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

by Michael Strahan

  Even before taking X-rays or putting it under a special moving X-ray machine, the doctor feels the foot, grabs at it and within fifteen seconds declares, “You don’t need surgery, Michael. I’ve seen a lot of bad ones, but this thing will get better. There’s a little separation of the bones, but nothing major. While you sprained it badly, hopefully by March we can just go in and inject it.”

  Great news…I think.

  I must admit, I had mixed feelings about the doctor’s report. I truly love football and I love being a football player. But my world is not just about being a football player, nor does my world consist only of challenging Sundays. My world is littered with too many incredibly boring Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  No More Fearing Head Coaches

  November 22, Tiki versus Tom

  As much as I’ve grown to like Tom, he still has that nasty streak that got him fired in Jacksonville and landed him in New York with the reputation of a guy the players love to hate. His nasty side reared its ugly head the week before Thanksgiving, after we lost to the Jaguars on Monday Night Football.

  After the game, Tiki again lashed out because of the coach’s decision not to run the ball more. It marked the second time in less than a year that Tiki claimed we were outcoached. The first was after a play-off loss in January against Carolina. This time he said something like we abandoned the running game. I read the story and immediately thought, “Come on, Tiki, not again.”

  After we got spanked by Seattle in Week Three, Shockey lashed out at Tom. But I hold Tiki to a higher standard. Tiki knows better, so I figured he must have a plan.

  Tiki got summoned to the principal’s office just before Thanksgiving. Wow! Fireworks, baby. He told me about his run-in and it completely blew my fracas over Clockgate.

  Tiki was steamed. He sat in a meeting room and waited for Tom to walk in. Then a Jerry Springer Show broke out! Coughlin stormed into the room, clutching a newspaper with Tiki’s quotes, and chucked the newspaper right in Tiki’s face! An aggressive stream of profanities flew from Coach’s mouth. Along with the cursing, Coach called Tiki a traitor and an insubordinate.

  In my fourteen years I’ve usually experienced one “first” per year. This was definitely a first, not a regular NFL occurrence. Coughlin continued his rant about Tiki being a traitor to the team. Tiki collected his thoughts and fired back with his own expletives and demanded he listen to him and listen to him good.

  Tom was stunned as Tiki explained his side. His quotes were not a shot at Tom and the coaching staff. They were taken out of context. The question centered around the Jaguars’ defensive tackle tandem of John Henderson and Marcus Stroud.

  Still, I believed Tiki was right, that we did abandon the run too early. I had breakfast with him the next morning over the issue and Tiki said that what got him so upset was when the game was on the line, he believed he earned the right to have the ball. Other teams put the ball in the hands of their stars at critical moments. Tiki earned the right to be the hero or the goat. Sometimes, coaches get too cute for their own good and they out-think themselves. Tiki was our primary weapon with the game on the line. The whole world knew the rock was going to him, so give it to him. Unleash the man the way Philly unleashes Brian Westbrook or Seattle lets Shaun Alexander loose or San Diego relies on LaDainian Tomlinson. You must live and die by your stars.

  Eventually the two of them calmed down—and Tiki was not even fined! Of course, I get fined for being three minutes early to a meeting, and he doesn’t draw one penny for f-ing off the coach? I told you, the man is brilliant.

  The episode is an example of how player-coach relationships have developed over the years and the difficulties we players have in channeling our frustration after games.

  After a loss, the coach comes in screaming and you never hear a word he says. You sit thinking to yourself, Just get the damn speech over with. Just shut up so we can go and hide under our covers. When you lose, you’re so embarrassed you don’t even want to be seen by the general public. It really sucks.

  It’s like you’ve worked on a huge business deal all week long, putting every free moment of your time into it, and suddenly it all falls through. You’re crushed, but then your boss hauls you into a face-to-face meeting. He lambastes you, blaming you for ruining the deal. He screams at you, questions your heart, intelligence, your will and at times your manhood. And when the grilling is over, he throws you out to the journalists and radio and TV reporters, who pepper you with questions asking how you blew the deal.

  Next you’re on the back page of every newspaper in town making fun of your misery with some cute tabloid headline. While you realize they have a job to sell papers, you still feel they’re just enjoying your misery.

