It’s not just the fear of dying on the field but that when I’m forty-five or fifty years old, right when my daughters will be discovering new planets or inventing something fantastic or having children of their own, I won’t be mentally able to enjoy their awesomeness.
I think about Cortez Kennedy, one of the best defensive players ever to play this game, one of the best Seahawks, and one of my friends. He died on May 23, 2017, and he was just forty-eight years old. I ate dinner with Cortez every Saturday night before home games for the last four or five years. He always had advice for me, on and off the field, and it staggered me when I heard he was gone. Cortez had an appointment to get his heart checked. Then he had a fatal heart attack the next day. He was a big man, and the strain on the heart for a former NFL player can be a more deadly byproduct of this game than brain injuries. We loved Tez—not just the team, everybody. They played a video tribute for him before the first home game of 2017, and you could see fans crying in the stands. I still hear his voice before games, saying to me, “Go get it, young fella.” As long as I hear those words, I feel like he’s still with us.
For me, the fear is not just of death. It’s fear of pain. And it’s the fear that all the love I get from fans is more like the love they might give a steak. I’m loved until I’m eaten and abandoned when all that’s left is a bone. The hardest part as a player is knowing that people love you conditionally. Out of sight, out of mind. I like having retired players eat at my house. I feed them. I take care of them. I thank them and make a point of saying, “I appreciate everything you’ve done.” It’s because I understand what they did for us. They put their lives on the line. We wouldn’t have a lot of the protections we have now if they hadn’t taken risks. When older players stand up for better pensions, we need to follow them and support them because they are our parents, in a way. To do otherwise would be like saying, “Why should we celebrate Black History Month? I don’t know any of those people. I don’t know Martin Luther King. I don’t know Harriet Tubman.” You don’t have to know them to know their impact. These players fought to get us everything from free agency to better medical care, and they haven’t been taken care of properly.
I think about people like Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell, Dwight Clark, Tony Dorsett, and Jim McMahon; I also think about the players who weren’t considered superstars but still suffer. They say, “After you retire, everything hurts all the time.” If you care about the person under the helmet it will break your heart. When I see the older players limping, or their hands shaking before they’re fifty, I feel scared, like I’m looking at my future. There are a lot of different figures out there of the percentage of players who die young or get severe CTE; let’s say that it’s 10 percent, which is crazy low, but for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with it. If 10 percent of women were getting killed or if 10 percent of kids were getting kidnapped, it would be a national emergency. I get scared that I could be in that percentage. You have to keep that fear in you and acknowledge it, because that is what makes you human and able to realize, “I shouldn’t be doing that shit.”
The fear isn’t just ours. Our families watch the games with their hearts in their throats every time we go down. One game, I went down just because I was dehydrated and my knee locked up. But watching up in the stands, my wife didn’t know that. All she knew was I wasn’t moving. Fans say, “Oh no! My fantasy team!” My wife and kids are saying, “Oh no. Our lives.” I wish the NFL would do a better job of showing the public that we’re not warriors but human beings. I hate that animated Fox NFL robot-soldier that gives the impression we are all like Robocop. It’s not just the injuries. I want fans to know how it hurts to be apart from your family most of the year. They don’t see the divide, the time a player spends away from his family. But then I wonder, if they did know, would fans care more about our well-being? Even those fans who don’t ignore the toll on body and soul of playing this game think that we’ve made a deal with the devil, and maybe they’re right. When you deal with the devil, sometimes it’s great, but when the devil comes calling, don’t expect any sympathy.
The NFL Is Also NOT Integrated
The pain of playing this game would be easier to swallow if we had the ability not only to play but, as former players, to have a voice: to become a general manager or even to own. But we don’t. The NFL has no Black owners and therefore this sport has yet to truly integrate. Fans might be paying to see the players, but the league is the owners. They make the decisions. They set the policies. They make the money with the extra zeroes. They’re the ones holding up the Lombardi Trophy when it all ends. They are also around much longer.
