Is There Life After Football? (36 page)

What they never get out of their systems are the selves and identities that were firmly established during the years in the NFL bubble. As Mike Flynn, a veteran of five NFL teams, recalls, “You come out of that tunnel [onto the playing field], you feel like you're a god.”
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That's a powerful self-image, but it's only one of many that players have come to know. There's the “football” self—the person identified with being an elite athlete on the field.
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This self encompasses the football player role, to be sure, but goes far beyond into the realm of the self-defining player ethos. Being a player involves far more than suiting up on Sundays. There's also the “celebrated” self that basks in the limelight of being an elite, highly paid, widely recognized athlete. We've also heard of the “gladiator” self—the warrior who fearlessly and violently sacrifices everything, body and soul, for his team and teammates. The gladiator marches into battle with his brothers, the “masculine” or “macho” self, who is all man, all the time. Then, of course, there's the “large self,” the one that thrives on excess, on “livin' large” at every opportunity. These are all selves that NFL players live by—socially structured and socially structuring sets of identities, personas, and related practices that serve to ground players' everyday activities and their notions of who they are.
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These selves are related—siblings of a sort—and the end of NFL careers places them in jeopardy. A seven-year veteran linebacker speaks
of what he's lost to retirement: “It [being a football player] is always what I've been and what I've done. So there's a little bit of identity change. . . . You know what I miss is . . . being an NFL football player. That status, that prestige, the respect.”
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Aspects of each identity fall away when players leave the NFL. Former players may grieve for some of them, but never miss others. Some may never go away. But former players' accounts of their transition troubles repeatedly come back to an ubiquitous loss:

I miss lining up on the opening snap and 65,000 people screaming, and making a big tackle. High-fiving my buddies, getting high-fived and knowing that ‘Man, I played good!' or I made a good play. . . . I miss men saying, ‘Hey, there goes [player]! He plays linebacker for the [name of team]. . . . I miss the Super Bowl, 850 million people watching you and you only. I mean, nobody else is watching anything else. It's awesome!
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Patricia and Peter Adler's revealing sociological study of a Division I NCAA basketball team offers keen insight into the identity implications of playing big-time sports. The “gloried self” is the centerpiece of their story. College basketball players are similar to NFL players in many respects; most importantly, they're elite athletes who garner considerable attention for excelling at their sport. The basketball players the Adlers studied were campus, if not national, celebrities, perpetually occupying the spotlight. As a consequence, write the Adlers, “The experience of glory was so existentially gratifying that these athletes became emotionally riveted on it, turning away from other aspects of their lives and selves that did not offer such fulfillment. . . . They thus developed ‘gloried' selves.”
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Like other versions of the self, the gloried self is the product of social feedback. Constantly told that they are great, athletes come to see themselves that way.
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Even the most modest, self-effacing NFL players sport gloried selves. They've been celebrated and idolized since they were kids. Consider the impact of seeing yourself—actually
being
yourself—in an EA Sports
Madden NFL
video game. In a sense, players can literally
become “Prime Time” (Deion Sanders) or “Megatron” (Calvin Johnson). Internalizing all of this, being cheered by millions, and feeling like a god or a video icon, who could resist the gloried self?

The gloried self is also greedy. It elbows aside other identities. The Adlers say it's intoxicating and addictive. It becomes the primary self through which players process their experience. Once players embrace the gloried self, they're “all in.” According to the Adlers, they may abandon all other aspirations and identities. They are virtually engulfed in the athletic role, which leads them to center their attention on the present while abandoning any future orientation. Their self-esteem and self-worth come solely from one source of gratification: athletic fame. As this happens, the field of identity options progressively narrows, so that the gloried self is both dominant and one-dimensional. College athletes, for example, ignore their student and social roles, while immersing themselves completely in the athletic role. NFL players are similarly consumed. The gloried self is so closely tied to the NFL life that it can't survive without it. And therein lies the problem when careers inevitably end.

While most elite athletes struggle with identity loss when their playing days are over, NFL players are especially vulnerable. Their careers stretch back to childhood. They've pursued no other options. They've made myriad “side bets” on their athletic success, attaching not only their identities, but their financial well-being, their work lives, their social lives, and even their health to their success as football players.
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When careers end, the rest can crumble, and the existential damage can be overwhelming. Their gloried selves dissolve. The Adlers note that the loss is especially sudden and devastating for college athletes, for whom “it's all over” once their eligibility runs out.
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It's not quite as sudden for NFL players. They stretch out their departure and milk their celebrity until it runs dry. Nevertheless, while they've banked more notoriety than their college counterparts, most former players eventually exhaust their NFL capital and the glory days come to an end, along with their gloried selves.

The NFL is a realm of excess: exorbitant salaries and extravagant spending; unbridled aspirations; hypermasculinity; near-lethal aggression and violence; extreme tolerance for pain; fanatical work ethic; total commitment. The league demands these qualities, and, for the most part, players eagerly comply. Earlier, we called the NFL a “greedy institution.” Perhaps it's even more demanding.

Another classic sociological concept aptly applies to players' seemingly total immersion into, and infatuation with, the NFL bubble. Erving Goffman popularized the term “total institution” to refer to institutions that have exceedingly high “encompassing tendencies.”
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These places typically segregate themselves and their inhabitants from the outside world with formal and informal barriers to physical and social interaction. Goffman had institutions such as prisons, mental asylums, and concentration camps in mind, noting that they typically surrounded themselves with high walls, locked doors, and other physical barricades. But he also included nursing homes, orphanages, rehabilitation clinics, monasteries, convents, and the military. The common linkage is their near-complete and intentional isolation from the rest of the world.

