Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

it had been awkward for everyone, not just the players. They should make the scouts sit there in their tighty whities and boxer shorts so we’re all on the same level. Someone actually picked up my leg and measured my thigh. I was like, “Excuse me? Keep your eyes up here, sir.” I thought, Damn, am I a piece of meat? Are they going to chop me up like cattle and sell me by the pound? It reminded me of descriptions I’d read of slave auctions. People don’t like to associate slavery with sports because of the money we’re paid. But when you are made to feel as if you are property, like a potential porterhouse, and having grown men lift your arms to check your armpits, I don’t really know what other comparison comes close.

The combine, though, was just mentally uncomfortable. You get through it and you move on. The real devil in this league is the pain: for the last seven years, I’ve been playing with a bad toe. I can’t even wear some shoes, my foot hurts so bad. I know a toe isn’t as serious as a concussion or a torn muscle, but I have to numb up part of my foot before every game. They stick a six-inch needle into my toe. They don’t show that on NFL Films. I’m glad they don’t. It’s gross. (Not my toe. My toe is beautiful.)

There are the hip surgeries, the knee surgeries, and the daily fear that you could just lose your brain; there is literally a bomb that could go off inside your skull on every play. That worry now hangs like a gray cloud over the game on Sundays. The word “concussion” softens what the injury really is. What we are talking about is a traumatic brain injury. When a normal person has a concussion, they’re done for at least a week, resting at home in a room, usually in the dark, letting it get better. But for us, it’s a bruise on your brain that never gets time to heal. In the NFL, we play on Sunday. No matter the rules and regulations, no matter how many posters they put on the locker room walls, we are pushed to do it by the toughest coach there is: that voice in our heads that tells us we don’t have guaranteed contracts and this can all go away if we can’t make it onto that field. Junior Seau played in the NFL for twenty years and was never diagnosed with a concussion, but it was found after he killed himself that he had CTE, and his family believed he’d had hundreds of concussions over the course of his career. I feel the same way. Of course I’ve had concussions. Just don’t ask me how many, because if you ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

Fans don’t see this. Fantasy football isn’t just a game they play on a computer. It’s what they’re watching on the field: the fantasy that we are disposable names and statistics. For years I’ve been trying to figure out what makes fantasy football so popular, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of fans play fantasy because it allows them to look at us as if they are executives in an owner’s box, and when they do that, it’s easier not to see us as human. They see a player as a part, an extension of equipment, a collection of statistics—and the numbers, not the human beings, tell the story. They don’t see that a player has a wife or kids or that real families are affected in the process. They don’t see the pain. All they see is Sunday. I remember watching Sidney Rice, a great wide receiver, catch a touchdown and get knocked out of a game against the Chicago Bears. He was flattened in a way that made you wonder if he would ever be the same again. But everybody in the stadium roared, “Oh my god! We won!” And my man is still flat on the ground. He was concussed and he could easily have been dead.

I think people feel that because we are getting paid a lot, the risks we take are justifiable. This also means there is little empathy to be had. In other high-risk jobs, if someone gets killed or hurt, people mourn. But when a player has CTE, it’s “He brought that on himself.” I think about Junior Seau a lot because he was one of the greatest defensive players ever, and the respect he commanded throughout the league was phenomenal. He was held up as the ideal of what a player should be, yet he ended up stuck with a body that wouldn’t physically work anymore and a brain that he couldn’t recognize as his own. He stopped being himself, and he chose death.

Or Steve Gleason, the former New Orleans Saint, suffering with ALS, his body slowly breaking down. People love his story but nobody wants to get deeply into it. No one wants to say that his current state damns the sport. Or the study published last year, which examined 111 former NFL players’ brains suspected of having CTE, and 110 had it. I don’t want these people’s names to be lost. The league doesn’t want you to see how the hot dogs are made, but I don’t want us to be hot dogs or statistics. You ever see what goes into a hot dog? Rat shit. We’re better than that.

I think about CTE and bodily injuries all the time. I can say without shame that I’m scared every time I go out on the field that something possibly could go wrong, and I might leave my kids for good. That’s my great fear, leaving my daughters and not seeing them grow. As I get older, and as I see them becoming these amazing young people, my fear is turning into a stone in my chest. I play with