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

by Jackson, Nate

  Ryan keeps me updated. They are negotiating this, they are discussing that. They are considering this, they are evaluating that. Eventually he calls me and says that he thinks we have a deal. It is a two-year deal, league minimum for sixth- and seventh-year players, plus a $425,000 signing bonus, a roster bonus, a workout bonus, and a handful of escalators in the event of a breakout season. This is amazing, I say. I’m mainly talking about the $425,000 up front. Guaranteed money is all that matters in the NFL these days. As we all know by now, no one is ever safe. I can sign a five-year $50 million contract, then get cut the next day and never see a penny: unless I get some up front. Guaranteed money is money already earned. I tell him, yes, yes, and yes. Let’s do this.

  Two weeks later, Ted gets the tap on the shoulder and is fired as general manager. It’s not just the players who sleep with one eye open: it’s everyone in the building.

  The week before we report back for training, I take a trip to Los Angeles to play in the Playboy Golf Tournament, where half-naked chicks doing keg stands is a requirement. Before Jake retired, he plugged me in with the Playboy people. Now I get invites to the events I used to sneak into. There are six to eight girls at each tee box. Early in the day, they are predictably unenthusiastic, lounging under trees and texting. But as the booze starts flowing and empty promises are shot through the well-rehearsed O’s of cigar smoke, their spirits lighten and the fun ensues. Each tee box presents a new group of barefoot drunk chicks doing cartwheels.

  The actual Playboy Playmates are not tee-box girls. They’re past all that. Instead they drive around in golf carts and pose for pictures with the foursomes. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the company of many a Playboy mag. I made friends with the pages. They have kept me company through sleepless nights. And so it is with a surreal kick in the scrote that I bury a ten-foot putt, pull my ball out of the cup, and glance up to see a familiar silhouette walking toward me. The sunlight holds the outline of her black hair and sheer white dress, which clings tightly to her hourglass frame, keeping no time but eternity. She stops directly eclipsing the sun and turns to look behind her. As she does, the light shoots through a violet gemstone hanging from her neck. Wait, I know that stone! It is Hiromi, my travel companion from Germany. She is wearing the amethyst that I carried in my jetlagged hallucinations, through the doors of perception. I don’t tell her that we’ve known each other for years. I don’t have to.

  11

  The Last Dislocation

  (2008)

  After sitting out most of the previous season, I’m eager to get back to work and back into the violence of the trade. I want to prove that I deserve my new contract. Enduring the pain and violence makes me feel like I’m earning my money. Violence is football’s winning formula. The game depends on it, and you can’t go through the motions in practice expecting to be in murder mode when the season starts. A taste for blood comes during training camp, when it’s hot and grimy and players are fighting for their lives.

  But as the visceral reality of constant violence digs into me, I begin to question everything about my life, wondering how I got myself into this mess and if it’s too late to get out. Worse still, Rod Smith is gone now.

  After playing the entire 2006 season, Rod had microfracture hip surgery in the off-season. The surgery did not work. His hip was ripped to shreds from the years of football. He spent all of 2007 on the sideline in the hopes of returning. But his body would not let him. He had hip replacement surgery at the end of the season and seven months later, as we arrived to camp, he announced his retirement. My role model has left the building. So have most of my close friends. I can’t be too far behind.

  Every morning when I pull myself out of bed, North Dallas Forty–style, I play out the conversation in my head, what exactly I will say when I go up to Coach Shanahan’s office and tell him I’m quitting, that I can’t take it anymore. But by the time I pull into the parking lot, I have once again convinced myself that I am a warrior, and this is my war.

  Training camp is an attack on the mind: an attack on one’s sanity. Enduring it for six years has desensitized me to pain and anguish. Pain isn’t rigid. It’s a choice, a weakness of the mind, a glitch in the system that can be overridden by stones and moxie. I find my switch and flip it. People often asked me how bad it hurt to get hit by those huge dudes. The truth is that it doesn’t hurt at all. The switch is on. I can’t feel a thing. My body is a machine and my emotions are dead.

