My connection to Leonard Shapiro is through golf. We walked many fairways in our day and even did a book together, Golf List Mania. We’re still in the process of negotiating the movie rights.

Len, though, also wrote about another game: Football. He was the long-time NFL writer for the Washington Post. If you go to Canton, you’ll see his name on a plaque at the Hall of Fame.

When it comes to respect from his peers, Shapiro sits among an elite group among the golf and NFL writers.

Now semi-retired with time to reflect, Len wrote a piece Sunday for his old paper with this headline: “For too long, sports journalists glossed over football’s violence. I was one of them.”

Definitely pay attention.

Len writes:

I covered the NFL over four decades dating back to 1972. Now semi-retired myself and five years removed from day-to-day football coverage, I have one main regret: not focusing more of my reporting and writing on the absolute brutality of the sport, particularly the painful post-football lives of so many players.

Instead, like many other sports journalists, I spent much of my career writing positive pieces about the league and its players — puffy features and breathless accounts of thrilling victories and agonizing defeats. I certainly covered my share of serious NFL warts: mounting injuries; the use of steroids and amphetamines; team doctors prescribing far too many painkilling pills and injections; the derogatory Redskins name; and, for many years, the dearth of African American quarterbacks, head coaches and ­front-office personnel. But until the past decade or so, most of us glossed over the brutality of the sport. Shame on us.

And more:

But it’s not just the NFL that needs to fess up. The news media — television, print and digital — also must take some responsibility for frequently glorifying the unadulterated mayhem of this perilous competition. This includes all those war images in our prose: all-out blitzes, bombs down the field, defenders striking like heat-seeking missiles and head-hunting linebackers.

We should have been on this story far earlier. It’s not as if this was a deep, dark secret. At every Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony each August in Canton, Ohio, it’s difficult to ignore former all-pros limping, leaning on canes or rolling onto the stage in wheelchairs. In conversations with countless former players, we hear about replaced knees, hips and shoulders, surgically repaired necks and backs. Worst of all, there’s clear evidence of memory loss and dementia from concussions either undiagnosed, shrugged off or totally ignored.

Shapiro concludes:

Still, when Washington hosts the Chicago Bears at FedEx Field on Sunday afternoon, I’ll surely be in front of a TV set, in my favorite chair and riveted to every play, just like so many other millions of fans across the country and the globe. The game is appealing and appalling at the same time. And I have no doubt that all of us, news media included, will continue to feed the beast, even if the beast keeps feeding on its own.

As always, good stuff from Len.