I just finished a pretty good book about life in the NFL by a middle-of-the-pack player who lasted six seasons. Check out these lines from Slow Getting Up by Nate Jackson: “Meetings, meetings, and a few more meetings: Watching film and going over plays on the night before the game always strikes me as pointless. If we don’t know it now, we’re not going to know it. But it’s a video league. We are two-dimensional beings. Football has been subverted into a made-for-television event. Everything is so clear. Except it’s not. The third dimension is what makes it real, violent, and dangerous. Consuming the product through a television screen, at a safe distance, dehumanizes the athlete and makes his pain unreal. The more you watch it, the less real it becomes, until the players are nothing more than pixelated video game characters to be bartered and traded.” “Professional athletes are attracted to strip clubs. This is well documented. But it’s not because athletes are rich, horny animals who gain pleasure in objectifying women. It’s because both strippers and professional athletes stand on the fringes of a society that judges them for their profession, based solely on stereotypes. These stereotypes are nearly impenetrable. Both stripper and athlete stand alone behind them, and often find solace with those who know what it’s like to be there. Also men like boobs.” “Players grunt, coaches yell, and pads and helmets crack, creating a frightening symphony of future early-onset dementia.” “. . . we are stuck in a purgatory of sorts: too far ahead of the journey we can’t appreciate, too far behind the glory we can’t catch.” “I go back for another PRP injection and lie on my face as one more needle pushes down into my soul. I start the maddening rehab process once again, lying around the training room and trying to figure out why it happened. Was it the Toradol shots? All the anti-inflammatories and painkillers? My diet? Was it the creatine? Poor treatments of my chronic hamstring injury? Poor healthcare in general? The steroid injection in the ischial tuberosity three years earlier? Was it the hamstring overcompensating for a weak groin? My weight gain? A weak core? Fatigue? Was it my mind? Fate? God? No. None of it. It is football. I play football for a living.”
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:56:11 +0000
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