  But the years of abuse are taking their toll. Misaligned joints, stretched ligaments, bruised bones, overworked muscles, and a jangled brain keep pace with an ambitious football mind. One play at a time: one day at a time. My football mind is stronger than my human body.

  After morning practice we have a few hours to ourselves. We have everything we need at the facility: inflatable mattresses for naps, video games, and DVDs on several large TV screens in the players’ lounge, a daily movie screening in the team meeting room, and plenty of boxes of tissues to sit in a dark corner and cry with.

  Because of the evil dream clown that has been tormenting my sleep since San Francisco, I don’t like to fall asleep between practices. Instead I sit in the locker room and shoot the shit with Domonique Foxworth and Hamza Abdullah and Brandon Marshall. I’m learning to play acoustic guitar. I sit on the floor and strum the only three chords I know. If someone walks through the locker room we make up a song about him. It’s meant to humiliate and cut deeply, in the hopes of unearthing a crippling insecurity. The more distraught our victim, the more aggressively we laugh at him. The longer he stays, the worse it gets, until he finally realizes he is dealing with madmen who have lost the ability to empathize, and he scurries off. I’m not concerned about another man’s feelings. I don’t even have time for my own. This follows me off the field and out into the world, where people’s concerns seem weak and pointless. Pain is a choice.

  I don’t realize it at the time, but the ability to relax and be an asshole between practices is a product of becoming a seasoned pro. My early years in the league were fraught with nervous tension. I was in no mood to joke around. How could I? I was on my deathbed. But as the years have gone by, conquering the daily struggle has become ingrained in my psyche. My mind is finally free inside the machine, sort of. I exercise the freedom in questionable ways.

  We have ten or so ball boys who spend training camp with us, helping out Flip and his staff, who are bogged down with work. They range in ages from ten to eighteen and are typically sons or cousins or friends of someone in the organization. By the end of camp we are all great pals, and parting is sweet sorrow. One afternoon I bump into one of our high school ball boys in the hallway. He is texting on his phone.

  —Who are you texting?

  —My girlfriend.

  —Let me see a picture.

  He hesitates.

  —C’mon!

  —Okay.

  He clicks through his phone.

  —Here.

  —Nice. Does she have a sister?

  —No . . . but her mom is hot. And she’s single.

  —What? How old is she?

  —I don’t know. Thirty-something.

  —Hook it up, Chad.

  —Really?

  —Yes, fucking really.

  —Okay, I’ll try.

  —Don’t try, Chad. Do it!

  He rolls his eyes.

  —Chad! I’m serious.

  —Okay! Jeez.

  I let him out of the headlock and walk away.

  Seen from space, training camp is hundreds of men sequestered in squalid conditions for a month with no female presence anywhere, except for the women who have come to watch practice. As camp wears on I spend more and more time scanning the crowd for good-looking girls whom I can point out to my equally deprived teammates.

  —Look, forty-yard line, white shorts. Do you see her?

  —I think that’s a
guy.

  —No way. Look at her ponytail.

  —Look at her mustache.

  It’s a common phenomenon. It’s what happened when beautiful Inés Sainz walked into the Jets locker room in 2010. They hadn’t seen a woman in weeks, let alone a beauty queen with a Spanish accent and an outfit that clung to her frame like the scent to a rose. Their reaction, the reaction that sent the media, not Inés, into a frenzy, was not rude or aggressive. It was boyish and harmless. It was campdick. Campdick led me back to Chad the next day, pestering him about the mother of his girlfriend.

  —What’s the word, dude? Tell me something good.

  —She said you can call her.

  —What?! Yes, Chad! Yes! Okay, what does she look like? Can you get me a picture? I need to know what she looks like, dude. I’d love to take your word and all but you understand. Have your girlfriend send you a picture.

  —Okay, okay. God, you’re weird.

  —Just do it.

  Later that night, Chad approaches me with his phone in his hand and a look of accomplishment on his face.

