Former Minnesota United defender Ike Opara on end of his MLS career: ‘I was fighting for my life’

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What happened to Ike Opara?

It’s a question that has remained unanswered for five years.

Before the 2019 season, Minnesota United traded for Opara, one of MLS’s best center backs; it was part of a veteran roster overhaul lined up to the opening of Allianz Field. Opara went on to win his second MLS defender of the year award that season, helping lead the Loons first to respectability, then the U.S. Open Cup final and their first MLS Cup Playoffs appearance.

Opara then played the opening two games of the 2020 season, but didn’t return after the pandemic pause. It wasn’t until August 2021 that MNUFC used its one buyout on Opara.

Opara’s history with concussions was part of the reasoning, but few details emerged at that time. A short statement from the club effectively served as an unceremonious end to Opara’s sidelined-to-star-to-sidelined 11-year career with three MLS teams, the San Jose Earthquakes, Sporting Kansas City and MNUFC.

Opara returned to St. Paul on June 1 and was honored at halftime of the Loons’ home victory over Sporting. It wasn’t a day he foresaw when he retired at age 31.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll see 35,’ ” Opara revealed in an interview with the Pioneer Press. “That’s how terrible I felt.”

Opara, now 35, came to Minnesota with a history of concussions, dealing with symptoms and trying to limit another head injury, including the use of headgear.

While the fallout from concussions led to the end of his playing days, “it was so much deeper than that,” he said. Some other factors included his unsteady mental health and his wife’s own health issues.

Opara still isn’t ready to tell his whole story. He said he struggles with how to share it properly. But he was willing to share some of what he was going through.

“It’s a story for another day because it’s hours on hours on hours,” Opara said. “It was like I was here today and gone tomorrow. (He laughed.) I’m sure it looked that way, but to me, it didn’t feel that way. It was truly — I was fighting for my life in so many aspects.

“But I’ll say … there were days that I thought I was going to be dead, you know, which is a scary fact, a scary thought to even — well, now (that) I’m over it,” he continued. “It is scary to even think about it. It took a while to get over those thoughts.”

Concussion became consistent. “It was really the reoccurring symptoms, and truthfully, I never really didn’t have any,” Opara said on June 7. “It just kept progressively getting worse and worse and worse. And, I mean, I’ve got stories from games and things like that.”

Soon after Opara arrived in Minnesota in 2019, he sat down the Pioneer Press for a longer interview at the National Sports Center in Blaine. His concussion history in Kansas City was a topic.

“I remember the time that we spoke,” Opara said. “I think you did a write up on me about the concussions and my advocacy and education with that. And a part of me felt kind of dirty when I did it, because that morning in the (training) session, I felt like I sustained another one. And I was sitting there talking to you about (the topic) two hours later.”

Opara said he was just trying to plug through as a professional athlete.

“It took a moment for me to forgive myself because I played through things that I shouldn’t have been doing,” Opara said. “I put my own life at risk, and I’ve looked at it for what reason did I do that? To chase an individual award? Or a team award? Nothing like that in the grand scheme of things is important.”

Opara sought help with different specialists and health clinics but nothing seemed to work. He said he got lucky when he found an institute that helped put him on the road to recovery.

“I’m more healthy today than I’ve ever been — 180 (degrees),” Opara said. “Super grateful.”

The shoutout to Opara’s contribution to MNUFC on July 1 came with his wife, Erin, and their young son by his side.

“I look at him like, ‘Man, what could not have been,’ I guess,” Opara said. “It always gives you perspective and keeps you grounded.”

Opara is now an assistant coach with Sporting Kansas City II, its MLS NEXT Pro developmental team. When he was a player, Opara said he had no desire to go into coaching, but former SKC teammate and current SKC II head coach Benny Feilhaber talked Opara into joining his staff a few years ago.

Opara enjoys working with players at that level because they are focused on improvement. He isn’t too keen on climbing the coaching ladder because he doesn’t want to deal with the egos and money matters that can cloud matters at the MLS level.

Opara said he has also been working with the MLS Players’ Association on concussion advocacy and prevention.

“How many players there are in MLS that have issues and are still on the field playing is alarming,” Opara said. “Trying to do my best to help guide them. At the end of the day, I understand, sadly, why they keep pushing. I’m trying to help them understand the bigger picture.”

When Opara returned to Minnesota earlier this month, he caught up with a handful of former teammates and players he respected on the other side of the pitch. He said he connected with his former center back partner Michael Boxall, goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair, midfielder Robin Lod as well as goalie Clint Irwin and mid Wil Trapp.

“It was a full circle moment (on the field) of wrapping a wild journey of a career and personally from when I started playing, when I was a little boy,” Opara said. “So, to be able to be honored and recognized was quite special.”

