It wasn’t the middle of Main Street and Jim Miller wasn’t the least bit put out. But he was sore. After one NFL game, they all are. And so it was that the Bears’ quarterback, trying to answer a question about playing in pain, offered a vivid example right there in the Halas Hall corridor.
“I don’t want to get personal, but look at this,” he said, turning around and lowering the back of his shorts. “It’s often the little things that nobody ever sees.”
In this case it was not, by any definition, little. A good 6 inches in diameter, a deep purplish-red in color and extending well above his tailbone and no telling how far below, Miller’s bruise was but one relatively minor example of what NFL players endure each week as they take to the field with broken bones, sprained ankles, separated shoulders, aching muscles and a wide assortment of cuts, scrapes and multicolored contusions that the average human has never glimpsed, let alone sustained.
“The big joke in our locker room before that first game is, `Get ready guys; this is the healthiest you’re going to feel all year,'” Miller said. “You’re always sore. Something always hurts. When you finally get something right, something else hurts. It’s a constant maintenance battle to get your body ready to play each Sunday.”
As the technology of sports medicine improves and athletes become more educated about the physiology of their bodies, one thing has remained the same: In football you play with pain or you don’t play.
“If you’re not out there performing, there’s always a younger guy coming up there to step in and take your job,” said Bears guard Chris Villarrial, who is playing with his fractured right thumb in a cast. “You’re never secure in this business, and that has a great deal to do with why we do it.”
But how do they do it? How do they not only block out pain that would have most of us confined to our sofas but also perform their jobs while greatly increasing the discomfort by jumping, pushing and banging on the injured body part?
“You almost get used to waking up every day being sore,” Villarrial said. “I always think of the old coal miners. Every day they went into that coal mine their backs hurt, they were putting their lives on the line. I come from a coal town, and those guys get paid [next to] nothing. I look at my situation and at the money I’m making and I’m like, `How can I complain?'”
Through a combination of pain-killing pills, numbness-inducing injections, a natural adrenaline rush and good old-fashioned concentration, they take the field each Sunday, some with injuries that seem so severe they shouldn’t be able to function. Others shield hidden agonies that have them gritting their teeth between plays.
“You just focus on one play, and if you get through it, then you go to the next play,” backup quarterback Chris Chandler said. “Whether it’s the flu or a knee or ribs or whatever, you do the best you can as hard as you can for those six to eight seconds during the play, then you gather yourself in the huddle.”
Most agree that linemen have it toughest and, accordingly, are the toughest when it comes to blocking out pain.
“I’ve seen guys come off the field, they’ve ripped their hand on somebody’s face mask, they get 10 or 12 stitches on the sideline, tape it up and go right back on the field,” Bears offensive line coach Bob Wylie said.
Wide receiver Ahmad Merritt still can’t get over the sight of offensive linemen removing their cleats after a game. “Their feet are all red and swollen, and there’s blood all over the place,” he said.
Villarrial says welcome to my world:
“By the end of the year, we probably have four toenails left between us. We step on each other and just blast each other’s toenails off.”
Safety Mike Brown, who played with a broken hand in training camp, still recalls one of the more gruesome injuries he has seen.
“My rookie year I’m on the sideline and [former Bears end] Clyde Simmons comes off and the ring finger on one of his hands was pointed all the way over to the side,” Brown said. “I’m in shock. I’m like, `Oh, my gosh, what are they going to do?’ And he is so calm. He just walks over to the trainers and was like, `Uh, you need to pop this back in place.’
“Bobby Slater (then an assistant trainer) grabbed his finger, looked him in the eyes and said, `Are you ready?’ and he was like, `Go for it.’ And boom, he popped it back in place and Clyde didn’t move, didn’t flinch, nothing. After that I told him, `You are the toughest guy I know. I’d be crying.'”
`You . . . do see stars’
Offensive players, who tend to take more hits than they deliver, certainly aren’t immune to the pain game. For wide receiver Marty Booker, last Sunday was typical–he was sandwiched between two Vikings defenders on one catch.
Did the collision feel as bad as it looked?
“It wasn’t a pain sensation; it’s more [like being] stunned,” Booker said. “You really do see stars in front of your eyes. I make sure I’m all gathered, have everything back and can get focused. That’s why I usually take a knee and make sure I can walk straight and am not talking to the wrong bench. Then I go back in the huddle and do it again.”
Bears coach Dick Jauron is a prototypical modern-day coach in that he takes his players’ welfare into account and does not pressure injured players to take the field.
