Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (17 page)

It’s a fun event, but what pushes it from “fun” to “no way I’m missing it” is the driver assigned to each player’s golf cart. It’s a Broncos cheerleader. This is a quality perk for the paying customers as well, as they are often pervy men who fancy themselves, in the right setting, able to properly love a beautiful young cheerleader, if only things had gone a little differently.

For me it’s a chance to have an actual conversation with a dancing figment of my imagination, a princess of my football dreams, a temptress in chaps, a goddess of the gridiron. I never knew which cheerleader it would be. It didn’t matter. They are all perfect.

O
ur final minicamp of the summer is in early July. By now the rookies have started to figure out the offense. Practices are crisp. Coach has us practicing on two separate fields simultaneously. One field is for the first- and second-team players. The other is for the rookies and the guys stuck farther down on the depth chart. Both fields run the same plays off the same script, and when we watch the film, we watch the starters’ field. The rookies have to stay later or come earlier so they can watch their practice on tape. I’m on the starters’ field and I’m getting lots of reps. Tony is nursing a broken bone in the outside of his foot: a common injury in football. We run a lot of two-tight-end sets. It’s called our “Tiger” group. When you have fast, athletic tight ends on the field it puts the defense in a bind. If they decide to cover us with linebackers and safeties it makes them vulnerable in the passing game. If they put nickel corners on us it makes them vulnerable in the run game.

I’m working in the first group with Daniel Graham (D.G.), our new free-agent acquisition from New England. When Daniel got to town the first thing he asked me was if I would be willing to part ways with 89. He had been 89 his whole career and was hoping to keep it that way. I didn’t care much for 89. It was the only one available when I switched to tight end. And since then, a few new numbers had opened up. I was happy to give up 89, but as is customary in the league, it would come at a price. I put on my hardball negotiating face and gave him my first demand: thirty thousand dollars.

He laughed in my face. “Fifteen. That’s it.” Fifteen is industry standard.

I laughed back. “No deal.” I walked away knowing I had him right where I wanted him. When he didn’t run over immediately and cave, I approached him with a new offer.

—Okay, fine. You wanna play hardball? Twenty-five.

—No, Nate. Fifteen.

Cool as can be.

—You’re not moving off that number?

—Nope.

—Well neither am I. No deal.

I walked away again and we didn’t speak the rest of the day. The next day I walked up to him in the weight room.

—Okay, buddy. You drive a hard bargain. Twenty. Otherwise no deal.

—Fine. No deal.

I waited ten minutes for him to realize his blunder then I approached him again.

—Seventeen-five.

—Nope.

—Sixteen-five.

—Nope.

—Sixteen.

—Nope.

—Fine. Fifteen it is.

We shook hands and the deal was done. It was strange at first watching film after practice because my eyes instinctively went to my number, 89. But by this last minicamp of the summer, my eyes have adjusted. I’m 81 now. And I like it.

8

Farewell, Bronco Betty

(2007)

T
he short break goes by in a blink. First I fly to Vegas and spend a few days with my new girlfriend, Sara. She lives there. A friend introduced us on one of our mancations in June. It was lust at first sight. We’ve been flying to see each other every chance we get. But Las Vegas takes on a different hue when you’re hanging out in the suburbs, filling up gas tanks and walking the dogs. For a partying tourist, the Strip is a wonderland. But it has a runoff. Driving through desert tract-home neighborhoods with rocks for front lawns and cacti for shrubs and tumbleweeds blowing through childless streets, the city reveals itself. People voluntarily come to Vegas to live a sequin fantasy: dollar signs shooting off like fireworks in the night sky. But the sun rises and illuminates the lie. The vampires scatter like roaches into soon-to-be foreclosed tract homes and shut the blackout shades. Life is but a dream.

After Vegas I go to New York to meet Charlie and Kyle. We are on a whirlwind partying circuit, spending our money as fast as we can, chasing a ghost that is pulling away from us. But we won’t go down easy.

In late July, Kyle and I go back to Denver and Charlie goes back to Houston. Training camp starts and it’s here-we-go-again. But the locker room feels different without Jake. His presence had been a part of my daily life. We had lots of talks over the years: about life, football, music, idealism, power, control, authority. That he had found success as an NFL quarterback made me believe that there was room for an iconoclast in the cloistered institution of big football. It had made me believe that a free mind could flourish in the confines of structure and rigmarole. When things fell apart between him and Mike, another piece of my idealism went with it.

But the good/bad thing about football is that it moves too quickly for your conscientious objections to keep pace. It pulls you along by sheer force. No sooner have I made peace with his absence than I’m back fighting to keep my job. I feel as healthy as I have in a while and, more important, I finally feel comfortable as a tight end. The hell I endured as fledgling blocker has given way to a polished attack that utilizes my strengths and camouflages my weaknesses. My missile-shot pop to the chin of the defensive end is refined to a laser beam. The firecracker explosion in my helmet is a familiar friend. The “Oh shit” moment is an “Oh well” moment. I’m comfortable in hell.

