Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (18 page)

—Yes, well, good! That’s good. Just making sure. Thank y—

Click.

But I’m not a pregame self-gratifier. I like to keep my weapon cocked and loaded. I believe that within my scrote swims an elixir that is a critical power source for my football performance, and to release it is to cripple my chances of finding glory the next day. But I still take advantage of the option. Watching pornography with no plan to discharge gives the film a depth that goes unseen when my intentions are lustful.

Dinner is a buffet of man food: chicken, steak, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, some things called vegetables, fruit, soup, burgers, french fries, salad, etc. I walk down to the meal room, which is in the hotel’s ballroom, with my playbook in my hand and fill up my plate with vegetables and pasta. I don’t want to stuff myself too much. I need to save a little room for the late-night snack. All of the same options will remain, plus chicken wings and a dessert bar with pies, cookies, and ice cream. Piles of vanilla and chocolate ice cream are scooped, one after the other, into cavernous to-go boxes by a baffled hotel employee and drowned in syrups and sprinkles, then taken up to the room to be eaten in ecstatic solitude in front of an unchild-locked television.

But before the ice-cream social we have meetings: thirty minutes of position meetings, thirty minutes of special teams meetings, thirty minutes of offense/defense meetings, then a fifteen-minute team meeting. They are the compilation of the practice week’s most heavily emphasized concepts and plays, already learned, already downloaded.

At our position meeting Pat returns the test that we turned in that morning in Denver. It’s a written test that requires an expansive knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the game plan from a tight end’s perspective. I copied off of Mike Leach so I know I will have aced it. There are a lot of terminological obscurities related to the offensive line and defensive fronts and gaps and protections that I have never really learned. I know what to do on the field but I don’t always know how to explain it in the terminology required of our pregame written test. So I cheat off of Mike. He always agrees but gives me a look I’m familiar with from high school, cursing me in his head for smoking pot under the bleachers while he was in the library at lunch studying.

Meetings, meetings, and a few more meetings: Watching film and going over plays on the night before the game always strikes me as pointless. If we don’t know it now, we’re not going to know it. But it’s a video league. We are two-dimensional things.

F
ootball has been subverted into a made-for-television event. Everything is so clear. Except it’s not. The third dimension is what makes it real, violent, and dangerous. Consuming the product through a television screen, at a safe distance, dehumanizes the athlete and makes his pain unreal. The more you watch it, the less real it becomes, until the players are nothing more than pixelated video game characters to be bartered and traded.

After meetings a group of us sit around a table in the meal room eating chicken wings and ice cream. After I lick the spoon I ask Greek for some Ambien, which he produces from a small pouch and drops into my hand. I have no problem falling asleep without Ambien. I just like to take them and watch porn. At eleven fifteen, right when the drug is kicking in, there is a loud bang on my door that shakes me from my soporific boob-hallucination. It is Rich and Crime doing bed checks. Here! I gargle. That’s all they need to hear, then they move on to my masturbating neighbor. If I hadn’t replied, they would have entered my room with a master key and had a quick look around to make sure I was there and that I was alone. Little did they know that [Insert Popular Porn Star Here] is with me.

Soon I fall into a heavy, purple sleep and wake up in the morning with a powerful game-day buzz. I shower and put my suit back on and go downstairs for breakfast. We are on east coast time and it fucks with our internal clocks. I’ll have some coffee. After breakfast, I get on the late bus (there are three different buses to the stadium and three different times in which to depart and indulge in whatever your away-game routine is) and look out the window at upstate New York. I listen to my music and prepare myself for combat. It’s a beautiful day for football: 67 degrees and partly cloudy. It’s the dawn of a new day, a new season, where anything can happen. We are Super Bowl bound, that much is for certain.

Tony is hurt so I am set to play a good deal on offense. I’m also on three out of the four special teams. One thing I love about playing special teams is that I am on the field for the first play of the game. It’s the culmination of an entire week, an entire off-season of hype, and the electricity runs through the fans and through the grass and up through my feet, bringing me into a zone where I feel neither fear nor worry, only an extreme heightened awareness. I am light and strong, focused and lucid, and as I jog out onto the field, I can feel the energy inching toward a crescendo, toward the moment when the ball pops off the foot of the kicker and towns and cities and dreams full of potential football energy finally explode into the kinetic, into the now, forming a tidal wave that I surf through the circuit of the ultimate football matrix. There is no feeling that will ever replace that moment in my life. I know that now.

