Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior

by Michael Strahan

  Wrist. I had surgery to remove bone chips in my right wrist. Every time I’d hit someone and try to lock him out, it was as if a match had been lit under my hand and the flame shoved inside the joint. Now I wear a brace that nobody sees and it allows my wrist to bend back only to a certain angle.

  Chest. I tore my pectoral muscle in 2004 when I tried to make a tackle on Bears running back Anthony Thomas. It was the same play I’d made countless times, but this one sent me to surgery and forced me into a sling for several weeks. They bring you in, cut you open, make the repair, sew you up and then off you go to rehab. Let’s get ’em back out there! In addition to my pec, I’ve also had a slight tear in a bicep muscle.

  Tongue. I once sprained my tongue. Yeah, you read it right. It was by far my strangest injury. I’m not sure which is stranger, the fact that I sprained my tongue or why I wasn’t wearing a mouthpiece in the first place.

  People love to talk about the gap between my teeth and now I’ve got a secret to admit—I never wore a mouthpiece because I was secretly hoping that I’d get a tooth knocked out so the dentist would have to fix the gap! Yup, it’s true. That was my great master plan. I can’t get it fixed now because it’s become my physical trademark but, hey, if Orlando Pace knocked it out, well, gee, doc, I guess you better just fix it. Just make sure you leave the gap.

  The sickest medical condition that I’ve ever heard a guy playing through was my former teammate and longtime Pro Bowl tackle Lomas Brown. Actually, it was more of an ailment. Lomas is one of the nicest and most respected guys I’ve ever played with, but my former teammate played a game while trying to pass kidney stones. To make matters worse, he had a catheter placed up his you-know-what to pass it…during the game! When the offense came off the field, Lomas’s teammates would surround him so the fans couldn’t see as he’d drop his pants and try to pass the last of the stones. Then he’d strap the bag up and go back out on the field! The strange thing was he was playing at the time for the lowly Cardinals, who were waaaaay out of the play-off hunt. For his troubles, Brown won the Ed Bloch Courage Award—an annual accolade given to a player on each team for playing through adversity. Now that’s crazy!

  The most disturbing injury I’ve witnessed was to 49ers All-Pro defensive tackle Bryant Young. I was watching from the sidelines in our Week Fourteen matchup in 1998. Nearly ten years later, I still cannot extract the sound from my mind.

  Linebacker Ken Norton Jr. got thrown into his teammate, helmet first. Then the helmet hit Bryant Young’s leg and the SNAP! of that man’s leg reverberated from one end zone to the other. Compound fracture. He snapped his tibia and fibula. The sight was Theismann-esque but the sound was worse than anything you could imagine. It was as if someone snapped a pair of two-by-fours in half. Bryant came back from that injury. If it had been me, I don’t know if I would have been able to get back out there. That type of injury is NOT part of our everyday game. We can deal with most things, but not the sound of bone snapping in half. Something like that can ruin a team’s psyche.

  I was standing near LaVar Arrington when he snapped his Achilles during our Monday nighter this past season against the Cowboys. LaVar dropped down, grabbed his ankle and rolled over a bit, but he never made a peep. I figured he had aggravated an ankle injury. The doctors and trainers tell the other players nothing. They keep us in the dark and rightfully so. It’s kind of hard to be told, “Hey, guys, LaVar just snapped his Achilles, but you all keep fighting. Good luck, boys.”

  For guys like Lomas, Bryant, LaVar and myself, injuries are as normal as death and taxes. They are pitfalls of our profession. After your first play in the NFL you wll probably never feel 100 percent again.

  Every time I see an older player I respect, I ask him how his body is. Jim Kelly told me that one of his shoulders hurts him pretty often. Former Steelers great, linebacker Greg Lloyd said he lives with an ankle that causes him to limp. When I was guest host on The Best Damn Sports Show Period, the legendary Houston Oilers running back Earl Campbell was a guest. There were two steps up onto the stage and Earl needed a few guys to help him up that one-foot elevation! For twenty years Earl had been the most physically imposing running back in NFL history! It scared the shit out of me. Hey Tiki, you are smart!

