We finish our morning meetings and have an hour to put on our suits and get on the buses. With the knot secure and my hair in place, I walk out of the locker room, across the parking lot, through the weight room, and into the small indoor field it’s connected to. On the indoor turf stand Transportation Security Administration employees armed with wands who check us for box cutters, explosives, and liquid exceeding 3.5 ounces. After the terror test I walk out the back door to the parking lot containing five or six buses. I get on bus number 3 and open a breakfast sandwich I poached from the rookie DBs. The end of the week signals the beginning of a three-day junk food binge leading up to the game. I know there is no way I can ever overeat. I’ll still be under my target weight. After everyone is aboard, the buses rev up and follow our police escort through the streets of Dove Valley and onto C-470. The motorcycle cops attack their duties with gusto, darting across lanes of traffic, yelling and pointing at confused drivers, zigzagging with menacing throttles and speeding up ahead to clear all traffic to the shoulder. Move over! There’s a football team coming through.
Thirty minutes later we pull onto the tarmac at Denver International Airport, right next to the airplane. The wind blows through my heavily gelled hair, rustling the lapels on my oversized suit as I ascend the stairs of the airplane.
We always have the same rotation of flight attendants. They are the queen bees in the United flight attendant hive. And on this flight they don’t have to go through any of the standard preflight safety instruction mumbo-jumbo. Everyone knows God loves the NFL too much to crash one of its planes. They also don’t have to enforce the FAA’s draconian passenger guidelines: seat back up, seat belt on, electronics off, bags under seats, no congregating in the galleys, no yelling obscenities or throwing grapes or looking at nudie magazines.
I say hello to the ladies on the way in and find my seat, labeled with a sticker with my name on it. The plane is big and spacious. Coaches up front in the luxury seats. Operational staff, media, marketing, equipment guys, trainers, etc., are crammed in next to each other in the middle cabin. We are in the back. I stretch out and listen to some music and pretend to read a book.
After a four-hour flight, the airplane lands and pulls up next to a fleet of buses. I descend the stairs in slow motion. I look magnificent. Somebody look at me! But there is no one to welcome us. We are shuttled, bused, and flown to the doorstep of every destination, escorted in through back doors under cover of police escorts and velvet ropes.
We get to the hotel a few minutes before 5 p.m. I grab the envelope that says JACKSON, NATE off the table near our private entrance. It has my room key, room number, another itinerary, and a room list. The room list comes in handy if you want to crank-call someone or desire to know the identity of your next-door neighbor whose head is less than two feet from yours while you both masturbate to free hotel pornography. Fifty-three men jerking: all in a row.
I arrive to find that the pay-per-view system’s child lock is on. I can’t find the smut in the guide. This happens sometimes. I just have to call down to the front desk and have them unlock it. No biggie.
—Uh, yes, hi. I’m not able to access the adult film selection in my room. I was wondering if you could remove the child lock.
—I’m sorry, sir, we don’t carry adult films.
—Yes, well, good! That’s good. Just making sure. Thank y—
Click.
But I’m not a pregame self-gratifier. I like to keep my weapon cocked and loaded. I believe that within my scrote swims an elixir that is a critical power source for my football performance, and to release it is to cripple my chances of finding glory the next day. But I still take advantage of the option. Watching pornography with no plan to discharge gives the film a depth that goes unseen when my intentions are lustful.
Dinner is a buffet of man food: chicken, steak, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, some things called vegetables, fruit, soup, burgers, french fries, salad, etc. I walk down to the meal room, which is in the hotel’s ballroom, with my playbook in my hand and fill up my plate with vegetables and pasta. I don’t want to stuff myself too much. I need to save a little room for the late-night snack. All of the same options will remain, plus chicken wings and a dessert bar with pies, cookies, and ice cream. Piles of vanilla and chocolate ice cream are scooped, one after the other, into cavernous to-go boxes by a baffled hotel employee and drowned in syrups and sprinkles, then taken up to the room to be eaten in ecstatic solitude in front of an unchild-locked television.
But before the ice-cream social we have meetings: thirty minutes of position meetings, thirty minutes of special teams meetings, thirty minutes of offense/defense meetings, then a fifteen-minute team meeting. They are the compilation of the practice week’s most heavily emphasized concepts and plays, already learned, already downloaded.
At our position meeting Pat returns the test that we turned in that morning in Denver. It’s a written test that requires an expansive knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the game plan from a tight end’s perspective. I copied off of Mike Leach so I know I will have aced it. There are a lot of terminological obscurities related to the offensive line and defensive fronts and gaps and protections that I have never really learned. I know what to do on the field but I don’t always know how to explain it in the terminology required of our pregame written test. So I cheat off of Mike. He always agrees but gives me a look I’m familiar with from high school, cursing me in his head for smoking pot under the bleachers while he was in the library at lunch studying.
Meetings, meetings, and a few more meetings: Watching film and going over plays on the night before the game always strikes me as pointless. If we don’t know it now, we’re not going to know it. But it’s a video league. We are two-dimensional things.
