The helmet-to-helmet shot knocked Tony Dorsett out cold in the second quarter of a 1984 Cowboys-Eagles game, the hardest hit he ever took during his Hall of Fame NFL career.

It was like a freight train hitting a Volkswagen,” Dorsett says now.

Tony Dorsett, a retired Hall of Fame running back for the Dallas Cowboys, is one of at least 300 former players suing the National Football League, claiming the NFL pressured them to play with concussions and other injuries and then failed to help them pay for health care in retirement to deal with those injuries.

“Did they know it was a concussion?” he asks rhetorically. “They thought I was half-dead.”

“That ain’t the first time I was knocked out or been dazed over the course of my career, and now I’m suffering for it,” the 57-year-old former tailback says. “And the NFL is trying to deny it. They use you up!”