Is There Life After Football?

by James A. Holstein

  In the NFL scheme of things, being soft is a greater sin than being crazy, crude, or barbaric. From this perspective, it’s Martin who is culturally out of step. Former Dolphins teammate Lydon Murtha virtually damned Martin when he characterized him as shy and standoffish, with “a tendency to tank when things would get difficult in practice.”15 Martin came off as the antithesis of Incognito’s “badass.” After all he’d majored in classical studies at Stanford and came from a long line of Harvard graduates. Coy Wire, a former Stanford and NFL player, knows what that might mean: “If you don’t fit into the mold, and the culture in the locker room, you won’t last. Sometimes, in a gladiator sport like football, intelligence can be perceived as being soft.”16

  And perception matters. As Mike Greenberg, Golic’s media sidekick, notes, “The NFL is probably the only place where having parents who went to Harvard, and you went to Stanford, is something you have to ‘overcome.’”17 In the warrior culture of the NFL, one can’t even appear to be soft. “This is a game of high testosterone, with men hammering their bodies on a daily basis,” says Lydon Murtha. “You are taught to be an aggressive person, and you typically do not make it to the NFL if you are a passive person. There are a few, but it’s very hard. Playing football is a man’s job, and if there’s any weak link, it gets weeded out.”18

  If toughness is the coin of the NFL realm, loyalty also carries considerable currency. Not surprisingly, after initial outrage from a few players not associated with the Dolphins, Incognito’s teammates—black and white—rallied to his support.19 To a man, they said that Martin should never have taken his complaints outside the locker room. Players stick together like a “band of brothers, like a fraternity” says former coach Brian Billick.20 “It’s a brotherhood, a pure brotherhood,” adds Ray Lewis.21 Airing dirty laundry in public is a cardinal sin. “Keep it in the house,” says Martin’s teammate Bryant McKinney.22 Remember, the code of the NFL is “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.” When Martin sought outside help, he was not only admitting to weakness, he became a traitor to the cause.

  Some compare the NFL code of loyalty to the code of silence and allegiance of gangs, prisoners, the military, or the police.23 By exposing the situation to the media, says Murtha, Martin broke that code. “It shows that he’s not there for his teammates and he’s not standing up for himself. There might be a team that gives him a chance [to play again in the NFL] because he’s a good person, but the players will reject him. They’ll think, if I say one thing he’s going to the press. He’ll never earn the respect of teammates and personnel in the NFL because he didn’t take care of business the right way.”24 According to Murtha and others, the Dolphins aren’t unique. Conflict breaks out routinely, but there are routine ways to handle it. “This racial slur would be a blip on the radar if everything that happens in the locker room went public,” claims Murtha. “All over the league, problems are hashed out in-house. Either you talk about it or you get physical. But at the end of the day, you handle it indoors.”25

  This is the culture of the NFL: the world of the tough guy, the loyal teammate, the gladiator. Commentators often dismiss locker room culture as an immature, ephemeral anomaly into which otherwise respectable men sometimes slip for good fellowship and light-hearted respite from adult responsibilities. But in the case of the NFL, it’s much more. It’s the quintessence of “team,” and its ethos is the heart and soul of its inhabitants. The local culture is fully embodied in players’ attitudes and lifestyle, which they carry with them wherever they go. It’s not that they are compelled to act this way. Rather, they opt to hold themselves accountable to the ethos, using it to justify a very distinctive set of behavioral habits.

  Of course, all this might easily be dismissed as the outlandish behavior of a rogue ball player—an aberration. Richie Incognito could be the exception to the NFL rule. Indeed, it’s this sort of extreme case—the deviant or outlier—that actually helps society identify the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable.26 It would be easy to characterize Incognito as such a boundary setting renegade, an anomaly. Tellingly, however, his behavior is not beyond the pale—at least not in the NFL. Incognito has been voted the league’s dirtiest player. He was dismissed from two college teams for inappropriately aggressive behavior. He’s appeared on national TV ranting vile obscenities and racial slurs in a bar.27 He was investigated in 2012 for sexually harassing a woman at a Dolphins golf tournament. According to police reports, a 34-year-old female volunteer told police that Incognito had been intoxicated and molested her with a golf club.28 Incognito routinely uses the term “nigger.” Despite all this, he was still a teammate in good standing. He wasn’t considered a deplorable anomaly, one who stood beyond the boundary. In fact, teammates considered Incognito more than acceptable as a member of the locker room brigade. He was a leader, an exemplar of the player ethos. In 2013, before the controversy broke, he was a member of the Dolphins’ leadership council.

  All of this speaks volumes about life in the NFL. If Incognito is “within bounds,” what might be “out of bounds”? Where are the limits of normal or acceptable in the league? Where are the lines drawn separating the upstanding from the intolerable? The NFL culture and player ethos not only abide Incognito’s demeanor and behavior, they honor them. At the same time they question Jonathan Martin’s character because he’s mild mannered and not loyal to the core. To listen to players comment on the controversy, it’s Martin who sets the standard for unacceptability. He’s too soft and disloyal.

