They test one position group at a time. Sometimes it comes in May, sometimes in June, sometimes in July, and sometimes not until August. The August test is a real buzzkill. That means months and months of thumb-twiddling and gazing off into the distance, enticed by nothing but raging hormones. Stoners are content sitting on the couch and thinking. Nonstoners need actual action to pacify them. They need booze and sex: or God. God is usually the odd man out. The NFL should remove marijuana from their banned substances list. Don’t tell anyone about it: just stop testing for it. Pain is a big problem in the NFL. Pain management is necessary. Weed is the least harmful and least addictive of the painkillers players use to cope with the violent demands of the game. Drug use in the NFL mirrors drug use outside of the NFL. Pills reign supreme. There are more overdoses in America from prescription painkillers than from cocaine and heroin combined. And no one ever overdoses from weed. The problem is pills and booze. A joint can alleviate the need for either and plant buttocks firmly on the couch, where a MacGyver marathon takes on epic proportions. And no one gets hurt, except for the idiot who locked MacGyver in the bowels of a sinking ship.
The week after the draft is our first minicamp. At the urging of their position coaches, the rookies transcribe every phrase uttered during meetings, assuming they are all important. That used to be me. They’ll learn soon enough. You don’t need to write down a word. The constant drone is by design. It seeps into your brain regardless.
Out on the field, minicamp practices are fast and crisp. Coach wants us practicing at game speed. If you practice slow, the game feels too fast. If you practice fast, the game feels slow. Knowing how to practice is just as important as knowing what to practice. But the rookies are lost in both regards. Not only do they have to figure out the tempo and the nuanced contact/noncontact line that we toe every day, but they have to learn a new language extremely fast. Each offensive system is a foreign language. Its cornerstone terms have no meaning outside the system. The terminology is dictated quickly and with the assumption that it is understood, even when there is no way it will be. We install the entire playbook in the first few days, knowing full well that it will whistle through the ears of most everyone, because during the second minicamp, it will be installed again, and again during training camp, until it becomes second nature. Until then, there will be confused rookies getting yelled at for fucking up play after play, day after day. I’m happy to be done with it. My grasp on the offense is complete. No surprises and no confusion. I can just go out and practice hard, then come in and hope the Pee Man is ready for me, so I can go home and watch MacGyver.
In early June Coach Shanahan hosts his annual golf tournament. It’s a popular event, drawing wealthy and influential people from all over the country. It usually falls during the week, and Coach gives us the option of going to the tournament or working out at the facility as scheduled. If we go to the tournament we get credit for the workout.
And if you go to the tournament you don’t have to play golf. You can just ride around in a golf cart and schmooze. Those of us who play, maybe twenty of us, are put in foursomes with corporate bigwigs or local heroes or cookie-cutter rich dudes. There are gift bags at the check-in desk, sponsored holes, gourmet food, beer tents, endless prizes, video cameras, and an awards dinner at the end of it. Golf balls are stacked into pyramids at each tee on the driving range. The beer is free and fully stocked at every hole.
Cigars are lit and we tee off. It’s a scramble, or “best ball” format, so my poor golf skills are protected. I’m the “Broncos player” in the group. Although they would have preferred one of our big-name guys, they’ll take what they can get. And once their disappointment with their pairing wears off, they feel great knowing that no matter who I am, they’re probably better than me at golf. Coach Shanahan always says that if a player is really talented at golf, it’s not a good sign. I find this encouraging. We have a few decent golfers on the team, but they are always either quarterbacks, kickers, or snappers: finesse guys. For the most part, football players swing a golf club like they are trying to make a tackle. That doesn’t translate to a good golf shot. Our foursome bonds over my inability to relax and swing the club. We toast our beers and pull on our cigars. I act like I know how to smoke one. We get drunk and tease each other. Does your husband play? Ha!
It’s a fun event, but what pushes it from “fun” to “no way I’m missing it” is the driver assigned to each player’s golf cart. It’s a Broncos cheerleader. This is a quality perk for the paying customers as well, as they are often pervy men who fancy themselves, in the right setting, able to properly love a beautiful young cheerleader, if only things had gone a little differently.
