by Glenn Stout
Even so, is this truly a look at CTE’s corrosive effects in real time? Or has Johnson, with his history of blame deflection and self-validating reasons, simply found an unimpeachable—and unprovable—excuse?
“Do I think he’s a special breed? Yes,” says Tony Johnson, who suggests the family will consider donating Larry’s brain for study after his death. “Do I think he might have CTE? I just can’t say.”
Others, who point out the brain’s frontal lobe is the portion that regulates judgment and behavior—and the region most under attack during on-field collisions—see it more Johnson’s way.
“I’m pretty sure that he definitely has something going on,” says longtime friend Cohen, who claims she knew Junior Seau, the Hall of Fame linebacker who in 2012 shot himself in the chest so that his brain could be studied; indeed, CTE was discovered in Seau’s brain. Cohen sees some similarities in the behavior of Johnson and Seau.
Johnson says years ago he was diagnosed with type-1 bipolar disorder, a condition he blames on head injuries. Though this cannot be confirmed in Johnson’s case, brain injury experts have found possible links between bipolar symptoms and midlife behavior issues and CTE.
“Certain things happen in your life,” he says, “that you just can’t come back from.”
After making the video for Jaylen a few years back, Johnson says, he spent the next 72 hours cycling from one party to the next, daring bar patrons or police or even death to bring him down. When nothing did, he kept going.
At one point he sat on a sidewalk, exhausted and struggling to breathe, and thought of his daughter. She was living with her mother at the time; Jaylen’s parents now share custody.
Johnson went home, slept it off, and not long afterward, he says, he sold his ownership stake in a club on South Beach and reduced his intake of hard liquor. He still found trouble sometimes, including a 2014 arrest for aggravated battery involving another man, and Johnson says he has since made more changes.
He moved out of a trendy high-rise in Miami and into a quiet townhouse in Fort Lauderdale, got rid of his guns, took a job with a nonprofit that uses the arts to mentor disadvantaged children. Johnson also quit therapy and refused to take his prescribed medication; he says it’s because he’s better equipped to manage his impulses himself. All these years later, it’s still Johnson against everybody—even himself.
He has, more recently, filled his bookshelf not with reminders of his playing career but with photographs of Jaylen and her paintings. If friends invite him out, more and more he turns them down.
“You kind of create your own prison,” Johnson says. “I’ve kind of barricaded myself in my surroundings [with] certain things that I can handle. That’s kind of how I beat it.”
That’s easy when his daughter is here—Jaylen spends most weekends with her father and weekdays with her mother in a nearby town—and a challenge when she’s not. On the nights he’s alone, Johnson is more likely to sulk or drink or venture into the depths of his restless mind. If she’s here, bedtime is at 8:30, and they play games or watch television or draw.
“She’s, like, a good distraction I have,” he says. “She sees something in me that most people will never see.”
Occasionally they watch football together, Jaylen in her Penn State or Kansas City jersey, and she asks why the announcers sometimes say his name. He explains some of it, and very carefully he has begun to explain some of the rest.
“Papi,” he says he tells her, “used to be really bad.”
He doesn’t offer much more, and though he’s uncertain what the future will bring, Johnson says he wants to tell her his whole story eventually.
Johnson figures that in seven more years, or when she’s 14 or so, Jaylen will be old enough to absorb the paradoxical nature of her father: the life of the party and the introvert, a man capable of violence and tenderness, the person he actually is and the one he wants to be.
He wants his mind to hang out at least that long. Jaylen might not like what she learns, but he wants to be present for those conversations.
His biggest fear, if he were to disappear now, is that Jaylen wouldn’t remember him; his second biggest is that she would.
“That scares me more than anything,” he says. “Sometimes it scares me to tears.”
Back to the Unknown
He’s driving again, steering the Porsche south on a highway not long after sunrise. Jaylen, who like her Papi is not a morning person, is dozing off in the backseat.
Earlier, the vehicle’s back latch wouldn’t close, and in the 20 or so minutes since, Johnson hasn’t said a word. He weaves through traffic, occasionally touching 90 miles per hour, and a radio commercial plays a doorbell sound. The tone repeats again. And again. Johnson jabs his finger into the preset button to change the station.
He cracks his knuckles, sighs loudly, checks his phone.
He looks behind him occasionally, Jaylen napping or drawing imaginary circles on the glass. She’s spending the next few days with her mother, and Johnson is already nervous about the upcoming time by himself. What if friends call and ask him to go drinking? Or if someone crosses him at the wrong moment?
How will he react this time if the demons come?
For now, she’s with him a few more minutes, so Johnson parks the Porsche and lifts her from the backseat. He carries her toward the elementary school and kisses her cheek as they cross the driveway and fall into a line of students.