Opara looked back fondly on his year-plus in Minnesota. He recalled the inaugural game at Allianz Field, a wild 3-3 draw with New York City in April; the Loons’ 2-0 win at Los Angeles FC that September (a game in which Opara wore the captain’s armband), and the home MLS Cup Playoffs loss to Los Angeles Galaxy in October.

But it was the 2-1 loss to Atlanta in the U.S Open Cup final which he first brought up. He drilled down to how Atlanta went down to 10 men with Leandro Gonzalez Pirez’s red card in the 74th minute.

“We were really a play away from making it to extra time,” Opara remembered. “And I have no doubt, we would have gotten the win with them down the man.”

Opara said it’s hard to compare his two MLS defender of the year awards: with KC in 2017 and Minnesota in 2019.

“Coming to Minnesota, which was a brand project as a whole, even though it was Year 3, and the lack of defensive strength that they had the first two years. It was, let’s try to build this thing principle-wise: create good habits, be a leader, be vocal, have everyone trust in me, and also give that trust and respect to others,” Opara remembered. “That give and take of a relationship as a unit. So it was like starting from scratch with Minnesota, which was completely different than Sporting.”

While Opara’s tenure in Minnesota was severed too short, he never felt animosity from MNUFC supporters.

“I think they appreciated the work that I put in,” he said. “Obviously, (it was) for just barely over a season. But I think what I kind of embodied with that city, just how I go about my business on the field, how I am off the field. … Despite some up-and-down times that I had with my time in Minnesota, the fans never would have an issue. They’re always behind me. I always felt love.”

Abortion pill access is unchanged after the Supreme Court’s decision. Here’s what you need to know

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By MATTHEW PERRONE (AP Health Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Access to the abortion pill mifepristone will not change after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected an effort Thursday by anti-abortion groups to roll back its availability, a win for abortion rights supporters and millions of women in states where abortion is legal.

Despite the ruling, women’s access to mifepristone still largely depends on a patchwork of state laws, with only about half of states allowing full access under terms approved by the federal government.

“It doesn’t change anything anywhere,” said David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. “Tomorrow’s the same as today, which is the same as yesterday, which is the same as before this case was filed.”

Here’s a look at what Thursday’s decision does and does not mean for abortion access.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

Essentially, the justices said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the case did not have the legal standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over the drug’s safety or changes making it more widely available. The FDA approved the drug more than 20 years ago and has reiterated its safety and effectiveness.

The anti-abortion doctors, under the name the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, argued they might have to treat emergency room patients who experience serious injuries after taking mifepristone.

While the decision keeps mifepristone available, legal experts say that other groups or individuals who believe they can show a stronger legal connection to the drug might try to sue along similar lines.

“It’s a win that the status quo is preserved but it doesn’t signal that these are now dead arguments that others aren’t going to try and pursue,” said Rachel Rebouche, a Temple University law professor.

What is mifepristone?

Mifepristone is a prescribed to end pregnancies by dilating the cervix and blocking the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain a pregnancy. It is usually taken with a second drug, misprostol, that causes the uterus to cramp and contract. The two-drug regimen is used to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks.

What does the ruling mean for the status of mifepristone?

Mifepristone remains fully approved and available under the current FDA framework, which allows telehealth prescribing and mail delivery to patients. The FDA has also expanded availability to large pharmacy chains and allowed prescribing by nurses and other health professionals.

Those policies have increased the prescribing of mifepristone, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions last year.

Access to the pills is restricted across large swaths of the country because of state laws that ban abortion (including medication abortion) outright or impose separate restrictions on the drug’s use.

How do state laws impact access to mifepristone?

Access largely depends on the laws in the state where a patient lives and, in the case of states banning or restricting mifepristone, what steps they are willing to take to circumvent them.

About half of U.S. states allows online prescribing and mail delivery of mifepristone, conforming to FDA’s label for the drug.

Currently, 14 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, including with mifepristone. More than a dozen other states have laws specifically limiting how it can be prescribed, such as requiring an in-person visit with a physician or separate counseling about the potential risks and downsides of the drug.

Those steps are not supported by major medical societies, including the American Medical Association.

How safe and effective is mifepristone?

The FDA and the Biden administration filed multiple legal challenges that reiterated the drug’s safety and effectiveness.

Mifepristone results in a completed abortion 97.4% of the time, according to the FDA label. Like all drugs, the abortion pill is not 100% effective and in 2.6% of cases, a surgical intervention was needed to complete the abortion. Less than 1% of the time, the pregnancy continued.

In rare cases, mifepristone can cause serious complications including excessive bleeding, infections and other emergency problems. Those occur in far less than a fraction of 1% of all patients using the drug, according to the FDA label.

How are medication abortions increasing despite restrictions?

Despite state laws targeting mifepristone, statistics show women in those states continue to receive the drug through the mail because state authorities have little visibility into deliveries by the U.S. Postal Service.

