‘He was just a baby’: CTE robbed footy player of his brain and then his life

Andrew Macpherson bent down and gave his niece, Charlie, a cuddle. He managed to manufacture a smile, but it was only for the six-year-old’s benefit. The night before this morning had been a bad one. His sister, Laura Clarke, had raced over to his place to pick him up and found him in a state she had seen before.

“I drove him back to my house, he cried the whole way,” Clarke says. “Like a baby, just broken. He had drank and was devastated he’d let himself get to that point again.”

She sat at the foot of her little brother’s bed until he fell asleep. When he left early the following morning no one was up except for Charlie. The little girl kissed her Uncle Mackie goodbye. Then he went home and took his own life.

Macpherson played footy for some two decades, throughout school and in the West Australian Football League. He spent much of that time running at bigger men and landing himself in hospital with concussions. That is before considering the many more sub-concussive blows he likely sustained.

For a while after his death, as the family awaited autopsy results from the Australian Sports Brain Bank, Clarke told her two daughters that Macpherson had died after an accident. They thought it meant a car accident. “I struggled with it,” Clarke says. “Charlie is a really deep thinker. They had a particularly lovely bond – she adored him.”

A few months later Clarke changed the story. “I said Uncle Mackie’s brain was broken and that caused his death.” This time she was telling the truth. His brain was broken, riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy lesions which scientists labelled “strikingly abnormal” for a 33-year-old.

A year before Macpherson died on 28 February, 2021, he had made a first suicide attempt while in the