Football has been subverted into a made-for-television event. Everything is so clear. Except it’s not. The third dimension is what makes it real, violent, and dangerous. Consuming the product through a television screen, at a safe distance, dehumanizes the athlete and makes his pain unreal. The more you watch it, the less real it becomes, until the players are nothing more than pixelated video game characters to be bartered and traded.
After meetings a group of us sit around a table in the meal room eating chicken wings and ice cream. After I lick the spoon I ask Greek for some Ambien, which he produces from a small pouch and drops into my hand. I have no problem falling asleep without Ambien. I just like to take them and watch porn. At eleven fifteen, right when the drug is kicking in, there is a loud bang on my door that shakes me from my soporific boob-hallucination. It is Rich and Crime doing bed checks. Here! I gargle. That’s all they need to hear, then they move on to my masturbating neighbor. If I hadn’t replied, they would have entered my room with a master key and had a quick look around to make sure I was there and that I was alone. Little did they know that [Insert Popular Porn Star Here] is with me.
Soon I fall into a heavy, purple sleep and wake up in the morning with a powerful game-day buzz. I shower and put my suit back on and go downstairs for breakfast. We are on east coast time and it fucks with our internal clocks. I’ll have some coffee. After breakfast, I get on the late bus (there are three different buses to the stadium and three different times in which to depart and indulge in whatever your away-game routine is) and look out the window at upstate New York. I listen to my music and prepare myself for combat. It’s a beautiful day for football: 67 degrees and partly cloudy. It’s the dawn of a new day, a new season, where anything can happen. We are Super Bowl bound, that much is for certain.
Tony is hurt so I am set to play a good deal on offense. I’m also on three out of the four special teams. One thing I love about playing special teams is that I am on the field for the first play of the game. It’s the culmination of an entire week, an entire off-season of hype, and the electricity runs through the fans and through the grass and up through my feet, bringing me into a zone where I feel neither fear
nor worry, only an extreme heightened awareness. I am light and strong, focused and lucid, and as I jog out onto the field, I can feel the energy inching toward a crescendo, toward the moment when the ball pops off the foot of the kicker and towns and cities and dreams full of potential football energy finally explode into the kinetic, into the now, forming a tidal wave that I surf through the circuit of the ultimate football matrix. There is no feeling that will ever replace that moment in my life. I know that now.
The opening kickoff of 2007 sails through the air. I chase it down the field, avoid the man who is supposed to block me, and tackle the returner at the twenty-five-yard line on the first play of our season. I’ll be the Super Bowl MVP. The game moves along: tit for tat, nothing doing. It’s a low-scoring affair going into the locker room at halftime. The Bills are up 7–6. Offensive coordinator Mike Heimerdinger, aka “Dinger,” writes some plays up on the whiteboard. Based on what we have seen in the first half, these are the plays that he thinks will work in the second half. He goes over a few things, then I take a piss and jog back out onto the field.
The Bills kick off to start the second half. Wide receiver Domenik Hixon receives it and pushes up the field behind the wedge of offensive linemen holding hands and leading the charge. The wedge breaks down on the right side and Domenik bounces the kick outside the wedge, meeting Bills tight end Kevin Everett in a routine-looking football hit. But the result is not routine. Everett collapses to the ground and does not move. The crowd falls silent. Tony and I stand next to each other on the sideline.
—He looks dead.
We don’t know how right we almost are. Everett has sustained a fracture and dislocation of his cervical spine. We’ll later find out that his life was saved by fast thinking and perfectly executed medical treatment, which stabilized his spine and whisked him off to the hospital so we could finish our football game in peace, without the realities of what we were risking getting in the way. The show must go on.
It isn’t long before the urgency of the game has erased the memory of what we have just witnessed. There is no time to consider the consequences. As the clock ticks down in the fourth quarter, we are down 14–12. But we are driving. With under a minute left and no timeouts, Jay pushes the ball down the field with precision, hitting Javon Walker several times and moving the ball inside Bills territory. We have Jason Elam waiting in the wings. He missed two field goals earlier in the game, very uncharacteristic of him. I’m the wing on the field goal team so I stand ready, too. If the clock isn’t stopped we will have to run on the field and set up for the kick quickly. With eighteen seconds left Jay hits Javon for an 11-yard pass down to the Bills twenty-four-yard line but he can’t get out of bounds.
—Toro! Toro! Toro!
The offense sprints off the field and the field goal unit sprints on. Tick-tick-tick. We can’t see the clock but the Bills fans are kind enough to count down for us. Jason Elam doesn’t have time to count out his steps. Our holder makes sure everyone is set and signals Mike Leach, who snaps the ball a tick before time expires. My man rushes hard off the edge and tries to jump between me and the end. I shove him in the chest and he twists through the air like a gymnast, landing on his back as the ball sails through the uprights for the win. Jason turns and sprints in the opposite direction, arms raised victoriously. I laugh and give chase. We need to celebrate this together. When I catch up I grab the back of his shoulder pads and tug him to the ground, sliding to a stop next to him just as everyone catches up and dogpiles us. It is a magical mountain of meat. We are 1-0 and Super Bowl bound.
