Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (22 page)

Brandon Bushnell, M.D.:

REASON FOR VISIT: Right shoulder injury

HISTORY: During today’s practice with the Cowboys, Nate was tackled and came down hard on the point of his right shoulder [
sic
]. He experienced immediate onset of pain. He did not feel like anything popped out of joint. He was able to complete practice. No tingling and numbness in his arm. No other complaints. Soreness localizes to the anterolateral aspect of his shoulder and is worse with attempting to raise his arm above his head or across his body.

RADIOGRAPHS: X-rays reveal anatomically aligned AC joint. No evidence of fracture, dislocation or subluxation.

ASSESSMENT: Right shoulder grade I AC sprain.

PLAN: After discussion of the risks and benefits including drug reaction, infection, skin color changes and other issues, the patient wants to proceed with an injection of the AC joint. Under strict sterile conditions, Dr. Schlegel injected the AC joint today. He tolerated the procedure well with no complications. Within a few minutes after the injection, he did report increased relief of his symptoms. We are going to have him work with the training staff on ice, stretching, and other modalities. He will be cleared for play and we will have him wear a doughnut pad over the AC joint. We will continue to follow him for improvement.

Hello again, Mr. Needle, how well you mask my pain. But will I pay for this quick fix some other lonely day?

The needle works and I forget about my shoulder. Soon there will be new pains to address. It seems as if my mind never takes on more pain than it can handle. An instability or budding injury might be waiting in the wings, might already be symptomatic, but it’s always polite enough to wait until the previous injury has significantly improved before roaring to life.

In the locker room after practice the next day, our defense is in a frenzy. There has been a fight on their field. It had started with Cowboys offensive tackle Flozell Adams and our linebacker, Nate Webster. Nate is a small linebacker and Flozell is a giant. He is the largest, scariest man I’ve ever seen in person. But Nate isn’t one to back down.

We watch the fight on film that night. It starts like most NFL fights. The whistle blows but the players don’t stop. Something snaps. Fuck him. Fuck him. Then an explosion of fists flying from a frenetic jumble of padded bodies: everyone swinging for the fences. Flozell ended up with a Bronco helmet in his hand and was swinging for the fences, too. Thankfully he didn’t hit anyone: but it wasn’t for lack of effort. There is a moment when a man snaps and all of the rules and regulations and cameras in the world can’t control the bloodlust that possesses him.

Coach’s pep talks have worked. We kick their ass at practice, then we kick their ass in the game. Revenge is sweet. Coach wears a satisfied look and lets us know how proud he is that we stood our ground and out-toughed the big, bad Cowboys. The locker room feels like we’ve won a regular season game. Pride is a powerful thing, even when the game doesn’t count.

T
he next week we play the Packers at home in the third preseason game. The third preseason game closely resembles a regular season game. The starters play into the second half and Coach wants to see us clicking. In the fourth and final preseason game, like every year, the starters will rest and the bubble guys will battle it out for the few remaining roster spots. That is usually me: ass clenched and paranoid. But this year is different. I’m not a starter but I’m a contributor. I’m on the field as our first offense battles the Packers’ first defense. We are moving the ball with ease. Coach calls a three-tight-end set down on their five-yard line going in. The play is called “spacing.” It evenly spaces out their predictable redzone defense with strategically placed receivers. They can’t cover all of us.

We are in “Bunch Left”: three receivers tight together three yards off the hip of the left tackle. Jay calls for the snap and I run my hook route and sit down on the goal line. He fires a bullet between two defenders and it sticks to my gloves. I fall horizontally on the chalk line for a touchdown. I jump up and, holding the football like a discus, turn and fling it into the south stands. The ref ducks. I have always wanted to do that. Someone up there catches it, I presume. I don’t see it land. I high-five my teammates and head to the sidelines to get in the huddle for kickoff coverage.

The next week we travel to Arizona for our last preseason game. Pat pulls me aside before meetings and tells me that I don’t have to play in the game the next night. I’m safe.

