The highest compliment Tom Landry could pay a player was to say he was a “pro.” In his eyes, the worst thing a player could be was an “amateur drawing pay.” A pro had a certain attitude, a certain way he conducted himself. He was businesslike in his approach to the game. He was relentless in his determination to play the game well. He was reliable and steadfast.
But these qualities, as admirable as they are, were not sufficient to make a pro. There was one other thing a pro had to do to truly be a pro–and this, in Coach Landry’s view, was the quintessential characteristic–a pro had to play when he was hurt. It was part of being steadfast. He had to be able to distinguish the difference between pain and injury. Coach Landry said this all the time. There was a big sign in the locker room plastered with those words. And if there was one player who understood what those words meant, it was Mike Ditka.
Ditka played in Dallas during the final three years of his career. One Saturday morning after practice, he was driving home and got in a traffic accident, smashing his mouth against the steering wheel of his car. There was a lot of blood. While no teeth had been knocked out, they were all pretty loose, particularly the ones in front. He went immediately to the dentist, who examined him and told him he’d be all right, that he could save the teeth, but his jaw would have to be wired shut and held immobile.
“Will I be able to play tomorrow?” Ditka asked.
“No, of course not,” the dentist said.
“Then pull ’em,” Iron Mike said.
Now, of course the dentist didn’t pull Mike’s teeth, and, as far as I know, Mike didn’t play the next day, and that’s how it usually went if you were seriously hurt. If you’d blown out a knee, for example, or broken an ankle, of course it was out of the question for you to play. Often, however, a player would find himself in a gray area. Bone fragments in a knee, for example. So his knee would swell up when he practiced. In this situation, a pro would get his knee drained. He would get it drained once during the week for practice and then again for the game. And this would continue, if need be, throughout the season.
“Whatever it takes,” as the saying goes.
But we’re not talking about a college season with just 10 or 11 games. In the NFL, we’re talking about a minimum of 20 games–four preseason, 16 regular season–and a maximum of 24, if you run it all the way through the playoffs. Now, for a player to do this, to take that needle twice a week, to undergo this excruciating treatment over that extended period of time, he has got to either possess or to develop a very peculiar relationship to his body. To fulfill the expectations of the ideal, to thus be elevated as a cultural role model, to be tough, by these standards–to be a pro, in other words–he has to come to regard his body as something that is not truly part of him. He’s got to come to regard his body as some kind of object, as a piece of furniture. To do this he has to split his psyche, to fragment himself. He has to dissociate in a serious way.
Is this a healthy state of affairs? Is this the kind of behavior we want to exalt for the benefit of our children?
When a player dies, as many have in the high school, college and pro ranks this season, I wonder if they were not trapped psychologically by this ideal. I could almost hear them chastising themselves after a miserable practice the day before. A bad play, missed assignment. Guilt, perhaps, over the level of their physical conditioning would override the messages of their body. The exhortations of staff and teammates, hammering away with the force of a mantra. “Play through it, Big Guy. You gotta play through it . . . ” Tragically, if they did.
For those of us who are fractured heroes, there is no other way.
And there’s a further cynical twist to this as well, in that the sport’s promulgation of this ideal serves a financial interest. Professionally, when a player gets hurt, he goes out, the backup moves in, and the club has to hire a new player to take the place of the backup while paying the injured. If this happens often enough, the club’s outlay in player salaries skyrockets.
Consider what happened during the inaugural season of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
I had the dubious distinction of being there, of playing every down of an 0-14 season. We lost every game. The fans, toward the end of the season, when it became clear we were never going to beat anyone, started holding up signs that read: “GO FOR 0.” And we made it, too, thanks in large part to a rash of injuries.
We were decimated by injuries. By the end of the season there were two players in the defensive huddle who were there at the beginning. Both of us, coincidentally, were from Vanderbilt. Which says something about the abuse we took playing for a private institution that aspired to compete with the state-school giants of the Southeastern Conference. At Tampa Bay, we had a construction worker out there. A truck driver. The right-side linebacker was a kid off the streets of Watts named Psycho Sims who weighed 180 pounds. You have to be psycho to play linebacker in the NFL at 180. Anyway, over a full season we had 21 guys on injured reserve. Eighteen of them had knee operations.
By Dallas standards, some of these injuries would have been considered marginal, and the players would have been kept on the field.
But the ideal of the pro had yet to be established in Tampa. The Tampa doctor was new. He hadn’t been indoctrinated into the medical realities of the NFL, so he was practicing medicine conservatively, as he’d been taught, which meant that he had the best interests of his patients at heart, rather than the owner’s pocketbook.
Needless to say, the owner, when he found himself paying out an additional half-million dollars in players’ salaries, took remedial action. He did what most owners would do in a similar situation. He fired the team physician and hired someone “more qualified.”
Of course there are countless medical horror stories out of the league that you rarely hear about.
And the truth is, the salaries are high enough now that a convincing rationale can be made for paying the physical price you have to pay to play in the league. But in the end, it’s just a rationale. It’s funny, but when you get seriously hurt, money ceases to have the value you attached to it when you were healthy.
What you want more than anything when you’re hurt is your health.
