Is There Life After Football? (16 page)

But sometimes the temporary hiatus grows from a “break” into a lifestyle. For some, this is financially feasible, for others it's an invitation to disaster. Brandon Gold played nine years for three teams in the NFL, appeared in two Super Bowls, and made it to the Pro Bowl once as a special teams player. His was a solid, if not spectacular career. He was in the comfortable middle of the NFL financial pack. Age and injury cost him his blazing speed, and his career ended more with a whimper than a bang:

I finished in 2003. I stayed at home. I read the Bible. I read a lot of spiritual books. I had some money in the bank, so it enabled me to just relax a little bit and try to figure out what to do . . . and then I bought a house. It appreciated like crazy, because it was before the economic meltdown, so that enabled me to live a couple of years almost making what I was making in the NFL. . . . It bought me more time. And then, when I saw the realty market, [my family and friends] explained to me that the real estate market was crashing. I sold my house, so it enabled me not to go bankrupt, but I still don't know what I want to do.
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Gold had financial resources, good advisors, family support, but only vague aspirations. He didn't do much with his first years out of football. He was bogged down, in a quagmire. He stayed in top physical shape, even if he knew he would never play again, but he didn't get seriously involved in anything else. He didn't have a “real” job for years. In a sense, Gold's inertia might be traced back to the NFL dream he described in
Chapter 1
.

I wanted to be an NFL player. . . . I played nine years, and then when it was really over, I had no idea what to do, because that is what I wanted to
do my whole life. All of my dreams were I wanted to go to the Pro Bowl. I wanted to go to the Super Bowl. But then all of a sudden one day, I realized that was awesome, but now you have to live another whole life. I kind of felt like I had to become a completely new life, because that life [football] is over, not in a bad way, but you did it, and now what happens?
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Gold may seem aimless, but he's far from debilitated. He leads a life many would envy. He's worked as a personal trainer at a fitness center. He's coached high school football. He's spent a lot of time on the beach in the Caribbean. If he's drifting without the laserlike focus of his football days, the NFL dream doesn't
haunt
him. But he has retreated from the world in which he once was a commanding force. He's lost his goals, and there's no powerful ethos to hold him accountable. After 20 years under the spell of football, Gold wonders where to turn and what to do. Like so many others, with his dream in the rearview mirror, Gold no longer has a destination.

It's easy to focus on the travails players face when football's over, but we shouldn't overlook success stories. Many players navigate the end of their careers without a hitch. There are countless attorneys (e.g., Brad Culpepper, Kellen Winslow, Larry Williams) and several MDs (e.g., Steven Brooks, Patrick O'Neill, James Kovach [who also has a law degree]) among NFL alumni, who moved more or less seamlessly from one career to another. Others hitched small businesses to the NFL wagon and successfully rode their notoriety immediately from one venue to another. As one ex-player noted, “A lot of guys got their shit together right away.”
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But why do some drift while others move forward? Sports sociologist Jay Coakley suggests that retirement for elite athletes is not an inevitable source of stress or trouble. He outlines social structural factors that variably influence the transition out of sport.
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As previously noted, Coakley suggests that players deeply entrenched in the bubble—those with limited real world experience and few outside associates—may have
trouble dealing with retirement. Coakley also suggests that the likelihood of retirement problems increases for athletes who don't cultivate alternatives in their lives. The unique circumstances of NFL players and their “greedy” institution heightens this challenge.
⁵⁵

Of course, many players actually capitalize on their unique NFL backgrounds to propel them toward post-football goals. For some, it's just a matter of jump-starting their lives: “The first month or two when you're not working is OK. After that . . . ‘Man I gotta do something, I'm bored. Sitting around the house watching
SportsCenter
gets old.'”
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So what did this former Carolina Panthers linebacker do? He got off the couch and went to dental school. The intelligence and initiative that made him an NFL stalwart translated well into his next professional enterprise. Another former player recalls how he got his life rolling: “I said . . . I'm not comfortable with the couch, so let me go see what Plan B is. I've got a degree. What do I want to do? . . . I got a guy that's in my close circle that owns a mortgage company, and I went to work for him. I got my license and all that stuff.” Within two weeks, he was on the job.
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Some argue that players from the “old school” were more apt to get on with their lives immediately because they didn't have enough money to sit back and take stock. It's likely that financial necessity was a more significant motivator “back in the day,” but it's probably simplistic to say that old-timers simply got on with their lives out of financial necessity. Many had plans and purpose. Consider the path taken by James Sutton, an All-Pro defensive back from the 1970s:

Football wasn't going to last forever, and I made a point to graduate from college. I got a degree in education, so I knew I could always teach. I always said a person without a goal is a person without a vision, but in sports, you always have to have something to fall back on, because I think it is like one out of every 450,000 high school football players are going to make it into the pros. . . . Well the transition wasn't that hard because during the off season, I taught school. . . . I was what they called a long-term sub. . . . I did that for 17 years. . . . I was not teaching school for the money.
Because they are the lowest paid salary jobs that have the most influence on a kid. . . . They can mold, shape, and develop kids in any shape, fashion, or form, so I enjoyed teaching. I had a calling all my life to work with kids, and so it was one of the ways that I could actually give back, and make a little money. . . . It was a transition that wasn't that hard. It felt strange the first year until I hit myself in the head and said, “Hey you are no longer a football player. Let it go. It's time to move on.”
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Was George Koonce right when he said there was no perfect exit? An occasional player disagrees. When asked why he retired at age 29, while seemingly on top of his game, legendary running back Jim Brown replied:

Football is one part of your life. After nine years, I wanted to do other things. I had prepared myself. I graduated from Syracuse University in four years. I went to the service as an ROTC second lieutenant. I worked for Pepsi Cola for nine years when I played and I knew I wanted to go into a high-profile profession, so I got into movies. So, it was not hard at all for me to leave at 29 years old, MVP of the league, and the last two years of my career we played for the championship. Now, why would I stay there and keep getting hit when I could be with Raquel Welch, Stella Sevens, and Jacqueline Bisset?
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Brown's story, however, is an exception to the rule. There's a long list of players who return to the game after leaving or being forced out. Brett Favre, Junior Seau, and Reggie White come immediately to mind. Their struggles to hang on underscore the extent to which players don't want to be evicted from the bubble. They're desperate to leave on their own terms, even if they embarrass themselves in the process. Brett Favre's ongoing retirement soap opera—with repeated retirement announcements, coy courtships with new teams, and triumphant returns—shows a man trying to postpone the inevitable while working fervently to leave
when, where, and how he wanted. It's as if Favre was trying to simultaneously “retire” while he was still livin' large from the seat of his tractor in Kiln, Mississippi, continuing to be larger than life, even as NFL life slipped away.

Some players are more graceful as they exit the stage. Donald Driver, longtime Packers favorite and teammate of Favre's, retired after the 2012 season. The team held a dignified and moving press conference which turned into a national media event. Driver was widely praised for both his sterling career and his poised exit. In June 2013, Driver hosted his annual charity fund-raising softball game. Over 9,000 people—the equivalent of nearly half the population of the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin, where the event was held—cheered Driver for 25 minutes as a Green Bay street was named after him. The mutual love and respect was moving. And yet, that very afternoon, Driver, perhaps unwittingly, hinted at a lingering pipe dream. “I'd be in shape,” he ventured. “At the end of the day, if they called, I'd be willing to play. If not, I'm done.” Was Driver channeling Brett Favre? The perfect exit, it seems, still had an escape hatch.
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Retired NFL Players Endure a Lifetime of Hurt

—Washington Post
¹

No aspect of players' football lives is more debilitating, controversial, or paradoxical than injuries and their consequences. The media strike a frightening chorus: “The NFL is killing its players and the league doesn't care.”
²
“Most pro football players face a future of disability and pain.”
³
“Retired NFL players experience living hell.”
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At the same time, other sources proclaim—as
Sports Illustrated
put it—“NFL players, in general, live
longer
” than their American male peers, and there's evidence that they're in better health than their non-player counterparts in many respects.
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Even more strikingly, we read that “former NFL players . . . are overwhelmingly happy they played in the league, including more than 85 percent of players who suffered at least five major NFL injuries.”
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Player after player culminates his story of NFL mayhem with the same surprising refrain: “I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat!”
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In recent years, the NFL has undertaken massive rule changes to curb violent hits and combat disabling injury, yet players overwhelmingly say the league is going too far.
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“I understand that they want the sport to be safer,” laments All-Pro safety Troy Polamalu. “But eventually you're going to start to take away from the essence of this game and it's not really going to be the football that we all love.”
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In spite of all they know about the prospects of disabling injury, players say they don't want to be protected. It's a tough man's game, and they want it that way.

No doubt, football is violent and dangerous; that's part of its appeal. But it's also part of the enduring mark it leaves on players. NFL Sundays—but also practices and workouts—clearly jeopardize players' health. There
were more than 30,000 injuries in the NFL from 2002 through 2011, including nearly 4,500 in 2011 alone.
¹⁰
That's more than two per active player. While some of these are fleeting, and recovery is complete, there's hardly a player who leaves the game without painful reminders of his violent past. Ninety-three percent of former players missed at least one game due to a major injury, and over half report suffering three or more
major
injuries during their NFL careers. Eighty-six percent report that they underwent orthopedic surgery as a result of a football injury.
¹¹
A substantial majority of ex-players said that injury played some role in ending their careers.
¹²

If the surgical scars aren't reminder enough, nine out of ten former players wake up each day to nagging aches and pains that they attribute to football. About eight in ten report that the pain lasts most of the day. Among younger retirees aged 30 to 49, one third say their work lives are limited in some way by the aftereffects of injury. Retired players are much less likely than their age peers in the general population to rate their health as excellent or good, and nearly 30 percent of NFL retirees rate their health as only “fair” or “poor.”
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Even though mortality rates among former players are lower than the general population, in many other respects, it's a grim picture. Many former NFL players are damaged goods.

In August 2013, the NFL reached an out-of-court settlement with over 4,500 former NFL players who sought damages stemming from disabilities brought on by head injuries suffered while playing in the league. The players alleged that the NFL had willfully concealed information, circulated significant misinformation, and obstructed research indicating that players put themselves at severe risk of chronic brain disease by playing pro football. The NFL agreed to pay up to $765 million to fund medical exams, concussion-related disability compensation, and a program of medical research into brain injuries. Payouts would extend over 20 years, with 50 percent coming in the first three. The agreement
explicitly states that the settlement in no way represents an admission by the NFL of liability or a concession that the plaintiffs' injuries were caused by football.

The settlement actually extends beyond those players who filed suit, and covers all 18,000 of the league's retired players, quadrupling the number eligible to receive compensation. Players can opt out of the settlement, thus declining compensation but retaining their right to pursue further legal action. All retired players or their families are eligible for compensation if they can show severe cognitive injury or impairment related to NFL football, but players who died before 2006 (and their families) will be excluded from benefits. The settlement caps payments at $3 million per individual for dementia, $4 million for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and $5 million for Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, or another severe cognitive impairment. At the time of the provisional settlement, there appeared to be at least 300 cases of former players who would qualify in the highest compensation categories.
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