Is There Life After Football?

by James A. Holstein

  This can’t be ignored when we ask how race affects players’ transition out of the NFL. The answer, however, is somewhat oblique. Players and former players virtually never explicitly mentioned race as a factor in their discussions with us. We’ve found nothing substantial in media accounts. Players frequently refer to the problems that emerge when families descend upon players who’ve signed big contracts, and they implicitly suggest that this is more of a problem for black players than whites due to the relative economic needs of the two groups and the perceived differences in kinship structure.43 When Bart Scott, an African American, says, “Getting money sometimes is like turning the lights on in a dark house in the ghetto. It exposes a lot of roaches and rats,” it’s hard not to infer racial connotations.44 But that’s as close as most former players come to invoking race as a post-career factor. Still, we’re reluctant to conclude that race simply doesn’t matter. As the Incognito controversy shows, race is important, but perhaps not in conventional ways.

  For example, at first, Incognito drew the ire and indignation of nearly everyone who heard his racially charged voicemail message to his black teammate: “Hey, wassup, you half nigger piece of shit.” While the media is loathe to even print the term, the focus was squarely on Incognito’s use of the typically redacted word “nigger.”45 As vile as the term may be, we explicitly use it here to make a set of important analytic points relating to race, culture, and meaning.

  Incognito was initially castigated throughout the sports media—indeed throughout the sports world—by both blacks and whites. For two days he was vilified as a racist. The overwhelming consensus was there was no place in football for language and attitudes like his. Indeed, there were indignant calls to uproot a locker room culture of racial animus and bigotry that was clearly infecting the NFL. But in an unanticipated turn of events, rejoinders from NFL locker rooms—again from both black and white players—turned the discussion upside down. Player after player—mainly Dolphins, but also from other teams around the league—rose to object. Ritchie Incognito was not a racist, teammates (black and white) proclaimed. He was a good teammate, one who embraced all his “buddies” in the locker room with the sort of camaraderie and fellowship that built team cohesion. Like his black “brothers,” Incognito used the word “nigger” as a way of signifying solidarity that crossed—even dissolved—racial lines.46

  Why, when the Anti-Defamation League was calling for investigations into NFL locker rooms, were Incognito’s black teammates dismissing the racist allegations? One of his black former teammates sums it up:

  Richie is honorary. I don’t expect you [reporter] to understand because you’re not black. But being a black guy, being a brother [in the NFL] is more than just about skin color. It’s about how you carry yourself. How you play. Where you come from. What you’ve experienced. A lot of things.47

  The importance of this and related exchanges isn’t about Richie Incognito, per se. Rather it’s about cultural understandings of race in the locker room more generally. Player after player insists that the NFL is “the least racist environment I’ve ever been in.”48 But significantly, players don’t say that locker rooms are color blind, that race doesn’t matter, that the environment isn’t racialized. The NFL is among a very few formal organizational environments that’s dominated by black men—rich, powerful black men. A large majority of the players are black. Team leaders are black. Most of the star players are black. Even the new generation of star quarterbacks is predominantly black. There are black coaches and general managers. NFLPA leaders are black. The locker room culture can’t help but reflect this fact. Certainly there are racial animosities. Race is sometimes invoked to explain perceived inequities. But NFL players also believe deeply that the league is a pure meritocracy. It’s part of the ethos. Talent wins out over everything else. For players, it’s an arena and an opportunity where anyone can achieve the American Dream on a level, multiracial playing field.

  Players leaving the league are probably never going to encounter such an environment again. They’ll return to the small towns of white west Texas or the black neighborhoods of Miami. For those who jump into the corporate world, they’ll find nearly all white colleagues, as well as increasingly more women. How does this affect former players’ retirement transitions? Black players, especially, but whites as well, will be venturing into new social territory. It’s not necessarily hostile or threatening, but it’s different. Players are imbued with the NFL culture and ethos as it pertains to masculinity, gender, and race. They are fluent in the language—both literally and figuratively. But locker room culture, demeanor, and behavior are out of place in the corporate world where “loose talk” about race, gender, sex, and sexuality are decidedly out of place. While many organizational environments leave much to be desired in this regard, they hardly compare to the NFL locker room, even at its worst.

  After inhabiting a culture where masculinity and race distinctively define social relationships in somewhat unconventional ways, former players may simply find the world outside the NFL to be “out of the ordinary.” Perhaps encounters with broader cultural standards regarding race and masculinity don’t constitute full blown “culture shock,” but, for former players, there’s a fundamental cultural “strangeness” with respect to these pillars of American social life that may be disorienting. Considering the extreme limits of cultural acceptability within the bubble—what’s “normal” in the NFL locker room—former players may understandably feel like “fish out of water.”

  Dealing with Disjuncture

  While the notion of culture shock helps explain the initial displacement and disorientation experienced by former players, another factor contributes to prolonged transition troubles. Culture shock usually dissipates, sooner or later. A different sort of disjuncture, however, may compound the lingering malaise that plagues some former players. It’s a form of social disconnection or misalignment that’s known in classic sociological terms as “anomie.”