  In February 2014, NFL-appointed investigator Ted Wells issued a report on the Dolphins’ situation that concluded that the team’s locker room supported a “culture of intolerance” and a “pattern of harassment” directed at Martin as well as another young Dolphins offensive lineman and a member of the team’s training staff. The Wells Report verified most of Martin’s claims, but stopped short of castigating the locker room culture that fomented the situation. It implied that the locker room ethos sometimes got out of hand, but the report never condemned the culture as pathological. At least for the moment, the discussion adopted the terms of inappropriate workplace “bullying.”29

  Reaction among NFL players was decidedly mixed, echoing arguments made earlier. The league itself offered pubic displays of grave concern, and even raised the possibility of penalizing players during games for any use of the “N-word” (although never publicly voicing the actual term “nigger” that was ostensibly to be penalized). Ultimately the discussion was tabled on the grounds that the use of racial slurs was already covered by unsportsmanlike conduct rules. The issues of locker room culture, threatening conduct, and racial animus were set aside in order to debate changes in the “extra point” rules.30

  The Wells Report is conspicuously noncommittal in assessing underlying factors precipitating this particular incident. “Our mandate did not include setting standards for what types of behavior should be permitted or prohibited within the Miami Dolphins organization,” says the report.31 For their part, the Dolphins vowed to continue reviewing relevant team policies and procedures to seek “areas of improvement.”32 Ultimately, we’re left with the report’s summation:

  The behavior that occurred here was harmful to the players, the team and the league. It was inconsistent with a civilized workplace—even in a professional football league and even among tough football players whose very profession is defined by physical and mental domination of players across the line of scrimmage. There are lines—even in a football locker room—that should not be crossed, as they were here. We leave the determination of precisely where to draw those lines to those who spend their lives playing, coaching and managing the game of professional football.33

  Such a conclusion essentially downplays the larger cultural issues underpinning this situation. If NFL standards for what’s “normal” allow for Richie Incognito’s extremes—or anything in the vicinity—how do they guide players operating outside the locker room? Of course most NFL players don�
��t act like Incognito. Many of them think he’s a jerk, even if they do respect what he brings to the game. But with standards established so far out on the periphery, nearly any excess seems tolerable. It’s no wonder players feel disoriented when they’re evicted from the locker room. The rules of the game radically change. Excess is called into question. It’s no surprise when things seem upside down, that former players don’t know exactly what to do. That’s culture shock: the disruption of the familiar, the loss of cultural cues and bearings. If Richie Incognito signals what’s “normal” inside the NFL, there may be problems when players step outside.

  Richie Incognito also helps set the parameters for what it means to be a real man in a tough guy’s game. The term “macho” was coined with him in mind. Masculinity is the bedrock of the NFL player ethos and in an environment where one’s manhood is challenged on a daily basis, Incognito pushed the limits. It was certainly the subtext of the controversy involving Jonathan Martin. To call Martin “soft” was essentially saying he wasn’t man enough for the NFL. As Lydon Murtha reminded us, it’s a “high testosterone” game.

  Just as the NFL ethos thoroughly conflates toughness and masculinity, it uses homophobia and misogyny to further highlight the contours of being a man. Homophobic slurs—such as “fag” or “faggot”—are so commonplace as terms of generalized derision that they lose their ostensible pejorative connection to sexuality. If players are suspected of malingering or refusing to play though pain, for example, they’re labeled “faggots.” Players don’t really believe that the targets of such remarks are actually gay. They simply use the slur as a way of condemning behavior or character that’s perceived as insufficiently masculine.34

  This practice was underscored throughout the Incognito–Martin controversy. The Wells Report documents multiple instances where Dolphins players (including Martin) “teased” a fellow teammate about being gay (although there’s no evidence confirming the teammate’s sexuality), calling him, among other things, “fag” or “faggot.” Other taunts were far more vulgar and sexually suggestive. Even members of the coaching staff participated. The report also revealed that the Dolphins kept an unofficial “fine book” that recorded players’ finable offenses, including being a “pussy”—which apparently referred to being “soft” more than sexuality.35

  It remains to be seen if such manifestations of locker room masculinity will thrive in the future. In February 2014, Michael Sam, All-American defensive end and Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year, publicly announced that he was gay. Initially considered a near certainty be taken in the NFL draft, Sam would become the first openly gay player in the league. While many players were immediately supportive, there were plenty of skeptics as well. Forbes contributor David Lariviere wrote that “With the recent announcement by Michael Sam . . . that he is gay, it is even more urgent that a tolerant atmosphere exist throughout the league. The frequent use of homophobic insults undermines this goal.”36 Some NFL executives were more explicit: “Outness” they suggest, is “an employment hazard” in a “man’s man’s game.” Drafting Sam will be a risk, one said, because “there’s nothing more sensitive than the heartbeat of the locker room.” A more general sentiment among NFL general managers was that Sam would probably still be drafted, but, that all things being equal, they preferred not to draft players who brought with them unnecessary “distractions.” This is the same caveat often used when discussing players with criminal records or histories of substance abuse, suggesting that being gay carries a stigma comparable to breaking the law or using illicit drugs.

