Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (20 page)

It’s here in the sea of friends and family that the humanity of my teammates is most apparent. A football team is thrown together from all corners of the country. Men are notified that they’ll be joining some far-off team and then they go alone. They make their way alone. They do it by themselves, and in the process their individuality suffers. Their sense of self is lost. They become what they are expected to be—part of a unit. Yet for these fifteen minutes, after every home game, the true personality of each man can emerge, because here it’s safe. I wasn’t born on the fifty-yard line with a football in my hand. Neither were they. I’m not alone. We all are.

F
rom the bowels of the stadium we walk back up the long ramp to the players’ parking lot, passing the fans who line the steel blockades. There are five or ten faces on each NFL team that are known nationally. The big names get marketed heavily. The rest of us are nameless and faceless. But in Denver, the fans know all of us. As we walk past them after the game, they ask us by name to sign autographs.

Up close and personal with Denver’s fans, it’s no longer just me in my bubble of football solitude, teeth gnashing and clawing for some elusive gridiron glory. It’s bigger than that, and it’s right in front of my face: the smile of the eight-year-old girl as I sign her shirt. The look on the husband’s face as he takes a picture of me signing his wife’s chest, and the story he tells me about the fourteen-hour drive they’ve made for every home game for the last twenty-three years. The kid who produces a picture of me and him, a picture I don’t even remember posing for, and now I’m signing it. There’s a genuine happiness spread across their faces as they meet their meaty unicorns. For a moment I can feel the horn in my forehead.

W
e leave the stadium and head south on I-25, back to the ’burbs for some very average Mexican food. Afterward, we go home and I tuck my family into bed. Win or lose, Sunday night’s for partying. I need a release. I’m going to Spill.

Spill is in downtown Denver, a few miles from the stadium, made rich and famous by the athletes who get hammered there. It sits on the corner of Market and Fourteenth: a loud, narrow bar with brick walls and high ceilings. Flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls play videos that are pumped through the speaker system. The bartenders are friendly and pour ’em stiff and tall. The girls are plentiful and eager to please. Downtown is alive.

Every major professional sports team in Denver plays downtown. The Rockies play at Coors Field on Twentieth and Market, in the heart of Lower Downtown, or LoDo. The Nuggets and the Avalanche play at the Pepsi Center on Fourteenth and Auraria Parkway, steps from Spill. And we play a few miles away on the other side of I-25. This type of proximal action makes downtown Denver a happy destination. It doesn’t matter, your preference. You’ll find somewhere that suits you.

College drunks drink Coors Lite out of plastic cups in LoDo. Hipsters drink whiskey on Colfax and Broadway. Socialites stay south of LoDo near Spill in the three-block radius between Fourteenth and Seventeenth streets and between Blake and Wazee, drinking vodka and colorful shots. There are endless bars and restaurants, and endless girls with endless appetites for everything except food. To the unknowing, Denver seems to be a harmless, slightly boring mountain town in the middle of nowhere. Naw, son. Denver’s a party town. Lucky me.

10

Watermelon Seeds

(2007–2008)

O
kay, guys, have a seat. Listen, fellas. They’re not doing anything we weren’t expecting. Okay? It’s pretty straightforward stuff. But you guys see how much they’re overpursuing our keepers, right? We’re going to go with our throwback keeper in the first series. Eddie, you good with that?

—Yeah.

I’m standing next to rookie wide receiver Eddie Royal on the north end of the locker room while Dinger holds court at the whiteboard. It’s halftime. We are playing the Chargers in week five, a few weeks after my touchdown. I got my first start today.

But the start only sounds pretty on paper. Our opening play was a two-tight-end set. And Tony’s still hurt. One play, then I was back off the field again and waiting. My main job is still special teams.

We kicked off on one of the last plays of the first half. At the end of the play, their special teams ace Kassim Osgood clipped me on the shoulder. I fell forward onto my knees, which were splayed wide. When I hit the ground I felt a tiny click in my left groin.

—Get yourselves warmed back up when you get back on the field. It’s getting chilly out there. You don’t want to get tight!

Scotty O is offering a bit of advice to which I’m not listening. I’m already warmed up. I feel great.

Last night after meetings I lined up for the needle again: 60 milligrams of Toradol, a powerful anti-inflammatory and painkiller. Ten or fifteen of us rely on it every game, physically and mentally. We live in pain during the week. We want to feel good on game day, and adrenaline isn’t enough anymore.

I jog out of the tunnel, drink some sideline Gatorade, and line up for the second-half kickoff. The ball pops off the tee and all ten of us tear down the field. Twenty yards into my straight-line sprint, a sniper somewhere in the cheap seats pops one off and hits me square in the left groin, tearing the muscle off the bone with a yank that rattles off the iron of heaven’s gate.
Thwap!

(I’ve been electrocuted once. When I was a kid there was a Coke machine in the locker room at swim practice that was busted open and the wires were hanging out. One of the kids said that if you touch that red one to that blue one, something happens. No one would do it. I was soaking wet; armor, I thought. I touched them together:
thwap!
Frozen to a tuning fork of lightning bolts.)

