Goin' Deep

"Put aside the fact that it ended my playing career, punched holes in my memory and put life as I knew it on indefinite hold, it wasn't that tough a hit." Thus begins "Goin' Deep", Matt Dunigan's gritty, often startling memoir of his 14-year journey as a Canadian Football League quarterback, a career brought to a shattering halt on an afternoon in Hamilton in 1996 in a game he still cannot remember.It is a story that takes readers where football fans cannot go - down the stadium runway into the dressing rooms - where injury is a fact of life, injections can put agony on temporary hold, and the tough-minded live by the credo that "Pain is mind over matter. If you don't mind the pain, it doesn't matter. But "Goin' Deep" is more than a football story. The concussion suffered in that game against the BC Lions marked the end of Dunigan's brilliant Hall of Fame career in the no-quarter world of professional football - and the beginning of another journey still in progress, where some days start third-and-long and memories can be shrouded in a drifting, frustrating fog that may or may not clear.