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

by Jackson, Nate

  The next week, during practice, I accelerate to track down one of Jay’s balls and my right hamstring, the one that had the “mild hamstring strain” three years earlier, fails me once and for all. Season over again. Career soon to follow.

  The Lighthouse Diagnostic Imaging Center reports its findings:

  There is a complete tear of the contouring biceps femoris semitendinosus from its origin at the ischial tuberosity. The fluid-filled defect is appreciated well on axial images 11. The semimembranosus component is intact. The torn tendon is retracted slightly greater than 2cm as next seen on axial images 14. There is a mild amount of surrounding peritendinous edema. There is intramuscular and peri fascial edema primarily involving the semitendinosus muscle. The more distal biceps femoris component of the tendon is thick and low signal. This suggests chronic tendinosis and prior injury.

  Comparison with large field of view images of the pelvis from November 2007 confirm chronic right-sided hamstring tendinosis with tendon degeneration or partial tearing affecting the biceps femoris semitendinosis on the prior examination.

  There is chronic partial tearing involving the adductor longus muscles from the pubic symphesis [sic] bilaterally, with greater involvement on the left. The distal fibers of the rectus abdominous [sic] are intact. There is fluid in the symphysis pubis with secondary cleft extending along the right aspect of the symphesis [sic]. This does not appear to be an acute injury.

  Not an acute injury. Both groins already torn. Both hamstrings already torn. Both hips already torn. The hamstring that had bothered me for years was torn from its attachment the whole time, and no one ever told me. It had never healed from the rehab or the injection or the off-season or anything. It was ready to blow.

  I go back to Vail for another PRP injection and lie on my face as one more needle pushes down into my soul. I start the maddening rehab process once again, lying around the training room and trying to figure out why it happened. Was it the Toradol shots? All the anti-inflammatories and painkillers? My diet? Was it the creatine? Poor treatments of my chronic hamstring injury? Poor health care in general? The steroid injection in the ischial tuberosity three years earlier? Was it the hamstring overcompensating for a weak groin? My weight gain? A weak core? Fatigue? Was it my mind? Fate? God? No. None of it. It is football. I play football for a living.

  I stay on my couch that week and watch us lose to the Raiders at home. Never lose to the Raiders: especially at home. It’s an ominous sign. We win the next two games and get to 8-5: in total control of our playoff destiny. It’s hard to win in the NFL. If you make the playoffs, you’re a great football team. Denver has come to expect that greatness because Coach Shanahan has consistently delivered it. But we have missed the playoffs in the previous two seasons. The natives are getting restless. All we have to do, though, is win one of our last three games and we are in the playoffs. Reach the playoffs and everyone should be safe for another year in paradise. But fate has other things in mind.

  I lie supine on a back corner training room table and watch a tide of poison molasses roll over our team. I can feel the life being sucked out of us. I stay at home while the team travels to Carolina and gets rolled. That sets up a home game against the lowly Bills in week fifteen. It’s all too easy: too perfect. Win and we’re in. I stand bundled up on the sidelines in the frigid Colorado winter and watch our season swirl down the drain. We are powerless to stop it. We lose 30–23 to a chorus of lecherous boos, setting up a week-sixteen matchup in San Diego against the surging Chargers. I go along on that trip to support the guys. But we don’t even need to show up for that one. It’s preordained. We get steamrolled. Our season is over.

  A few days later Mike Shanahan is fired as head coach of the Denver Broncos. Not long after that, I am fired as backup tight end/special teams player for the Denver Broncos. Look, Ma, I’m nothing.

  12

  The After Affect

  (2009)

  A week after being cut, I fly back to Denver to clean out my locker and say goodbye to my friends who work for the team. All of my teammates are gone for the off-season. I’ll never see them again. Flip and the guys in the equipment room, Greek and Corey and Trae, and Rich and Crime, and everyone else. They have become my extended family. When I came to Denver, I came alone. All players do in one way or another. The Bronco organization was my lifeline. They were very good to me. I love them. I want to tell them how I feel about my time there. But I don’t have the words.

  All I can think about is Josh McDaniels not calling me back. I want to run into him in the parking lot. I won’t need any words for that. I have a bone to break with him. But Flip tells me that he’s not even here. He’s in Indianapolis for the combine. Lucky Josh. Not that I don’t understand his indifference. He’s thirty-two years old. He’s just suicide-squeezed his way into the head coaching position of one of the NFL’s most venerable institutions, taking over for a future Hall of Fame coach who controlled the entire operation from top to bottom. The last thing he wants to do is waste his time explaining to a backup tight end why he doesn’t fit into the plan.

  I sit down in my locker for the last time. It was always a bit out of sorts, full of clothes and shoes and tape and gloves, notebooks and letters and gifts. Do I even want these cleats? These gloves? These memories? Yes. I fill up my box. Six years as a Denver Bronco. Six more than most people can say. Still feels like a failure, though. So this is how the end feels? Standing in an empty locker room with a box in my hand? Yep. Now leave.