There is nothing as satisfying in the NFL as going on the road and winning, because everything is going against you. You have to travel and stay in a new hotel. You have to face the unfamiliarity of a different city, a different locker room, different food, and a different time zone. The crowd is screaming, cursing your family, and laughing at your pain.
And you win anyway. Sixty-five thousand people fall silent. The locker room is jubilant.
A win means that all sins are forgiven, if only for a few days, and everyone can relax. Being able to actually relax in the NFL is rare. The pressures are too great. And they are constant. The head coach is under siege at all times, and it trickles down to everyone else. The industry hates losers. They ridicule them, defame them, and run them out of town. But we are winners. We are safe for the moment.
The back of the plane is boisterous. This is what the NFL is supposed to feel like. Grown men are happy and filling up red Dixie cups with vodka smuggled onto the aircraft. Booze in the empty postgame stomach of a football player is a bottle rocket. It hits the bloodstream dancing a jig and sings carols on the doorstep of the cerebellum. It feels like damn Christmas morning back here, in the working-class area of the Boeing 747, where FAA regulations are trumped by the laws of the jungle. We congregate in the back galley as the plane speeds down the runway and takes off into the sky, eight grown men leaning forward at a 30-degree angle like synchronized ski jumpers, heading back home to a proud city in love with its Denver Broncos.
We mingle in the back with the flight attendants. After all the trips, we have gotten to know them and they have gotten to know us. Not the faceless behemoths we are on television, but human beings with families and feelings. It is always the same group of us in the back of the plane. We are singing songs and telling jokes. As we cut through the night sky somewhere over Nebraska, John Lynch grabs the intercom microphone and flips it on.
—Excuse me. Is this thing on? May I have your attention, please, everybody. I’d just like to say, we live in the greatest country in America. Now please everyone, stand up, put your hand over your heart, and sing along with me.
He sings “God Bless America” at full tilt, and doesn’t cheat his audience out of one single note. It echoes through the slumbering cabin and those of us in the back sing along, too, hands over our hearts, soaring over the Great Plains. This land is your land, this land is my land. Damn right we live in the greatest country in America.
After our laughter dies down, we all go back to our seats for a nap before the plane lands. An hour later we touch down in Denver and get on the buses, which appear unmoved from the previous day. The unloading of the plane and the bus ride take another hour. By the time we pull up to Broncos headquarters, we are all dead tired. And there is Bronco Betty.
Bronco Betty is the superest superfan in a world of superfans. She lives Bronco orange. She’s at every charity function, every event, every training camp practice, and every game. She has a variety of health issues, and uses a walker, but she is unrelenting with her support for the team. And not just the team: the men. She knows everyone’s name and everyone’s story. She doesn’t just watch the game, she sees it, and everything that happens. She sees every play that every player makes or doesn’t make, and has a loving word for him regardless, win or lose.
Bronco Betty waits for us in a folding chair at the front gate of our facility to see us off as we leave for every road game and to greet us when we get home. Just Betty, alone in the Denver cold at three o’clock in the morning, sitting in her chair, happy as can be, festooned in her pin-accessorized Broncos gear and shouting personalized words of encouragement to each of us as we walk to our cars.
—I love you guys! Go, Broncos! I love you guys! I love you, Nate!
—I love you, too, Betty.
9
Rocky Mountain High
(2007)
The wake-up call doesn’t wake me. I’m already up, lying on my back in my king-sized bed at the Inverness Hotel in Englewood, Colorado. My playbook is next to me on the bed. My clothes are laid out on a chair across the room. I get up, throw open the drapes, and behold the Rocky Mountains. Thus begins the same game-day ritual I’ve had since my first preseason game, more than four years earlier. Same room, in fact. And the same urgent feeling.
The security guard at the elevator sees me walking down the hall and presses the butt
on to summon the lift.
—Good luck.
—Thanks, brother.
The elevator dings and spits me out into a buzzing lobby. Fans and family and friends in their finest orange and blue sip oversized coffees and laugh the carefree laugh of spectators. I walk past the reception desk, through a long hallway lined with meeting rooms, and into the largest banquet room at the hotel, which serves as our cafeteria.
—Morning, Chip.
—Morning, Nate.
Chip’s our operations guy. He handles everything but the footballs: airplanes, buses, hotels, and meals.
I fill my plate with food to push around and sculpt. I’m not hungry. Eggs, potatoes, oatmeal, bacon, bagel, yogurt, fruit: a bite here, a bite there. That’s all my stomach can handle. I napkin my plate and pick up a Denver Post that someone left on the table. “The keys to victory,” “What to look for,” “Key match-ups.” Meh. I toss it back on the table, lean back, and sip my coffee. Several of the offensive linemen join me, fresh out of Mass, which is led by Bill Rader, our on-site spiritual advisor.
—Gentlemen.
—Hello, Nate.
The offensive linemen are the most devout Christians on the team. They attend Mass on game day and during the week. They attack their religious study as though it might offset the brutality with which they attack their jobs. Jesus levels them out. They’re a thoughtful bunch: my favorite group with whom to break bread.
Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile Page 17