  —I got it!

  He shows me the picture. It’s blurry but he is right. She’s hot. This is exactly the excitement I need: a nonfootball distraction to remind me that I’m not a football robot.

  —Perfect. Give her my number. Nice work, you little fucker!

  The next day she texts me and I text back. Back and forth we go. She implores me to send her a picture of me since I have seen a picture of her. I’m considering it over a bowl of Cheerios when one of the ball boys, named Aaron, son of superlawyer Harvey Steinberg, sits down at my table at the cafeteria with a solemn look on his face.

  —What? I ask him.

  He looks at me sheepishly.

  —What is it, Aaron? Out with it!

  He then reluctantly tells me that Chad and Bobby, another of the ball boys, are playing a trick on me. That isn’t Chad’s girlfriend’s mom’s number. That’s Bobby’s phone. I have been texting him.

  —Well, what about the picture?

  —They got it off the Internet.

  —What? The Internet? You’re lying! Don’t lie to me, Aaron!

  —I’m not lying. I promise.

  I’ve been had, duped, played like the delusional campdicked loser I am. I text Megan and tell her she is going to fucking pay and to be ready for the fires of hell to engulf her sneaky, conniving little face. The next day I recruit my best friends on the team for some retribution. My plan is to get an army of dudes to subdue them both in the locker room, wrap them up like Siamese mummies with athletic tape, dump every available noncorrosive liquid and powder on top of them, and throw them incapacitated into a freezing cold shower, where they will squirm around on the tile floor until they either wiggle out or some sympathetic pussy sets them free: a fairly standard hazing. The problem is, in order to recruit members for this special-ops mission, I have to tell the story. I have to explain to them why they should commit this act of torture on these pubescent teens. The reaction I get is not what I had hoped for. Everyone thinks it’s hilarious and declares them geniuses.

  —Well, fuck you guys, then! I’ll do it on my own.

  But I can’t do it on my own. Thankfully, Tony Scheffler and our new linebacker, Niko Koutouvides, see how desperate I am and help me corral them as they walk through the locker room collecting laundry bags that evening. But Tony’s and Niko’s hearts aren’t in it. My heart, though, is fully invested. I do my best to execute my plan on my own. I get them tied up, sort of, and pour ketchup and mustard and baby powder on them as everyone looks on and laughs, presumably at me and the frantic pace with which I’m trying to even the score in a game that has already been won. Sweating profusely and out of breath, I drag them into the showers, turn on the cold, and leave them to fend for themselves. It doesn’t take long before some sympathetic loser is cutting them free.

  Breaking up the monotony of camp is the arrival of the Cowboys for three days of practice leading up to our preseason contest against them at [Insert Corporate Logo Here] Field. Practicing against another team is difficult. There is an etiquette and tempo that exists at practice that varies slightly from team to team. For us it goes like this: unless it is a live goal-line drill, which only happens maybe once a week in camp, no one blocks below the legs or tackles the legs or touches anyone’s legs in any way. Everyone stays off of each other’s legs because that’s how people blow out ACLs and break ankles. You also don’t take anyone to the ground. You simply “thud up” with a nice pop. Coaches see if you are in a position to make a tackle. No point putting an exclamation point on it. You also don’t block a guy in the back or pull on someone’s jersey from behind or take a kill shot on a player or dive on a pile or touch the quarterback at all. You protect each other if possible because the sixteen-game regular season is brutal enough as it is. And after all, we’re all on the same team.

  But when another team comes in to practice, the lines get blurred. The previous year we had gone to hot, muggy Dallas. We had come directly from our preseason game in San Francisco. We were tired and nursing injuries and didn’t perform well. They were hooting and hollering. They wanted us to know who they thought they were.

  After the few days of practices we played the game and got our ass kicked. And they broke a few unspoken rules in the process. Preseason is a time to run your basic shit. No one game-plans heavily for their opponent. But the Cowboys had blitzes and trick plays and all kinds of nonsense. Then they ran up the score when they had us whupped, airing it out with only a few minutes left in the game and a hefty lead.