But less than a week into training camp, between practices, I receive word that Bill Walsh has died. I knew he was sick but I didn’t know the extent of it. It was leukemia that killed him, the same disease that had taken his forty-six-year-old son five years earlier. Bill had kept the severity of the worm to himself, not wanting to worry those who loved him. His death produces a powerful reaction in the football community.

I feel instant remorse. I haven’t spoken to him since I shook his hand in his office four years earlier and left for my new life in Denver. I never reached out to say thank you, to tell him what his influence had meant to me, the life that it granted me, the dream it fulfilled. I had plenty of chances to call him or write him and tell him how I felt. But for whatever reason, I didn’t. Whenever the thought came to my mind, I dismissed the idea, thinking that he probably didn’t want to be bothered, didn’t want people’s sympathy, didn’t want to be reminded that he was dying.

As I walk onto the field for afternoon practice, Coach pulls me aside and asks me if I have heard the news. I say I have. We stand in a silent recognition that only Mike and I can share. The three of us form a triangle inside of which my NFL life has taken shape. It was Mike who answered Bill’s call and agreed to bring me in for a look. I had been an extension of Mike’s appreciation for the roots of his own football philosophy, and aside from the two of us, no one knew much about my connection to Bill. I didn’t talk about it to anyone. It happened under cover of darkness. I had come to Denver alone. But Bill was always on my shoulder.

After practice the next morning, Mike asks me if I want to go to Bill’s funeral service at Stanford. I hadn’t thought about it. We’re in the throes of camp, but I can tell that Mike wants me to go. He can’t leave his football team in the middle of camp. Bill wouldn’t have approved. But he wants to send a representative contingent. The day of the service, Coach charters a private plane for John Lynch and me. John played for Bill at Stanford in 1992.

Instead of waking up and going to practice, I wake up and put on a suit and drive to Centennial Airport, a mile away from our facility. John and I board the plane and sit back for the two-hour flight. We are picked up in San Francisco by a car service that drives us straight to Stanford. We check in at a desk outside the church. It’s a beautiful sunny day. My suit hides my training camp welts and bruises and my blisters rub on my dress shoes as John and I find seats near the far left in an open pew. The service unfolds like a dream.

Dr. Harry Edwards, longtime 49ers consultant and iconic sports sociologist and a mountainous man with a baritone voice, takes the pulpit to eulogize his mentor and friend. Bill had known he was going to die so he prepared the service like a game plan. But he left the substance of the eulogy up to Dr. Edwards. I sit transfixed by the doctor, pulled into his words as he puts Bill’s legacy in the proper light. I knew Bill Walsh as a man who helped me though he did not have to, a man who cleared the path for me to chase my dreams. I knew him as the coach of my childhood street football games. I knew him as the reason I’m a professional football player, as the reason I believed I could be one in the first place.

I scan the room as Dr. Edwards speaks and I see the look on everyone’s faces. It’s the same look, all of us thinking the same thoughts about the man who changed our lives. There is Joe Montana. There is Jerry Rice. There is Steve Young. There is Eddie DeBartolo, 49ers owner. There is Ronnie Lott. There is everyone—all players, coaches, politicians, family, friends—hearts opened to Harry Edwards as he contextualizes Bill’s legacy. Bill Walsh was a football visionary. But he was much more. He was a social innovator in a sport that was bogged down in oppressive traditions.

He started the minority coaches internship program, which initiated the hiring of black coaches in a sport dominated by black men. And when he observed the real-world shortcomings of men who had been bred and groomed to play football, he tried to even the scales. He started the college reentry program, the postcareer occupational and preparational internship program, the financial counseling program, and the family and personal counseling program. He saw the need for an improvement in the life skills of his players and he acted on that knowledge because he loved them. He loved the athlete: not just his body, but also his mind. He wanted the athlete to flourish and achieve his true potential, in football and in life.

Dr. Edwards fights back tears and sums up the sentiment. Then one after another, a who’s-who of Bay Area football greats take the podium and try to put into words what can’t be: Montana, Young, DeBartolo, Senator Dianne Feinstein. The gratitude flows from pew to pew, reflects off the stained-glass windows and illuminates the photo of the Gray Fox that sits perched above a bouquet of white flowers next to the pulpit.

After the service, I stand alone outside while John talks to some old friends. I look around at all of the hardened football men I know from television, and they melt before my eyes into human beings. The 49ers of my youth stand in a cluster and embrace each other like only brothers can. This is what football can do. This is what it means. It’s not the yards or the touchdowns or the money or the fame: it’s this.

As I walk around the outskirts of the church I run into Doug Cosbie and Fred Guidici, two of my old Menlo coaches. Fred brought me to Menlo eight years earlier. Doug introduced me to Bill two years after that. Those Menlo years were special for all of us. I haven’t seen either of them in a while. Can’t remember the last time. Football is strange that way. When you’re on the same team, practicing, preparing for games, sitting in a meeting room, you’re as close as can be. You know everything about each other. But when you move on, you drift away. We all hug and share a few words about Bill. Then Doug asks me how camp is going, how I like being a tight end. I chuckle and he knows what I mean. He was an All-Pro tight end with the Cowboys. He knows all about it.