For me it’s a chance to have an actual conversation with a dancing figment of my imagination, a princess of my football dreams, a temptress in chaps, a goddess of the gridiron. I never knew which cheerleader it would be. It didn’t matter. They are all perfect.
Our final minicamp of the summer is in early July. By now the rookies have started to figure out the offense. Practices are crisp. Coach has us practicing on two separate fields simultaneously. One field is for the first- and second-team players. The other is for the rookies and the guys stuck farther down on the depth chart. Both fields run the same plays off the same script, and when we watch the film, we watch the starters’ field. The rookies have to stay later or come earlier so they can watch their practice on tape. I’m on the starters’ field and I’m getting lots of reps. Tony is nursing a broken bone in the outside of his foot: a common injury in football. We run a lot of two-tight-end sets. It’s called our “Tiger” group. When you have fast, athletic tight ends on the field it puts the defense in a bind. If they decide to cover us with linebackers and safeties it makes them vulnerable in the passing game. If they put nickel corners on us it makes them vulnerable in the run game.
I’m working in the first group with Daniel Graham (D.G.), our new free-agent acquisition from New England. When Daniel got to town the first thing he asked me was if I would be willing to part ways with 89. He had been 89 his whole career and was hoping to keep it that way. I didn’t care much for 89. It was the only one available when I switched to tight end. And since then, a few new numbers had opened up. I was happy to give up 89, but as is customary in the league, it would come at a price. I put on my hardball negotiating face and gave him my first demand: thirty thousand dollars.
He laughed in my face. “Fifteen. That’s it.” Fifteen is industry standard.
I laughed back. “No deal.” I walked away knowing I had him right where I wanted him. When he didn’t run over immediately and cave, I approached him with a new offer.
—Okay, fine. You wanna play hardball? Twenty-five.
—No, Nate. Fifteen.
Cool as can be.
—You’re not moving off that number?
—Nope.
—Well neither am I. No deal.
I walked away again and we didn’t speak the rest of the day. The next day I walked up to him in the weight room.
—Okay, buddy. You drive a hard bargain. Twenty. Otherwise no deal.
—Fine. No deal.
I waited ten minutes for him to realize his blunder then I approached him again.
—Seventeen-five.
—Nope.
—Sixteen-five.
—Nope.
—Sixteen.
—Nope.
—Fine. Fifteen it is.
We shook hands and the deal was done. It was strange at first watching film after practice because my eyes instinctively went to my number, 89. But by this last minicamp of the summer, my eyes have adjusted. I’m 81 now. And I like it.
8
Farewell, Bronco Betty
(2007)
The short break goes by in a blink. First I fly to Vegas and spend a few days with my new girlfriend, Sara. She lives there. A friend introduced us on one of our mancations in
June. It was lust at first sight. We’ve been flying to see each other every chance we get. But Las Vegas takes on a different hue when you’re hanging out in the suburbs, filling up gas tanks and walking the dogs. For a partying tourist, the Strip is a wonderland. But it has a runoff. Driving through desert tract-home neighborhoods with rocks for front lawns and cacti for shrubs and tumbleweeds blowing through childless streets, the city reveals itself. People voluntarily come to Vegas to live a sequin fantasy: dollar signs shooting off like fireworks in the night sky. But the sun rises and illuminates the lie. The vampires scatter like roaches into soon-to-be foreclosed tract homes and shut the blackout shades. Life is but a dream.
After Vegas I go to New York to meet Charlie and Kyle. We are on a whirlwind partying circuit, spending our money as fast as we can, chasing a ghost that is pulling away from us. But we won’t go down easy.
