Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (12 page)

O
n our first team meeting of the regular season, Coach says that before he gets started, someone has something to tell us. Out of the corner of my eye I see a figure descending the stairs on the right side of the room. I turn to see Jerry walking down the steps wearing a tan suit. He gets down to the front of the room and thanks Coach and turns to face us: nearly one hundred grown football men sit rapt. I know what’s happening. Jerry’s made the team after a solid camp, but he can see how the offense is stacking up. Jerry Rice is nobody’s backup. I sit in my chair and watch my hero tell me he’s retiring from the game of football. No more catches, no more records, no more Jerry. I hear the voice of Bay Area commentator Joe Starkey echoing through my head:

—Touchdown 49ers!

At the beginning of every practice, before we stretch, our defensive captain Al Wilson calls someone to the front of the group to break us down and send us into the day’s work. We all clap in unison until the designated breaker downer drops into a low stance and does a little dance. It’s meant to be silly and slightly humiliating for whomever Al calls to the front. For this reason Al usually picks a rookie or a team clown to come up and do it. And out of respect for Jerry, Al had never called him up.

But here’s Jerry, in front of us all for the first and last time. After he says all he wants to say about the end of his career, he’s about to walk off when he thinks of something and stops.

—Oh, and one more thing. Since you guys never had me break us down out there, I want to do it now, in here, one last time.

He starts clapping and we follow: the whole room clapping in unison, echoing through the meeting room. Jerry breaks us down, giving us a quick preview of the moves he’ll later use on
Dancing with the Stars
. The room erupts. Jerry smiles and takes a mental picture, then walks up the stairs and out of the meeting room forever. My hero has left the building. The door clicks shut and it’s back to the business of professional football.

T
he NFL is a job. Every morning I go to work through the facility’s cafeteria door, scarf a plate of whatever looks good, fill up a cup of hot coffee, and go through the locker room toward our main meeting room. Sometimes there’s a note hanging in my locker signaling that I have been selected for a drug screening, a random steroid test.

Once I see the note on my locker, I have four hours to produce a sample. If I can’t produce in four hours, it’s considered a failed test. We have a Pee Man who sits in a folding chair near the urinals and handles all the urine. When it’s ready to flow, I knock on the door to his office. It echoes off the porcelain gods.

—Hey, Nate. You ready?

—Yes, sir.

—Okay, wash your hands; water, no soap.

I wash them.

—Now select a cup.

I grab one of the prewrapped, sterilized urine bowls, unwrap it, and hand it to him.

—Okay, now remove your shirt and pull your pants below your knees.

I disrobe and he hands the cup back to me. I take my place at the urinal and he takes his place three feet away, perpendicular to me, and watches me pee. Ever since a player was caught at the airport with a prosthetic dick, called the Whizzinator, long ago, the league has mandated a visual inspection by the Pee Man, who confirms that my urine is exiting my actual penis through my very own, personal urethra.

Some players get gun-shy and have to drink copious amounts of fluid to fill the cup, only to be told that their urine is too diluted. The rules are strict. They want to catch people cheating. But I’ve never seen steroids around. I’ve never seen anyone get caught, either. I’ve never heard anyone talk about taking them, or heard from anyone that someone else was juicing. I’ve never seen HGH, either. I only learn about it through the media. They tell me it’s undetectable, that it’s a wonder drug, that its benefits are manifold, and that it can accelerate the healing process after an injury. Sounds great, if you want the truth, but even if I knew how to get them, I don’t have the time or the peace of mind to arrange something so secret. Besides, I made it here without them. We all did. Steroids won’t make you a good football player.

A
fter my piss test I go into the team meeting room and take my seat at 8:14 a.m. for our Thursday special teams meeting. There are large, digital clocks throughout the facility so that everyone is on the same schedule. Punctuality is important; the meetings start on the dot. The clock strikes 8:15. Ronnie clears his throat, takes two gulps of coffee, and starts coaching.

