Is There Life After Football? (35 page)

For example, at first, Incognito drew the ire and indignation of nearly everyone who heard his racially charged voicemail message to his black teammate: “Hey, wassup, you half nigger piece of shit.” While the media
is loathe to even print the term, the focus was squarely on Incognito's use of the typically redacted word “nigger.”
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As vile as the term may be, we explicitly use it here to make a set of important analytic points relating to race, culture, and meaning.

Incognito was initially castigated throughout the sports media—indeed throughout the sports world—by both blacks and whites. For two days he was vilified as a racist. The overwhelming consensus was there was no place in football for language and attitudes like his. Indeed, there were indignant calls to uproot a locker room culture of racial animus and bigotry that was clearly infecting the NFL. But in an unanticipated turn of events, rejoinders from NFL locker rooms—again from both black and white players—turned the discussion upside down. Player after player—mainly Dolphins, but also from other teams around the league—rose to object. Ritchie Incognito was not a racist, teammates (black and white) proclaimed. He was a good teammate, one who embraced all his “buddies” in the locker room with the sort of camaraderie and fellowship that built team cohesion. Like his black “brothers,” Incognito used the word “nigger” as a way of signifying solidarity that crossed—even dissolved—racial lines.
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Why, when the Anti-Defamation League was calling for investigations into NFL locker rooms, were Incognito's black teammates dismissing the racist allegations? One of his black former teammates sums it up:

Richie is honorary. I don't expect you [reporter] to understand because you're not black. But being a black guy, being a brother [in the NFL] is more than just about skin color. It's about how you carry yourself. How you play. Where you come from. What you've experienced. A lot of things.
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The importance of this and related exchanges isn't about Richie Incognito, per se. Rather it's about cultural understandings of race in the locker room more generally. Player after player insists that the NFL is “the least racist environment I've ever been in.”
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But significantly, players don't
say that locker rooms are color blind, that race doesn't matter, that the environment isn't racialized. The NFL is among a very few formal organizational environments that's dominated by black men—rich, powerful black men. A large majority of the players are black. Team leaders are black. Most of the star players are black. Even the new generation of star quarterbacks is predominantly black. There are black coaches and general managers. NFLPA leaders are black. The locker room culture can't help but reflect this fact. Certainly there are racial animosities. Race is sometimes invoked to explain perceived inequities. But NFL players also believe deeply that the league is a pure meritocracy. It's part of the ethos. Talent wins out over everything else. For players, it's an arena and an opportunity where anyone can achieve the American Dream on a level, multiracial playing field.

Players leaving the league are probably never going to encounter such an environment again. They'll return to the small towns of white west Texas or the black neighborhoods of Miami. For those who jump into the corporate world, they'll find nearly all white colleagues, as well as increasingly more women. How does this affect former players' retirement transitions? Black players, especially, but whites as well, will be venturing into new social territory. It's not necessarily hostile or threatening, but it's different. Players are imbued with the NFL culture and ethos as it pertains to masculinity, gender, and race. They are fluent in the language—both literally and figuratively. But locker room culture, demeanor, and behavior are out of place in the corporate world where “loose talk” about race, gender, sex, and sexuality are decidedly out of place. While many organizational environments leave much to be desired in this regard, they hardly compare to the NFL locker room, even at its worst.

After inhabiting a culture where masculinity and race distinctively define social relationships in somewhat unconventional ways, former players may simply find the world
outside
the NFL to be “out of the ordinary.” Perhaps encounters with broader cultural standards regarding race and masculinity don't constitute full blown “culture shock,” but,
for former players, there's a fundamental cultural “strangeness” with respect to these pillars of American social life that may be disorienting. Considering the extreme limits of cultural acceptability within the bubble—what's “normal” in the NFL locker room—former players may understandably feel like “fish out of water.”

While the notion of culture shock helps explain the initial displacement and disorientation experienced by former players, another factor contributes to prolonged transition troubles. Culture shock usually dissipates, sooner or later. A different sort of disjuncture, however, may compound the lingering malaise that plagues some former players. It's a form of social disconnection or misalignment that's known in classic sociological terms as “anomie.”

Emile Durkheim famously invoked the term to refer to social circumstances where standards or expectations for behavior are confused, ambiguous, or missing. It's often called a state of “normlessness.” Anomie emerges when community standards no longer regulate member's activities. Under such circumstances, rules on how people ought to behave don't seem to apply and people don't know what to expect from one another. Without normative guidelines, individuals can't find their place in society.
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Robert Merton modified Durkheim's term to refer to social conditions whereby adherence to cultural imperatives is thwarted by social structural circumstances. In Merton's terms, anomie is a disjuncture between culturally prescribed means and socially valued goals. Culture instructs individuals in the acceptable ways of pursuing societal objectives: acceptable means to valued ends, so to speak. Those ends are legitimate aims for the group's members, the things worth striving for. Anomie exists when means and goals fail to align, producing a cultural-structural disjuncture resulting in
social strain
that provokes individual adaptive responses.
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When players leave the NFL, they carry the insider's
ethos
and the bubble's norms with them. Outside the bubble, however, the norms no
longer apply. Former players find it difficult to act “instinctively” or naturally because the larger social world doesn't honor the code to which they've become habituated. They experience their own version of normlessness. At the same time, former players' value structures are also in flux. The goals of dominance and winning don't necessarily disappear, but they're transformed, and become less clearly defined. The outside world has no direct counterpart to winning a game, a championship, a Super Bowl. While there are analogous socially valued goals such as financial success, personal accomplishment, or celebrity, they aren't as clear-cut as those that NFL players pursue each Sunday.

