Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile

by Jackson, Nate

  But Cecil easily avoids the block from the frontline guy and makes it down the field a step before me. He attacks the inside edge of the wedge and forces the linemen to honor his presence. The inside lineman jumps out to him. The outside lineman jumps out to the R2. That leaves me on the middle lineman and he’s discombobulated and off balance and the wedge has collapsed. I give him a hard jab step inside and rip through with my inside arm, squirting into the hole and directly into the path of the returner.

  I tackle him at the twenty-seven-yard line. First down Jags.

  After a defensive stand near midfield, we get the ball back near our own twenty-yard line. A first-down pass loses two yards. Then I enter the game in our two-tight-end package called Tiger. Jay lifts his foot and I come across the formation in motion, settle, and start to lean. I’ve timed up the motions with Jay’s cadence perfectly in practice. He usually snaps the ball as soon as I get to my spot.

  But this time: no snap. Jay’s looking at the defense, which is shifting and trying to confuse him. I’m leaning too much. I have to hold on with the tiniest proprioceptive muscles in my feet and hope he’ll snap it before I take a step forward. Otherwise I’ll get a flag.

  Leaning, leaning, leaning.

  —Sethut!

  He snaps the ball and I run my corner route and turn to look for the ball. He throws it to the opposite side, to D.G., who ran the same route on the other side, and who catches the ball for a 34-yard gain before being pushed out of bounds. Yes! I look around for a flag.

  Fuck.

  —Illegal procedure, number eighty-one offense. Five-yard penalty. Repeat second down.

  We punt two plays later.

  I come to the sideline knowing I blew it, that I killed the whole team’s momentum. We’d just stopped them on defense, forced a punt, and completed a 34-yard pass on second down. That’s a great start. I ruined it single-handedly.

  The first quarter ends scoreless. Broncos fans don’t like scoreless. They’re not used to it. They get restless when we don’t score, even when it’s a close game. They boo third-down incompletions. They want blood.

  The first blood drawn in the game is by the Jags. They score a second quarter touchdown and line up for the kickoff. I’m on the front line, second man in from the right. Scotty O calls a middle return. The R3 is my man. The numbering system is the same as the opening kickoff except flipped. Looking at the kicker from where we stand, the R5 is directly to his right, the L5 to his left.

  The more special teams I play, the more it slows down in my head. This allows me to be craftier. On kickoff return, that craft means not looking at the man I am blocking. After seeing the ball kicked, I turn and sprint back twenty-five yards at an angle, stacking the pursuit of the R4, the man inside the R3. I stare the R4 in the eyeballs so he thinks I’m coming for him. But I’m really looking at the R3 out of my periphery. (I wasn’t always so crafty. I used to stare down my man the whole time, which meant he was prepared for the collision and tried to run through the back of my skull. I had to adapt, simply to save my brain.) Then, at the very last minute, with the R4 within steps of me, I plant my inside foot hard and explode past him and hit his buddy under the chin. He doesn’t see me until it is too late. Now he’s going to have to watch that on film tomorrow in front of all of his friends. Anyway, it was a touchback. No harm done.

  We get the ball and start driving. A few first downs and we’re into the red zone. Then we’re down at the one-yard line.

  —Jumbo! Jumbo!

  That’s our three-tight-end, two-running-backs package. I jog onto the field and take my place in the huddle.

  —Okay, here we go.

  Jay glances at me.

  —Tight Left, Disco Motion, blah blah blah, on one, on one, ready, break!

  I walk to my spot and get down in my three-point stance.

  —Blue twenty-two.

  He lifts his foot and sends me in motion. I rock back onto my feet lazily, trying to lull my man-to-man defender to sleep as I pass. Then I pivot and come back, equally lazily. The point is to make him think I’m doing a return motion and ending up in the same spot I started, so I can block a front-side run play. So don’t look him in the eye. Make him think you aren’t doing shit. Make him think you’re blocking. Make him think you’re bored. So much of offensive football is lying with your body, getting the defender to think you are going somewhere you aren’t. Tell a story with your movements: a bloody lie! After my return motion, I turn on a dime and explode down the line of scrimmage back in the direction I was originally going.

