As Mitch noted, there are all kinds of Jews. As I see it everyone in the world should be free to follow their own religious path. Being a professional football player, I have to miss some traditions and holidays. Do I want to miss them? No. While I did sit out Yom Kippur once during my freshman year in college when I wasn’t making it into games, as a pro in the NFL I don’t feel I have that option. There are 16 games in the regular season. Every game is just as important as the next so, if I’m healthy, I’m determined to play in every single one. It’s what I get paid to do, and I have a commitment to my teammates and my family to excel at my job. Sitting on the sidelines or missing a game because of a holiday is just not an option for me.
But I do go to temple when I get the chance. It’s important to me to honor tradition. Especially on the High Holy days, such as Yom Kippur, when you typically fast and reflect on your life and your actions. So if the holiday falls on the weekend, I try to make it work somehow. I’ve gone to services at the start of the holiday when it has fallen on Friday nights, but after that, I’m committed to the team and the upcoming game. It’s tough, but I know I’ll have my job for only a certain number of years, and I’ll have the rest of my life to go to services.
When my dad grew up everyone knew the story of Sandy Koufax, the Dodger star pitcher who refused to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series because it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement that is considered the most holy day of the year. It was great that he did that, but comparing a baseball player sitting out a game to a football player sitting out is not an apples-to-apples comparison. There were plenty more games for Koufax to pitch. He started and lost game two, and went on to pitch—and win—the fifth and seventh games of the series.
When I asked my dad about Koufax, he had an interesting perspective. “I think in some ways Koufax made it worse for other Jewish players,” he said. “When you’re Koufax, and you’ve just won twenty-seven games, you can do what you want and no one says boo to you. But what if you’re not a star? There’s always going to be pressure to play.”
My dad is right. Within the culture of football, it’s hard to miss a game for religion—and it doesn’t make it any easier when people don’t understand the religion. But even if they do, it wouldn’t make much difference. There is definitely pressure to play come game day in the NFL no matter what the issue. People play when they are hurt, they play when they are sick, they play when their kids are getting born, and when their parents are dying. It is a competitive game. And unless you are a star, like Sandy Koufax, everyone can be replaced. So I play, because I love it, because I want to contribute, and because it’s my job.
I’m proud to be a role model to young Jewish kids and athletes, letting them know it’s possible for them to reach their goals. Mitch and I were honored at a fund raiser for a Jewish charity dedicated to meeting the nonmedical needs of seriously ill children called Chai Lifeline in 2015, and the response of the community was humbling. We were told it was a record turnout. People wanted to pose for pictures with us, and they asked for our autographs. As Mitch says, it was surprising because neither of us ever thinks of ourselves as celebrities. But to the people in the audience—kids and adults—we were a point of pride. It felt great.
I do wish that Passover would occur during the season. I’d love to host a seder for my teammates. Eating with your teammates—and really, with anyone—is an ancient recipe for connecting. Unfortunately, the season is over by the time the holiday rolls around.
Growing up, the Passover seder was always one of my favorite meals of the year. Seder means “order or arrangement” in Hebrew. So it is really a ritual in which we gather at the dinner table and recount the miracles that brought Jews out of slavery in Egypt. We take turns reading passages about the story of Moses. It’s always a jovial mood with kibitzing and jokes, that warm atmosphere comes with being around the people you love and are comfortable with. I think the mood is also helped by the fact you are supposed to drink four glasses of wine during the evening.
At the Weinsteins’ house, where we’d celebrate every year, they’d keep the meal loose and interesting. Seders weren’t just the strict reading of prayers and recounting of the story, which is important, because while you are sitting there reading, the smells of brisket and matzo ball soup are wafting around the house, making you hungrier and hungrier. They would have their sons sing the four questions, one of which asks, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The answers are we recline—some people sit on cushions or pillows—during the meal to mark our freedom, we eat bitter herbs to remind us of slavery, we dip a vegetable into salt water to remind us of shed tears in Egypt, and we only eat matzo instead of leavened bread.
Because the seder is about thanking God for the liberation of the Jews, sometimes we’d have conversations about oppression and people of all faiths who live under modern-day pharaohs, which, for me, sort of takes the holiday rooted in the past and brings it into the present. I really liked that. When we were younger, the parents would hide a ceremonial piece of the matzo called the Afikomen and we would have to find it, get a reward, and then share it as “dessert.”
Our dad is one of the rare people on the planet who eats matzo year-round. Mitch and I aren’t big fans of the stuff. We tend to view matzo as a bland, crunchy carbohydrate-based food-delivery system. If you’ve never had matzo, imagine a giant saltine cracker without all that salt, and that will give you some idea of what we’re talking about. It’s thin, dry, and brittle unleavened bread.