In late July, Kyle and I go back to Denver and Charlie goes back to Houston. Training camp starts and it’s here-we-go-again. But the locker room feels different without Jake. His presence had been a part of my daily life. We had lots of talks over the years: about life, football, music, idealism, power, control, authority. That he had found success as an NFL quarterback made me believe that there was room for an iconoclast in the cloistered institution of big football. It had made me believe that a free mind could flourish in the confines of structure and rigmarole. When things fell apart between him and Mike, another piece of my idealism went with it.
But the good/bad thing about football is that it moves too quickly for your conscientious objections to keep pace. It pulls you along by sheer force. No sooner have I made peace with his absence than I’m back fighting to keep my job. I feel as healthy as I have in a while and, more important, I finally feel comfortable as a tight end. The hell I endured as fledgling blocker has given way to a polished attack that utilizes my strengths and camouflages my weaknesses. My missile-shot pop to the chin of the defensive end is refined to a laser beam. The firecracker explosion in my helmet is a familiar friend. The “Oh shit” moment is an “Oh well” moment. I’m comfortable in hell.
But less than a week into training camp, between practices, I receive word that Bill Walsh has died. I knew he was sick but I didn’t know the extent of it. It was leukemia that killed him, the same disease that had taken his forty-six-year-old son five years earlier. Bill had kept the severity of the worm to himself, not wanting to worry those who loved him. His death produces a powerful reaction in the football community.
I feel instant remorse. I haven’t spoken to him since I shook his hand in his office four years earlier and left for my new life in Denver. I never reached out to say thank you, to tell him what his influence had meant to me, the life that it granted me, the dream it fulfilled. I had plenty of chances to call him or write him and tell him how I felt. But for whatever reason, I didn’t. Whenever the thought came to my mind, I dismissed the idea, thinking that he probably didn’t want to be bothered, didn’t want people’s sympathy, didn’t want to be reminded that he was dying.
As I walk onto the field for afternoon practice, Coach pulls me aside and asks me if I have heard the news. I say I have. We stand in a silent recognition that only Mike and I can share. The three of us form a triangle inside of which my NFL life has taken shape. It was Mike who answered Bill’s call and agreed to bring me in for a look. I had been an extension of Mike’s appreciation for the roots of his own football philosophy, and aside from the two of us, no one knew much about my connection to Bill. I didn’t talk about it to anyone. It happened under cover of darkness. I had come to Denver alone. But Bill was always on my shoulder.
After practice the next morning, Mike asks me if I want to go to Bill’s funeral service at Stanford. I hadn’t thought about it. We’re in the throes of camp, but I can tell that Mike wants me to go. He can’t leave his football team in the middle of camp. Bill wouldn’t have approved. But he wants to send a representative contingent. The day of the service, Coach charters a private plane for John Lynch and me. John played for Bill at Stanford in 1992.
Instead of waking up and going to practice, I wake up and put on a suit and drive to Centennial Airport, a mile away from our facility. John and I board the plane and sit back for the two-hour flight. We are picked up in San Francisco by a car service that drives us straight to Stanford. We check in at a desk outside the church. It’s a beautiful sunny day. My suit hides my training camp welts and bruises and my blisters rub on my dress shoes as John and I find seats near the far left in an open pew. The service unfolds like a dream.
Dr. Harry Edwards, longtime 49ers consultant and iconic sports sociologist and a mountainous man with a baritone voice, takes the pulpit to eulogize his mentor and friend. Bill had known he was going to die so he prepared the service like a game plan. But he left the substance of the eulogy up to Dr. Edwards. I sit transfixed by the doctor, pulled into his words as he puts Bill’s legacy in the proper light. I knew Bill Walsh as a man who helped me though he did not have to, a man who cleared the path for me to chase my dreams. I knew him as the coach of my childhood street football games. I knew him as the reason I’m a professional football player, as the reason I believed I could be one in the first place.
I scan the room as Dr. Edwards speaks and I see the look on everyone’s faces. It’s the same look, all of us thinking the same thoughts about the man who changed our lives. There is Joe Montana. There is Jerry Rice. There is Steve Young. There is Eddie DeBartolo, 49ers owner. There is Ronnie Lott. There is everyone—all players, coaches, politicians, family, friends—hearts opened to Harry Edwards as he contextualizes Bill’s legacy. Bill Walsh was a football visionary. But he was much more. He was a social innovator in a sport that was bogged down in oppressive traditions.