The line starts moving, and he tucks in her shirt and kisses her again. “I’ll see you this weekend, okay?” he says, and then he turns toward the crosswalk.
He’s alone again, left to face the next few days—and whichever emotions and impulses are waiting—with his mind as his only company. He looks behind him to see Jaylen toddling toward the entrance, and with little more than uncertainty ahead, Johnson stands on the curb and waits for her to drift out of sight before stepping, finally, off the edge.
David Roth
Downward Spiral
from The Baffler
When the pregame show after the first pregame show ended, there were of course commercials. After that, nearly 100 million Americans watched a quill pen being dipped into an inkwell. The camera pulls back to reveal the arm and powdered wig of the man holding the pen; his hand protrudes from a voluminous sleeve that seems to terminate in some kind of avant-garde doily. String tones and a lone plonking horn on the soundtrack set a properly capital-H Historical tone. We are already hearing voiceover, plummy and rounded and fakey. A wider shot reveals a pewter mug at the edge of the desk, with a half-dozen other quills sticking floofily out of it. The bewigged man with the avant-garde sleeves signs his name and the date: Th. Jefferson, June 1776.
It was almost time for the football game.
A record 97.5 million people were watching Fox TV that night, February 3, 2008, to see the last and most important game of the NFL season, between the New York Giants and the undefeated New England Patriots. But first, to what we might as well imagine was their moderate-to-great surprise, they were watching this. The millions looked on as, in the next sequence, actors done up in inexpensive-looking Founding Father finery materialize like jowly ghosts in the interior of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and deliver themselves of famous historical quotes to a camera tracking left to right. The lighting is gauzy, and a snare drum rum-dummy-dums under all of it.
“The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants both,” the man playing Thomas Jefferson says. The actor’s hair is in a severe middle part, and seen straight on he is thickish and pale and looks like a bartender in a Coen Brothers film. This concluded the Spectral Founder portion of the segment, which ran for six and a half minutes in all, and promptly gave way to something even stranger. The image dissolves to NFL Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, in a full denim ensemble and what appears be a camouflage kufi, and he solemnly recites the first words of the Declaration of Independence. Only then did the broadcast of Super Bowl XLII reach the 90
-second mark.
It improbably got weirder still from there, like, Peyton Manning grimly intoning 18th-century prose through his pipe-organ sinuses weird. But the most important thing to note here is that this was all real—at least in the sense that the NFL’s self-dramatizing rites of civic belonging are now a real and autonomous part of our bedrock national saga. Less grandiosely, I guess, this was real in the sense that anything that happens on TV in America is automatically real.
The reality of all this is worth reiterating mostly because the sheer absurdity of it would otherwise be overwhelming. There was former commissioner Paul Tagliabue honking out his lines while standing at attention by the Jefferson Memorial; there was Giants defensive end Michael Strahan—well before his rebranding as a happy-talk daytime TV host—barking out the word “rectitude” while surrounded by firemen at Ground Zero. This was really on television, where millions of Americans who mostly wanted to watch a football game could see it. Something similar had happened in years before and has happened in years since. Fox started doing this with Super Bowl XXXVI, which was played five months after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Three years after those 97 million or so viewers watched Tedy Bruschi, Jack Kemp, Steve Largent, Roger Staubach, and Marie Tillman (the widow of Pat Tillman) do their best with their assigned chunks of the Declaration before Super Bowl XLII, another record viewership—111 million, this time for the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV—was treated to an iteration that began with former secretary of state Colin Powell and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell striding gravely through the National Archives.
This is not only real, but in the broader context of the NFL—the biggest, richest, and most luridly batshit sports league the world has ever seen—it is even something like normal.
Blood, Soil, and Pigskin
Not normal by any standard except for the one that prevails in the NFL, admittedly, but that’s the one we’re talking about here. We are talking about the NFL, which is to say that we are talking about a league that increasingly sees itself as presenting not only the most popular American sport—which football demonstrably is, at least going by television ratings and profits—but the most American American sport.
The sport’s elephantine self-regard plays out in ways big and small—and in ways that transcend the obvious patriotic signifiers that the NFL grafts to every available surface of its exhaustively branded viewing experience. It’s not just the booming fighter jet flyovers or the deployment of American flags visible from space when it’s time for the national anthem, although there is all that. It’s the bombastic anthem rituals—and the sidelong glances cast during that anthem to make sure that everyone around is revering the anthem appropriately. Some of that is the result of Colin Kaepernick’s quiet and quite probably career-ending anthem-based act of protest, but the NFL’s dedication to its specific and strange vision of conformity predated Kaepernick’s political awakening. The NFL is selective and self-serving and alternately priggish and thuggish in how it goes about maintaining its strange brand, but it is always singular. Every mania of our broader moment, from those grandiose delusions to the million points of cheesy graft, is reflected in the NFL itself. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the NFL would come into conflict with President Trump—when it comes to honking overdetermined proxies for Maximum America, there can be only one.