A survey earlier this year found about about 8,000 women a month in states that restrict abortion or place limits on telehealth prescribing were getting the pills by mail by the end of 2023, according to the Society of Family Planning.

What’s next for legal challenges to mifepristone?

Legal experts say other parties could bring new lawsuits.

Idaho, Kansas and Missouri sought to join the case against the FDA and the Biden administration, which Supreme Court rejected — though a conservative Texas judge who initially ruled against the FDA allowed them to intervene in the case in his district. The three states, all led by Republican attorneys general, could try to revive the case at the lower court, according to legal experts.

“They are not physicians who have to show that they actually have some relationship to abortion care,” Rebouche said. “They’re claiming a state interest in the regulation of medicine, so I think that’s the vehicle in which you could see a lawsuit come forward.”

___

Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this story from Cherry Hill, N.J.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Other voices: Trump is not the answer to America’s immigration crisis

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If you think America’s immigration system is broken now, wait until Donald Trump fixes it.

Immigration may be the decisive issue of the 2024 election. Voters consistently cite it as the country’s most pressing problem. Migrant encounters at the border reached an all-time high in December, while cities across the US have scrambled to process and house a surge of undocumented arrivals. Perhaps 11 million unauthorized immigrants were in the country in 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Many more have entered since.

Trump says he’ll simply deport them all. In contrast to some of the more effective policies he pursued in this first term, he now cites a military-style program started by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, which the government says resulted in the return of about 1.1 million unauthorized migrants to Mexico. (Some scholars put the number far lower.) That precedent is in fact telling, though not in the way Trump thinks: It was cruel, chaotic and achieved nothing of lasting value. Unlawful border-crossing soon resumed, and it hasn’t stopped since.

Trump’s reprise won’t fare any better. The idea, his advisers say, is to use the National Guard and local law enforcement to help conduct nationwide raids, detain migrants in “vast holding facilities” and eventually deport them en masse, in what one aide dubs “the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Recall that Trump made similar promises in his first term but was undone by the legal and logistical challenges involved. The problem has not grown simpler in the meantime.

Even if they were competently executed, such policies would be very costly. One study found that arresting and deporting all 11 million undocumented migrants would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, take about 20 years and reduce real gross domestic product by roughly $2 trillion. Studies of previous deportation efforts suggest that they would also do significant harm to native-born workers: One analysis found that for every 1 million deportations, about 88,000 Americans would lose their jobs. As with the disastrous family-separation policy of Trump’s first term, this plan is likely to be gratuitously harmful to children, about 4.4 million of whom are US citizens living with an undocumented parent.

On legal immigration, the story is much the same. A Heritage Foundation plan — widely considered a blueprint for a second Trump term — includes an array of dubious gimmicks intended to impede new entrants and make life harder for those already here. It would effectively gut visa programs for temporary workers, for instance, by directing the Department of Homeland Security to not update its list of eligible countries. It would tweak rules for H-1B visas in a way that would make it all but impossible for recent foreign-born graduates to qualify. It would prevent agencies from devoting staff time to paperwork for programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Across myriad programs, it would raise fees, add red tape, create intentional backlogs and otherwise gum up the works of essential services.

To go down this road is to privilege an ideological fixation over the national good. America’s ability to attract legal immigrants is one of its greatest strengths. By one measure, immigrants are responsible for more than a third of aggregate U.S. innovation in recent decades. They’re much more productive than migrants to other countries. They produce patents and win Nobel Prizes at rates out of all proportion to their numbers. Yet a president bent on destroying this salutary system — with enough enablers to see the plan through — would have nearly limitless tools to do so.

To be clear: Immigration is perhaps President Joe Biden’s signature failure. Last week, he took modest steps to address the issue, belatedly acknowledging voters’ concerns. Had he acted more promptly, he might’ve forestalled a crisis and reduced the likelihood of losing the election. As things stand, that latter possibility looks all too likely — which means that Trump’s new plans, in all their ineptitude, may soon become reality.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

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Vikings star Justin Jefferson will take center stage on Netflix starting July 10

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Vikings star Justin Jefferson is already a household name among diehard fans of the NFL.

Now he will get a chance to reach some of the casual fans with the premiere of the Netflix series “Receiver” set to drop on July 10.

This is more or less the sequel to the Netflix series “Quarterback” that released last summer. The smash hit helped former Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins endear himself to the masses.

This time around the cameras will chronicle the life of an NFL pass catcher, giving an inside look into the life of Jefferson, Davante Adams, Deebo Samuel, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and George Kittle.

The most interesting part about Jefferson’s storyline is the fact that he spent most of last season rehabbing a hamstring injury. This will be the first time many people get to see the hard work Jefferson put in as he grinded through the recovery process.

You can watch the full trailer below.

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