Nick Buoniconti of Springfield, has been named an All-Pro five times, more than twice as many times as any other Massachusetts-born NFL player in history. Buoniconti won two back-to-back Super Bowls while playing with the Miami Dolphins and in 2001, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Throughout his life, Buoniconti championed medical research. According to The New York Times, after his son Marc Buoniconti was paralyzed from a college football injury, Nick Buoniconti helped raise nearly $500 million for spinal cord and brain research.
In his later life, Buoniconti suffered from dementia. After his death in July 2019, his brain was donated to Boston University to help determine if this was at all caused by his football career.
"I'm not mad at the game, I'm mad at the owners," he said in "The Many Lives of Nick Buoniconti," an HBO documentary. "I think that we paved the way for the NFL being what it is today. In other words, we, uh, we paved the way for them and they're, they're reaping all the benefits."