  Imagine if you went through that ordeal seven times a year. How about twelve or thirteen for the losing or building teams? That’s why guys like Shockey and Tiki lose patience and pop off after games.

  There remains a very interesting dichotomy at play here: Every Sunday, during the game, we are asked to transform ourselves into violent, bloodthirsty warriors. Thousands scream for carnage, encouraging us to knock someone’s head off. Our lives have all these military connotations and war terms like blitz, bomb, firing bullets, in the trenches.

  After the game ends, we are required to turn the aggression off completely. We don’t get time to simmer down. We must will it to come to a screeching halt or else we end up saying something we’ll regret like, “We were outcoached.”

  You take all these uppers and meds to put you into a gladiator state, slam your body against a wall of warriors with 78,000 people screaming at you, your coach is constantly criticizing you, your knees and feet feel like you’ll never walk again and then you get absolutely ripped to shreds. But you better calm down in four minutes flat, because you have to tell fifty cynical journalists why we stink without actually saying so. Go!

  When I lose a big game, it takes me forever to get undressed. I sit and think and replay the game in my head. Some coaches come over, win or lose, no matter what happens. Then you have other coaches who won’t go near you. I prefer someone to come to me no matter what. Then, after a few minutes of sitting and staring at the ground, an equipment guy yells, “Media here in one minute.”

  Now I have to collect myself so I don’t say something stupid. I don’t have a master’s degree in public relations. Instead we learn from veteran players how to bite our tongues. Some guys learn from college, but some went to small schools with fewer opportunities. I watched LT and Phil Simms for ways to handle press people.

  Nobody says a word; people are afraid to break the silence. The media usually senses this, too, so they don’t come in screaming questions like you see in the movies. They’ll ask questions in a low tone of voice while we get changed into our suits.

  However, they do try to ask questions they know will elicit the response they need. When your answer doesn’t cause controversy, other guys will ask the same question in different ways to find that adversity.

  In Week Three we lost to Seattle 42–30. Tom came in and downright lambasted us, and rightfully so, considering we only managed a 42–3 score by the third quarter. Yeah, we were a finely tuned machine all right.

  Tom was furious. He stormed into the postgame locker room with his face redder than a tomato.

  “It looked like we’ve never played football before!” he yelled at us. “That was embarrassing. You guys missed your assignments, you let your guy beat you, it was a disgrace…but I’ll take the blame.” I love when Coach tells us that after ripping us apart. “I’ll take the blame.” Gee, thanks, now we feel better.

  Tom continued, “As a competitor, I don’t understand how you can go out and play as bad as you played when that much is on the line.”

  I like Tom a lot because he treats me like a man who has had success in this league. But when a head coach today detaches himself from the troops, guys are going to push back when times are bad. When
Tom rips into us, some guys don’t feel ashamed. Some get mad that he’s ripping into us. Some take it as creative criticism! We’re all different, but we’re not living in fear any longer.

  Shockey fired back at the media, “We got outplayed and outcoached. Write that one down! They were in defenses that we didn’t know they were going to be in. They did things we hadn’t seen. You can make adjustments all you want, but when they switch things up, we can’t do anything. The coaches’ jobs are supposed to be to put us in the best situations to succeed.”

  When I first got into the league, I would not have stood up to Tom the way Shockey did or even the way I did when Coach fined me for being three minutes early to that meeting. I certainly wouldn’t have told the coaches, “Fine me or lecture me, I’m not getting both.” But now there is so much money involved and so much intensity, we’re all living life in one big pressure-cooker red zone. Free agency has put us all in the same boat. As a result of all the financial reward for success and all the public pressure, everyone’s blood pressure in the locker room has soared. It’s harder on everyone to contain themselves after a game.

  It used to be that a coach would explode on us and we’d feel like garbage and bite our tongues. Coach was going to be around a lot longer than we were. But now the players are feeling as much pressure as the coaches, due to the size of our contracts. At the same time, the coach is on as shaky ground as we are. So who is he to put the whole mess on us?

  The landscape changed in the late 1990s. The more money we players received and the more free agency seeped in, the more freedom we felt we could wield as players.