“I’m not a trainer and I’m not a doctor,” Jauron said. “I listen to what our medical staff tells me, and then I coach off that information.”
Doug Buffone, a Bears linebacker from 1966-79, says coaches weren’t as understanding in his day–the pressure to play was intense.
“I remember playing Detroit, they literally shattered my teeth, the nerves were sticking out and the pain was just firing through my head,” he said. “But they stitched me up at halftime, put Novocaine in my mouth to kill the pain and I kept playing.
“I’m not sure we were tougher in my era, just dumber,” Buffone joked.
Many guys with whom he played are permanently disabled or wracked with pain–a condition Buffone has somehow managed to avoid.
“I’m knocking on wood,” Buffone said. “I talked to Ronnie Bull the other day and he just came back from another knee operation. Dick Butkus has the artificial knee, Mike Ditka the hip. I’ve seen all my buddies suffer. But do I think they would’ve done the same thing again? My gut feeling is yes.”
Macho code
It is the football way, the mentality that tells them whatever it takes to play, you play. You don’t let your teammates down.
“It starts when you’re really young,” Brown said. “Coaches always wanted you to be tough, get up off the ground, stop crying, it’s only a bruise. So you get that mentality, and especially when you’re in a game, your mind isn’t thinking about it.”
On the Bears, “Big Cat [Williams] is a good example,” Villarrial said. “It’s his 13th year in the league and he just never gives up. He feels he can never miss practice, never miss a rep. This is my seventh year and sometimes I’m like, `Geez, I’m feeling sore today,’ but then you look at that guy and he just keeps on doing it every day. What am I complaining about? I’ve got to get my butt out there.”
A number of Bears, including Booker, Anthony Thomas, Marcus Robinson and Bryan Robinson, say they prefer to avoid pain-killing injections–if adrenaline doesn’t carry you through, nothing will, Bryan Robinson said.
Miller and Chandler are all for them. “Football,” Miller said, “is in the now.”
They are equally divided on the hypothetical question of whether they would play hurt if doctors told them they were risking permanent injury.
“That’s a close call,” Thomas said. “It depends on the situation. If we’re playing in the Super Bowl, I’ll be out there playing, but if it’s not, I’m going to take it off.”
Bryan Robinson said: “I won’t say, `Do whatever it takes.’ If there’s a chance I can’t play with my kids 10 or 15 years down the line, then it’s not for me.
“I was watching `SportsCentury’ and they showed Earl Campbell . . . the guy can barely move. Granted, he was a running back and he took a lot of shots, but just looking at the guy, I was like, `I do not want to be like that when I’m 50.'”
More often than not it’s the “little things” that hurt the most and are simply a part of playing football.
Marcus Robinson is sporting an artificial-turf burn that extends from the back of his elbow almost to his wrist and is so raw and so vulnerable to infection that it resembles and is treated like a third-degree burn.
Many players go through an entire season with similar wounds, and any healing is undone each Sunday when they open up again.
“It burns badly, but when I did it I didn’t even know,” Robinson said. “When we went in at halftime I still didn’t know until it accidentally rubbed my jersey and I was like, `What?’ Then I was like, `Oh, man.'”
There is hurt and there is injured. And there are the everyday maladies that bring even the toughest men to their knees, such as the case of dehydration that forced Brown off the field three times last Sunday, twice for intravenous fluids.
“I tried to push through and it just wasn’t working for me, so I had to get out of the game because I would have ended up hurting the team,” he said.
Sometimes your body lets you down completely just when you’re pushing the hardest, as with the late Korey Stringer.
“All your life you’ve been told to push yourself–if your body’s tired, push, push, push,” Marcus Robinson said. “Who knows their body temperature is 107? They just know the body’s tired, the body’s hot, but I’m going to push. That’s what you’re taught all your life–push your body to the limit. As far as injuries are concerned, we’re taught to play with them. It’s what we do.”
Bearing the pain
A number of Bears are banged up after just one game this season. Here’s a glimpse at who can go and who can’t for Sunday’s game against the Falcons:
IN THE LINEUP
Jim Miller
Quarterback
Playing with bruised tailbone.
Chris Villarrial
Offensive guard
Playing with a fractured thumb.
TAKING SUNDAY OFF
R.W. McQuarters
Cornerback
Out with knee injury sustained last week.
Phillip Daniels
Defensive end
Out with ankle injury sustained last week.
Ahmad Merritt
Wide receiver
Sustained broken hand in preseason. (Chicagoland edition Sports section, Page 1).
