Is There Life After Football? (37 page)

Dr. Ramon Hinojosa of the Veteran's Administration observes that military personnel also routinely receive preseparation debriefings as they leave active duty. Specially designed programs address the social, psychosocial, and economic challenges that return to civilian life may pose. But many discharged service men, according to Hinojosa, ignore the information or reject the advice, often out of masculine pride, denial, disregard, or ambivalence about life after the military. These responses
are symptomatic of a military culture that, in many ways, resembles that of the NFL. In both cases, “exes” insist that they will be fine, although post-retirement evidence says this isn't always the case.
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While working on this book, George Koonce received a handwritten letter from an officer in a middle-size Wisconsin police force. He'd read a newspaper interview Koonce had recently done on the subject of his post-career transition. This note offers some additional insight into how still another totalizing institution creates challenges similar to those confronted by players leaving the NFL:

I'm just a middle-aged cop in Wisconsin who enjoyed watching you play. . . . Cops are in a similar situation. We spend our career somewhat isolated. Our unique duties, life and death dependency on each other, the 24/7 schedule, shared experiences (tragic and funny) really create that camaraderie that must be similar to a football team. Being a cop sometimes creates an identity that becomes your whole life. So, when we retire, we lose something that can't be replaced. . . . It can send you adrift, trying to fill that void in many ways—some destructive (which partially accounts for our high rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism, etc.).

The letter is a compassionate gesture grounded in common experience. It's also a warning about the challenges of stepping outside of totalized environments such as the police department or the NFL bubble.

Perhaps the essence of leaving the NFL with good prospects and positive momentum is to actively resist “totalization.” Players who thrive after football often defy cultural and organizational pressures to become full-blown NFL “organization men.”
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This doesn't mean they've failed as players. Rather, it means they've poked their heads out of the bubble occasionally, sheltered aspects of their selves from the locker room culture, and developed talents that might serve interests other than football. In doing so, they've inoculated themselves against
engulfment, rejecting total institutionalization in favor of personal diversification.

Does this limit their success in the NFL? Perhaps. If they don't pay the price, they don't make the roster. If they don't go “all in” all year round, there careers might be short. But one thing seems certain. If players put all their eggs in the NFL basket, they're inviting serious challenges when they leave the game because they haven't built a foundation of post-career options. In today's greedy NFL, the trick may be to hold football at bay—at least sometimes—in order to keep options open.

Players often claim that the contemporary game demands all their time, but that's an exaggeration. The NFL is not a voracious predator, gobbling up
every
second of every day. It's not irresistible. We've seen plenty of examples where planning and prudent time allocation allow players to get college degrees—and educations—while still in the league. And examples abound of players launching second careers while they're still playing.

Still, players are reluctant to branch out, and for good reason. They don't want to imperil the NFL dream. Michael Oriard, for one, occasionally wonders if he would have been more successful in the NFL if he'd put more of himself into the game. He speculates that he might have been more than a backup lineman if he'd made greater sacrifices, wanted it more. Ultimately, Oriard concluded that football success wasn't worth the price that might have been extracted from other dimensions of his life. “How ironic is it,” he notes, “that the better players and the players for whom football has greater personal importance must pay the penalty in a more difficult adjustment to retirement.” “Blessed are the mediocre,” he concludes, “for they shall inherit the future.”
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While Oriard is far too modest about his football career, he still conceives of himself as a football player and this deeply informs his identity. But he also sees himself in more enduring, far-reaching terms:

The long career [as an English professor at Oregon State] is clearly what's more important, because it was the longer career. . . . I've been more
successful as an English professor than I ever was as a football player. . . . I've written seven books—I've been a very productive scholar. I was named a distinguished professor at my university. Of course, that old cliché, that “sports is life with the volume turned up . . .” Well, it's true that my successes as an academic have been more routine than my going from walk-on at Notre Dame to the NFL. . . . I paid my dues and it all worked out OK.
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Michael Oriard, George Koonce, and countless other players committed major portions of their lives and selves to NFL success, yet they still had enough left over to thrive after football. Indeed, Koonce and Oriard offer exemplary lessons in avoiding “institutionalization,” even though they're studies in contrast. It's easy to peg Oriard as the white, cerebral offensive lineman, while Koonce is the black, athletic middle linebacker. It's tempting to conclude that Oriard's social background alone predicted life successes that Koonce likely wouldn't achieve. Probabilistically, that's the case. The range of choices available to them were definitely conditioned by their socioeconomic, racial, and educational foundations, but each made crucial choices within his range of possibilities—choices that either opened or closed options.

Oriard grew up in a middle-class family, was an honor student at private schools, and had the luxury of being socially positioned to choose from a full slate of possibilities. His football dream led him to Notre Dame, but not on a football scholarship. What if he'd chosen another university, say, Miami or Michigan? Would those schools have embraced a walk-on who wanted to study physics and English lit? Being middle class or white doesn't necessarily mean one takes education seriously, or makes the most of one's opportunities. Remember Jim Harbaugh's experience at the University of Michigan. Nor does it insure prudent planning. Former first round draft choice Todd Marinovich planned his pursuit of the NFL down to the smallest detail. The son of a football coach, Marinovich had seemingly every social advantage. He made every choice of his young life (or had them made for him) with NFL success
in mind. His commitment was as “total” as one could imagine, but these choices left him floundering when football was done with him, with an unfortunate legacy of homelessness, drug abuse, and jail.
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Being poor or black, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily mean that one majors in “eligibility” or “sport and recreation.” It doesn't prescribe “livin' large.” Eugene Profit and Charles Nobles testify to this. George Koonce came from modest means, where school was an afterthought to many of his peers. But his parents wouldn't let him slack off, even when he sometimes lagged behind. When he couldn't qualify for a Division I football scholarship, Koonce did his time at a community college rather than quitting in despair, laying an academic as well as a football foundation. He got a degree in industrial technology and construction management—a field which dovetailed with past work experience, as well as with his future investment plans.

