Is There Life After Football? (26 page)

There's no simple answer. Players and circumstances differ. There's one thing former players have in common, however. They've been in the bubble for years. Consequently many have had little responsibility for managing the mundane details their lives. As William Rhoden
suggests, the “football machine” creates dependency. Players show up to play, Andrew Brandt reminds us, and colleges and the NFL take care of the rest. But who takes over when the end arrives? No matter how many times they're warned to plan for the long term, many players fail to see the big picture. What captures their attention? It's the locker room culture, the NFL player ethos, and the hypercompetitive, hypermasculine atmosphere in which they're totally immersed. It's the allure of livin' large. These influences are fundamentally incompatible with financial life
outside
the bubble.

“What do you want to do after football?” “After football? There's nothing after football!”

—NFL quarterback Tom Brady
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NFL players hold their dream jobs, but former players are “out of work” with time on their hands. They are “exes”—out of the bubble, no longer gridiron gods. “What's next?” is a complicated question with significant financial and identity implications most men their age don't have to face. Understandably, most former players want continuity in their work lives, but there's no NFL seniors league. They're not expressly looking to duplicate the NFL experience, but they do search for elements that made life in the bubble so satisfying. This process sometimes leads them to unrealistically narrow their options.

Like the “broke and bankrupt” myth, there are several problematic narratives about NFL players' work lives after football. The first is that most players are financially “set for life” and never need to work again. A second holds that former players are broke and can't seem to find and hold respectable jobs. They wander aimlessly, living in the past, complaining about the present, and fading quietly and desolately into oblivion. While elements of these narratives are often true, they're also crude caricatures.

Given the shortness of the average career, most former players are in their twenties when their playing days are over. Only a very few are older than 35. And like others of their age cohorts, they typically settle into jobs to support themselves. The NFL Player Care study found that around 70 percent of former players say they are “working now” in some
capacity. It's hard to know exactly what this means, especially since the study doesn't specify precisely what “working” means. Nearly 30 percent of those surveyed are over age 65—typically considered the retirement threshold. We wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have jobs. Over half the players surveyed have reached 55, the age when full NFL pensions kick in—another good reason not to hold a job. Nevertheless, most NFL alumni are working at
something
. Younger alumni (30–49), however, are about 12 percent less likely to be working than men of the same age in the general population (78 percent versus 90 percent), but older alumni (50-plus) are about eight percent
more
likely to be currently working (66 percent versus 58 percent). Overall, former NFL players appear to be better off financially than their age peers, as a group. These statistical trends correspond to several noteworthy challenges in former players' lives.
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(See
Appendix 2
for a brief summary of retired players' income. There's no good estimate of their current total worth.)

Recently, the
Wall Street Journal
noted that “just 49.2 percent of NFL retirees between 30 and 49 years old had jobs within a year of leaving the league.”
³
Highlighting these “poor employment figures,” the article implies that former players have trouble finding work, largely because they lack the background and training necessary to hold 21st-century jobs. The NFL and the NFLPA have been sensitive to this narrative for years. Embedded in this perspective, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding about the end of NFL careers. As we've seen, most players don't consider their football careers to be over for a year or two after they've played their final games. The fact that only 50 percent of former players have jumped into new jobs during that year in limbo isn't surprising. Most don't consider themselves to be finished with football. Their failure to find new jobs hardly indicates, by itself, that players are unemployable.

That's not to say, however, that finding jobs is easy. Accounts of post-career financial failures often implicate players' inability or unwillingness to find work after football. Not only do we hear of players going broke, but stories abound of players waiting idly for opportunity to come their way, bouncing from one venture to another, or mismanaging businesses.
We're told, for example, that less than one half of one percent of former players have historically been able to make successful transitions to business careers.
⁴
Nevertheless, this simply doesn't jibe with the Player Care study or other systematic research. Indeed, the percentage cited is so small that even anecdotal evidence challenges the assertion. As with similarly audacious statistical claims, it's hard to know where such figures come from and how they are derived. Regardless, the media have taken note and increasingly highlighted post-NFL problems.

Unfortunately, there's little systematic data on what sorts of jobs players pursue after they finish with football. There's no inventory of where they work or in what capacities. Given their proven willingness to work hard, their ability to learn complex plans and procedures, their capacity to analyze situations on the fly, and their discipline in pursuing success diligently, players have succeeded in just about every career imaginable: doctors, lawyers, business tycoons, investment managers, politicians, judges, coaches, teachers, preachers, movie stars, and owners of bars. But not everyone succeeds, and their challenges and failures aren't arbitrary or capricious. There are some notable patterns to former players' work lives—both successes and failures—that emerge in relation to the unique circumstances of living in the bubble for years, then confronting an involuntary and uncertain ending.

Refusing to concede that their playing days are over, many players spend months, if not years, working out and trying to make a roster. This keeps them out of the job market for a year or two, with long-term implications. It took George Koonce a couple of years to go back to school and get a job in athletic administration. Others have similar stories. They are often “paralyzed,” and sometimes the paralysis isn't temporary. Recall, for instance, how Brandon Gold ended his career. He stayed home, relaxed on the beach, worked out, read the Bible. But somewhere along the way he realized he had another life to lead. That involved a decade-long struggle.