  I get home and call Ryan. He knows that my prospects aren’t great. I am an undersized tight end with injury problems and I am pushing thirty. I need to find a team that wants a player with my skill set and won’t be turned off by the injuries. That won’t be easy, especially because the most recent one hasn’t healed. What I couldn’t convey honestly to Greek I can to Ryan. There is a problem—a deeper problem—that’s affecting my body. It’s not simply that my hamstring is shit. The entire functional movement of my body is off. I can feel it with every step I take. Something is amiss.

  Ryan sets me up with a biomechanics specialist/physical therapist in San Diego named Derek Samuel. Ryan thinks I’ll get along with him. He’ll assess my situation and we’ll go from there. But I’m afraid this won’t be enough. Desperate times, you know the saying. I reach out to a connection I made a year earlier and acquire a supply of human growth hormone, HGH. The drugs come in the mail in a package stuffed with dry ice. I half expect to see the feds storm out of the bushes, guns blazing, as I pull the box off my front porch.

  But no feds. Just me and another needle.

  It comes with very little guidance as to the quantity and regularity of the shot. I have a conversation with my supplier and he tells me how to do it. Other than that I’m on my own. I will tell no one what I’m doing. I go to the store and buy syringes and start injecting it in my stomach immediately. I am paranoid about every aspect of this decision. I’ve never used performance-enhancing drugs. Haven’t ever even seen them. I take pride in my natural ability and I don’t want to taint it. I don’t want to test the karmic winds. But I also don’t want to taste the death of my football dreams, not like this.

  I pack up my Denali and head over the Rocky Mountains, the vials of HGH stuffed in an ice-filled cooler. My time with the Broncos is up. That’s for sure. The rest of it will reveal itself eventually. But all men must move along. And they must do it with the feeling that they have left business unfinished, relationships unformed, opportunities untaken. I played for the Denver Broncos. I achieved my dream, which confronted me with a naked truth: the dream has been won, and it is not enough. I leave for San Diego to revive the dream, to give it the fresh air it needs, so that I can leave the game on my own terms.

  From the moment I step into Derek’s La Jolla office, which connects to a small fitness club, I know I am in the right place. Derek is a six-foot-three former volleyball player at the University of Californi
a, Irvine, with a friendly disposition and a freaky knowledge of the human body. He asks me questions and lets me talk. He is interested in what I think and not just what I was told. He is interested in how the treatments I got in Denver affected me, how I responded to them and how I felt about them. He wants to know the backstory so he can make more sense of what he discovers on his own. It is refreshing, truly. For the first time in years I am free to look at my body through my own eyes and to own my own flesh.

  After an examination, Derek determines that not only is my hamstring incredibly weak, but my hips are drastically misaligned, my pelvis is tilted forward, and my core strength is very poor. We get to work immediately, realigning my body and strengthening its foundation: the core. This isn’t accomplished by snapping it back in place. It takes a soft touch, a gradual redirection of the years of bad habits that I formed while playing football. The body must correct itself. And it must be listened to every day. Derek’s genius lies in his ability to hear the human body’s cries. But in order to do that, he also has to hear the cries of the mind. He is simultaneously acting as physical therapist and psychotherapist, easing me into a transition I am denying. I think my football days are far from over, yet I rail every day about the oppressive nature of the industry. Between sets of exercises, I go on and on about the meat market of the NFL, the hypocrisy of coaches, the false glamour of fame, and the inevitable meltdown of the players who play football.

  He sees many football players in his practice, and knows firsthand what I’m talking about, but he never lays it on me with any air of finality. He is too smart for that. But the fact that I am here at all, seeing Derek for my treatment, means that I have cleared an existential boundary in my pursuit of football absolutism. I have turned my back on the modern philosophy of NFL injury treatment, and in doing so, have taken one more step away from the industry I think I am running toward. Certainly, I am getting superb treatment. But my mind is doing something else. It is picking apart a system to which I have bowed my entire adult life. It is, as a defense mechanism I suppose, finding all of the reasons why I should cash in my chips and walk away. But I can’t.

  Along with Derek’s workouts in La Jolla, I am meeting a track coach at the University of California, San Diego. My first day on the track is a sad realization of how unhealed my hamstring is. To be medically cleared by the Broncos, I had to pass a series of strength and endurance tests. But those tests did not include running. I haven’t run since the corner route that tore it three months earlier. And when I try to open up and sprint on the track, I can’t. I simply cannot run. Judging by the look on the track coach’s face, it’s a sad sight. I wish the drugs would fix me already.

  I’ve been hiding the vials in the refrigerator of my friend Billy, who I’m staying with in San Diego. I become a master of refrigerator organization with the express purpose of concealing contraband, wrapped in the folds of my deli meat. Nobody touch my goddamned turkey!