In a sense, Koonce and Oriard got onto paths running parallel alongside football. Perhaps it was a luxury for Oriard and more of a necessity for Koonce, but both actually had to work for their livings while trying to land positions in the NFL. Once there, Koonce had a far more productive and lucrative career, while Oriard just managed to get by. But Oriard also managed to complete most of his doctoral studies with his NFL income paying the bills. Koonce, on the other hand, had his bouts of minor excesses, but basically trod a conservative path through his playing years. He maintained ties with his alma mater. Keeping true to his roots, he bought rental properties and other real estate and preserved his financial solvency, even though he had some bad investments and terrible luck with injury and non-guaranteed NFL contracts. He didn't simply blow through his NFL money and end up broke at the end of the line.

Given the chance and the choice, both Koonce and Oriard cultivated varied opportunities rather than immersing themselves totally in football. To invoke a useful cliché, both chose to keep other irons in the fire while pursuing their NFL dreams. “Educate and prepare,” said Hakeem Chapman. “Change the focus from your game to your job. . . . You have everything you need, just refocus it.” Oriard and Koonce got the message.
Neither was totally “institutionalized” or completely swallowed up by the NFL and its culture. The NFL player ethos didn't rule their lives with an iron hand. It wasn't mediocrity that insured their futures. It was diversification: their defiance of totalization.

Clearly, there's life after football, and for many former NFL players, it's full, rich, and rewarding. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Some of the post-career pitfalls we've seen leave us with grave reservations. Our qualms stem from seeing players close down options and make short-sighted or poorly informed choices among limited alternatives. The pertinent question, from our vantage point, is what might be done to enhance players' lives when they finish playing? Can they have
better
lives after football, where players and their families won't be overwhelmed by physical injury, financial woes, bleak job prospects, and social voids?

Certainly post-career plans, programs, and opportunities play a role, and the NFL and NFLPA have finally stepped up to take responsibility for helping players transition to the future. They're encouraging education, work training and experience, internships, media training, investment advice, financial management, and even “life coaching.” While there's still room for improvement, opportunities are there for the taking.

But there's even greater need for change within the NFL bubble and its prevailing culture. We've argued that one key to successfully transitioning out of the NFL is to resist the league's totalizing tendencies. That means being wary of going “all in,” even when that's the optimal strategy for succeeding in the game itself. In nearly all walks of life, when a person is “all in,” it's challenging to get out with any degree of success.

Prisons and the military are two well-know “totalizing” institutions. Even more than the NFL, they command all aspects of players' lives; their cultures are all encompassing. Reintegration problems for their “exes” are famously difficult, but they may be instructive. The prison literature, for example, stresses two major “reentry” challenges faced by those going back to the “real world.” First, “prisonization” is a
functional
adaptation to the institutional and cultural demands of “the inside,” but it inhibits success on the outside. Second, the more “prisonized” the individual, the more difficulty he or she has reentering normal society. Deeply socialized and enculturated, those who are “prisonized” have lost the tools to rejoin society. We aren't claiming that NFL players are fully “prisonized” and it would be unfair—and maladaptive—to ask them to reject unilaterally the demands of the NFL, its culture and ethos. But in light of recent developments, perhaps it's reasonable to suggest that the NFL culture better align itself with wider cultural values, mores, and practices.

We're not suggesting a wholesale abandonment of the NFL ethos, just a tempering of the violence, coarseness, hypermasculinity, and excess that dominates life in and around the NFL. A continued insistence, for example, on defying injury and emphasizing toughness borders on pathological. Bodies, if not lives, are severely endangered—as the recent concussion controversy demonstrates—in ways that are counterproductive for the game, its players, and its alumni. The crude vulgarity of locker room culture and its hypermasculine, homophobic atmosphere strikes most outsiders as outrageous. The compulsion to live large is hard for outsiders to comprehend. To the extent that the NFL can curb these excesses to bring locker room culture more in line with workplace cultures in the wider world, the better chance NFL players have to succeed in that wider world.

It may increase the NFL's chances of thriving as well. With today's concern about the league's antisocial images and culture of violence—where players themselves resist nearly all safety measures that might impugn their toughness or masculinity—there's a growing apprehension about football's future viability. While it appears to be a thriving financial enterprise, a recent NBC poll found that 40 percent of American parents would steer their kids away from playing football.
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Whereas this would have minimal impact in the immediate future, without the conveyor belt from peewee football, to high school, to colleges, the player supply chain might eventually dry up.

In 2014, the NFL finds itself under scrutiny on myriad fronts. The concussion controversy, the Richie Incognito debacle, and the addition of its first openly gay player, however, present opportunities to reconfigure some cultural components in ways that might keep players from becoming so culturally isolated in the bubble that they can't function outside. It's a chance for the league itself to check its totalizing tendencies, allowing players to exercise discretion and responsibility in ways that will help them better prepare for life after football. Fifteen-yard penalties for on-field racial slurs aren't the answer.