The goals of total institutions vary widely, from caring for the infirm or helpless, to protecting society from the dangerous, to providing contemplative sanctuaries or spiritual retreats. Again, what they all have in common is the aim of reforming. In Goffman's words, total institutions are “part residential community, part formal organization . . . they are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.” Total institutions, he notes, are established to produce particular types of individuals.
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The resemblance to the NFL here is largely suggestive. We're not saying that the NFL meets all of the requirements for being a bona fide total institution, but there are sufficient parallels to adopt it as a useful analytic guide. For example, Goffman suggests that total institutions aim to break down the separation of typically independent spheres of everyday life by consolidating all activities in one place, under a single authority. All
members' needs are explicitly anticipated and provided for on site. All phases of the day's activities are highly planned and tightly scheduled, and are concertedly aimed at the institution's goals and guided by formal rules and strictures. Intense surveillance accompanies the high degree of regimentation. Each phase of a member's daily activity is conducted in the immediate company of fellow members, who are similarly guided and motivated.
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The NFL isn't literally a total institution because players aren't confined to NFL facilities—at least not 24/7. They are, of course, mandated to be at team facilities for early morning treatment, meals, and meetings. And they stay until the full workday is done. They're fined if they miss meetings or appointments, or even if they are late. And they are “locked up” for training camps, as well as the nights before games. While the accommodations are far better than those of most other total institutions, players are still confined to their quarters, required to observe curfews, and subjected to bed checks. Minor details aside, the NFL has much in common with other total institutions—at least metaphorically.

Like other total institutions, the NFL aims to mold men into institutionally desired forms. It replaces competing agendas with its own. It disrupts players' alternate behavioral habits, totally and radically reshaping the structural and moral contours of daily living. The resulting “disculturation” renders players manageable, hopefully maximizing their productivity. As Goffman warns, however, disculturation is likely to leave members with a sort of childlike dependency, “incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside.”
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What's more, Goffman claims that a central aim of total institutions is the “mortification” of self, whereby members surrender outside identities to those preferred and cultivated by institutional authorities. Insulated from outside interaction, immersed in institutional culture and regimens, and surrounded by others undergoing the same process, outside identities are systematically and ceremonially stripped away, to be replaced by selves constructed to institutional order.
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This is more than institutional socialization. It's fundamental identity transformation, which Goffman
says leaves members with severe deficits in “adult self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.”
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Effectively “colonized” by the institutional experience, members of total institutions lose confidence in their ability to function outside institutional confines. Transition to the outside world triggers “release anxiety,” in Goffman's terms.
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Members simply aren't up to speed with the cultural guidelines and cues of the outside world. Perhaps retiring players wouldn't call it “release anxiety,” but they know the trepidations that come with being released. Absent the literal walls of the classic total institution, the NFL erects metaphorical, cultural walls that may be just as confining.

We should be cautious, however, in drawing literal comparisons with other total institutions, because the NFL differs in some very significant respects. Prisons, for example, command
every
aspect of prisoners' lives, something the NFL can't and doesn't claim to do. Plus prisons are both involuntary and unabashedly coercive, again quite different in degree from the circumstances of the NFL, where there are tremendous incentives to seek membership. Prisoners neither enter nor leave at their own discretion. But they do leave on schedule, another difference from the NFL, where the end is poorly anticipated.

Despite these differences, however, the challenges of “reentry” for prisoners and former players bear significant similarities. Inside prisons, for example, there's tremendous pressure to assimilate prison norms, which often leads to a sort of “institutional dependency.” Prison life teaches prisoners to rely on the prison structure for all aspects of their existence and the NFL bubble has its counterparts. Prisoners often lose the ability to make their own decisions and cease to realistically envision life after their sentences are up. They can't plan a new life and provide for themselves when they finally get out. They aren't prepared to face the social, economic, and emotional challenges on the outside. They even lose the social-relation skills necessary to reconnect with intimates and close associates in the outside world. Taken to the extreme, some prisoners become totally “institutionalized” or “prisonized,” in Donald Clemmer's
famous terms.
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Having forgotten how to live in “free society” with its mundane complexities and demands, they're ill prepared for the transition they face. They're essentially incapable of surviving outside prison.
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While former players seldom encounter difficulties of this magnitude, we've heard player narratives that closely mimic these concerns. NFL players certainly aren't “prisonized,” but they encounter many of the same institutional stumbling blocks and parallel transition troubles. The central lesson of the prison experience for NFL players is clear, however. The deeper and more complete the immersion in the institutional culture, the more difficult it is to make the transition to the outside.
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Comparisons between the military and the NFL as total institutions may also be instructive. Entry into both is voluntary and there are significant incentives to join both. Exit is “semi-voluntary” and, like most NFL players, some military personnel are not especially anxious to muster out. We need to be careful to distinguish the experiences of actual combat veterans. They face a constellation of traumas that we don't intend to compare to those in the NFL. Still, members of the military and NFL players share the experience of “totalization.” And once again we find that discharged armed service members (not necessarily combat vets), like prisoners and NFL football players, have trouble readjusting to the “real world.”
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They must relearn the practical and social skills needed to survive in a less regimented environment. Today's military attempts to deal with these problems aggressively, conducting discharge preparation programs and manning a web site and online informational brochures in ways remarkably similar to the NFL's Player Care programs and web site.
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