  Emile Durkheim famously invoked the term to refer to social circumstances where standards or expectations for behavior are confused, ambiguous, or missing. It’s often called a state of “normlessness.” Anomie emerges when community standards no longer regulate member’s activities. Under such circumstances, rules on how people ought to behave don’t seem to apply and people don’t know what to expect from one another. Without normative guidelines, individuals can’t find their place in society.49

  Robert Merton modified Durkheim’s term to refer to social conditions whereby adherence to cultural imperatives is thwarted by social structural circumstances. In Merton’s terms, anomie is a disjuncture between culturally prescribed means and socially valued goals. Culture instructs individuals in the acceptable ways of pursuing societal objectives: acceptable means to valued ends, so to speak. Those ends are legitimate aims for the group’s members, the things worth striving for. Anomie exists when means and goals fail to align, producing a cultural-structural disjuncture resulting in social strain that provokes individual adaptive responses.50

  When players leave the NFL, they carry the insider’s ethos and the bubble’s norms with them. Outside the bubble, however, the norms no longer apply. Former players find it difficult to act “instinctively” or naturally because the larger social world doesn’t honor the code to which they’ve become habituated. They experience their own version of normlessness. At the same time, former players’ value structures are also in flux. The goals of dominance and winning don’t necessarily disappear, but they’re transformed, and become less clearly defined. The outside world has no direct counterpart to winning a game, a championship, a Super Bowl. While there are analogous socially valued goals such as financial success, personal accomplishment, or celebrity, they aren’t as clear-cut as those that NFL players pursue each Sunday.

  In this state of anomie, social accountability falters, feelings of belonging weaken, and the sense of a coherent social world evaporates.51 The structures of former players’ experi
ence are suddenly in flux. Being in a state of relative normlessness doesn’t mean that former players now inhabit a world without norms, however. To the contrary, they’re well aware of the normative expectations and constraints that characterize the NFL bubble; they’re deeply internalized. But former players realize that the standards of the bubble don’t necessarily apply in the world outside. So they’re carrying the ethos of the bubble around with them, with no way to live up to it. They don’t have the same opportunities to “live large,” compete in the extreme, or be a tough guy anymore. It’s ingrained in them—the essence of who they once were—but now they have no legitimate means to pursue those goals or live by their former code of ethics.

  The psychological consequences of anomie are sometimes called “anomia.” This is a mental and emotional state whereby a person’s sense of social belonging is broken or disrupted. Anomia is the feeling of disorientation, accompanied by a sense of emptiness or apathy—a sensation of meaningless, accompanied by anxiety and confusion.52 It was part of George Koonce’s state of mind as he worked out for months on end, keeping himself in shape for the opportunity to get back in the NFL—an opportunity that never came. It’s the emotional place in which he found himself as he drove aimlessly to the beach, not knowing what he was looking for, and when he took that turn too fast in his Chevy Suburban, just to see what would happen. It’s the psychological space where Otis Tyler and Drew Raymond occasionally still find themselves.

  Former players’ responses generally aren’t as dramatic as Koonce’s. Merton, however, would not have been surprised. In circumstances where original goals or aspirations are out of reach or have been abandoned, some individuals persist in their futile pursuit. They adhere to culturally prescribed conduct, even though it’s pointless. Continuing the old ways approaches a compulsion, especially when there is no payoff in sight. Merton calls this adaptation “ritualism.”53 We’ve heard myriad accounts of former players ritualistically rehabbing serious injuries, working out hours each day, “running laps” from training camp to training camp, all in the futile pursuit of a withered dream. Merton tells us to expect something like this when the individual’s social status and worth is largely dependent on a particular kind of achievement, as is the case in the NFL. Most players move beyond this in a year or two. The unrealistic goals succumb to the reality that no NFL team is going to call and the comeback attempts and the ritualistic workouts cease. The cost to former players, however, is considerable delay in getting on with their lives. In some instances, the inertia established in the first year or two out of the league keeps some players from moving on to something new with any enthusiasm or momentum.

  Merton also wouldn’t be surprised by former players who seem to give up altogether. When a loss of goals combines with a perceived lack of avenues to success, individuals turn away from social engagement. Merton calls this “retreatism”—the abandonment of both cultural goals and institutionalized practices.54 It’s an extreme response to acute anomie, where there’s been an abrupt breakdown in the familiar and accepted normative framework and where goals are suddenly out of reach. This is often the case when individuals unexpectedly become exempt from role obligations, such as with military discharges, leaving the priesthood, or being deselected from the NFL.

  The most common symptom of retreatism, according to Merton, is a generalized apathy. Retreatists simply don’t connect with society. The most extreme manifestation is suicide. Although infrequent, we’ve seen it far too often among former NFL players, and we’ve noted many examples of despondency and several suicide attempts. Sometimes we hear accounts of players breaking ties completely with the league, selling their memorabilia, and avoiding all contact with former teammates. Some simply languish, without serious attempts to establish new careers or pastimes. Such adaptations certainly resonate with Merton’s model.