The opening kickoff of 2007 sails through the air. I chase it down the field, avoid the man who is supposed to block me, and tackle the returner at the twenty-five-yard line on the first play of our season. I’ll be the Super Bowl
MVP.
The game moves along: tit for tat, nothing doing. It’s a low-scoring affair going into the locker room at halftime. The Bills are up 7–6. Offensive coordinator Mike Heimerdinger, aka “Dinger,” writes some plays up on the whiteboard. Based on what we have seen in the first half, these are the plays that he thinks will work in the second half. He goes over a few things, then I take a piss and jog back out onto the field.

The Bills kick off to start the second half. Wide receiver Domenik Hixon receives it and pushes up the field behind the wedge of offensive linemen holding hands and leading the charge. The wedge breaks down on the right side and Domenik bounces the kick outside the wedge, meeting Bills tight end Kevin Everett in a routine-looking football hit. But the result is not routine. Everett collapses to the ground and does not move. The crowd falls silent. Tony and I stand next to each other on the sideline.

—He looks dead.

We don’t know how right we almost are. Everett has sustained a fracture and dislocation of his cervical spine. We’ll later find out that his life was saved by fast thinking and perfectly executed medical treatment, which stabilized his spine and whisked him off to the hospital so we could finish our football game in peace, without the realities of what we were risking getting in the way. The show must go on.

It isn’t long before the urgency of the game has erased the memory of what we have just witnessed. There is no time to consider the consequences. As the clock ticks down in the fourth quarter, we are down 14–12. But we are driving. With under a minute left and no timeouts, Jay pushes the ball down the field with precision, hitting Javon Walker several times and moving the ball inside Bills territory. We have Jason Elam waiting in the wings. He missed two field goals earlier in the game, very uncharacteristic of him. I’m the wing on the field goal team so I stand ready, too. If the clock isn’t stopped we will have to run on the field and set up for the kick quickly. With eighteen seconds left Jay hits Javon for an 11-yard pass down to the Bills twenty-four-yard line but he can’t get out of bounds.

—Toro! Toro! Toro!

The offense sprints off the field and the field goal unit sprints on. Tick-tick-tick. We can’t see the clock but the Bills fans are kind enough to count down for us. Jason Elam doesn’t have time to count out his steps. Our holder makes sure everyone is set and signals Mike Leach, who snaps the ball a tick before time expires. My man rushes hard off the edge and tries to jump between me and the end. I shove him in the chest and he twists through the air like a gymnast, landing on his back as the ball sails through the uprights for the win. Jason turns and sprints in the opposite direction, arms raised victoriously. I laugh and give chase. We need to celebrate this together. When I catch up I grab the back of his shoulder pads and tug him to the ground, sliding to a stop next to him just as everyone catches up and dogpiles us. It is a magical mountain of meat. We are 1-0 and Super Bowl bound.

There is nothing as satisfying in the NFL as going on the road and winning, because everything is going against you. You have to travel and stay in a new hotel. You have to face the unfamiliarity of a different city, a different locker room, different food, and a different time zone. The crowd is screaming, cursing your family, and laughing at your pain.

And you win anyway. Sixty-five thousand people fall silent. The locker room is jubilant.

A win means that all sins are forgiven, if only for a few days, and everyone can relax. Being able to actually relax in the NFL is rare. The pressures are too great. And they are constant. The head coach is under siege at all times, and it trickles down to everyone else. The industry hates losers. They ridicule them, defame them, and run them out of town. But we are winners. We are safe for the moment.

The back of the plane is boisterous.
This
is what the NFL is supposed to feel like. Grown men are happy and filling up red Dixie cups with vodka smuggled onto the aircraft. Booze in the empty postgame stomach of a football player is a bottle rocket. It hits the bloodstream dancing a jig and sings carols on the doorstep of the cerebellum. It feels like damn Christmas morning back here, in the working-class area of the Boeing 747, where FAA regulations are trumped by the laws of the jungle. We congregate in the back galley as the plane speeds down the runway and takes off into the sky, eight grown men leaning forward at a 30-degree angle like synchronized ski jumpers, heading back home to a proud city in love with its Denver Broncos.

We mingle in the back with the flight attendants. After all the trips, we have gotten to know them and they have gotten to know us. Not the faceless behemoths we are on television, but human beings with families and feelings. It is always the same group of us in the back of the plane. We are singing songs and telling jokes. As we cut through the night sky somewhere over Nebraska, John Lynch grabs the intercom microphone and flips it on.

—Excuse me. Is this thing on? May I have your attention, please, everybody. I’d just like to say, we live in the greatest country in America. Now please everyone, stand up, put your hand over your heart, and sing along with me.