  That’s not to say that players have never stood up to their coaches. The year before I got to New York, Carl Banks jacked up Ray Handley, the head coach at the time, in the halftime locker room. Guys like LT had to step in and stop him from killing the man. But that was an isolated instance.

  Players used to squabble only with the front office because that was the area of the team responsible for your pay. When we had a contract issue, there was no way to get out of Dodge and thus we were stuck.

  Back then a coach and a general manager were clearly two separate entities. You often felt the coach was on your side against the big bad front office. The coaches could support our resentment and jointly blame the front office if we weren’t getting paid what we thought was fair market value.

  But as the bidding for head coaches became intense and the salary cap skewed player values, many owners lured coaches with the caveat of being the general manager as well. Even the coaches who aren’t general managers can no longer put things on the front office. The landscape has changed; coaches are now considered part of the front office.

  When a player is released, it’s the front office and head coach making a decision together due to salary-cap management. When a player has an issue with a contract, the head coach usually has some sort of say as well. Thus our fight has changed from player versus front office to player versus head coach/front office.

  Coaches today need to treat players with more respect than they did back in the day. Why? Coaches need to win now more than ever before. In today’s climate they must win now, period, end of story. There is no longer a grace period.

  In the not too distant past, a head coach was allowed time to rebuild in order to get a team on track. But because of the money involved, that grace period has been cut in half, maybe more because the owners want to get an instant bang for the buck, so rebuilding isn’t really an option.

  It’s gotten so bad that in some places it’s now a job killer to select a quarterback early in the draft and let him take his lumps. You can’t have a coach survive Troy Aikman going 1-15 like he did his rookie year or Peyton Manning starting 2-14 like he did his first two seasons. The money has raised expectations while severely lowering fan and front-office patience.

  Players aren’t dumb. They know the public’s patience for coaches has waned and the money for players has grown. So we don’t fear coaches like we used to.

  Just look at Terrell Owens and Bill Parcells. T.O. could give a damn what Parcells thought of him. He had little regard for his head coach’s fury. That must have been quite a shock to the Tuna, who has made a career of bullying players when he had to.

  The players feel much more empowered now. Coaches and front offices need to talk to us to find out things about players who become free agents. They enlist us to help them recruit free agents and even put us on chaperone duties when those players visit.

  Coaches come to players for help much more so than in the past. Although it’s against anti-tampering rules, coaches and assistant coaches have called me many times to ask for my opinion about an assistant or head coach hitting the open market. How about that? I have some juice and my opinion matters.

  Coaching jobs are so tenuous that coaches will ask us for help to get a new job when they get fired. Some ask you to put in a good word for them if their head coach gets fired.

  Whenever a team struggles and has a coach it wants to fire, the owner may hire the complete opposite type of coach to replace him. Then, when that coach wears out his welcome, the owners start to yearn for how it was with the last guy. They then go and hire the complete opposite of that guy, pretty much the type of personality of the coach who was fired in the first place. It goes around and around.

  Say a team has a player-friendly coach and when he burns out, they’ll hire a real hard-ass like Tom. Then when Tom wears out his welcome they’ll say they need the exact opposite and go back to a guy more like Coach Fassel. The Jets did it last year when they hired Eric Mangini because they felt they needed the complete opposite of Herm Edwards. But what was Herm? The complete opposite of Al Groh, the man who bolted on them right before Herm took office. Groh, by the way, is a coach from the same coaching tree as Mangini, who is from the Belichick/Parcells camp.

  The pressure to win is alarming. How alarming? How many fans actually know that team trainers now hand out Lipitor, blood pressure medication, to their head coaches when they first get their job because of the huge amount of stress this position carries?

  After Tiki’s rant, late in the season, when it looked like Tom would be fired, he fired his offensive coordinator, John Hufnagel, and moved our quarterbacks coach, Kevin Gilbride, into that role. We realized, as players, that our voices were heard and will continue to be heard. That’s the way it’s going to be.

  It’s alarming to think how much the NFL will change over the next ten years. As our contracts double over the next decade and our financial stability increases, will our respect rise or fall? Will every single locker room have a T.O.? