Another highlight of the season took place during one of our home games when two high school buddies of mine, Andy Megee and Grant Lipschultz, flew up from New York to see us play the Houston Texans and against J. J. Watt. It’s always great to see Andy and Grant and catch up. I enjoy going out and hearing about their jobs, life in the Big Apple, Andy’s fiancé and Grant’s girlfriend. This time though, as soon as we met up, they were more amped than usual. The conversation went something like this:
“Dude, you should give us the game ball,” said Andy.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“The seats you got us were next to this girl and her friend.”
“We really talked you up,” said Grant.
“We got her number,” said Andy
“Brooke. Her name is Brooke.”
“You need to call her, man.”
“We really talked you up.”
“Yeah, we showed her your picture and she still said you should call. Incredible, right?”
“Are you guys punking me?” I asked. “How much have you been drinking?”
“We’re serious,” Grant said. “She’s a smoking brunette, man!”
“Totally,” Andy seconded.
“We talked to her the whole game. She’s perfect for you. I mean, come on! Women who go to Browns games? Who the hell likes the Browns?”
“Oh, just an entire city,” I said. “Not to mention me.”
“I’m just kidding, man, kidding.”
“But she is perfect.”
“Yeah, we are not kidding about that.”
Eventually I concluded Brooke was not a figment of their imagination. And that they were not, in fact, trying to set me up with a modern-day Quasimodo as some kind of twisted practical joke. I gave her a call. I’m not exactly a rap meister, as you can probably tell, but Andy and Grant said she was friendly and open, and that proved to be very true. I was intrigued at the idea that two unaccompanied babes would go to a Browns game. I know there are a lot of women who are fans, but the crowd at professional football games skews heavily male. We met face-to-face the following week, and I found out she had gone to the game to accompany the girlfriend of one of my teammates at the time. And Andy and Grant were right. She was a gorgeous brunette, with a perfect smile, and big, mind-melting dark eyes
I consider myself a cautious, thoughtful, analytical guy.
But Brooke pretty much had me at hello. So much so that a year later we were engaged.
* * *
As you can guess from me being an avid fan of great food, one of the things I like to do with Brooke is explore restaurants. I’m happy to report that Cleveland, despite all the many, many jokes at this great city’s expense, has some fantastic food and restaurants. And I haven’t even really explored the city’s ethnic restaurants. Plus, I’ve yet to sample unique Cleveland dishes such as the Hanky Pankies, open-faced sandwiches with chopped sausage and ground beef and covered in Velveeta cheese, and sauerkraut balls, which involve fried and baked orbs of ’kraut, sausage, onions, bread crumbs, and egg. But they are on my list.
My favorite restaurant in Cleveland might be Crop Bistro. It is one of the most stunning spaces I’ve ever encountered. Taking up two floors of what was the elegant United Bank and Trust Building, erected in the 1920s, the huge restaurant, which is built in a former bank and has massive vault doors, reminds me of a small-scale version of New York’s Grand Central Station. Interestingly, while the architecture and design feel classic, menu-wise the restaurant has a very fresh take on food. Literally. The chef, Steve Schimoler, uses whatever ingredients are in season, so the menu changes regularly based on what’s fresh and what’s good. I love that philosophy, and I wish more restaurants had that attitude. I mean, I love novelty foods, but it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to fly strawberries into Cleveland in the middle of February.
My other go-to restaurant is Lola Bistro, which is one of Michael Symon’s restaurants. Symon, who is a Food Network star, deserves his fame from where I sit—which is right in his restaurant eating incredibly high-quality, flavor-packed creations. He launched his career with Lolita, and that restaurant is still going strong, too.
The longer I stay in Cleveland, the more I like it. It’s definitely different than L.A. Obviously the first thing you have to get over is the weather. Say what you want about L.A., but the climate is close to perfect. I know a lot of people in the Midwest and Northeast sing the praises of the seasons, and I certainly enjoy the colors of the fall and the arrival of spring. But there is something to be said for constant blue skies and perfect temperatures.
I live and train on the outskirts of Cleveland, and one thing I love is that getting from one place to another is a dream compared to L.A. It still blows my mind when it’s 6 p.m. and there’s no traffic on the freeways. You can find parking wherever you need to. Everything is a little slower paced here, too. There’s not the hustle and bustle of L.A., where everyone’s trying to get somewhere fast and they needed to be there five minutes ago.
There might not be quite as much to do, activity-wise, but the fact is, outside of the kitchen, I’m not the most adventurous guy in the world. Still, if you want culture, museums, a waterfront, interesting architecture, cool ethnic foods, and music—I’ve been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum at least four times—it’s here for the taking. And the basketball team with that guy LeBron isn’t bad. As the opening theme song for The Drew Carey Show says, Cleveland rocks!
* * *
The next time we played the Bengals was at the end of the year and it was a very different story. After midseason we went into a nasty, inexplicable slide. It was as if all the crisp execution that carried us to a winning record just vanished. The offensive line lost our awesome center, Alex Mack, who went down with a broken leg in the second week of October. Alex was a big loss, no question, but we won some games after he was out, so it’s hard to use that as an excuse. At any rate, we were not playing particularly well going into the second Bengals game. The game was Johnny Manziel’s first start. I think there’s tremendous pressure from all sides when a highly touted quarterback makes his first start. And Johnny was about as high profile as you can get.
So we were riding a losing streak and going in with a rookie quarterback against our biggest rivals, a team that was out for revenge, no less.
They got it.
The Bengals ended up beating us worse than we beat them. I have literally wiped the score from my mind. It was a strange game all the way around. We couldn’t get anything going offensively, which wasn’t Johnny’s fault. Their defense was really solid, holding us to 100 total yards or something. And their offense did a good job. They ran all over us. I didn’t play particularly well—I think it was one of the few times I’ve ever had a false start. But this was a total group effort on our part—one of those games where the Bengals were in a perfect groove and we were completely out of sync.
That was 2014 in a nutshell. The Browns were the Jekyll and Hyde of football that year, providing me with the best game and the worst game of my entire career. We started out 6 and 2, and leading our division, and then crashed to end the year at 7 and 9.
Geoff
Football players definitely have a schedule that’s unique, and though it can feel like a physical grind at times, I would never complain about it for a number of reasons. First, I love what I do. Second, I think it’s a lot better than working a 9-to-5 every day. Now, I say that having never actually had a 9-to-5 job, but I’ve witnessed how fulfilling they can be. I’ve watched my mom and dad work far longer hours than that, and I have seen they really enjoy the challenges and the successes that come with office work. I’ve also seen Meridith go in for training shifts—and nursing shifts in hospitals are often twelve hours or more, which is impressive, considering the life-sustaining work they do—so I know other people have grinding, physically tough schedules. I also know that you don’t have to be a coal miner to suffer at work; just standing on your fe
et working a retail job in the mall or the checkout line at the supermarket can be murder on your legs. Football players, for all our blood, sweat, and tears, are privileged to work in world-class facilities, with catered food, and great teammates all focused on the goal at hand. Third, yes, we work really hard and train almost year-round, but our year has all kinds of different points in it, different seasons, if you will. Here’s a breakdown.
During the season players have one day off every week: Tuesday. Mondays we go in from ten until two. Wednesdays and Thursdays, the scheduled hours are usually eight to four. But I like to get in at seven o’clock in the morning, I do a little rehab if I’ve got an injury, which really means getting hot and cold tub treatments. Then I watch some extra film. Then we work out individually and as a team. Our meetings are over at around four. I usually do one more round in the cold tub or some other rehab-related activity, so I’m not out of there until about five. Then Friday is considered a half day, but I’m still in at about seven in the morning and there are no afternoon meetings, so I’m out of there at about one o’clock.
Meridith and I typically use Friday night as a date night. I think a lot of the guys go out then. Saturday nights, as a night for socializing, don’t really exist for NFL players during the season—we are sequestered in a hotel whether our game is at home or away. So if there’s one night to socialize or do something special, it’s Friday. We usually go out to have a nice dinner, and maybe go to the movies. It’s harder to do now that we have Alex in our lives, but we try to make it work. After all we’ve been through, it’s important we have time to focus on each other.
Sundays are all about the game, of course. Home games are a lot easier because there’s no travel. It’s a fact that football players have it much easier than the rest of the world when it comes to travel—as Mitch says, we don’t have to deal with all the lines and hassles that come with commercial fights. I guess only world leaders and billionaires with private jets have it easier than professional athletes. But it’s not like we are all lounging in first class drinking champagne—in fact, the only team I’ve ever been on where players sit in first class is the Giants. Most teams that I played on reserve the front of the plane for coaches. But Coach Coughlin is one of the few who has veterans sit up front and enjoy the extra leg room.
I love traveling and visiting new cities, but travel in the NFL is all about the work you are going to do on the field. Often we arrive in the city that we’re playing in around 4 p.m. on Saturday, although when flying from one coast to the other, teams typically fly in on Friday to get acclimated. We get a couple of hours for dinner and to meet up with family or friends in town. We get back to the hotel by 7 p.m. and have meetings and go to sleep. Then we wake up the next morning to play our game and fly home immediately afterward.
Playing a night game on the road is probably the hardest kind of road trip. You don’t get back until around 6 a.m. sometimes. And you know how some trips go more smoothly than others? Sports teams have unexpected screwups, too. I think the worst case of adding insult to injury was the Giants in Dallas when we let the Cowboys come back and beat us; that night our plane had mechanical problems and we were left out on the runway for three hours.