He sings “God Bless America” at full tilt, and doesn’t cheat his audience out of one single note. It echoes through the slumbering cabin and those of us in the back sing along, too, hands over our hearts, soaring over the Great Plains. This land is your land, this land is my land. Damn right we live in the greatest country in America.

After our laughter dies down, we all go back to our seats for a nap before the plane lands. An hour later we touch down in Denver and get on the buses, which appear unmoved from the previous day. The unloading of the plane and the bus ride take another hour. By the time we pull up to Broncos headquarters, we are all dead tired. And there is Bronco Betty.

Bronco Betty is the superest superfan in a world of superfans. She lives Bronco orange. She’s at every charity function, every event, every training camp practice, and every game. She has a variety of health issues, and uses a walker, but she is unrelenting with her support for the team. And not just the team: the men. She knows everyone’s name and everyone’s story. She doesn’t just watch the game, she
sees
it, and everything that happens. She sees every play that every player makes or doesn’t make, and has a loving word for him regardless, win or lose.

Bronco Betty waits for us in a folding chair at the front gate of our facility to see us off as we leave for every road game and to greet us when we get home. Just Betty, alone in the Denver cold at three o’clock in the morning, sitting in her chair, happy as can be, festooned in her pin-accessorized Broncos gear and shouting personalized words of encouragement to each of us as we walk to our cars.

—I love you guys! Go, Broncos! I love you guys! I love you, Nate!

—I love you, too, Betty.

9

Rocky Mountain High

(2007)

T
he wake-up call doesn’t wake me. I’m already up, lying on my back in my king-sized bed at the Inverness Hotel in Englewood, Colorado. My playbook is next to me on the bed. My clothes are laid out on a chair across the room. I get up, throw open the drapes, and behold the Rocky Mountains. Thus begins the same game-day ritual I’ve had since my first preseason game, more than four years earlier. Same room, in fact. And the same urgent feeling.

The security guard at the elevator sees me walking down the hall and presses the button to summon the lift.

—Good luck.

—Thanks, brother.

The elevator dings and spits me out into a buzzing lobby. Fans and family and friends in their finest orange and blue sip oversized coffees and laugh the carefree laugh of spectators. I walk past the reception desk, through a long hallway lined with meeting rooms, and into the largest banquet room at the hotel, which serves as our cafeteria.

—Morning, Chip.

—Morning, Nate.

Chip’s our operations guy. He handles everything but the footballs: airplanes, buses, hotels, and meals.

I fill my plate with food to push around and sculpt. I’m not hungry. Eggs, potatoes, oatmeal, bacon, bagel, yogurt, fruit: a bite here, a bite there. That’s all my stomach can handle. I napkin my plate and pick up a
Denver Post
that someone left on the table. “The keys to victory,” “What to look for,” “Key match-ups.” Meh. I toss it back on the table, lean back, and sip my coffee. Several of the offensive linemen join me, fresh out of Mass, which is led by Bill Rader, our on-site spiritual advisor.

—Gentlemen.

—Hello,
Nate.

The offensive linemen are the most devout Christians on the team. They attend Mass on game day and during the week. They attack their religious study as though it might offset the brutality with which they attack their jobs. Jesus levels them out. They’re a thoughtful bunch: my favorite group with whom to break bread.

After a short chat about who watched what movie the night before, I leave and drive back to my house, shower, and change into my game-day clothes. My mother and father and Aunt Marsha and Uncle Bruce are in town for the game. The previous night, before I left for the team hotel, which even for home games we’re remanded to, I showed my dad some plays in the playbook. I emphasized a specific goal-line play where I’m the only option to get the ball. Me or no one. In three years at Menlo College, I had 43 touchdowns. The plan was to keep right on catching touchdowns in the NFL, into the sunset. But it is my fifth year in the NFL and I have zero. Shanahan, God bless him, is trying to get me one.

We’re playing the Jaguars in the third game of the season. I get home and say hello to my parents, who had the house to themselves last night. I take a shower and we board my Denali and embark downtown to [Insert Corporate Logo Here] Field.

—So it’s a goal-line play you said to watch for?

—Yeah. I’ll be on the wing on the left side of the formation. I go in double motion—actually it’s like a triple-motion thing—and run a little flat route. The ball should be coming to me.

—All right, son. We’ll be watching for it.

The play is designed to lull my man-to-man defender to sleep with a lazy double motion, then explode back down the line, behind the ass of the quarterback. He’ll snap it just as I pass him, take three quick steps, and fire it to me at the front pylon for six points.

D
riving up Interstate 25 from Greenwood Village to downtown Denver on game day is a meditative trip. The Rocky Mountains to the left, snowcapped with high-definition clarity, sparkle in the late-morning sun. I-25 is the main artery that connects Denver to its many southern suburbs. Among them, Dove Valley, which houses the Broncos headquarters; Greenwood Village, where I live; Cherry Hills, home of the rich and influential Denverites, including Coach Shanahan; and Highlands Ranch, the swingers capital of America (and where Charlie lives).

As we clear the suburbs and the city skyline comes into view, I-25 bends west for several miles and we pass Colorado Boulevard and University Avenue. The golden tower of Denver University’s cathedral rolls by on the left, and somewhere out of sight on my right, Washington Park, the quintessential Denver patch: all sunshine and grass and dogs and volleyball and slip-’n’-slides and beer. Past the Whole Foods that sits perched above the freeway like a taunt. Past Broadway, Denver’s oldest road (that’s what my Denali salesman told me), which brings the swingers straight to downtown. Past the industrial warehouses off Santa Fe, where the road dips slightly then banks a hard right at an angle that’s left the guardrail permanently scarred. After the road straightens out and ascends a small incline, the skyline once again comes into view to the northeast. And a moment later, like a flash, [Insert Corporate Logo Here] Field, straight ahead and slightly left.

Our stadium feels different than other stadiums. Where others are boxy, ours is rounded. Where others are rigid, ours flows. The upper rim of the stadium is not parallel to the ground but rises and falls like a hilly landscape, creating the illusion of moving water. And when all seventy-six thousand fans are in a frenzy, the field is a raft on a sound wave to Happy Town.

Normally I make the drive by myself. When the stadium comes into sight, my heart starts racing. I slow down for my exit and feel a stream of sweat run down my side. The Seventeenth Street exit wraps around and back underneath the freeway, past tailgaters and ticket scalpers, past the traffic cops and the early Broncos fans, all flooding into the stadium area with orange and blue everything. I show the security guard my player’s parking pass and pull into the players’ lot. Same time every time: 11:45 a.m.

B
ut today I drop my family off at a restaurant downtown and take a different route into the stadium, no less festive. I park my car, grab my bag, and head for the locker room. To enter the bowels of the stadium from the players’ lot, we have to walk down a long ramp that’s lined on both sides by three-foot-tall iron dividers. Fans congregate behind the makeshift fences to watch us come to work in our civilian clothes, gazing upon us like ugly runway models. Some fans shout for autographs but most respect the game-day focus etched on our faces.

I pause at the locker room door and turn off my cell phone; I can be fined five thousand dollars if it rings on game day. On the other side of the double doors is Fred Fleming, our Everything Man, seated near the entrance.

—Cell phone off, Nate.

—Got it, Fred. Thanks.

The locker room is a large, open room: defense in the front, next to the equipment room, offense in the back near the showers. The carpet is blue with an orange and white Broncos logo in the middle. I walk straight to my locker and swing my bag into it. Then I circle back to the equipment room near the entrance and grab a pair of gray shorts, change into them, and go to the hot tub next to the training room. Like every other week, here’s Lou Green and Cecil Sapp.

—What up, fellas?

—What’s up, Nate Jack?

Cecil has his headphones on so he can’t hear me. He’s reviewing his notes for the game. Running backs always have extra notes and tests and handouts they’re studying. Lou’s a linebacker. But we’re all special teamers. And we came into the league around the same time and were on the practice squad together before being activated. We’ve done it the hard way.

After the hot tub I rinse off in the shower and walk back to my locker, change into my shorts and a T-shirt, put on my headphones, and take the field to warm up on my own before the team assembles. Those first steps onto the perfectly manicured grass, surrounded by seventy-six thousand seats, remind me of something I forget from time to time: I’m playing in the NFL. To be in the NFL, you can’t be in awe of the NFL. You can’t appreciate it while you’re doing it. There’s precious little time for self-reflection.

But as I jog onto the field at my own pace, the music in my ears, the stadium nearly empty, I take it all in. The crisp mountain air, the bright colors, the Broncos legends listed around the stadium in the Ring of Fame, and the faces of the fans who are given early access. The way they look at me. They don’t know anything more about me than that I’m wearing cleats. That’s enough.

After my warm-up routine, I reenter the locker room and sit back down in front of my locker. We have forty-five minutes before we’ll take the field. I tape up my two big toes with two different kinds of tape, to stave off the blisters. I wrap a thin strip of tape around each finger and thumb between each knuckle. When I was a wide receiver, my fingers were pristine. I didn’t need any finger tape. I barely needed gloves. But now I’m popping fingers all the time grappling with the beasts. The tape protects them.