So there are the flyovers and the performative patriotism, but there is also the fact that the NFL was, for years, secretly billing the Pentagon for all those color guards and Hometown Hero promotions. And it’s maybe especially the fact that the commissioner’s office expressed shocked dismay upon the exposure last year of all of this and contritely returned a small percentage of the money the teams had received.
To a culture that’s addicted to spectacle and inured to dishonesty, the NFL delivers bulk loads of both: the pyrotechnically performative God-and-country stuff and the greasy profit-seeking, the stilted recitation of the Declaration of Independence before a football game, and then the batshit branded hijinks that follow at the commercial breaks. There isn’t much distance, in broadcast time or pure blank weirdness, between those patriotic fife-and-drum montages and the ads in which a lone Budweiser Clydesdale convinces a small businessman not to commit suicide or a man eating Doritos is comically rocked in the nuts by a snack-minded Corgi or whatever. America, as the poet said, is hard to see. But in watching the NFL, at the baroque phase on what appears to be the back end of its zenith, we can see a reflection of the nation at something like the same point.
The NFL is financially healthy and also pretty luridly out of its mind, increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial and spasms of executive sadism. And lately, it’s declining—in ways that are obvious for even casual viewers and evident during an average Sunday’s slate of games and in ways that the league might not fully feel for generations.
It’s America’s game all right, and if the NFL is sick, if it is even perhaps dying, it is for the most American of reasons—because it is increasingly ragged and rotten with corruption, and because it can’t quite come up with any other way that it would rather be.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Impunity
There is a door that opens while watching a bad NFL game on TV, a gateway into something very much like an out-of-body experience. It’s not an especially desirable out-of-body experience, to be sure, but there’s something about being subjected to a NFL game at its worst that grants even the most devout fans the opportunity to see how football looks to people who absolutely hate football. Witness enough off-tackle plunges for one-yard gains, then watch as they are negated by offsetting penalties, and something reveals itself, even to those of us who enjoy the game.
It is not pretty. The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials—for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies—at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show—one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.
For people who don’t like watching the NFL, every excruciating moment of every game looks like this. For those of us who enjoy it, against or despite our better political and aesthetic judgment, that description only fits the worst shitshow jackpot: muddy punt-offs in Cleveland, for example, or the groggy Sunday morning games that the NFL has lately played in front of rustling, uninterested crowds at London’s Wembley Stadium as part of its stalled attempt to open international markets.
In recent years, though, the games resembling out-of-body experiences have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.
Not every game can be a classic, of course, or even competitive. But the palpable decline in game quality, week by week and 12–9 game by 12–9 game, is neither incidental nor accidental but happening seemingly by design—the natural result of teams taking cheap-out shortcuts in constructing their rosters, and a high-volume and highly conservative coaching style that emphasizes an empty efficiency over any of the unpredictabilities that make games worth watching.
Put another way, the specific nature of the league’s declining ratings is a reflection of the limited appeal of spending three hours watching quarterbacks rack up four-yard completions. As The Ringer’s Kevin Clark points out, the absolute number of people watching N
FL games hasn’t declined, but those viewers are watching for increasingly brief periods of time. “Fans are tuning in and then tuning out,” Clark writes. “If that doesn’t scare the league, then nothing will.”
Gladiators on the Make
Here’s the thing, though: the NFL not only doesn’t seem scared, it doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s broadly understood that NFL football is not terribly good at the moment. If you credit the lamentations of the anonymous front-office types who tend to pop up in stories complaining, always complaining, about how unprepared today’s college players are for the pro game or the dearth of NFL-ready quarterbacks available through the NFL draft, the near future does not look great either. Factor in a steady decline in youth football participation that extends back to the first stories about the link between football and brain injuries (such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy) more than a decade ago and it’s tough to feel great about the long-term outlook.
Rich television deals ensure that profitability is locked in for the foreseeable future, and ratings are only slightly off their old Olympian standard. But the NFL currently feels very much like a league in decline—the league seems in a real way to have lost interest in football, or in trying to stop the league’s broader skid. There are and will always be bad teams, but the NFL in 2017 is remarkable for the number of teams that appear not even to be trying to compete. This includes not just teams embarking on variously forward-thinking tank schemes to gain advantageous position in upcoming drafts, or the roughly equal number of teams that are plainly institutionally incompetent. The ones that stand out most dramatically are those that are plainly not trying to do anything but bump along the bottoms of their divisions and collect their share of the $39.6 billion in television revenues that the league’s 32 teams will divide between 2014 and 2022.