  Throughout my career, I have to think about today and not tomorrow, because I might not be able to convince my body to do things I ask it to do on Sundays if I always think twenty years down the road. As retirement starts to creep into my mind, I realize that my back and one of my ankles will hurt me forever.

  When the cheers die down and I’m left alone in my own private world, my body will hurt for no reason. I don’t want to be like Earl Campbell. I want a good quality of life as I grow older. But after fourteen years, the reality is I will live the rest of my life with some form of physical pain. I can understand why guys get hooked on Vicodin and other painkillers and I hope the same fate doesn’t await me. Which is worse, a life of pain or painkillers? It may be something that I avoid now but have to wrestle with as the years go by.

  Maybe the NFL should institute a ten-year rule. It might be a great idea for the league to make us get out after ten years, to protect us from ourselves. That’s why I respect Tiki for getting out when he did. After ten years your body feels all those hours of contact, and the healing process becomes a day-to-day ordeal.

  But Tiki is different from a lot of us. Some of us, including me, will use up our bodies, hiding our long-term problems with short-term surgeries. We’ll patch ourselves together and not dwell on the long-term effects. I hope I don’t limp out of the league into a retirement of pain, but to be honest, that is probably wishful thinking. Yet I’m not asking for sympathy—I’d sacrifice my life and limbs all over again for those Sunday afternoons of battle.

  In the twenty-four hours after we beat the Texans that Sunday, I finally started to question whether the Lisfranc sprain was a sign from above. Was this G-d’s way of telling me the time has come to stop abusing my body? The bottom line is a player must constantly remind himself that we play a physical and violent game. Injuries occur. There’s nothing prophetic or special or glorious about it. It truly becomes part of who you are, and when I look back on my injuries, they are my medals from my many battles and I wear them with tremendous pride.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Lousy Life of a Rookie

  November 26, Giants versus Titans

  My eyes shot from the TV down to the text message that blipped across my cell phone, then quickly back to the TV again. I wasn’t sure what to do next—keep looking at the TV or the cell phone?

  There is no possible way that our rookie let Vince Young go on fourth-and-10, allowing him to scramble for nineteen yards and a huge first down. Absolutely no way! He had the man wrapped up for the sack. Game was over. Signed, sealed, delivered. All the rookie had to do was keep Young in his grasp until the whistle or take him to the ground and we would have won this game.

  My phone was blowing up as Osi Umenyiora and I frantically sent text messages to each other.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  Both Osi and I were injured, so this gave our rookie Mathias Kiwanuka the opportunity to step in there and show the world what our first-round pick could do. What he did was send Coach Coughlin and every living, breathing Giants fan into an irate frenzy. I sat in disbelief with a feeling of absolute helplessness as my team nursed a 21–0 lead going into the fourth and blew it. Tennessee mounted a comeback but were still down 21–14 when they took over the ball on their own 24 with 3:07 remaining. They didn’t gain a single yard on the next three snaps. All our rookie needed to do was wrap up this guy and we’d have an automatic score near the two-minute warning.

  As a rookie, Kiwanuka was given more of a chance to shine than Osi and I put together. He stepped up when an opportunity presented itself to change the game. What else can you ask of a rookie? But on fourth-and-10, Young dropped back, strayed a bit to his left
and then—BAM—our first-rounder sealed the deal. I jumped off my couch readying for a celebration. That’s when it happened. The unthinkable! The unimaginable! The inexcusable!

  The rookie let go.

  I was trying to find an excuse for him. After all these years, I knew the ramifications that lay ahead for this youngster. Maybe he heard a whistle. Maybe he thought Young got rid of the ball.

  All I could think at the time was: “Damn rookie!”

  The next day, I had calmed down enough to seek out Mathias. He explained that he had gotten hit with a questionable Roughing the Passer penalty earlier in the game. He was afraid he would be flagged for the same call in the most crucial moment of the game.

