In the final minutes of the pre-recorded speech that finally inducted him into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Roger Craig — the workhorse who powered three of the San Francisco 49ers' Super Bowl teams — told a national television audience he has been diagnosed with vascular dementia, a condition his doctors believe may be tied, at least in part, to the concussions he absorbed over 11 NFL seasons.

Craig's disclosure, delivered Saturday from the stage in Canton and first reported by NBC Bay Area, adds one of the most beloved figures of the Bay Area's greatest sports dynasty to the lengthening roster of former players who have publicly linked football to their own cognitive decline. It lands with particular weight in San Francisco, where Craig's high-stepping running style was a signature of the Bill Walsh era — and where the toll of that era on the men who built it keeps surfacing, one diagnosis at a time.

Roger Craig had waited more than three decades for the phone call that came on Feb. 5, when he was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Class of 2026 at the NFL Honors show in San Francisco. He had been a finalist repeatedly. When the moment finally arrived in Canton, he chose to spend part of it on something harder than a highlight reel.

"Today, there is another chapter I want to share," Craig said near the end of his roughly 10-minute pre-recorded address, according to NBC Bay Area. "I've been diagnosed with vascular dementia that my doctors believe may be related, at least in part, to the concussions I experienced during my career."

Craig, 66, told the audience his symptoms crept in gradually and were at first written off as ordinary aging. As NBC Bay Area noted, vascular dementia is caused by conditions that limit blood flow to the brain and can lead to problems with memory, thinking and behavior. Craig did not describe a single defining injury so much as an accumulation; he characterized his doctors' assessment as a diagnosis that "may be related, at least in part" to the hits he took across his career.

What made the disclosure resonate was less a medical claim than the way Craig held two ideas at once. "Two things could be true," he said, per NBC Bay Area. "Football gave me opportunities beyond anything I can imagine. It helped shape the man I became. At the same time, we know more today about brain health than when I played. And I hope sharing my story encourages people to pay attention to their health and seek help when something doesn't feel right."

The football he described was extraordinary. Craig was a second-round pick out of Nebraska in 1983 who became a fixture in Walsh's West Coast offense as a rookie, according to his Hall of Fame biography. In 1985 he became the first player in NFL history to gain 1,000 yards rushing and 1,000 yards receiving in the same season. He set a 49ers single-season rushing record with 1,502 yards in 1988 and won three Super Bowl rings in San Francisco before finishing his career with the Raiders and Vikings. He retired 13th on the league's all-time rushing list.

That résumé is also a ledger of collisions. Craig carried the ball nearly 2,000 times and caught 566 passes over 165 regular-season games, according to Hall of Fame records — a decade-plus of the repetitive contact that has moved to the center of the sport's reckoning over brain health.

That reckoning has arrived unevenly, often only when a familiar name attaches a diagnosis to it. Craig, notably, framed his own disclosure as a deliberate act of use rather than resignation.

"I want people to know this diagnosis doesn't define me," he said, according to NBC Bay Area. "I am still Roger Craig. I am still a father, a husband, a teammate, a friend, and someone who loves this game." If telling his story helped "even one family or one former player," he added, "then it's worth it."

Craig had not spoken publicly since his election was announced. When he finally did, he turned his induction — the honor that certifies what the game gave him — into a warning about what it may have cost.