Coach Shanahan extends the curfew of the guys who aren’t playing so we can blow off some steam. We have until 12:30 a.m. Dave Muir, who moved to Arizona after retiring from coaching, picks us up from the hotel after meetings and we head to a local gentleman’s club. There’s a wild monsoon that night. Thick sheets of water fall down from the sky like gunshots, flooding the streets. But we press on. Our mission is true.

We park in a puddle and run through the deluge to the campdick magnet. Once inside we run into some teammates seated near one of the stages. This particular club hands out popcorn to its patrons, and one of our friends, in a fit of adolescent sexually frustrated excitement, is throwing the popcorn in the air and jumping up and down. We sit on the other side of the room.

I lean back with my beer and take it all in. Blacklit G-strings shoot through my retina and coat my battered brain. The well-rehearsed gyrations of the dancers soothe my aching muscles. I munch a handful of fresh popcorn and finish my Bud Light. Another round. The slightly less naked waitress brings more numbing liquids. Cheers, boys. We clink bottles. The echo of the faulty sentiment summons a smart lightning bolt that tickles a local power line and cuts the power to the club with an audible downshifting “click”: pitch black and complete silence. No lights. Naked women. Crazed men. A cacophony of zoo-like snorts and chortles cuts through the silence as the men in the crowd assess the moment. Recognizing the danger, the bouncers yell for the girls to return to the dressing room, which is followed by groans from the men, who had hoped the power outage would break down the walls of strip club etiquette and the dancers would finally be free to ravage the bodies of the patrons they were quietly lusting after, under cover of darkness.

On our way out I make friends with a dancer. I stand near the entrance smiling as she rubs herself on me, inspecting me, telling me with her polished stripper wit about all of the reasons why life is good and nothing ever changes. 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 live 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. Football players are included in this demographic. And our hasty retreat to an Arizona strip club, despite the best efforts of Mother Nature to prevent it, is a product of the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. Campdick has me by the balls. I just need to smell a woman, even if she is wearing nine-inch heels.

A
few days later Coach Shanahan throws a party at his home to usher in the regular season. Everyone is in good spirits. It represents an important landmark. This is our team: we go together henceforth. This party is our chance to let our guard down and appreciate the moment. Our girlfriends and wives are with us, buffering out the macho posturing. We can relax and mingle with our coaches in a less stressful setting. As the party winds down, I find myself talking with Coach Shanahan near the front door. He tells me that he is really excited about this team. He loves all of the guys. He says I’m doing a good job out there: that he’s proud of me.

—Nate, as long as I’m here, and you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll be here, too.

Some words are music to the soul. These are a masterpiece; the iron words I’ve been hoping to hear, or to believe, for my entire career. My hard work is recognized. My skill is respected: by the man who controls my fate.

Just then Sara walks up with her coat and we say goodbye. It is hard to get to know your NFL coach as a man. The environment prevents such intimacy. But slowly, over the years, I have gotten to know Mike. He is a good man. On the ride home I feel myself relax, if only for the night.

Our first game of the season is a Monday night game in Oakland. Our pilot sizes up the island runway at San Francisco International Airport. I look out the western window at the clouds rolling over the green hills of the peninsula, richly lit by the setting sun. As the airplane approaches the runway at SFO, it looks like it will land on the water. It is a majestic scene: the bay directly underneath and the hills and the sky in the distance. The wheels hit the ground and a surge of nostalgia shoots up through my seat. I pause as I reach the open door and look out on the tarmac’s fleet of buses: the smell of home fills my lungs. When I reach the bottom of the stairs I stop again. Someone bumps into me. These hills are my hills. Menlo College is fifteen minutes away. So many memories, so many emotions, dreams, pains, and ecstasies: painted in the blood-orange light crawling over the hills. I turn to Tony as we stride toward the bus.

—Isn’t it beautiful?

—What?

—What? This! This place! Isn’t it beautiful?

—Hell no. This place sucks.