Then I put on all my gear: socks, compression shorts, game pants, then my cleats. After tying up my shoes, I walk to the training room and jump up on Corey’s table for my ankle spat. A spat is a tape job that wraps around the shoe and secures it to the foot, making the two feel like one. It is not as constrictive as a normal tape job, which goes directly on the skin, but still supplies noticeable ankle support. Even if there is a line for Corey and an empty table next to him in front of Greek or Trae, I wait for Corey. Corey spats me during the week, too. His spat feels like home. I’m not going to mess around with a new feel on game day.

Back at my locker, I pull on my shoulder pads and jersey. The pads are already fitted inside, and the whole setup is sitting on top of my locker when I arrive. I think about those doleful Sundays in the past when, after I had been declared inactive, Flip would come pull my jersey off of the shoulder pads I wouldn’t be using.

I go into the bathroom to behold my body in its game-day armor. I’m not the only one who finds strength in the pre-kickoff mirror. There is a clamoring around the reflective glass. We are going on television. We want you to love us.

I’m impressed by myself
.
I look good and I feel good. My adrenaline is bubbling. I am a man built for hand-to-hand combat. The look is in my eye. The mirrored gaze. The dream fulfilled. I am a hungry animal. Time to eat.

T
ight ends, running backs, receivers! Bring it up!

Bobby-T calls us up to take the field. We get in a line and walk out of the locker room, through the hallway, and out the tunnel. We stop at the back edge of the end zone and make a tight circle. D.G. puts his hand in the middle. We stack our hands on top of his.

—All right, fellas, we’ve put in the work, now it’s time to have some fun. This group right here, everyone is looking at us to make plays. When you get that ball in your hand, make a fucking play. Make a
fucking play
! Forget everything else. Let’s look out for each other out there, all right? And have some fucking fun. Broncos on three. One-two-three!

—Broncos!

And we’re off, jogging down our sideline toward the opposite end zone, where we get loose. By this time the crowd has begun filling the stadium. The buzz is getting louder. We bounce around in the end zone and go through small drills with the tight ends: foot drills, ball drills, and some blocking to get the crank shaft ripping and the kinks out. Smack heads a few times, light off a few thunder bombs.

We break off with the quarterbacks and run routes, on the thirty-five-yard line, going in. Precise, crisp routes, exploding out of the break, snatching the ball that by now is as big as a blimp and squeezing with a strength reserved for emergencies, tucking the ball high and tight in my arms and exploding up the field into the end zone. I circle back around and toss the ball to Flip, who stands next to the quarterback and keeps him fed with balls. Then I’m back in line, waiting my turn again, nodding my head to the music that blasts from the speakers.

The horn blows. Riverside! Flip the line of scrimmage and take it down to the ten-yard line, coming out. We run set plays with the whole offense and the whole defense, thudding up but nothing too physical. A smack and a pop but let’s save the ultraviolence for the game. After fifteen minutes of plays, the horn blows again and we jog off the field back into the locker room. As we make our way across the field, a cameraman lies on the ground filming us walk by him with a live feed to the Jumbotron. I walk past him slowly and look up at myself in giant form. Another quick reminder: you’re in the NFL, buddy.

We have twenty minutes in the locker room before we come out to play. Quiet time. The calm. A pregame sheen of sweat covers me as I take my seat and again put on my headphones. The tunes are arranged down to the minute, to load, cock, and shoot my gun in unison with the first whistle. Seated on my locker chair, facing the large, open locker room, I scan the faces of my brothers. All of them are lost in thought, or lost in a thoughtlessness, a weightlessness that cannot be duplicated anywhere, ever—something that contrasts violently with the constant blah that follows an NFL career. This blah, when compared to the feeling right before stepping on the field, is what drives men to fits when they step off it for good. The nitro button is all the way down for too long and now the juice is all burned up.

—Praying in the shower, fellas! Praying in the shower.

The Christians gather in the large communal shower area, a secluded open space to kneel and pray. I joined them my first year until I realized I am closer to God if I sit still and listen to my music.

Coach Shanahan makes his way around the room and shakes every man’s hand, tells him good luck, and gives him a pat on the back. He has an elephant’s memory with the handshake thing and all things, really. Sometimes guys aren’t in their seats when he makes his way around the room, so he goes around several times until he finishes the job, down to every last man. He never double-shakes.

Kickoff is at 2:15. The digital clock strikes 2:00 and Coach yells:

—Bring it up!

I throw my headphones in my locker and circle up tight around Coach, taking a knee and grabbing the hands of the men on either side of me.