The pop splays my left leg off to the side. I reach for my groin and hop on one foot. Total malfunction but I’m still on the field in the middle of the play. And I still have a job to do. The returner breaks a tackle and runs through the wedge, coming right at me. I have to make this tackle regardless. There are things on the line, after all: pride, glory, other stuff. Hopping along like that on the fifty-yard line, some things get put in perspective. One, Scotty O was right: I should have warmed back up. Two, I’m fucked. Three, somebody please tackle this man.

Just then a teammate trips him up and he comes to rest five yards in front of me. I turn and limp to the sideline, get dizzy, and almost faint as I reach the chalk. My vision blurs, tunnels, then steadies as Greek appears.

—What happened?

—Something popped.

—Where?

—Here.

I point to my groin.

—Okay, give it a minute and see how it feels.

—All right.

I turn and walk away gingerly. I’m done for.

I spend the rest of the game on the sideline with an ice bag stuck down my crotch. After the game I go home with instructions to return first thing in the morning. A pulled groin, they think. No biggie. My sister Carol and brother-in-law Jeff are in town for the game. We go out to dinner, a Brazilian meat-on-a-stick restaurant downtown called Rioja. I limp and hop between tables and chairs. People look at me strangely. I am also meat-on-a-stick.

The next morning I continue the limp and the hop into the facility. My inner thigh and pubic region is very swollen. I’m walking timidly, slowly, straight-leggedly. It’s ice and stim, right away. The stim, or “stimulation,” uses electrical charges that pulse through two positive and two negative wire lines, like jumper cables, and are fixed to conductive pads and stuck on the skin, forming a picture frame around the injured area. The machine is turned on and the current surges diagonally through the meat, stimulating the healing process. The muscle jumps as the dial is adjusted and the electricity flows.

On top of the electrical pads, a bag of ice is fixed: formfitting and expertly tied. There is an art to tying a bag of ice. All of the air must be sucked out of the bag and the bag twisted and tied. And it can’t be ice cubes. They don’t conform to the contours of the skin. It needs to be ice pebbles, ice chips, ice dust, which will wrap around the injured area and freeze the muscle into a submissive postinjury state that will stop the swelling by slowing the blood flow, and, stay with me here, speed up the healing process.

The combination of an electric surge pulsing through the body, intended to stimulate blood flow, and an all-encompassing ice bag, intended to slow down that flow, might seem contradictory to someone in a position to consider it. But I am not in that position.

What’s that, Nate? You want to rest it? Wait until it feels better before you start working it? Ha! You don’t know anything about the human body. We have to speed up the healing process! Your body’s natural reaction to the injury is incorrect. We can’t trust it. We need to manipulate the body’s natural healing process—shock it, change its temperature, strain it to the point of exhaustion, stretch it to the point of snapping, blast it with powerful anti-inflammatories and painkillers, then shock/temperature change again, strain/stretch again, pills again, and repeat. That’s how you heal the human body, Nate. Make sense?

A
nother ice and stim treatment and then I drive to get an MRI. After filling out paperwork and wondering why I have to fill out paperwork, a nurse leads me into a back room, where I remove all metal from my pockets. Then she takes me into a large, all-white room and points to what looks like an alien pod. I kick off my slippers and maneuver slowly onto a plank. She ties my feet together and gives me headphones.

—Did you bring a CD to listen to?

No, I did not. The radio will have to do. She says goodbye as if I’m going on a deep-sea voyage and she leaves the room. She presses a button and the plank slides me into a magnetic cocoon. Her music preference query is a cute way of diverting my attention from the fact that I’ll spend the next forty minutes in hell, as the hammers of Satan pound my skull into dust. Spiraled shock waves thunder down from Euclidean storm clouds, recording the fleshy echoes of my heartbeat. Bang after solitary bang: quicker, then slower, now faster than ever, now faster again. Finally, mercifully, the machine clicks off. I shudder as she rolls me out into the light.

—That wasn’t so bad, was it?

I come back to the facility and roll on the training table for more ice and stim. The training room has a sterilized hospital smell to it: salves and creams and freshly laundered towels and cleaning supplies. I hate it, just because I know what smelling it means. I’m injured again.

Training tables in two rows line the back of the room and up front are the taping tables and a long counter with all the tools of the trade for trainers: tapes, goops, bandages, scissors, meds, rubber gloves, adhesive pads, X-Acto knives, nail clippers; you name it. The locker room is on the other side of the wall with the counter.

I lie on the table in the back corner sulking with an ice pack wedged in my taint, electrodes diagonally pumping through my testicles; electric chair for my spermatozoa, waiting for our team doctor to arrive and assess the situation. Once the MRI results are received, the doctor meets with the athletic trainer. They discuss the findings, come up with a course of treatment, then they brief the head coach. Once everyone is on the same page, they tell me. Make sense?

MRI findings:

High-grade complete tear and stripping of proximal left adductor longus and brevis, with distal retraction and about 5cm tear defect gap with intervening edema and hemorrhage. Strain of the adjacent pectineus and obturator externus and gracilis muscles and attachments.

Moderate proximal hamstring tendinosis and/or strain and scarring are seen, with longitudinal thinning and possible tearing of the proximal deep margins at the ischial tuberosity attachments bilaterally.