  When it’s shooting time, I get the turkey and retreat to my room, where I mix the active ingredient with the solution, pinch my belly, plunge the needle into my skin, and push the poison into my body. Once again, I imagine the HGH as a fleet of noble warriors. I am doing God’s work, after all. There is nothing dishonest about it. HGH is a hormone naturally produced in the body, and my body is starved for it. I am broken. I am unable to perform the sacred task that I was born for. To turn my back on it would be to spit in the face of God. So I draw back the syringe and poison myself again, and again, and again. I don’t know what I expect to happen: a miraculous recovery perhaps. A newfound clarity. A bigger dick. But nothing happens. The only noticeable effect is that my body aches viciously. I don’t know what this means and I’m too afraid to ask anyone about it, so I assume it is part of the process. My muscles are big and well defined, perhaps slightly more than normal, but perhaps not. I was always muscular, and I am training like a madman. My body looked the same when I was in Denver shooting tequila instead of HGH. Either I’m not doing it right or my body doesn’t like it. And the fact that I’m doing it at all, sneaking around, carrying this secret, makes me feel mentally weak and undeserving of good fortune. Regardless, after a few months of intrastate trafficking and refrigerator espionage, I throw it all away in one dramatic garbage-can dump, and I close the lid. If I am going to play football again, I’ll do it clean.

  About that time, in April or May 2009, I start receiving calls from Eric Van Heusen, the tight end coach with the Las Vegas Locomotives, one of six teams in the upstart United Football League. The UFL is hoping to steal some of the NFL’s thunder. Alternate leagues have been tried in the past and all of them have failed. The branding of the NFL is too good. But the financial backers behind the UFL have an idea that the NFL might implode over the collective bargaining labor dispute and leave the country scrambling to fill the void the NFL’s absence created. It is a worthy gamble, I suppose, if you have money to burn.

  The Locos have drafted me and now hold my rights. Jim Fassel, the former head coach of the New York Giants, is to be the Locos’ head coach and they have already received commitments from a host of former NFL players in limbo, like me. I tell Van Heusen that we’ll talk about all of that if the NFL doesn’t work out. But I believe it will work out. And when the call comes I’ll be ready.

  So I keep training. My body stops aching, and thanks to Derek’s training methods, I am getting very strong. I feel pretty good considering the hamstring. And I’m getting my stride back on the track. My days consist of four or five hours of training. That’s all I do. Ryan tells me to stay ready. Teams have shown some interest and once training camp starts, men will be falling and they’ll need a veteran to come in right away and be ready to play. Well then, I’ll be that veteran. I’ll be ready!

  I run sprints on a field that overlooks La Jolla cove; I’m sweating in the San Diego sun and trying to manifest my destiny. When I sprint, I feel vulnerable. I feel like I will snap and collapse into a bag of bones at any moment. But I can sprint. Not as fast as I once could, but fast enough for a tight end. And perhaps the hamstring isn’t so bad after all. Perhaps it’s healing.

  The summer creeps by and I try to stay positive. I convince myself that things will work out if I keep working hard and trust my instinct. Never mind that my instinct, my true instinct, has been screaming at me for years. But I have stopped listening.

  One day after workouts I go into an American Apparel store in San Diego and there is a smoke detector beeping. It has a battery that needs to be changed. It’s a loud, sustained beep every fifteen seconds. A month later I return to the same store. And still the same beeping. Only now it’s two of them. And the same girl is working behind the counter. I buy two T-shirts and as I am paying for them, I ask her about the beeping.

  —What beeping?

  What beeping? She can’t hear it. She’s just like me. My body beeps all day long.

  Training camps start in late July and I’m not on a team. But I have no other plan. I will train and I will wait. Someone will call. Meanwhile, the therapy sessions with Derek are unearthing more misgivings that I have with the NFL. I rail against what I now see as years of mishandled injuries, against the emptiness of fornicating with the jersey chasers, against my own inability to turn from the game, against my monetary motivations for still wanting to play it, against the media’s petty ownership of the players, and against the entire bastardized commercialization of what to me is the most beautiful game on earth. And here is the crux of it: I still believe in the beauty of the game. This above all else is true. But to be a fly on the wall, or to be Derek, is to be struck in the face with how delusional a man scorned by his lover can be. Here I am telling him all the reasons why I hate her, in between sets of an exercise specifically designed to lead me back into her arms. I am sick.

  Then, in early August, my phone rings. It’s the Philadelphia Eagles. They want to fly me in for a workout. Later that day I am at the San Diego airport on my way
to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where their training camp is being held. I am picked up at the airport by an Eagles employee, a college kid with an internship. I hop into his college kid car, scattered with papers and trash. He pulls the pile of stuff from the passenger seat and tosses it onto the pile of stuff in the backseat. I kick some water bottles aside to make room for my feet and we drive through the city toward my hotel. There is a music festival in Bethlehem that forces a long detour, which gives us plenty of time to think of stuff to talk about. Girls. Yes, girls. We both like girls.

  The next morning I eat a light breakfast and go to the lobby at the scheduled pickup time. Also milling around the lobby are two other dudes just like me. This is how it will be. A team needs a player, so they fly in several of the same position and work them out, and they take the best one. There are three of us for this workout, and while we get ready in the locker room, we make small talk.

  —This is pretty weird, huh?

  —Shit, this is my third workout in the last week.

  —It’s my second.

  —Damn. This is my first.

  —But you played before, right?

  I was obviously the elder statesman.

  —Yeah, for the Broncos.

  —Dass whassup.

  —You guys?

  —Naw, I just got cut last week.

  —Naw, me neither. I was in minicamp in Cleveland. They cut me the day before training camp started.