The gloried self is also greedy. It elbows aside other identities. The Adlers say it’s intoxicating and addictive. It becomes the primary self through which players process their experience. Once players embrace the gloried self, they’re “all in.” According to the Adlers, they may abandon all other aspirations and identities. They are virtually engulfed in the athletic role, which leads them to center their attention on the present while abandoning any future orientation. Their self-esteem and self-worth come solely from one source of gratification: athletic fame. As this happens, the field of identity options progressively narrows, so that the gloried self is both dominant and one-dimensional. College athletes, for example, ignore their student and social roles, while immersing themselves completely in the athletic role. NFL players are similarly consumed. The gloried self is so closely tied to the NFL life that it can’t survive without it. And therein lies the problem when careers inevitably end.
While most elite athletes struggle with identity loss when their playing days are over, NFL players are especially vulnerable. Their careers stretch back to childhood. They’ve pursued no other options. They’ve made myriad “side bets” on their athletic success, attaching not only their identities, but their financial well-being, their work lives, their social lives, and even their health to their success as football players.64 When careers end, the rest can crumble, and the existential damage can be overwhelming. Their gloried selves dissolve. The Adlers note that the loss is especially sudden and devastating for college athletes, for whom “it’s all over” once their eligibility runs out.65 It’s not quite as sudden for NFL players. They stretch out their departure and milk their celebrity until it runs dry. Nevertheless, while they’ve banked more notoriety than their college counterparts, most former players eventually exhaust their NFL capital and the glory days come to an end, along with their gloried selves.
Totalizing Tendencies
The NFL is a realm of excess: exorbitant salaries and extravagant spending; unbridled aspirations; hypermasculinity; near-lethal aggression and violence; extreme tolerance for pain; fanatical work ethic; total commitment. The league demands these qualities, and, for the most part, players eagerly comply. Earlier, we called the NFL a “greedy institution.” Perhaps it’s even more demanding.
Another classic sociological concept aptly applies to players’ seemingly total immersion into, and infatuation with, the NFL bubble. Erving Goffman popularized the term “total institution” to refer to institutions that have exceedingly high “encompassing tendencies.”66 These places typically segregate themselves and their inhabitants from the outside world with formal and informal barriers to physical and social interaction. Goffman had institutions such as prisons, mental asylums, and concentration camps in mind, noting that they typically surrounded themselves with high walls, locked doors, and other physical barricades. But he also included nursing homes, orphanages, rehabilitation clinics, monasteries, convents, and the military. The common linkage is their near-complete and intentional isolation from the rest of the world.
The goals of total institutions vary widely, from caring for the infirm or helpless, to protecting society from the dangerous, to providing contemplative sanctuaries or spiritual retreats. Again, what they all have in common is the aim of reforming. In Goffman’s words, total institutions are “part residential community, part formal organization . . . they are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.” Total institutions, he notes, are established to produce particular types of individuals.67
The resemblance to the NFL here is largely suggestive. We’re not saying that the NFL meets all of the requirements for being a bona fide total institution, but there are sufficient parallels to adopt it as a useful analytic guide. For example, Goffman suggests that total institutions aim to break down the separation of typically independent spheres of everyday life by consolidating all activities in one place, under a single authority. All members’ needs are explicitly anticipated and provided for on site. All phases of the day’s activities are highly planned and tightly scheduled, and are concertedly aimed at the institution’s goals and guided by formal rules and strictures. Intense surveillance accompanies the high degree of regimentation. Each phase of a member’s daily activity is conducted in the immediate company of fellow members, who are similarly guided and motivated.68
The NFL isn’t literally a total institution because players aren’t confined to NFL facilities—at least not 24/7. They are, of course, mandated to be at team facilities for early morning treatment, meals, and meetings. And they stay until the full workday is done. They’re fined if they miss meetings or appointments, or even if they are late. And they are “locked up” for training camps, as well as the nights before games. While the accommodations are far better than those of most other total institutions, players are still confined to their quarters, required to observe curfews, and subjected to bed checks. Minor details aside, the NFL has much in common with other total institutions—at least metaphorically.
Like other total institutions, the NFL aims to mold men into institutionally desired forms. It replaces competing agendas with its own. It disrupts players’ alternate behavioral habits, totally and radically reshaping the structural and moral contours of daily living. The resulting “disculturation” renders players manageable, hopefully maximizing their productivity. As Goffman warns, however, disculturation is likely to leave members with a sort of childlike dependency, “incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside.”69
What’s more, Goffman claims that a central aim of total institutions is the “mortification” of self, whereby members surrender outside identities to those preferred and cultivated by institutional authorities. Insulated from outside interaction, immersed in institutional culture and regimens, and surrounded by others undergoing the same process, outside identities are systematically and ceremonially stripped away, to be replaced by selves constructed to institutional order.70 This is more than institutional socialization. It’s fundamental identity transformation, which Goffman says leaves members with severe deficits in “adult self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.”71
Effectively “colonized” by the institutional experience, members of total institutions lose confidence in their ability to function outside institutional confines. Transition to the outside world triggers “release anxiety,” in Goffman’s terms.72 Members simply aren’t up to speed with the cultural guidelines and cues of the outside world. Perhaps retiring players wouldn’t call it “release anxiety,” but they know the trepidations that come with being released. Absent the literal walls of the classic total institution, the NFL erects metaphorical, cultural walls that may be just as confining.