  —Blue twenty-two, sethut!

  Jay snaps the ball quickly as I cross the ass of the guard. Stud cornerback Rashean Mathis is covering me. He catches on to the play and starts sprinting down the line of scrimmage behind his linebackers, who are hugged up on the asses of the defensive line. I’m sprinting, too. I feel slow: slow-footed, slow motion. The years have caught up to me. It’s going to be close. Mathis has a good angle on me. Jay fires it down the line at the front pylon, which is my “aiming point.” Either it will be a touchdown or an interception returned 99 yards for the Jaguars’ own score. I reach out for the ball. So does Mathis. But he’s one step late. The ball sinks into my fingertips and I squeeze it into my body.

  Touchdown.

  Five fucking years.

  It’s our first score of the game. The crowd goes wild—I think. The portal closes again and I can’t hear anything. Total silence in my head. There were times over the years when the crowd was so loud I could hear my future children crying. But not this time. The kiddies are sound asleep. I spread my arms out like the wings of an airplane and soar around the back of the end zone smiling.

  I circle back toward my teammates. D.G. comes to greet me first and we jump into the air and bump hips. I hold the ball tight in my right hand. Then I remember my family. By chance, I’ve scored in the end zone where they are sitting, a few rows back in the friends and family section, right along the goal line. I caught the ball on the pylon fifty feet in front of them. I look up to them and point. My father is smiling. My mother is crying. So is Aunt Marsha. Uncle Bruce, who has made the trip from Australia, is smiling and pointing at my mother saying, “That’s his mom!” My parents have seen me score a million times in my life, on a million different fields and courts and swimming pools. Is this any different for them? Maybe. Is it different for me? Not really.

  I walk to the sideline with the ball in my hand, absorbing the smacks and head slaps from my friends. They knew how bad I wanted that ball. They all want it just as bad. Some will get it. Most won’t. I hand the ball to Flip.

  —Nice catch, Nate.

  He takes the ball and puts it into one of the trunks for safekeeping. He’ll give it to me later. I take a swig of water. The extra point is good. I walk to the other thirty-yard line to take my place on the kickoff team.

  The train rolls on.

  After showering and changing, I throw my playbook in the playbook bin and fill up my bag with waters and Gatorades from the fridge. Then I walk through the double doors and out into the cavernous inner-stadium area where the buses pull in. Friends and family gather there to wait for us. Fresh off my first ever touchdown, I walk out and instantly see my father, then my mother, then Aunt Marsha and Uncle Bruce standing there as proud as can be.

  We lost the game 23–14. But for a mother, the score doesn’t matter so much. My mom has three criteria that she uses to judge a game. One, did I stay healthy? Two, was I happy with my performance? Three, did we win? Moms are ahead of the curve. The NFL is momless.

  Up above our heads in the stands, the loss is all that matters. But down here outside the locker room, there is little to indicate the outcome of the game. Everyone’s happy. If you are standing down here at all, you’ve already won.

  It’s here in the sea of friends and family that the humanity of my teammates is most apparent. A football team i
s thrown together from all corners of the country. Men are notified that they’ll be joining some far-off team and then they go alone. They make their way alone. They do it by themselves, and in the process their individuality suffers. Their sense of self is lost. They become what they are expected to be—part of a unit. Yet for these fifteen minutes, after every home game, the true personality of each man can emerge, because here it’s safe. I wasn’t born on the fifty-yard line with a football in my hand. Neither were they. I’m not alone. We all are.

  From the bowels of the stadium we walk back up the long ramp to the players’ parking lot, passing the fans who line the steel blockades. There are five or ten faces on each NFL team that are known nationally. The big names get marketed heavily. The rest of us are nameless and faceless. But in Denver, the fans know all of us. As we walk past them after the game, they ask us by name to sign autographs.