  As with culture shock, we need to consider why responses to anomie can be so extreme among former NFL players. Again, the answer lies in the degree to which football has dominated players’ lives. The culturally exalted goals have been with most players since childhood. The socially structured means to these ends have been in place for nearly as long. And they’re all encompassing. Players’ entire lives have been structured around their NFL dream. When that structure disappears, there’s little to which former players can cling, nothing left to shoot for. The social disjunctures at the end of NFL careers are serious fractures, not minor fault lines.

  Identity under Siege

  Former NFL players confront myriad challenges on the social psychological front, too. Retirement places their identities at stake. Viewed abstractly, the ways in which players experience, apprehend, and appreciate their lives after football are filtered through the ways that they conceive of and evaluate their selves. The social objects that individuals understand themselves to be provide the experiential anchors for making sense of their lives. We live by and through those selves. Associated identities claim our places in the world around us.55 But when these selves are in flux—when identities are challenged—the ways we navigate everyday life, and the way we feel about our experience, are put to the test.

  If feelings of disorientation and distress derive from the cultural shock of leaving the NFL, there’s even greater cognitive and emotional turmoil when players’ fundamental sense of who they are is cut adrift. This isn’t just a sense of cultural confusion or normlessness. It’s a loss of personal bearings. Certainly losing the central role in players’ lives is unsettling, but the persistent feeling that something’s wrong or something’s missing signals greater social psychological upheaval than simply role exit or job loss.

  The concept of “role” is useful in thinking about the various enterprises and activities in which individuals engage, but it’s too limiting and static to capture what it actually means to be an NFL player. There is no script or set of normative role requirements that captures everything that’s involved. By the same token, “role exit” simply doesn’t convey the radical change that sweeps over former players’ lives. They aren’t losing roles; they’re losing selves they’ve known for a lifetime. “I am 48 years old and I still have dreams about it,” says Jamaal McDaniels, speaking about being an NFL player. “You never get that out of your system, man.”56

  What they never get out of their systems are the selves and identities that were firmly established during the years in the NFL bubble. As Mike Flynn, a veteran of five NFL teams, recalls, “You come out of that tunnel [onto the playing field], you feel like you’re a god.”57 That’s a powerful self-image, but it’s only one of many that players have come to know. There’s the “football” self—the person identified with being an elite athlete on the field.58 This self encompasses the football player role, to be sure, but goes far beyond into the realm of the self-defining player ethos. Being a player involves far more than suiting up on Sundays. There’s also the “celebrated” self that basks in the limelight of being an elite, highly paid, widely recognized athlete. We’ve also heard of the “gladiator” self—the warrior who fearlessly and violently sacrifices everything, body and soul, for his team and teammates. The gladiator marches into battle with his brothers, the “masculine” or “macho” self, who is all man, all the time. Then, of course, there’s the “large self,” the one that thrives on excess, on “livin’ large” at every opportunity. These are all selves that NFL players live by—socially structured and socially structuring sets of identities, personas, and related practices that serve to ground players’ everyday activities and their notions of who they are.59

  These selves are related—siblings of a sort—and the end of NFL careers places them in jeopardy. A seven-year veteran linebacker speaks of what he’s lost to retirement: “It [being a football player] is always what I’ve been and what I’ve done. So there’s a little bit of identity change. . . . You know what I miss is . . . being an NFL football player. That status, that prestige, the respect.”60 Aspects of each identity fall away when players le
ave the NFL. Former players may grieve for some of them, but never miss others. Some may never go away. But former players’ accounts of their transition troubles repeatedly come back to an ubiquitous loss:

  I miss lining up on the opening snap and 65,000 people screaming, and making a big tackle. High-fiving my buddies, getting high-fived and knowing that ‘Man, I played good!’ or I made a good play. . . . I miss men saying, ‘Hey, there goes [player]! He plays linebacker for the [name of team]. . . . I miss the Super Bowl, 850 million people watching you and you only. I mean, nobody else is watching anything else. It’s awesome!61

  Patricia and Peter Adler’s revealing sociological study of a Division I NCAA basketball team offers keen insight into the identity implications of playing big-time sports. The “gloried self” is the centerpiece of their story. College basketball players are similar to NFL players in many respects; most importantly, they’re elite athletes who garner considerable attention for excelling at their sport. The basketball players the Adlers studied were campus, if not national, celebrities, perpetually occupying the spotlight. As a consequence, write the Adlers, “The experience of glory was so existentially gratifying that these athletes became emotionally riveted on it, turning away from other aspects of their lives and selves that did not offer such fulfillment. . . . They thus developed ‘gloried’ selves.”62

  Like other versions of the self, the gloried self is the product of social feedback. Constantly told that they are great, athletes come to see themselves that way.63 Even the most modest, self-effacing NFL players sport gloried selves. They’ve been celebrated and idolized since they were kids. Consider the impact of seeing yourself—actually being yourself—in an EA Sports Madden NFL video game. In a sense, players can literally become “Prime Time” (Deion Sanders) or “Megatron” (Calvin Johnson). Internalizing all of this, being cheered by millions, and feeling like a god or a video icon, who could resist the gloried self?