John and I ride in silence back to the airport, absorbed in our thoughts. A few hours later the airplane touches back down at Centennial Airport. We make the short drive back to the facility and are in our seats in time for our 7 p.m. team meeting. After the meeting I find Coach Shanahan. I thank him for the gesture. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to do any of it. He must have learned that from Bill.

—N
ate, come help me tie my tie, man. Just like yours. That knot is
clean
.

I got lucky with this knot, which has brought me Cecil Sapp’s admiration. I give his own my best shot but it ends up in a silk puddle under my Adam’s apple.

—Sorry, man. I can’t do it.

Someone else will help him. It’s Saturday morning of week one and we have a plane to catch. We are headed to Buffalo. I got back from Bill’s funeral and had one of my best camps as a pro. Compared to Brew’s House of Vitriol, Pat’s bugfuckerless meeting room is cordial and calm, allowing us to flourish on the field. Our position group is solid. We are playing well and we know our shit. We are all veterans and we all get along. Tight end has given me a new perspective on the game, and it’s made me a much smarter football player. As a receiver, I was always stuck out on an island. I learned to embrace the solitude. But we are landlocked as tight ends, in the thick of a pass-rushing, run-stuffing defense. And it’s turning me into a man.

But earlier this week, the day after our last preseason game, the reality of the business showed its fangs again. Once again I played in the last preseason game against Arizona, assuming I needed to play well to keep my job. And once again I sat envious as the starters were excused from meetings and told that they weren’t playing in the game the next night: they were safe. One of the safe guys was Kyle. He was our starting fullback. Had been for the last two seasons. Kyle stood on the sidelines in his sweats and his jersey with the rest of the starters and laughed while we grunted and popped our way through a meaningless game. I was proud of him. He deserved it, a security I had never known. But the next day he got a call from the facility and was cut. Even security wasn’t secure. No one was safe.

We finish our morning meetings and have an hour to put on our suits and get on the buses. With the knot secure and my hair in place, I walk out of the locker room, across the parking lot, through the weight room, and into the small indoor field it’s connected to. On the indoor turf stand Transportation Security Administration employees armed with wands who check us for box cutters, explosives, and liquid exceeding 3.5 ounces. After the terror test I walk out the back door to the parking lot containing five or six buses. I get on bus number 3 and open a breakfast sandwich I poached from the rookie DBs. The end of the week signals the beginning of a three-day junk food binge leading up to the game. I know there is no way I can ever overeat. I’ll still be under my target weight. After everyone is aboard, the buses rev up and follow our police escort through the streets of Dove Valley and onto C-470. The motorcycle cops attack their duties with gusto, darting across lanes of traffic, yelling and pointing at confused drivers, zigzagging with menacing throttles and speeding up ahead to clear all traffic to the shoulder. Move over! There’s a
football
team coming through.

Thirty minutes later we pull onto the tarmac at Denver International Airport, right next to the airplane. The wind blows through my heavily gelled hair, rustling the lapels on my oversized suit as I ascend the stairs of the airplane.

We always have the same rotation of flight attendants. They are the queen bees in the United flight attendant hive. And on this flight they don’t have to go through any of the standard preflight safety instruction mumbo-jumbo. Everyone knows God loves the NFL too much to crash one of its planes. They also don’t have to enforce the FAA’s draconian passenger guidelines: seat back up, seat belt on, electronics off, bags under seats, no congregating in the galleys, no yelling obscenities or throwing grapes or looking at nudie magazines.

I say hello to the ladies on the way in and find my seat, labeled with a sticker with my name on it. The plane is big and spacious. Coaches up front in the luxury seats. Operational staff, media, marketing, equipment guys, trainers, etc., are crammed in next to each other in the middle cabin. We are in the back. I stretch out and listen to some music and pretend to read a book.

After a four-hour flight, the airplane lands and pulls up next to a fleet of buses. I descend the stairs in slow motion. I look magnificent. Somebody look at me! But there is no one to welcome us. We are shuttled, bused, and flown to the doorstep of every destination, escorted in through back doors under cover of police escorts and velvet ropes.

W
e get to the hotel a few minutes before 5 p.m. I grab the envelope that says
JACKSON, NATE
off the table near our private entrance. It has my room key, room number, another itinerary, and a room list. The room list comes in handy if you want to crank-call someone or desire to know the identity of your next-door neighbor whose head is less than two feet from yours while you both masturbate to free hotel pornography. Fifty-three men jerking: all in a row.

I arrive to find that the pay-per-view system’s child lock is on. I can’t find the smut in the guide. This happens sometimes. I just have to call down to the front desk and have them unlock it. No biggie.

—Uh, yes, hi. I’m not able to access the adult film selection in my room. I was wondering if you could remove the child lock.

—I’m sorry, sir, we don’t carry adult films.