  Up close and personal with Denver’s fans, it’s no longer just me in my bubble of football solitude, teeth gnashing and clawing for some elusive gridiron glory. It’s bigger than that, and it’s right in front of my face: the smile of the eight-year-old girl as I sign her shirt. The look on the husband’s face as he takes a picture of me signing his wife’s chest, and the story he tells me about the fourteen-hour drive they’ve made for every home game for the last twenty-three years. The kid who produces a picture of me and him, a picture I don’t even remember posing for, and now I’m signing it. There’s a genuine happiness spread across their faces as they meet their meaty unicorns. For a moment I can feel the horn in my forehead.

  We leave the stadium and head south on I-25, back to the ’burbs for some very average Mexican food. Afterward, we go home and I tuck my family into bed. Win or lose, Sunday night’s for partying. I need a release. I’m going to Spill.

  Spill is in downtown Denver, a few miles from the stadium, made rich and famous by the athletes who get hammered there. It sits on the corner of Market and Fourteenth: a loud, narrow bar with brick walls and high ceilings. Flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls play videos that are pumped through the speaker system. The bartenders are friendly and pour ’em stiff and tall. The girls are plentiful and eager to please. Downtown is alive.

  Every major professional sports team in Denver plays downtown. The Rockies play at Coors Field on Twentieth and Market, in the heart of Lower Downtown, or LoDo. The Nuggets and the Avalanche play at the Pepsi Center on Fourteenth and Auraria Parkway, steps from Spill. And we play a few miles away on the other side of I-25. This type of proximal action makes downtown Denver a happy destination. It doesn’t matter, your preference. You’ll find somewhere that suits you.

  College drunks drink Coors Lite out of plastic cups in LoDo. Hipsters drink whiskey on Colfax and Broadway. Socialites stay south of LoDo near Spill in the three-block radius between Fourteenth and Seventeenth streets and between Blake and Wazee, drinking vodka and colorful shots. There are endless bars and restaurants, and endless girls with endless appetites for everything except food. To the unknowing, Denver seems to be a harmless, slightly boring mountain town in the middle of nowhere. Naw, son. Denver’s a party town. Lucky me.

  10

  Watermelon Seeds

  (2007–2008)

  Okay, guys, have a seat. Listen, fellas. They’re not doing anything we weren’t expecting. Okay? It’s pretty straightforward stuff. But you guys see how much they’re overpursuing our keepers, right? We’re going to go with our throwback keeper in the first series. Eddie, you good with that?

  —Yeah.

  I’m standing next to rookie wide receiver Eddie Royal on the north end of the locker room while Dinger holds court at the whiteboard. It’s halftime. We are playing the Chargers in week five, a few weeks after my touchdown. I got my first start today.

  But the start only sounds pretty on paper. Our opening play was a two-tight-end set. And Tony’s still hurt. One play, then I was back off the field again and waiting. My main job is still special teams.

  We kicked off on one of the last plays of the first half. At the end of the play, their special teams ace Kassim Osgood clipped me on the shoulder. I fell forward onto my knees, which were splayed wide. When I hit the ground I felt a tiny click in my left groin.

  —Get yourselves warmed back up when you get back on the field. It’s getting chilly out there. You don’t want to get tight!

  Scotty O is offering a bit of advice to which I’m not listening. I’m already warmed up. I feel great.

  Last night after meetings I lined up for the needle again: 60 milligrams of Toradol, a powerful anti-inflammatory and painkiller. Ten or fifteen of us rely on it every game, physically and mentally. We live in pain during the week. We want to feel good on game day, and adrenaline isn’t enough anymore.

  I jog out of the tunnel, drink some sideline Gatorade, and line up for the second-half kickoff. The ball pops off the tee and all ten of us tear down the field. Twenty yards into my straight-line sprint, a sniper somewhere in the cheap seats pops one off and hits me square in the left groin, tearing the muscle off the bone with a yank that rattles off the iron of heaven’s gate. Thwap!

  (I’ve been electrocuted once. When I was a kid there was a Coke machine in the locker room at swim practice that was busted open and the wires were hanging out. One of the kids said that if you touch that red one to that blue one, something happens. No one would do it. I was soaking wet; armor, I thought. I touched them together: thwap! Frozen to a tuning fork of lightning bolts.)