  In the team meeting the night before they arrive in Denver, Coach Shanahan reminds us of what happened the previous year. We remember. When practice begins the tension is thick. Wade Phillips, the Cowboys’ coach, has surely just given them the same speech. There is shit-talking, big hitting, and a lot of unnecessary celebrating. HBO’s Hard Knocks is following the Cowboys for their annual training camp series, which does little to limit the theatrics. I stand on the sideline laughing about it with one of my old 49ers teammates, Terrell Owens. He’s a Cowboy now. I haven’t seen him in years. As we talk I recall a chat we had six years earlier at the lunch table in San Francisco. I was a baby deer slipping on the training camp ice. He was a superstar. I wanted what he had. I was trying to pick his brain. But it was already picked clean by the machine. He told me then that basketball was his real passion.

  —This shit, football, is for the birds.

  Football is for the birds. Here we are six years later: a couple of fucking peacocks.

  Then I have to get in the huddle and social time is over. There are two full-sized grass fields at our facility, as well as an almost-full-sized field-turf field. One grass field is our offense versus Dallas’s defense. The other grass field is our defense versus the Cowboys’ offense. It stays that way all practice, except for special teams, when we all gather on one field. There are hundreds of people separating the two fields.

  The Cowboys’ defensive line is enormous and freaky strong. By now I know what I have to do to block a beast like that: crack him in his jaw with the crown of my helmet, then grab him tight and hold on. And still I’m at a disadvantage. Every run play is internal chaos and insecurity pushed through a makeshift “get-it-done” filter. Visualize the task and fucking do it. On one particular play I’m playing fullback, as tight ends are often asked to do. Years ago Mike Leach had adopted the “the more you can do, the better off you’ll be” credo, and it worked. I’ve followed his lead and it has kept me around, too. But among the do-everything guys, we have another credo: “the more you can do, the more they make you do.” That’s what happened with Chad Mustard, too, when they moved him to tackle. In some cases—such as this one—it works against your better interests. I hate getting put in at fullback. Whenever I do, I look at Pat McPherson like, Really? He looks at me like: Yeah, really, motherfucker! I came into the
league thinking I was going to be a Pro Bowl wide receiver. Now here I am in a three-point stance lead blocking through the two-hole, about to get my dick ripped off.

  The ball is snapped. I take a slight sidestep with my left foot and come downhill through the hole. I am off balance as I bend to the right to find my man, middle linebacker Bobby Carpenter. We meet with a hearty pop. I take it all on the point of my right shoulder, feeling it buckle and separate. A power hose of fire ants shoots through the right side of my body. My arm hangs dead like an ivory-scalped elephant trunk. But a shoulder separation is only pain. So deal with it. After practice it’s examined.

  Brandon Bushnell, M.D.:

  REASON FOR VISIT: Right shoulder injury

  HISTORY: During today’s practice with the Cowboys, Nate was tackled and came down hard on the point of his right shoulder [sic]. He experienced immediate onset of pain. He did not feel like anything popped out of joint. He was able to complete practice. No tingling and numbness in his arm. No other complaints. Soreness localizes to the anterolateral aspect of his shoulder and is worse with attempting to raise his arm above his head or across his body.

  RADIOGRAPHS: X-rays reveal anatomically aligned AC joint. No evidence of fracture, dislocation or subluxation.

  ASSESSMENT: Right shoulder grade I AC sprain.

  PLAN: After discussion of the risks and benefits including drug reaction, infection, skin color changes and other issues, the patient wants to proceed with an injection of the AC joint. Under strict sterile conditions, Dr. Schlegel injected the AC joint today. He tolerated the procedure well with no complications. Within a few minutes after the injection, he did report increased relief of his symptoms. We are going to have him work with the training staff on ice, stretching, and other modalities. He will be cleared for play and we will have him wear a doughnut pad over the AC joint. We will continue to follow him for improvement.