  “What you do is, don’t let him go. You roll to the ground with him,” I explained to the rookie. “You’ve got to know how to work around the rules. Just roll with him, that’s the solution whenever you aren’t sure. You don’t slam down on him. Just drop and roll with the quarterback like you’re on fire.”

  After discussing it with him I had calmed down further, but still not to the point where everything was happy in Mayberry. I had a birthday party scheduled that night and I was so sick over the loss I just canceled it. Nothing to celebrate. No reason to party. When you lose, you feel so incredibly sick to your stomach, you want to crawl up into the fetal position and literally hide. If you can’t even face the cashier at a McDonald’s drive-through window, you certainly don’t want to see a gang of friends at your birthday party.

  When the reality that we’ve actually lost creeps in, life feels terrible. It’s depressing, like getting knocked out in a big boxing match on national TV after you promised your family a victory in front of your hometown fans.

  That first loss against Manning and the Colts? It took me the whole week to get over it. That week was brutal.

  Monday, you get your butt chewed out by the coaches. They’ll rip you apart, tell you what each mistake cost the team, and then rip you apart some more during a practice period supposedly dedicated to correcting your mistakes from the previous day.

  But the week after a loss, especially one in which our rookie defensive end committed such a huge brain blunder, every repetition feels harder. Every stride feels more and more tiring. Every meeting feels a month long.

  After a loss, I really don’t want to talk to another human being. Even though I wasn’t on the field for that game, I couldn’t help but blame myself. I should have just shot up the foot, taped it and gotten out there. Although’s that’s unrealistic, I felt if I had, this agony wouldn’t have fallen on my teammates. It’s awful. Terrible. Horrible. Torturous. After a loss, I feel nauseated. My insides burn. I don’t feel like eating and there is not a single thing that can help me get over it, aside from a win.

  The pain of losing is ten times more powerful than the joys of winning. When you win, you enjoy that one night after the game. The week is more fun, but it’s still tough. After a win I still make it hard on myself. I’ll replay the mistakes I made over and over in my head. In football, there’s rarely pure, unalloyed joy. Players have told me, when you win a Super Bowl, it lasts for a bit but players will ask themselves, “Okay, what next?” For now I’ll have to take their word for it.

  However, I do know how bad a Super Bowl loss burns at your insides for the rest of the off-season. Or if you never get back, maybe it’ll burn for the rest of your life. I’ve talked to Dan Marino about it and to this day, years and years after his retirement as the greatest passer in NFL history, he still hurts. Guys never get over a loss of a Super Bowl.

  When you lose, your mind plays tricks on you. You question your own brothers, the same brothers you’ve bled and sweat and fought beside for weeks and months. You begin questioning yourself, “Why did I take that extra shot? How is it worth it for me to play in pain? For this crap? Why bother working my ass off if this is what it gets me?”

  The next time you’re at a game, watch the body language of the players on both teams. The winners, no matter how banged up they are, block out the pain and the physical injuries. After a loss, as the final whistle blows, you’ll see guys immediately begin to limp. Guys who spent the past three hours racing all over the field suddenly can no longer walk without a limp. The mind is a powerful tool.

  After a hard loss, we’re strewn around the locker room sitting on our stools, in far too much pain to even bend down and untape our cleats. Five minutes earlier I was smashing my body into two players weighing a combined 650 pounds, running in a frenzy after the quarterback. Only minutes after that whistle blows, I can’t move a muscle, can’t even bend over.

  There are actually stages of grief in dealing with a loss. It’s much easier when you’re blown out because you can strike it up to a bad day at the office. A blowout shows the holes you have to work on. But in a game where we had it won, a game where all our rookie had to do was wrap, roll and sack, it’s demoralizing. You feel like you did something bad in a previous life, that you’re being punished for it now. You resent the sweat and the blood lost that week. It’s bad enough to lose, but when a rookie gets fingered for the loss, it’s hard to imagine the guilt that young guy must feel that week.