In this state of anomie, social accountability falters, feelings of belonging weaken, and the sense of a coherent social world evaporates.
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The structures of former players' experience are suddenly in flux. Being in a state of relative normlessness doesn't mean that former players now inhabit a world without norms, however. To the contrary, they're well aware of the normative expectations and constraints that characterize the NFL bubble; they're deeply internalized. But former players realize that the standards of the bubble don't necessarily apply in the world outside. So they're carrying the ethos of the bubble around with them, with no way to live up to it. They don't have the same opportunities to “live large,” compete in the extreme, or be a tough guy anymore. It's ingrained in them—the essence of who they once were—but now they have no legitimate means to pursue those goals or live by their former code of ethics.

The
psychological
consequences of anomie are sometimes called “anomia.” This is a mental and emotional state whereby a person's sense of social belonging is broken or disrupted. Anomia is the
feeling
of disorientation, accompanied by a sense of emptiness or apathy—a sensation of meaningless, accompanied by anxiety and confusion.
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It was part of George Koonce's state of mind as he worked out for months on end, keeping himself in shape for the opportunity to get back in the NFL—an opportunity that never came. It's the emotional place in which he found himself as he drove aimlessly to the beach, not knowing what he was looking for, and when he took that turn too fast in his Chevy Suburban,
just to see what would happen. It's the psychological space where Otis Tyler and Drew Raymond occasionally still find themselves.

Former players' responses generally aren't as dramatic as Koonce's. Merton, however, would not have been surprised. In circumstances where original goals or aspirations are out of reach or have been abandoned, some individuals persist in their futile pursuit. They adhere to culturally prescribed conduct, even though it's pointless. Continuing the old ways approaches a compulsion, especially when there is no payoff in sight. Merton calls this adaptation “ritualism.”
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We've heard myriad accounts of former players ritualistically rehabbing serious injuries, working out hours each day, “running laps” from training camp to training camp, all in the futile pursuit of a withered dream. Merton tells us to expect something like this when the individual's social status and worth is largely dependent on a particular kind of achievement, as is the case in the NFL. Most players move beyond this in a year or two. The unrealistic goals succumb to the reality that no NFL team is going to call and the comeback attempts and the ritualistic workouts cease. The cost to former players, however, is considerable delay in getting on with their lives. In some instances, the inertia established in the first year or two out of the league keeps some players from moving on to something new with any enthusiasm or momentum.

Merton also wouldn't be surprised by former players who seem to give up altogether. When a loss of goals combines with a perceived lack of avenues to success, individuals turn away from social engagement. Merton calls this “retreatism”—the abandonment of both cultural goals and institutionalized practices.
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It's an extreme response to acute anomie, where there's been an abrupt breakdown in the familiar and accepted normative framework and where goals are suddenly out of reach. This is often the case when individuals unexpectedly become exempt from role obligations, such as with military discharges, leaving the priesthood, or being deselected from the NFL.

The most common symptom of retreatism, according to Merton, is a generalized apathy. Retreatists simply don't connect with society.
The most extreme manifestation is suicide. Although infrequent, we've seen it far too often among former NFL players, and we've noted many examples of despondency and several suicide attempts. Sometimes we hear accounts of players breaking ties completely with the league, selling their memorabilia, and avoiding all contact with former teammates. Some simply languish, without serious attempts to establish new careers or pastimes. Such adaptations certainly resonate with Merton's model.

As with culture shock, we need to consider why responses to anomie can be so extreme among former NFL players. Again, the answer lies in the degree to which football has dominated players' lives. The culturally exalted goals have been with most players since childhood. The socially structured means to these ends have been in place for nearly as long. And they're all encompassing. Players' entire lives have been structured around their NFL dream. When that structure disappears, there's little to which former players can cling, nothing left to shoot for. The social disjunctures at the end of NFL careers are serious fractures, not minor fault lines.

Former NFL players confront myriad challenges on the social psychological front, too. Retirement places their identities at stake. Viewed abstractly, the ways in which players experience, apprehend, and appreciate their lives after football are filtered through the ways that they conceive of and evaluate their selves. The social objects that individuals understand themselves to be provide the experiential anchors for making sense of their lives. We live by and through those selves. Associated identities claim our places in the world around us.
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But when these selves are in flux—when identities are challenged—the ways we navigate everyday life, and the way we feel about our experience, are put to the test.

If feelings of disorientation and distress derive from the cultural shock of leaving the NFL, there's even greater cognitive and emotional turmoil when players' fundamental sense of who they are is cut adrift. This isn't just a sense of cultural confusion or normlessness. It's a loss of
personal
bearings. Certainly losing the central role in players' lives is unsettling, but the persistent feeling that something's wrong or something's missing signals greater social psychological upheaval than simply role exit or job loss.

The concept of “role” is useful in thinking about the various enterprises and activities in which individuals engage, but it's too limiting and static to capture what it actually means to
be
an NFL player. There is no script or set of normative role requirements that captures everything that's involved. By the same token, “role exit” simply doesn't convey the radical change that sweeps over former players' lives. They aren't losing roles; they're losing
selves
they've known for a lifetime. “I am 48 years old and I still have dreams about it,” says Jamaal McDaniels, speaking about being an NFL player. “You never get that out of your system, man.”
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