No matter what city we are playing in, there is someone on the team experiencing a similar emotional homecoming and feeling similarly unable to grasp the moment. There are human subplots to every football game—ethereal manifestations of childhood dreams—but we rarely notice them because there just isn’t time. There is a football game to play. Then there is another. Always another: next week, next play, next season, the next opportunity for glory. And with this 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.

The next afternoon I get on the number 3 bus with a stone face. Fuck nostalgia: it’s game day. We drive over the San Mateo Bridge from our hotel near SFO and up 880, slowly pulling up to the outskirts of the Raiders tailgate area. A woman on the other side of a chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the road sees us and sneers. She reaches into a cooler and removes a handful of eggs, cocks back, and lets them fly. The first egg misses. The second egg cracks against the window of the seat directly in front of me, where my teammate sits absorbed in his music. The embryonic explosion six inches from his face sends him careening into the aisle of the bus. He recoils in horror as a glob of never-gonna-cluck oozes down the glass.

We make a right and pull through devil’s alley: the long, narrow road that leads to the bowels of the stadium. The zombies swarm us like, well, zombies. The music pulses through my headphones: background noise to a delightfully rowdy scene. The line for the port-o-potties usually indicates the drunkenness of the fans. In Oakland the lines are the longest: a piss-taught collection of venomous derelicts snaking through the asphalt. A night game means five extra hours of drinking. The parking lot is a pit of vipers.

Because of the scene in Oakland, my mother stays at home and watches the game on television, even though it’s less than an hour’s drive from our house. The Black Hole is no place for the mother of the enemy. Raider Mamas are treated like queens. Bronco Mamas:
prima nocte
. But I still had to get more than thirty tickets for friends and family. People assume that we get free tickets to the games but we don’t. We get two complimentary tickets for home games; the rest we pay for. For away games we pay for all of them. Taking hits on game tickets is part of the gig. I get ticket requests for every game I play in, and it’s rarely accompanied with an offer for reimbursement. People assume. People always assume. The football player obliges and goes broke.

We script the first fifteen plays of every game, a staple of Bill Walsh’s west-coast offense. We get the script the day before the game so we know what is coming. One of the early plays is a tricky little comeback route to me on the sideline. It’s about a fifteen-yard route. During warm-ups I play it out in my head. Oakland’s field doubles as a baseball field. The dirt behind second base comes onto the field near the Raiders’ sideline, right at my break point on the comeback route, assuming we are headed south. I really hope we aren’t headed south.

But we are. On our first possession, I run my route and make my cut in the dirt. I’m wide open. Jay throws a perfect ball. I feel my feet chopping through the pebbles and dirt clods, trying to stay inbounds. I glance down at my feet just as the ball hits me in the hands and bounces to the ground. Most things I ever did on a football field had to be forcefully learned through hours of painful repetition. Running routes, blocking, tackling, reading defenses, playing special teams: none of these came naturally to me. But catching the ball was easy. Catching the ball was like breathing. I never had to think about it. On the rare occasions that I dropped one, I was mind-numbingly embarrassed.

Compounding my shame were my pleas the night before for all thirty-plus of my slacker friends and family to be on time because I was catching the ball on one of the first plays. Jay glares at me as I run back to the huddle. It brings up third down. Brandon Stokley scoops up a low throw and keeps the chains moving. He makes money catch after money catch, game in, game out. I thank him profusely. We go on to rout them. Late in the game I catch a flat route near their goal line. As I turn upfield their safety corrals me and folds me in half sideways, like a paper clip. I feel my organs squeeze between my ribs and touch on the other side, then snap back into place as I crash to the ground. I jump up and pretend I’m fine.

As the clock ticks down, I stand on the sidelines and watch the circus in the stands. The Raider fans are by now a drunken, blithering mess. A few fights break out and someone catches a shank: nothing a little superglue won’t fix. I’m able to observe it all from the safety of the field, separated by metal barricades and the walls of sobriety. I’ve grown to appreciate the Raider fans over the years. Sure, they’re a little rough. But the roughness is authentic and comes from a place of hope. The roughness is born of a common identity with the Raider image, the spirit of rebellion and defiance, toughness and edge, and felonious blade-wielding.