  The frequency of the games teaches you to have a very short memory. By Tuesday, let the losses go. But really, how can we? Losses lurk in the dark recesses of our minds. But as you get older, they hurt more and more. Me, I’m on borrowed time. With no time to waste, I don’t have time for losses.

  When I was younger I figured I’d work harder next week. There were always plenty of chances. But as I grow older, I know that each game may be my last. Sitting in on those awful meetings becomes tougher. The light at the end of the tunnel begins to dim. Before long, forget the light. The entire tunnel fades to black. Honestly, even sitting and writing about a loss bothers me. On so many wasted weekends, the pathetic emotions of loss agitated and depressed me.

  The loss with Kiwanuka was terrible for me and I wasn’t even in the game. That was a hard one for Coughlin to swallow. Harder, I’m sure, for the rookie to deal with. When you’re younger, you’re just trying to survive. Back in the day, I’d go into hiding. Today’s rookies don’t have that luxury. You’re picked and signed to play immediately. There is no grace period. As tough as my life was as a rookie, nothing compares to the pressure those guys feel today. My pressure was from trying not to get beat up by the veterans in the locker room, but their pressure is to not get beat up by the press or the high expectations of the fans.

  In hindsight, I didn’t make it any better on this kid, since the other players in the locker room realized his gaffe was the reason I canceled my birthday party. They were right. But Kiwanuka wasn’t the only reason. We had just dropped our third straight game, one behind Dallas for the division. It also marked the first time in franchise history the Giants took a 20-plus-point lead into the fourth quarter and blew it.

  Things got even worse for the rookie. He got absolutely lambasted and chewed to bits by Coach Coughlin. It was the rookie’s first game in front of some of his family members. Imagine your family watching you play professional football for the first time and they have to watch you pull off the mistake of the year, and then your coach beats the tar out of you in front of 70,000 people.

  As if it couldn’t get any worse, when our plane landed in Nashville Saturday morning, Kiwanuka received word that his truck had been stolen out of the Giants Stadium parking lot.

  The next week he didn’t fare any better. In a home game against the Cowboys, Mathias picked off a Tony Romo pass, heading for daylight when all of a sudden he pulled a Leon Lett and the ball popped loose for a Cowboys recovery. Another rookie mistake! Wearing slick sleeves, Mathias carried the ball wrong en route to what could have been a touchdown. After said ball popped loose, Dallas scored.

  That’s it; the kid was permanently snakebitten. I decided at that moment I wasn’t going to stand next to him for the rest of the year. The way things were going for him, he might get struck by lightning. I didn’t n
eed to become collateral damage.

  A half-eaten piece of chicken has more rights than a rookie. We all go through something that first year, every one of us. While some guys get thrown right into the fire the first year, some get thrown in the first day. After all, nobody had a wilder first day as a rookie than Jeremy Shockey.

  While most of us don’t start off with as much of a bang as Jeremy’s fistfight with Brandon Short I told you about earlier, what most people don’t know is that I went through something just like Shockey did on my first day in rookie camp. I was warned before setting foot onto my first NFL practice field to fight for myself at the very first sign of someone testing me. If I failed, I’d get messed with every single day, for the rest of my NFL life. If I stood up for myself early, they’d back off.

  Shockey must have received the same verbal memo I did, because it took him all of one day for someone to take a hack at him just like it took all of one day for defensive tackle Keith Hamilton to start messing with me. When I first got to the Giants, that man hated me. I came into camp a week late because of contract stuff, so Hammer wanted to make sure I knew he was the vet with a whopping one more year of service under his belt.

  Our defensive line coach at the time was a country guy named Earl Leggett. The man is a legend in coaching circles, and rightfully so. He served as the Raiders defensive line coach with Howie Long and all those great Raiders teams. Earl made the old-school world seem brand-new.

  Every practice we started out with those same up-downs you do on the high school football field. If you didn’t do them right, Earl made the whole group do more. That first day I didn’t know we needed to go down and then jump all the way back up. I thought we could just come halfway up and plop down again. Of course, Earl made us do more as a result of my first-day ignorance.