We should be cautious, however, in drawing literal comparisons with other total institutions, because the NFL differs in some very significant respects. Prisons, for example, command every aspect of prisoners’ lives, something the NFL can’t and doesn’t claim to do. Plus prisons are both involuntary and unabashedly coercive, again quite different in degree from the circumstances of the NFL, where there are tremendous incentives to seek membership. Prisoners neither enter nor leave at their own discretion. But they do leave on schedule, another difference from the NFL, where the end is poorly anticipated.
Despite these differences, however, the challenges of “reentry” for prisoners and former players bear significant similarities. Inside prisons, for example, there’s tremendous pressure to assimilate prison norms, which often leads to a sort of “institutional dependency.” Prison life teaches prisoners to rely on the prison structure for all aspects of their existence and the NFL bubble has its counterparts. Prisoners often lose the ability to make their own decisions and cease to realistically envision life after their sentences are up. They can’t plan a new life and provide for themselves when they finally get out. They aren’t prepared to face the social, economic, and emotional challenges on the outside.
They even lose the social-relation skills necessary to reconnect with intimates and close associates in the outside world. Taken to the extreme, some prisoners become totally “institutionalized” or “prisonized,” in Donald Clemmer’s famous terms.73 Having forgotten how to live in “free society” with its mundane complexities and demands, they’re ill prepared for the transition they face. They’re essentially incapable of surviving outside prison.74
While former players seldom encounter difficulties of this magnitude, we’ve heard player narratives that closely mimic these concerns. NFL players certainly aren’t “prisonized,” but they encounter many of the same institutional stumbling blocks and parallel transition troubles. The central lesson of the prison experience for NFL players is clear, however. The deeper and more complete the immersion in the institutional culture, the more difficult it is to make the transition to the outside.75
Comparisons between the military and the NFL as total institutions may also be instructive. Entry into both is voluntary and there are significant incentives to join both. Exit is “semi-voluntary” and, like most NFL players, some military personnel are not especially anxious to muster out. We need to be careful to distinguish the experiences of actual combat veterans. They face a constellation of traumas that we don’t intend to compare to those in the NFL. Still, members of the military and NFL players share the experience of “totalization.” And once again we find that discharged armed service members (not necessarily combat vets), like prisoners and NFL football players, have trouble readjusting to the “real world.”76 They must relearn the practical and social skills needed to survive in a less regimented environment. Today’s military attempts to deal with these problems aggressively, conducting discharge preparation programs and manning a web site and online informational brochures in ways remarkably similar to the NFL’s Player Care programs and web site.77
Dr. Ramon Hinojosa of the Veteran’s Administration observes that military personnel also routinely receive preseparation debriefings as they leave active duty. Specially designed programs address the social, psychosocial, and economic challenges that return to civilian life may pose. But many discharged service men, according to Hinojosa, ignore the information or reject the advice, often out of masculine pride, denial, disregard, or ambivalence about life after the military. These responses are symptomatic of a military culture that, in many ways, resembles that of the NFL. In both cases, “exes” insist that they will be fine, although post-retirement evidence says this isn’t always the case.78
While working on this book, George Koonce received a handwritten letter from an officer in a middle-size Wisconsin police force. He’d read a newspaper interview Koonce had recently done on the subject of his post-career transition. This note offers some additional insight into how still another totalizing institution creates challenges similar to those confronted by players leaving the NFL:
I’m just a middle-aged cop in Wisconsin who enjoyed watching you play. . . . Cops are in a similar situation. We spend our career somewhat isolated. Our unique duties, life and death dependency on each other, the 24/7 schedule, shared experiences (tragic and funny) really create that camaraderie that must be similar to a football team. Being a cop sometimes creates an identity that becomes your whole life. So, when we retire, we lose something that can’t be replaced. . . . It can send you adrift, trying to fill that void in many ways—some destructive (which partially accounts for our high rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism, etc.).
The letter is a compassionate gesture grounded in common experience. It’s also a warning about the challenges of stepping outside of totalized environments such as the police department or the NFL bubble.
Keys to Transition
Perhaps the essence of leaving the NFL with good prospects and positive momentum is to actively resist “totalization.” Players who thrive after football often defy cultural and organizational pressures to become full-blown NFL “organization men.”79 This doesn’t mean they’ve failed as players. Rather, it means they’ve poked their heads out of the bubble occasionally, sheltered aspects of their selves from the locker room culture, and developed talents that might serve interests other than football. In doing so, they’ve inoculated themselves against engulfment, rejecting total institutionalization in favor of personal diversification.