He started the minority coaches internship program, which initiated the hiring of black coaches in a sport dominated by black men. And when he observed the real-world shortcomings of men who had been bred and groomed to play football, he tried to even the scales. He started the college reentry program, the postcareer occupational and preparational internship program, the financial counseling program, and the family and personal counseling program. He saw the need for an improvement in the life skills of his players and he acted on that knowledge because he loved them. He loved the athlete: not just his body, but also his mind. He wanted the athlete to flourish and achieve his true potential, in football and in life.
Dr. Edwards fights back tears and sums up the sentiment. Then one after another, a who’s-who of Bay Area football greats take the podium and try to put into words what can’t be: Montana, Young, DeBartolo, Senator Dianne Feinstein. The gratitude flows from pew to pew, reflects off the stained-glass windows and illuminates the photo of the Gray Fox that sits perched above a bouquet of white flowers next to the pulpit.
After the service, I stand alone outside while John talks to some old friends. I look around at all of the hardened football men I know from television, and they melt before my eyes into human beings. The 49ers of my youth stand in a cluster and embrace each other like only brothers can. This is what football can do. This is what it means. It’s not the yards or the touchdowns or the money or the fame: it’s this.
As I walk around the outskirts of the church I run into Doug Cosbie and Fred Guidici, two of my old Menlo coaches. Fred brought me to Menlo eight years earlier. Doug introduced me to Bill two years after that. Those Menlo years were special for all of us. I haven’t seen either of them in a while. Can’t remember the last time. Football is strange that way. When you’re on the same team, practicing, preparing for games, sitting in a meeting room, you’re as close as can be. You know everything about each other. But when you move on, you drift away. We all hug and share a few words about Bill. Then Doug asks me how camp is going, how I like being a tight end. I chuckle and he knows what I mean. He was an All-Pro tight end with the Cowboys. He knows all about it.
John and I ride in silence back
to the airport, absorbed in our thoughts. A few hours later the airplane touches back down at Centennial Airport. We make the short drive back to the facility and are in our seats in time for our 7 p.m. team meeting. After the meeting I find Coach Shanahan. I thank him for the gesture. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to do any of it. He must have learned that from Bill.
—Nate, come help me tie my tie, man. Just like yours. That knot is clean.
I got lucky with this knot, which has brought me Cecil Sapp’s admiration. I give his own my best shot but it ends up in a silk puddle under my Adam’s apple.
—Sorry, man. I can’t do it.
Someone else will help him. It’s Saturday morning of week one and we have a plane to catch. We are headed to Buffalo. I got back from Bill’s funeral and had one of my best camps as a pro. Compared to Brew’s House of Vitriol, Pat’s bugfuckerless meeting room is cordial and calm, allowing us to flourish on the field. Our position group is solid. We are playing well and we know our shit. We are all veterans and we all get along. Tight end has given me a new perspective on the game, and it’s made me a much smarter football player. As a receiver, I was always stuck out on an island. I learned to embrace the solitude. But we are landlocked as tight ends, in the thick of a pass-rushing, run-stuffing defense. And it’s turning me into a man.
But earlier this week, the day after our last preseason game, the reality of the business showed its fangs again. Once again I played in the last preseason game against Arizona, assuming I needed to play well to keep my job. And once again I sat envious as the starters were excused from meetings and told that they weren’t playing in the game the next night: they were safe. One of the safe guys was Kyle. He was our starting fullback. Had been for the last two seasons. Kyle stood on the sidelines in his sweats and his jersey with the rest of the starters and laughed while we grunted and popped our way through a meaningless game. I was proud of him. He deserved it, a security I had never known. But the next day he got a call from the facility and was cut. Even security wasn’t secure. No one was safe.
Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile Page 16