—Gentlemen, listen up, okay? Hey, good work on punt team yesterday but we need to tighten up that left side when they twist. Look, gentlemen, this is our most important operation here, okay? We gotta be able to protect our punter. Or he’s gonna be shitting his pants back there. Let’s not leave the game up to the athleticism of our punter, okay? No offense, Micah. We gotta communicate out there, gentlemen. Okay? Let’s take a look at the film.

Forty-five minutes later the rest of the team shows up. Starters don’t come to special teams meetings. They’re happy not to play during the ritual sacrifice of kickoffs and punts, but maybe they’re also a bit envious. We’re a tight-knit group. We know things the other guys don’t. We know about fifty-yard dead-sprint head-on collisions. We know about snot bubbles. We look at the game differently.

And none of us played much special teams in college. In those days, we were the starters who trickled in after special teams meetings and sat down as the room’s laughter trailed off from a joke we’d never understand.

At 9 a.m. Coach Shanahan comes in to address the whole team. The entrances are at the back, like a lecture hall. To get down to the front stage, you descend the stairs on either side of the room. Coach takes his place at the podium and gives us our marching orders. Here’s what we have to do, let’s go get it done. The head coach is the big-picture guy. He runs the show. His underlings tighten the screws. The defense has a stable of coaches: a defensive coordinator, and a coach or two for every position. On offense, Kube runs the passing game. Rico, our O-line coach, runs the running game. The small technical stuff is left to our position coaches. That’s why some of them get a little carried away with the technique stuff: it’s all they control.

After Coach’s spiel the defense leaves the room and Rico takes the stage and installs the run plays. About now in our daily program is when I usually zone out. We’re learning the same plays . . . again. The game plan varies from week to week, but only about 10 percent of it is new. The other 90 percent is made up of the same plays we’ve been running for years. Even the new plays are based on the old plays. Once you learn the concepts and the terminology, everything else falls into place. But every week Rico teaches us the alphabet as if we never learned it the first time. B, it turns out, still comes after A.

After the run install, Rico and the O-line leave and we install the pass plays. Same old plays with a few new wrinkles. I have to know the wrinkles. After that I can let my mind drift again. I’m prone to flights of doodling and prose, I admit. If a coach glances at me in the middle of his dissertation, he’ll think me a football scholar, quietly taking notes.

When that’s over we break for fifteen minutes and Brew goes over the script for the day. Every day has a log-sheet that contains the plays we’ll run that day, in the order we’ll run them. It also has the defensive front, coverage, down and distance, hash-mark, and blitzes, which helps practice move along smoothly. No alarms and no surprises, please. It’s mostly for the coaches. Helps them feel like they’re in control of the product. Inevitably, that all falls to shit on game day. That’s when you need the players to take over. To this day no coach has successfully scripted a football game.

After a forty-five-minute walk-through—really a jog-through of the plays we’ll run later in practice—it’s back inside for lunch. I’m never hungry. My stomach is in a perpetual knot. Every day after walk-throughs, Mike Leach whizzes by me with a nice soup and sandwich combination on his way to the players’ lounge to do some emailing and eat his lunch, humming a little tune as he goes. I’m envious. If anyone has job security, Mike does. As long as he snaps well, he eats well. I eat horribly. I’m losing the weight I put on in the off-season.

And every Friday morning we have a weigh-in. They want me at least above 230 pounds. But I’m a little under. I walk into the locker room and past Crime. He sits next to the scale near the entrance, weighing guys as they walk in.

—Nate! You gotta weigh
in
.

—Okay, Crime, give me a second.

—Why do you need a second, Nate? Just do it now!

—Just a second, Crime! Jeez.

—You always do this. I don’t know why you always
do
this!

I walk to my locker, change into my team sweats, sneak into the training room, and grab an ankle weight. I strap it on under my sweats and walk back to the scale where Crime is sitting with his clipboard.

—Told you I’d be right back. I just had to change.

I step on the scale.

—Two thirty-four.

—Nice. Thanks, Crime.

—Whatever.

The extra weight is hard to keep on. So even when I’m not hungry, I have to eat. I force down a ham sandwich and some goulash in the cafeteria and go into the locker room to get ready for practice.

