream job. Locksley grew up in an area of Washington, D.C., that is still troubled and dangerous. He was the first in his family to go to college, thanks to football. It is where he met Kia.

“The benefits of playing the game of football, coming from where I was, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he said. “The brown leather ball with however many ounces of air in it, it changed the lineage of my family.”

He continued, putting his feelings to words.

“Does it hurt that I lost my son? One-hundred percent it does. Does it hurt to know that he had C.T.E. and it possibly could have been because of playing college football, high-school football, youth football? Sure. But if you were to ask me today how I feel — I have grandsons now that love football and are playing contact football before high school.”

Kia Locksley now believes that children should not play tackle football, perhaps until high school. That echoes the recommendation of C.T.E. researchers who see a correlation between C.T.E. and the number of years of full-contact participation.

Her husband sees that as impractical unless a ban were widely implemented “and everybody did it.”

Meiko’s diagnosis has changed the way he coaches, Locksley said. He is more aware of the signs of concussions and appreciative of the protocols.

“It definitely makes me think twice about how we practice, how often we are having contact,” he said.

But he dismissed the idea that Maryland might consider following the lead of some colleges, like those in the Ivy League, that limit contact only to games, which researchers think would greatly reduce brain injuries in athletes.

“If one team is doing things a certain way and another is doing it differently, then sometimes that does create a competitive disadvantage,” he said. “I’m judged Saturday on winning games.”

That form of judgment begins again this Saturday, as Maryland opens its season against Towson — the school where Locksley got his start and met his wife, and where Meiko last played football.

The next day will be the anniversary of Meiko’s death.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.