Symbolically, of course, it’s crucial to Passover—reminding us that as our ancestors were fleeing through the desert there was no time to wait for dough to rise. But speaking from our own taste buds, it exists as a vessel for condiments, like an apple, nuts, and wine concoction called charoset. And of course, during the next eight days of the holiday we put everything on it: peanut butter, butter and jam, cheese.
Speaking of Jewish meals, while I love our soul food—latkes, hamentashen, blintzes, knishes, gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, pastrami on rye—I was not raised in a kosher household. I eat everything and so do many Jews. Frankly, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to observe kosher laws and make your way through the NFL as a 340-pound lineman who needs to eat huge amounts of protein. Teams are understandably not going to cater to one person’s religious dietary laws.
There have been instances where I’ve posted images of food on my Twitter feed and someone will invariably say, “That’s not kosher!” This is not the response I’m looking for. I never said I was kosher. It is interesting that some people want me, or expect me, to mirror their behavior. Personally, I take a modern view of religion and laws. While some of the dietary laws made perfect sense to protect people from sicknesses such as trichinosis, which is transmitted through pork, and hepatitis, which can be transmitted through shellfish, modern health laws and improved sanitary food practices have pretty much eliminated the health reasons that I believe at least partially inspired these prohibitions.
THIRD DOWN
8
MY BROTHER’S KEEPER
Geoff
There are two things in every professional athlete’s life that are worse than losing.
Being injured and being released.
At the beginning of 2011, neither of these issues seemed like a looming threat. I was projected to be the starting right guard after successfully switching to that position for the last 11 games of 2010. I was feeling so great about my future that I decided to spring a surprise on Meridith. I convinced her to come to a baseball tournament in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to see the high school team I’d been working with. After the tournament, I suggested going to the beach, which Meridith loves. We were lying on our blanket having a great time when I made my move. I dropped to one knee—all those lineman drills finally came in handy for something other than blocking 270-pound headhunters—and I proposed to the gorgeous, sexy, compassionate, whip smart woman who had captured my heart.
/> I didn’t think most women would expect to be proposed to during a baseball-filled weekend, or on a beach blanket. So I totally surprised Meridith.
She said yes.
But while my personal life was riding high, the whole dynamic of the 2011 season felt a little off, a little abnormal from the very beginning of the year. For one thing, all the players spent most of the season training on our own because the NFL Players Association’s collective bargaining agreement with the league owners had expired. For another, the entire coaching staff of the Panthers had been overhauled, so I was coming into a team where the coaches didn’t know me and I didn’t know them.
During the lockout I was working with a trainer who noticed that I was shifting my weight during squat lifts and favoring one side over the other, which meant that I was losing strength on one side. I went to a physical therapist, we did drills and exercises, and I felt as if I was getting better, which was huge for me, because the last thing I wanted was to show up at camp and not be able to perform for new coaches.
The union finally signed the collective bargaining agreement a day before camp was scheduled to begin, which was a relief to everyone involved. On the first day of camp, I was excited to finally start the year. After going 2–14, I really wanted to get out there, work my game, and build toward a winning season. But I rolled out of bed and my back gave out. That had happened before once or twice, so I wasn’t too concerned. I got to training camp and I couldn’t really get loose. Over the next few days, I had some of the worst practices since I came into the league. My back was bothering me, and my hip was bothering me, too. Instead of impressing the new coaches, I actually got demoted from first string to second string. After all my hard work to become a starter, it was beyond depressing, and it was also alarming. My body wasn’t cooperating, despite all my work and focus. Then, about ten days into camp, we were executing a field goal drill and I went to plant my foot for my blocking assignment and my back and hip really gave out.
The next day the team flew me to a specialist in New York who found out that I had a hip impingement—also known as a bone spur—which is when the ball and socket in your hip don’t fit together in a smooth, easy alignment. When that starts to happen, you often lose range of motion and suffer tears to the cartilage that lines the socket. For some people, apparently, impingements will go away in a couple of days. So at first, the doctors told me to just wait and rest. After a week of zero improvement, the team flew a specialist to New York who found I had impingements on both hips.
The doctor advised me to have corrective surgery on one side first to see if that might help the other hip heal, and that’s exactly what I did. Unfortunately, that untreated impingement didn’t cooperate, so a few months later I had surgery on the other hip.
Recuperating from an injury is never easy, but for me, it’s a serious battle. I need to stay active because it turns out I have one of the slowest metabolisms known to mankind. Seriously, it takes a lot of work for me to burn off food. That is one difference between Mitch and me—he can pretty much eat whatever he wants whenever he wants because his body processes food with the efficiency of a Cuisinart. My system takes its own sweet time. As a result, I can gain major tonnage in a few days, so I have to be careful about what and how much I eat. I understand my body very well, now, and how it reacts to different foods, but at this time, my understanding of nutrition and diet wasn’t as strong as it should have been.
