Welcome to the life of a star NFL player: The glamor, the fame, the million-dollar contracts.
And all the pain. All the punishment. None of the pity.
Marcellus Wiley, a Pro Bowl defensive end for the Chargers, spoke throughout the season with the Los Angeles Times and revealed some of the behind-the-scenes realities of America’s most popular sport.
Wiley, 28, who went from running back in high school to Ivy League standout at Columbia to surprise second-round pick of the Buffalo Bills, spoke of his successes and his scars, and why–if he has a son–he would never want him play football. He talks about that and more as the Super Bowl comes to Wiley’s hometown San Diego on Sunday.
I could die young.
I definitely know I’m going to feel worse at my age than my peers. So I can progress that thought to, hey, I may die before him. I’ve seen more than a lot of my peers. I’ve done more. I’ve had more opportunities come my way. And I think that’s just going to keep multiplying.
Some people live their life in numbers, and some people live in per-day experiences. I’m kind of living life in dog years. One of my years is seven to somebody else.
There are two mindsets. One is, I’m a human being dealing with that pain. The other is, the football realm and dealing with that pain.
I’ve had times in my career when I couldn’t walk but I played football. People don’t understand that. You can’t get up in the middle of the night to get some relief. You’ve got to have an apple-juice jar next to the bed just so you can go to the bathroom. But at the same time you can wake up and play the game at 100 mph.
Sometimes people don’t know the meaning behind those big checks. I’ll tell them, “Hey, man, would you stand on a street corner when you don’t have the right of way and step out in the street
50 times a day?” We do that.
There are injuries, dislocations, broken extremities. I broke my pinkie toe. And it hurt bad. Yeah, it was terrible. But I played that week. I remember my coach saying, “You don’t need your pinkie toe. You’ve got nine others. Lean on those.” I was like, “I guess I will.”
As football players, our hands are a mess. You come into the game with 10 fingers. With 10 fingers that point straight. You leave with hopefully half of them pointing straight. I’m down to five. Bruce Smith has no good ones. Looks like he has a tennis ball in his hands at all times. You can try and mask it. But if one of your fingers is on a different plane, it’s pretty noticeable.
I’ve seen a guy’s bone split right through his finger. Bone out of skin, that’s not a good sight. They’ve got a glove on and a bone sticking out of it.
Sometimes you need a fistful of Vioxx. Any anti-inflammatory. You need it to survive. Vioxx is a beast. I love Vioxx. I’m going to invest in that company when I retire.
When you get a shot of painkiller, it’s not like when they’re taking blood at a blood bank. They’ve got to grind that needle in there. I mean grind it. The guys laugh at me because I’m in tears when I have to get one. I bite on a towel and just try not to pass out.
But like they say, you’d better get it now, because if you wait for tomorrow you’re not going to want it. Your body’s going to be relaxed, and you’re not going to want it. You’ve got to get it when that adrenaline’s flowing and you’re pumped up.
You have to shut down some of your responses. You can’t shut down your response to certain things that are out there. If someone hits me in the head, it’s going to hurt. What a football player must do is answer that response, which a normal person may not.
You can’t pity yourself. You know, how bad it is, how hard it is, how we’re losing this game, how my arm feels like it’s going to fall off. No pity.
I throw up every day I play football. You may think it’s nerves but it’s not. I try to throw up around guys. Never in the bathroom. That’s weak. I knew a guy, a nose guard, who used to throw up on the football during a game. He’d wait until the ball was about to be snapped, then he’d throw up on it. During a game, I’ll take a drink of Gatorade and in three seconds it’s coming back up. Guys will tell me, “You’re a nasty dude, man.” Whatever.
The toughest time in my life every year is training camp. Regardless if I’m in great shape, I come into that camp and it is really hard. You’re getting up at 5:30 in the morning. It’s like, I just went to bed at 11 or 12 o’clock the night before, and you’re telling me to wake up, get out there on that grass, hit somebody as hard as I can, go to meetings all day, get treatment all day, and deal with those terrible heat conditions? Then wake up and do it again? And again and again and again? Playing football in the games is fun, practice is tough, but camp is a beast. Even though the games hurt the most, that’s what you do it for. You live for that point.
That’s what I call living in dog years.
