To the Editor:

Re “Football Players Deserve to Retire With Dignity,” by Jim Brown, the former running back for the Cleveland Browns (Sunday Review, Dec. 8):

Having been associated with the National Football League and the San Francisco 49ers in particular for more than 33 years, I am now seeing players I counseled as young athletes returning on Alumni Day each season. Too many of them are in bad shape medically, financially and psychologically.

The 49ers organization has stepped up in many cases and provided help, particularly in crisis cases, but this has been in response to what are essentially the worst symptoms of a much deeper and more pervasive problem: a lack of commitment and a failure by the N.F.L. and the players union to respond to support the players who contributed so much to building the league into what it is today.

I stand with my friend Jim Brown and the many former players who languish and suffer from circumstances fully within the corrective capacities of the players union and the league they helped toward realization of its current greatness.

I implore Commissioner Roger Goodell; the executive director of the players union, DeMaurice Smith; and the 32 team owners to make the right call: Let this 100-year commemoration of the pro game also mark the year that those surviving players from the past receive the medical and pension benefits they have earned and so justly deserve.