Dr. Schlegel, Boublik’s partner, walks out of Greek’s office and comes to my table with an excellent poker face.

—What’s the word, Doc?

—Well, there are three muscles in the groin that come up and attach to the pelvis. The MRI showed that you tore two of them off the bone: the longus and the brevis. There’s a five-centimeter retraction on those muscles, meaning they tore away and retracted from the bone by five centimeters. That’s a significant retraction, but there is still one muscle intact and there are some fibers from the torn muscles that are connected to the pelvis, along with the intact muscle. In light of all that, we feel that we’ll be able to avoid surgery.

—Okay.

—But this is a significant injury, Nate. We’re going to give it a few days to let the swelling go down, and reassess. But we think we’re going to send you to Vail for a procedure that we’ve had a lot of success with lately. Greek will tell you more about it, but it’s an injection that uses your own blood to help speed up the healing process. It’s called a platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, injection. It has proven to be a very effective treatment, especially with athletes. But this is at least an eight-to-ten-week recovery.

—All right. Thanks, Doc.

—No problem. And get some rest.

Doc Schlegel leaves and I don’t. Greek comes out and asks me if I have any questions about what Dr. Schlegel has told me.

—No, not really. He said I might be going to Vail. And he said I’m done for two or three months. And he said to get some rest.

—Yep, exactly. Now let’s get another round of ice and stim going.

Eight to ten weeks puts me into December. NFL teams have fifty-three active players. Coaches want all fifty-three men helping the team win: practicing, sitting in meetings, playing in games. If someone gets hurt, they have to decide how to handle it. Do we keep him on the roster and hope he gets better in time to play at the end of the season? Or do we put him on the injured reserve list, and call it a year? This frees up a roster spot and someone healthy can be signed and start practicing immediately. But injured reserve is a death sentence. Once you’re on the list, your season is over.

The next morning I come into the training room on crutches with a watermelon cock. The swelling has overtaken my genitalia, mushing it into the opposite corner of my crotch. Black-and-blue ribbons curl up and down my inner thigh. A mile’s worth of chains are wrapped around my pelvis, intertwined, cinched tight and locked. I am worthless. The medical staff reaches the same conclusion: no point rushing this injury back on the field. Greek tells me I am going on injured reserve. My season is over.

W
hat do you call a football player who’s not playing football? You don’t.

On Wednesday morning we watch special teams film and I see my injury on the big screen. There I am running down the field. But it doesn’t feel like I’m watching me. I’m watching someone else: something else. I’m watching a video game. When the video game player hitches and starts hopping, I think, what the fuck is wrong with that guy? Fucking run! Run, you idiot!

I crutch in and out of a few meetings that day but soon realize there’s no reason to be there. I’m not going to play; no need preparing like it. Besides, a cripple hobbling in and out of meetings every day is not a welcome sight for those trying to focus on the task at hand. A cripple makes them confront the obvious: you’re one play away from ending up like me. NFL football players must believe they’re invincible or they’ll get trampled on the field.

As I lie incapacitated on the back table on Wednesday, one by one my coaches come to pay their final respects. They tell me to hang in there; work hard on my rehab and I’ll be as good as new. They use hushed voices and somber tones. They wear grave looks on their faces. This is my eulogy. They are moving on in order to save themselves. They have no choice. I’m dead until April.

T
he limp and the hop; perfected in silent corridors, echoing off the tiles of an empty shower room. The watermelon ripens in the corner of my manhood. After four or five days, the swelling has gone down enough to go to Vail for the PRP injection. In the middle of the week, Sara flies to town and drives us up into the mountains while I squirm in my seat like a thing unhinged.

The procedure is set for the morning. We go up the night before and check into the Sonnenalp resort, dimed by the Broncos. It is just down the street from the highly esteemed Steadman-Hawkins Clinic, in the heart of beautiful Vail. It is a great place to convalesce. I haven’t seen Sara for a while. And it’s nice to get out of my house in Denver. The room at the Sonnenalp is nice, too. It has a mountain lodge feel: spacious and cozy. We have a fireplace and a big bathtub and despite my disability, I am determined to take advantage of the accommodations.

As I lie on the bed, and as she scuttles around me rearranging things, I grab her and pull her on top of me. I kiss her and reach between her legs. She protests the advance, if not simply to spare me the embarrassment. But I persist. She stirs passions in me that even a watermelon cannot deflate. She is the most beautiful creature I know. And my subconscious knowledge that we won’t last makes certain I’ll appreciate her while we do.

Delicately we remove our clothing. She maneuvers herself on top of me, flinching only slightly when she sees the rotten fruit. But her touch sparks a miraculous blood flow. In defiance of the forces that oppose it, my valiant soldier rises to salute his muse. In appreciation of the gesture, she gently accepts.

Slowly we squirm, but I am wilting. I remind myself of the objective—coming—and try to clear my head. The misery of life’s worst moments, deepest pains, and saddest bedridden days of depression are no match for an orgasm. But the body on body, the thrust and the cushion, the sensual bumping and pressing that accounts for the real action of love, is nearly impossible.