Obviously the travel kind of throws your Monday off, but you just deal with it. Speaking of sleep, someone told me that most NBA players take afternoon naps. It’s like a lifestyle ritual. They work out in the mornings, have lunch, and then it’s siesta time. I guess that makes perfect sense for them, as they play most of their games at night. They probably don’t leave the arena until 11 p.m., then they go eat, and decompress, and so I bet their day starts later, too. I wonder if baseball players do the same thing.
For football, though, this sequence—train, game, repeat—is locked in for the entire season, with the exception of the bye week, when we get four days off in a row. Most players use that time to visit family. But it sure goes by quickly, and then you are right back drilling, studying, and planning for the next game.
During the off-season we definitely have it nice. But after the intensity of the season, that can take a little getting used to, strange as that may sound. When we’re off completely, it’s definitely weird the first couple of days because our lives have been so regimented for six or seven months.
Once the season is over, we have four months of freedom (unless, of course, you make it to the Super Bowl; then you have just under three months off) until the voluntary off-season workouts start, usually around the last two weeks of April. Over the years, Meridith and I have tried to get away on a real vacation at the end of March. Last year we went to Hawaii with eight-month-old Alex. It was great, except for the six-hour time change from the East Coast, which meant that Alex would wake up at 3 a.m. ready to get busy and play. I like to joke that somebody needs to invent a word for “a vacation with a hyperactive baby” because I’m not sure the word “vacation” is accurate.
When we get back from our holiday, I start getting ready for the season and head to Arizona for a few weeks with LeCharles and start my diet again. When I return, the official voluntary off-season work starts. These are nine-week programs, which used to be thirteen-week programs back when I was a rookie. The first two weeks are strength and conditioning and rehab. Basically it is a great deal of weight training. Then there are three weeks of on-field workouts and drills, but those are zero-contact or offense versus defense drills. For those first five weeks, we work four-hour days. I go in at nine o’clock and am home by one. Hard to complain about that, right?
Over the next four weeks we have ten total days of what is called OTA—organized team activity. That’s when we have 7 on 7 or 11 on 11 drills. There’s not that much live contact, but we do have a bit of hitting. These sessions go on for six hours and I get home at three o’clock.
When we break in the middle of June, I’ll go to Arizona for more conditioning and Meridith will go to Charlotte. Then we meet back in New Jersey about a week before the start of the thing that really matters, the reason we’ve done all this conditioning: to survive and thrive during preseason training camp.
I think I’ve talked a bunch about training camp. By now I consider it more a mental grind than a physical one. We are there from seven o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night. That is a very long day, and like the combine all those years ago, it’s physically and mentally taxing. One of the things I do to help myself get through the day is I take the schedules that are handed out and I cross off the day as it progresses. Of course, sometimes I get wrapped up and forget, but then I go back and cross off everything I’ve done. It’s a little thing, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment, of progress. I’ve crossed off one of my trials and am that much closer to the end.
The Giants hold training camp at their state-of-the-art facility in East Rutherford, near the MetLife Stadium, and I am completely thankful for that. It makes my life a little more normal. I get the purpose of going away to training camp in a remote location. I like that you bond with your teammates and feel like you are only there for football. But having Alex and being able to see him every day because training camp is twenty minutes from my house has been beyond great. It is just awesome.
The grind of preseason is still tremendously draining. If there’s any turning point in training camp for established players, I’d say it’s when you get to that second preseason game and the coaches start game planning more. That’s the point when it starts to become less like boot camp and more like the season.
12
THE STREAK: STAYING IN SHAPE AND DECOMPRESSING
Mitch
“What’s your secret?”
After the usual questions about my size and my parents’ size (they are a bit taller than average and have medium builds), and whether I think Johnny Manziel is going to be as good as he was in college, most people ask me about my streak of consecutive games and how do I do it. I’ve played every offensive down of every game for the Browns. That’s 64 games and counting. Add that to my
51 games in college, and that’s a pretty good streak. But when people start to make a big deal out of it, I have to laugh. First of all, I’ve got a long way to go before I can give Brett Favre a run for his money. I am proud of my record. It is pretty cool. But that guy started 297 games in a row, which is truly astounding when you consider he played the one position that comes with a bull’s-eye on its back. Nobody will ever admit to trying to injure another player on the field, but knocking the starting quarterback out of the game is the best way to ruin the opposing team’s game plan. So the fact that Favre endured so many sacks and knockdowns without actually missing a start is one of the most remarkable records in football history and maybe all of sports history.
Second of all, my record isn’t even very notable on my own team. My buddy Joe Thomas has started 112 consecutive games and played on every offensive snap—he was up to 6,923 consecutive offensive plays toward the end of the 2015 season—during that streak. He’s played nine straight seasons with no sign of slowing down. So I’ve got years to go before things get serious.
Third of all, anyone who can put together a long string of games—like Favre or Cal Ripken’s incredible 2,632 consecutive baseball appearances—owes a tip of the hat to genetics and luck. I know I do.
Eat My Schwartz Page 14