The NFL is a league of tough guys, a league of hard-bitten men who think nothing of playing in pain that would keep most of us in bed for a month.
We think of football players, we think of Jack Youngblood playing a Super Bowl on a broken leg, and Ronnie Lott having his pinkie voluntarily amputated, and Chuck Bednarik shaking his fist over the prone body of Frank Gifford, knocking Gifford out of the sport for a year … and we also think of Gifford actually coming back from that hit, playing three more seasons.
We think of Vince Lombardi coaxing a Packer to play on a leg fracture because the affected area “isn’t a weight-bearing bone.” We think of Bill Parcells playing mind games to lure injured players out of the hot tub and onto the field because “you’re of no use to us in there.” We see three roughing-the-passer penalties every week that make us all pine for the good old days when men were men and hitting the quarterback was the point of the whole thing.
Tough league. Populated by tough guys.
“That’s the problem, in a way. You’re expected to ‘man up’ and play through everything, and, look: if you play football, you understand that part of the deal is that every day you play, from junior high to your last game in the NFL, something is going to hurt. That’s the easy part. Other stuff … isn’t … so easy.”
Speaking is a longtime football player. He played big-time college football, played for more than a decade in the NFL, had a fine career for three teams. He loved every part of his football experience except one:
“I was always a big guy, and people thought I could take anything,” he said. “So I got — whatever you want to call it. Hazed. Harassed. Picked on. I’ve played through strains and sprains and once even a hairline fracture in my neck. None of that compared to what I went through taking a hard time.”
In college, it was upperclassmen, and they made his freshman year hell. And because he was “young and dumb,” he said, the moment he was a sophomore he became “as big an ass to the freshmen as anyone had ever been to me. I guess it was my way of striking back. But I hated it. I felt awful about it. Later, I apologized for it. One of the freshmen told me, ‘If I had it in me to kill a man, I’d have killed you.’”
By the time he got to the NFL, it happened again, all through his rookie year. And some of it was vile. He was white — as were his most vicious tormentors — so there was no racial angle to exploit.
“But everything else,” he said “was fair game.”
And it reached a nadir when one of his linemates — “It’s crazy to compare football to war, but there are trenches, man, and you do feel close to these guys” — offered to take him to a strip joint and buy him a couple of lap dances, his version of an olive branch. He was freshly engaged, and never much attracted to those kinds of clubs anyway. He said no.
“And for three straight months,” he said, “it was day after day of homophobic slurs. And worse. Much worse. I had friends who told me, ‘Just kick his ass and make it stop.’ But that’s not who I am. And fighting him wouldn’t give me any satisfaction. I just wanted it to stop.”
One day, it stopped. And that was that. Years later, his tormentor found Jesus and asked forgiveness, and he gave it to him. And the past few days he has read the stories about whatever occurred between Dolphins linemates Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin, and he felt chills tingling his spine.
“You never know details unless you’re there,” he said. “And you never know what’s in someone’s heart. But if these stories are true … I understand why people say he should’ve just decked him and ended it. But I also know: Sometimes, that’s just not an option.”
For now, one player is suspended and another is trying to figure things out, and we have a peek into how primal the locker-room culture still is. Part of that, as always, is boys will be boys. Until it’s not. Until it’s uglier than that. Until all you want is for it to stop.
And sometimes, it just doesn’t stop.