A football player is like a good dog. He will run until it kills him. Inside this world of football that others frivolously call a game, this comes as no surprise. When Vikings’ All-Pro tackle Korey Stringer died during training camp last month, his position coach Mike Tice said, “He worked himself to death.” That might sound bizarre to someone who thinks of the world of football as a game. But for those inside that world, the only real surprise is that there haven’t been more deaths in the NFL.
Every year players work themselves to death. They do it in college. They do it in high school. They do it trying to get to the NFL. Only this summer were most people aware of these perennial tragedies because the media were wheeling madly in the sky above the world of football, alerted to the carnage by the demise of an NFL star.
Stringer and many others have perished on the field because they have been taught to ignore pain. When their bodies are screaming out to stop, they, like all football players, push on. Pain is the red light that comes on, warning the human mind that the body is in danger of irreversible damage. Football players are taught at an early age to ignore the warning light, to treat it like a faulty sensor on the dashboard of a dilapidated automobile. Players do this because otherwise they cannot survive in the world of football. And so pain is also the chain-link fence behind which the rest of the world must stand in street clothes and watch. Pain is a badge of honor, worn by players with a pride that is bone deep.
But pain isn’t something you simply learn to tolerate. You can learn that in elementary school gym class. Pain is something you must embrace, something you dance with, something you caress and then cast aside with a sneer. If you ask a player what’s the worst pain he’s had to play with, his eyes will sparkle as he recalls a broken thumb, screwed together with steel pins, or the titanium bar running through the marrow of a bone.
I take delight in describing to my friends the size of the needle that is plunged beneath the kneecap to remove bloody yellow fluid that could slow a player down on the field. To this day I will encourage people to feel the knob below my neck where the collarbone was sprung free from my sternum in the middle of a game against the 49ers. That was pain. It left me begging for a shot. But no doctor would inject an area so close to my heart and lungs, and so I played on for weeks while the red light blinked maniacally in my brain.
Proud to do it
I was proud to do that then and I’m proud of it now.
In the NFL it’s OK to mask your pain. Drugs are morally acceptable. Opiates and their imitators only dull the searing agony of damaged and swollen tissue. Performance is the only regulator. You can use painkillers up to the point they detract from your acuity on the field. There is no shame in a temporary reprieve from pain so long as it takes you to that fine line between relief and lethargy. Relief can actually enhance your performance and therefore help your team win. The pain will be back by the time you’re out of the shower anyway.
A shot of Novocain is also sensible. Your misery may be lessened by a shot, although many people would cringe at the sight of a needle being inserted into a shoulder joint or between two vertebrae, but this is a much more audacious deed. The shot could cripple you. Think of someone who’s had Novocain at the dentist’s office immediately sitting down to a meal and chewing a hole in the side of his face. The additional damage you can do to an injury under the anesthesia is staggering.
I watched one teammate take shots in his knee, week after week exacerbating the injured joint until not only was his career finished, but he could no longer play with his kids on the lawn.
Decisions to inject a player are made all the time and based on a complex and amorphous calculation. The needs of the team come first. If a coach is in the last year of his contract, his focus is short-term. He may allow even a star player to take a chance with his health that a more secure coach wouldn’t. Can the team win a particular game without him? Is it early in the season or late? If the team has an adequate backup, there will be little resistance to keep a player from taking the field under the aid of medication.
The team medical staff, doctors and trainers have some say in the matter. They will consider the long-term ramifications of an injection and pass it by their own conscience. But by necessity, these men have grown callous. They know the fragility of a player’s career: It could end tomorrow. They have borne witness to these tragedies time and again. These are the men who work diligently year-round to help players rehabilitate their injuries, resuscitate their careers and save their football lives. To take a chance on exacerbating an injury with a shot becomes almost trivial.
The final factor is the player himself, and his approach rarely deviates. Players will do everything they can to play. They will shorten their life expectancy. They will risk disability. They will endure the excruciating pain because they have to stay on the field. If you don’t stay on the field, no matter how big a star you might be, you risk being replaced.
In football the blame for injury belongs to the victim. Injury is attributed either to bad luck or a lack of preparation, intolerable weaknesses inside the world others call a game. If you are replaced, your life in the world of football may be at an end. That is like death. That is what indubitably brings tears to the eyes of the mighty and the stoic–the end of football. And so, the player will almost always take the shot.
What it’s all about
While all this may sound a bit mindless or even mad, while it may elicit images of cattle in a slaughterhouse, we have to remember what it’s all about.
Playing in the NFL is an American dream.
It is a dream of stardom. It is a dream of riches. It is a dream of unbridled thrills, heartfelt camaraderie and masculine prowess. It is a dream that young men will dedicate their lives to, and when they reach it, it will satisfy many of even the greatest expectations. The allure of all these things is the beacon on which the player must set his sights. And that beacon must burn with such intensity that it renders the bright red warning light of pain meager and insignificant. Only then will a player earn the right to flaunt his physical skills to the watching world.
However, like a comet that streaks across the blanket of night, that beacon will burn not only bright, but fast.
And once it ceases to exist, the striking darkness is troubled by just one thing. Although it may flicker and fade, by now the red light of pain is usually chronic, a lifelong reminder of what was. Players know intuitively that this fate awaits them.
Still, they will carry on, pushing themselves beyond human limits, fighting for the privilege to light up the sky, and struggling to postpone the moment when everything else in life seems like nothing more than a game.