[Finding] a job is extremely difficult. I have humbled myself so much now. I will do whatever. . . . I'm a great guy, but I don't know what I am supposed to be doing. . . . You have to reinvent yourself . . . and you are going to need to do something totally normal.
⁵

Gold is ambivalent about assuming new professional statuses and roles. He was “humbled” after all the excitement, glory, and money of the NFL. He needed to become someone new, doing something “totally normal.” Money and identity were both at stake. These dilemmas resonate throughout Tommy Jones's saga:

[Entering a new profession] wasn't going to pay me the type of money that I want right now. I wasn't thinking about [the job] being beneath me. Yeah, that was part of it. . . . I was used to having checks for thousands, and to just be on a salary for $15 an hour, I just couldn't do that.
⁶

Entangled in family finances and poor decisions, Jones had fiscal qualms, but also had ego problems. He put off getting his college degree or getting onto an alternate employment path. Suddenly, he was 15 years down the road, having made little progress. “I kind of put everything on the back burner. I wasn't even thinking about going to school at that time. . . . To be honest, the years just went by. . . . It was tough to swallow at first, and for four years after retirement, I didn't want to get a job.”
⁷
A decade later, Jones had no steady job or source of income. He'd dabbled in some investment schemes in the clothing and recording industries, but those failed. While he still had plans, he remained captive to his initial post-football inertia and lofty expectations.

Gold and Jones both allude to the ego sacrifices entailed in taking ordinary jobs, doing something “totally normal.” One of the most frequent observations former players make about their football careers is how exciting they were, how much players craved the intensity and attention
that were part of the bubble. Hakeem Chapman, a veteran of five Super Bowls, sums it up:

There is nowhere in the world you can go and get that same feeling you got when you were out there on that football field playing ball. You didn't have that type of excitement when you got married or with the birth of your child. You can't find it anywhere. You played in the Super Bowl. You tell me [where] to find that kind of excitement that you had in the Super Bowl. I'm still searching for it—that high.
⁸

Having been special for years, players love the adulation. They're virtually addicted to the excitement and attention. Doing something else for a living pales in comparison. So, when Tommy Jones balks at taking a mundane job—“Not necessarily that that was beneath me to do, but I just didn't want to do that right now”—he's looking down from a lofty professional pinnacle. It's hard for another line of work to measure up. Recall George Koonce's reaction to the initial job offer he received to work in the ECU Athletic Department for $36,000 a year.
⁹
He was insulted. His agent was appalled, and egged him on:
“He said, ‘George, you got to be kidding me.' He said, ‘You need to go up there and tell them to kiss your ass.'”
¹⁰
The mundane job and the ordinary salary had Koonce on the verge of declining the job offer, until reason, in the name of Tunisia Koonce, took over. Koonce was disheartened by the same realization many former players have—that few jobs will actually pay them the amounts to which they had become accustomed—but his wife helped him adjust to that reality.

Some players are humiliated when they're confronted with being normal—taking ordinary jobs. That doesn't prevent then from going to work, but it may steer them into particular kinds of occupations. Throughout our research, we've come across relatively few former players who hold conventional, salaried, nine-to-five jobs. To be sure, many are self-employed and set their own hours. Others are professionals, who by definition, work until the job is done. Whereas there was a time when
former NFL players would turn to teaching, or sell cars or insurance, younger alumni are more likely to be entrepreneurs or cobble together combinations of money making activities that generate income, but that don't constitute a conventional professional résumé. It's not necessarily due to an aversion to work. Rather it's a desire to maintain a high public profile, combined with a penchant for control over personal time and effort—a desire to be their own men, not someone else's employees. Players want to continue being distinctive in some capacity, not just one of the crowd. And they hope for jobs that provide a modicum of the excitement they used to feel in going to work: jobs in entertainment or the mass media; professions with tangible, immediate payoffs; high-risk, high-reward occupations and business enterprises. They're looking for jobs that embody the NFL ethos and resemble aspects of the bubble. They're not exactly spoiled by success, but their past success shapes how they evaluate prospects for the future.

Looking for vestiges of their former careers, former players often set high standards. We've seen how using questionable standards for comparison leads players to extravagant spending and fiscal shortsightedness. This practice infects post-football career planning as well. As Hakeem Chapman suggests, if you're looking for a comparable career, “You can't find it anywhere.” It's hard to get seriously interested in a mundane job like teaching or coaching high school football, where the take-home check might amount to less than $3,000 a month—less than a rookie free agent training camp stipend. When even a former journeyman player can walk away from a weekend of autograph signing with thousands in tax-free cash, nine-to-five office work has muted appeal. Most former players immediately make more in severance pay and their annual cut of the NFLPA's group licensing agreement than they might earn at entry-level administrative or service positions.
¹¹
With NFL salaries as a benchmark, almost any other occupation falls short.

A second type of problematic benchmarking creates a more subtle challenge. Former players often claim they've spent their “best years” in the NFL, but those days are over and they are back at square one when seeking new jobs and careers. They frame time spent in the NFL as time lost on the job track. George Koonce elaborates:

When we was off playing football, our classmates on campus, they were doing internships, they was working their way up the ladder. While we were on the practice field learning how to tackle, they were learning the game of life. Now, all of a sudden I am 32 years old, I'm out of the league, and my classmate that was in my industrial technology classes, he is 32, but he has had ten years on me, going through the interview process, closing deals, so now, I am at 32, trying to compete with him. That's tough
.
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