  The pop splays my left leg off to the side. I reach for my groin and hop on one foot. Total malfunction but I’m still on the field in the middle of the play. And I still have a job to do. The returner breaks a tackle and runs through the wedge, coming right at me. I have to make this tackle regardless. There are things on the line, after all: pride, glory, other stuff. Hopping along like that on the fifty-yard line, some things get put in perspective. One, Scotty O was right: I should have warmed back up. Two, I’m fucked. Three, somebody please tackle this man.

  Just then a teammate trips him up and he comes to rest five yards in front of me. I turn and limp to the sideline, get dizzy, and almost faint as I reach the chalk. My vision blurs, tunnels, then steadies as Greek appears.

  —What happened?

  —Something popped.

  —Where?

  —Here.

  I point to my groin.

  —Okay, give it a minute and see how it feels.

  —All right.

  I turn and walk away gingerly. I’m done for.

  I spend the rest of the game on the sideline with an ice bag stuck down my crotch. After the game I go home with instructions to return first thing in the morning. A pulled groin, they think. No biggie. My sister Carol and brother-in-law Jeff are in town for the game. We go out to dinner, a Brazilian meat-on-a-stick restaurant downtown called Rioja. I limp and hop between tables and chairs. People look at me strangely. I am also meat-on-a-stick.

  The next morning I continue the limp and the hop into the facility. My inner thigh and pubic region is very swollen. I’m walking timidly, slowly, straight-leggedly. It’s ice and stim, right away. The stim, or “stimulation,” uses electrical charges that pulse through two positive and two negative wire lines, like jumper cables, and are fixed to conductive pads and stuck on the skin, forming a picture frame around the injured area. The machine is turned on and the current surges diagonally through the meat, stimulating the healing process. The muscle jumps as the dial is adjusted and the electricity flows.

  On top of the electrical pads, a bag of ice is fixed: formfitting and expertly tied. There is an art to tying a bag of ice. All of the air must be sucked out of the bag and the bag twisted and tied. And it can’t be ice cubes. They don’t conform to the contours of the skin. It needs to be ice pebbles, ice chips, ice dust, which will wrap around the injured area and freeze the muscle into a submissive postinjury state that will stop the s
welling by slowing the blood flow, and, stay with me here, speed up the healing process.

  The combination of an electric surge pulsing through the body, intended to stimulate blood flow, and an all-encompassing ice bag, intended to slow down that flow, might seem contradictory to someone in a position to consider it. But I am not in that position.

  What’s that, Nate? You want to rest it? Wait until it feels better before you start working it? Ha! You don’t know anything about the human body. We have to speed up the healing process! Your body’s natural reaction to the injury is incorrect. We can’t trust it. We need to manipulate the body’s natural healing process—shock it, change its temperature, strain it to the point of exhaustion, stretch it to the point of snapping, blast it with powerful anti-inflammatories and painkillers, then shock/temperature change again, strain/stretch again, pills again, and repeat. That’s how you heal the human body, Nate. Make sense?

  Another ice and stim treatment and then I drive to get an MRI. After filling out paperwork and wondering why I have to fill out paperwork, a nurse leads me into a back room, where I remove all metal from my pockets. Then she takes me into a large, all-white room and points to what looks like an alien pod. I kick off my slippers and maneuver slowly onto a plank. She ties my feet together and gives me headphones.

  —Did you bring a CD to listen to?

  No, I did not. The radio will have to do. She says goodbye as if I’m going on a deep-sea voyage and she leaves the room. She presses a button and the plank slides me into a magnetic cocoon. Her music preference query is a cute way of diverting my attention from the fact that I’ll spend the next forty minutes in hell, as the hammers of Satan pound my skull into dust. Spiraled shock waves thunder down from Euclidean storm clouds, recording the fleshy echoes of my heartbeat. Bang after solitary bang: quicker, then slower, now faster than ever, now faster again. Finally, mercifully, the machine clicks off. I shudder as she rolls me out into the light.