One minute before 1 p.m. I jog on the field with the rest of the proletariat, hard hat in hand, ready for thirty minutes of special teams practice. My feet hit the grass and I flip the switch. Time to be a man. Practice moves from one scripted period to the next, with a bipolar air horn blow to signal each new period. Even though the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday practice schedules are nearly identical, Thursday’s the hardest practice day of the week because we are in full pads. We’re lucky here in Denver. Coach Shanahan doesn’t believe in having us beat the crap out of each other. He tries to keep our bodies fresh. Lots of teams hit two or three times a week but we only have to bang today. And nothing says banging like nine-on-seven.

Nine-on-seven is a drill for running plays. There are no receivers or defensive backs in the drill. Other than that it’s a live running play. The receivers and the defensive backs are on a different field with one of the quarterbacks doing one-on-ones. When the sad horn blows to signal the start of nine-on-seven, I longingly watch my old buddies jog to the other side of the field where, for the next twenty minutes, they’ll play schoolyard football. It’s mano a mano over there, a receiver and a cornerback. You get the ball no matter what.

No such luck in nine-on-seven. This is tactical mayhem. In an actual game, the defense has to honor the threat of a pass. In nine-on-seven, there is no threat of a pass, so the defense explodes off the ball downhill, trying only to stuff the run. Players grunt, coaches yell, and pads and helmets crack, creating a frightening symphony of future early-onset dementia. But we have to do it if we want to be a good running team, which we always are.

Nine-on-seven is a special kind of hell for me because no matter who I have to block, I’m outmatched. I’m no tight end; I only play one on TV. I have to employ some different tactics to get the job done. One of those tactics involves a bit of trickery. Since I’m quicker than the meat sacks I have to block, I can afford to take a jab step and a head fake to get them off balance before I pounce on them. But I can only do it once in a while or it won’t work. And coaches don’t like finesse in the run game. Rico always glares at me when I try something different. There is only one right answer!

So I play along, shooting myself out of my stance headfirst and trying to crack the end in his face before he can move. I aim for the tonsils with the crown of my forehead. Frontal lobotomy. That’s my only chance. My technique is horrible—I’m standing straight up, crossing my feet over each other, ducking my head—and I lack the size and strength to overpower anyone on the line of scrimmage. My only chance is to hit them first, pound my feet into the ground and hold on until the whistle blows. If it feels like a firecracker exploding in my helmet I know I’m on the right track. Then I go back in the huddle and do it again.

If we mess up the scripted plays, we run them again until we get them right. The period doesn’t end until Coach nods to Flip, and Flip lets the horn blow. If we are having a bad day, it seems to go on forever. Crack! Internal brain bleed. Smack!

—C’mon,
Nate
!

Strange sensation in the jaw.

—What the
fuck
, Wesley!

Dizzy. Achilles tendon pain.

—Blue twenty-eight, Blue twenty-eight, Set
hut
!

Hemorrhaging contusion. Stinger. Pop. Dislocated finger.

—Huddle up!

Shit.

I keep a quick eye on Flip and his healthy finger, resting delicately on the orange button of the horn clipped to his waistband. Press it, Flip! Let it blow, Flip!
Please!
One hundred dollars.
Five hundred dollars, Flip!

CRACK! SMACK! WHAMMO!

Eventually we get it right and Coach nods. Flip lets it blow. The same evil sound that started the period thirty minutes ago is now the sweet, sweet sound of survival. Another week is passing. Time slows down to honor its most painful landmarks, stamped in wounds across my battered frame. One more horrible thing is over.

The next morning we watch film of nine-on-seven with the whole offense. Watching it in front of my friends is torture. My shittiness is on full display. Rico leads the meeting. I remember every play from the previous day clearly, and I know when a bad one is approaching on film. My heart speeds up as the tape rolls on. Here comes the play where I get body-slammed. I hold my breath. Ooooh, that was ugly.

—C’mon,
Nate.
That’s not good enough.

Stick the knife in, Rico.

—
If you can’t make this block, we’ve gotta get someone who can.

Twist it, Rico.

—We can’t win with that kind of effort.