  Eventually, Sam was drafted at the end of the seventh round by the St. Louis Rams., the 249th out of 256 players drafted. For an SEC defensive player of the year to slide this far down the draft board is nearly unprecedented. At the same time, however, the consensus among NFL personnel evaluators was that Sam’s “tweener” size, mediocre “measurables,” and lack of fit with conventional NFL defensive schemes diminished his value. Regardless, official reaction to Sam’s drafting from the league, the Rams, and the national news and sports media was extremely positive, embracing the occasion as a groundbreaking, historic moment. Still, a few players and former players offered strong negative comments implicating Sam’s sexuality. Sam was cut at the end of training camp but performed well enough that he may still catch on with an NFL squad. The extent of the league’s acceptance of an openly gay player remains to be seen.37

  The objectification and vilification of women plays a similar role in fortifying the NFL’s culture of toughness and masculinity. Locker room banter and sexual braggadocio is legendary. Players use outlandish and derisive comments about mothers, sisters, and girlfriends both to humorously denigrate one another and to distance themselves from all things feminine. Indeed, to be a man often seems to require demeaning women. During the Incognito–Martin controversy, for example, Martin’s attorney, David Cornwell, alleged that an unnamed Dolphins teammate reportedly directed the following remarks toward Martin and his sister: “We are going to run a train on your sister. . . . She loves me. I am going to f*** her without a condom and c** in her c***.”38 The Wells Report offered additional graphically demeaning examples. These remarks almost assuredly had nothing to do with Martin’s sister personally. They are simply depersonalizing and degrading slurs aimed at challenging Martin’s masculinity by debasing his sister. Once again, we see just how far behavioral boundaries are stretched in the name of “normal.” As former NFL quarterback Danny Kannell observes, players simply treat race, gender, sexuality, and toughness in ways totally different from how they are handled in other work places or social settings.39

  Sociologist Michael Kimmel would certainly recognize the rites of masculinity in an NFL locker room. Indeed, he might suggest that we see their roots in the everyday pursuit of manhood across the landscape of 21st-century American society. Based on years of field research, Kimmel argues that contemporary young men occupy a social world he calls “Guyland.”40 It’s a phase of life and social arena dominated by “buddy culture,” with minimal demands from parents, partners, and casual outsiders. Its occupants skirt the responsibilities of mature adulthood and the nuisances of everyday life as they try to develop mature masculine identities. Largely in the company of other young men, they test and prove themselves as men and develop the defining attitudes and self-images they will carry into mature adulthood. In Guyland, peer approval and tacit adherence to the “guy code” are the prime forces in shaping young men’s behavior and identities.

  The guy code exhorts a commitment to relentlessly masculine attitudes and camaraderie. Kimmel describes it using a widely known indigenous shorthand: “Bros before hos.” The code is simple: Be a man among men (no sissies allowed). Be important, successful, and powerful. Be reliable and loyal. Be daring and aggressive. The camaraderie of Guyland is key. Male bonding and a commitment to a “band of brothers” are scaled-down versions of the masculine fellowship that emerges in wartime combat, or among the ranks of the police and firefighters. The social world of Guyland revolves almost exclusively around other guys. In Kimmel’s terms, it’s a “pure, homosocial Eden, uncorrupted by sober responsibilities of adulthood.”41

  Does this sound familiar? The NFL locker room is Guyland on steroids, where players aggressively exaggerate the “guy code.” Masculinity lives large, with the volume turned way up. It’s hypermasculinity. Just as individual men aren’t the virtual embodiments of Guyland, not all NFL players are fully committed to locker room masculinity. In the bubble, they strike their own deals with the pervasive normative order. But the NFL culture definitely leaves its masculine imprint, even when players leave the game. The bubble packs a more powerful cultural punch than the more amorphous Guyland, leaving lasting habits that shape not only what former players do, but how they see their worlds, even when they are out of the league. Out of the game, it’s difficult for players to find their hypermasculine-identity bearings, to know society’s limits.

  At the same
time that the NFL culture offers an exaggerated version of masculinity, it also provides unique cultural cues about race and race relations. The manner in which players rallied to deny Incognito’s racism elucidates a unique aspect of NFL culture that’s sometimes an additional source of culture shock. In fact, the entire controversy offered a rare glimpse into racialized interactions between NFL players, as well as into some of the ways that race is insinuated into NFL culture.

  The topic of race was almost never volunteered by anyone associated with the NFL in all the narrative materials we’ve collected about life in and after football. Periodically, league and union officials and self-appointed watchdogs assess the state of racial parity in the NFL, offering statistical analyses of percentages of white and non-white players, coaches, and administrators.42 There’s been a longstanding conversation about “stacking” black players at particular positions (i.e., assigning them to positions demanding extreme athleticism but excluding them from “thinking positions” and positions “close to the ball,” quarterback in particular). Today, the general tenor of the discussions is that the NFL is far from perfect, but has made steady progress over the decades, and is presently at the forefront of institutional race relations in the United States. With the exception of outright ownership, African Americans have been prominently and successfully represented throughout the NFL, including upper management (there have been a small handful of black minority owners/partners). The fact that most current players (and a growing proportion of alums) are non-white, however, receives relatively little critical inquiry.