Does this limit their success in the NFL? Perhaps. If they don’t pay the price, they don’t make the roster. If they don’t go “all in” all year round, there careers might be short. But one thing seems certain. If players put all their eggs in the NFL basket, they’re inviting serious challenges when they leave the game because they haven’t built a foundation of post-career options. In today’s greedy NFL, the trick may be to hold football at bay—at least sometimes—in order to keep options open.
Players often claim that the contemporary game demands all their time, but that’s an exaggeration. The NFL is not a voracious predator, gobbling up every second of every day. It’s not irresistible. We’ve seen plenty of examples where planning and prudent time allocation allow players to get college degrees—and educations—while still in the league. And examples abound of players launching second careers while they’re still playing.
Still, players are reluctant to branch out, and for good reason. They don’t want to imperil the NFL dream. Michael Oriard, for one, occasionally wonders if he would have been more successful in the NFL if he’d put more of himself into the game. He speculates that he might have been more than a backup lineman if he’d made greater sacrifices, wanted it more. Ultimately, Oriard concluded that football success wasn’t worth the price that might have been extracted from other dimensions of his life. “How ironic is it,” he notes, “that the better players and the players for whom football has greater personal importance must pay the penalty in a more difficult adjustment to retirement.” “Blessed are the mediocre,” he concludes, “for they shall inherit the future.”80
While Oriard is far too modest about his football career, he still conceives of himself as a football player and this deeply informs his identity. But he also sees himself in more enduring, far-reaching terms:
The long career [as an English professor at Oregon State] is clearly what’s more important, because it was the longer career. . . . I’ve been more successful as an English professor than I ever was as a football player. . . . I’ve written seven books—I’ve been a very productive scholar. I was named a distinguished professor at my university. Of course, that old cliché, that “sports is life with the volume turned up . . .” Well, it’s true that my successes as an academic have been more routine than my going from walk-on at Notre Dame to the NFL. . . . I paid my dues and it all worked out OK.81
Michael Oriard, George Koonce, and countless other players committed major portions of their lives and selves to NFL success, yet they still had enough left over to thrive after football. Indeed, Koonce and Oriard offer exemplary lessons in avoiding “institutionalization,” even though they’re studies in contrast. It’s easy to peg Oriard as the white, cerebral offensive lineman, while Koonce is the black, athletic middle linebacker. It’s tempting to conclude that Oriard’s social background alone predicted life successes that Koonce likely wouldn’t achieve. Probabilistically, that’s the case. The range of choices available to them were definitely conditioned by their socioeconomic, racial, and educational foundations, but each made crucial choices within his range of possibilities—choices that either opened or closed options.
Oriard grew up in a middle-class family, was an honor student at private schools, and had the luxury of being socially positioned to choose from a full slate of possibilities. His football dream led him to Notre Dame, but not on a football scholarship. What if he’d chosen another university, say, Miami or Michigan? Would those schools have embraced a walk-on who wanted to study physics and English lit? Being middle class or white doesn’t necessarily mean one takes education seriously, or makes the most of one’s opportunities. Remember Jim Harbaugh’s experi
ence at the University of Michigan. Nor does it insure prudent planning. Former first round draft choice Todd Marinovich planned his pursuit of the NFL down to the smallest detail. The son of a football coach, Marinovich had seemingly every social advantage. He made every choice of his young life (or had them made for him) with NFL success in mind. His commitment was as “total” as one could imagine, but these choices left him floundering when football was done with him, with an unfortunate legacy of homelessness, drug abuse, and jail.82
Being poor or black, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily mean that one majors in “eligibility” or “sport and recreation.” It doesn’t prescribe “livin’ large.” Eugene Profit and Charles Nobles testify to this. George Koonce came from modest means, where school was an afterthought to many of his peers. But his parents wouldn’t let him slack off, even when he sometimes lagged behind. When he couldn’t qualify for a Division I football scholarship, Koonce did his time at a community college rather than quitting in despair, laying an academic as well as a football foundation. He got a degree in industrial technology and construction management—a field which dovetailed with past work experience, as well as with his future investment plans.
In a sense, Koonce and Oriard got onto paths running parallel alongside football. Perhaps it was a luxury for Oriard and more of a necessity for Koonce, but both actually had to work for their livings while trying to land positions in the NFL. Once there, Koonce had a far more productive and lucrative career, while Oriard just managed to get by. But Oriard also managed to complete most of his doctoral studies with his NFL income paying the bills. Koonce, on the other hand, had his bouts of minor excesses, but basically trod a conservative path through his playing years. He maintained ties with his alma mater. Keeping true to his roots, he bought rental properties and other real estate and preserved his financial solvency, even though he had some bad investments and terrible luck with injury and non-guaranteed NFL contracts. He didn’t simply blow through his NFL money and end up broke at the end of the line.
Is There Life After Football? Page 27