Still, with all that time healing there were plenty of opportunities to watch the Food Network and to experiment in the kitchen. It was around that time that I started honing the dish that has become a go-to favorite of mine—Shrimp Pasta. One of the reasons I like it so much is that I can play around with it. I can keep it simple, and go with butter, garlic, shallots, and basil. Or I can add extra zing to it with lemon juice or pepper. If I’m feeling decadent, I might work up a cream sauce. Or if I’m feeling ambitious and healthy, I might sauté some light vegetables in there.
I love the improvisational aspect of cooking. Often I’ll watch a show and decide to make something similar. It’s not like I take notes or anything like that. One day Meridith and I watched someone create crab cakes. The next day we went out, bought the ingredients we could remember, and got busy. As we were mixing the crab cakes up, I couldn’t remember if they’d used garlic powder or the real thing and decided to just mince a clove. Then Meridith remembered the TV chef had put dry mustard in the recipe. We didn’t have any, but we did have some hoity-toity Dijon mustard and some Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Would a teaspoon hurt? I went with the Dijon and fifteen minutes later, we got to find out. Our golden brown crab cakes might have been based on a half-remembered recipe, but it didn’t matter—they were fantastic, and the Dijon and garlic added just a ghost of their flavors to the delicious crabmeat.
I spent all of the 2011 season on the injured reserve list, and worked on getting back in shape. The improvement was dramatic; I was pain-free and my range of motion was smooth and wide. I remember not being too worried about my future with the Panthers because I’d had a strong 2010. But it turns out, I was a bit naive.
Actually, I was a lot naive.
Sitting on the injured reserve does not help your cause when there’s a new staff in charge with no memory of your previous achievements. The fact is, that staff is invested in playing their own guys—the players they drafted and brought in via free agency. In their eyes, I was the odd man out, a guy who crashed during training camp and might still be a liability. It makes perfect sense that until you can prove yourself on the field to them, you remain an unknown quantity.
When the season ended, the Panthers didn’t offer me a contract and I became an unrestricted free agent. I was bummed out and part of me felt a little betrayed—I had busted my butt, but the powers that be on the team had written me off. That is never a good feeling. And I had no idea what my perceived value would be, coming off an injury, so that was a big question mark. Plus, Meridith was still in school in Charlotte, and there was no question I was going to have to relocate.
The good news was that my old Panther offensive coordinator was looking for players for the Minnesota Vikings, and he knew exactly what I was capable of. So Minnesota seemed to offer the best opportunity for me to regain a starting position and I signed a one-year deal with them.
I spent most of the off-season in Minnesota working out and rehabbing my hips Monday through Thursday and then I’d fly home on the weekends to see Meridith. That summer my brother, getting ready for his first year at Cleveland, came to Charlotte and we worked out together, which was so awesome. We would train, watch tape, hang out, and cook.
One morning working out with Mitch, I started to feel something was not right. We were doing sprints, and Mitch was making me look bad. I remember finishing a sprint and telling Mitch, “There is something wrong with me. This is not right. I should be further along. I should be faster than this.”
When I checked into preseason camp at Minnesota State University in Mankato, I started getting pains in my hip again. At this point, having been injured and rehabbing for a solid year, I kind of lost it. My mind was filled with worry and dread. Basically, I thought my career was over. I was thinking, “I’m done. I’ve injured my hip again, and I will never play again.”
This kind of thinking is antithetical to my nature. I’ve always been a guy to accentuate the positive. I’ve always risen to challenges and fought the odds. But in the blistering summer heat with my body betraying me, doubt about my body creeped in. Even when I went through that miserable draft day, waiting to be picked, I never questioned my ability to play. I believed I could compete in the NFL. Now, for the first time ever, I really wasn’t sure.
When I went to visit the doctor, trying to cope with all that panic, I prepped myself for bad news and another year of working on my body. But I also grappled with the what-if scenario that my career might be over. Would I stay in football and coach? Would I go to law school? What would Meridith think?
Unfortunately, the situation I left in Charlotte repeated itself with the Vikings. I couldn’t crack the starting lineup because of that damn sports hernia. It’s hard to earn a place if you are not in training camp, and I had missed practically the entire camp. So I wound up playing sparingly. I also got the sense that the team had made other guys a priority. Once again, the coaches and the GMs wanted their draft picks to shine. I ended up playing right guard sporadically in 13 games and we finished 10–6, for my first winning season in the NFL, which was nice. There were some other positives, too. I was part of a terrific offensive line that helped Adrian Peterson gain an incredible 2097 rushing yards that season, which was 9 yards short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record. Adrian won the league’s MVP award, which was cool. And I played in my first playoff game. Unfortunately, we lost to the Packers.
Eat My Schwartz Page 10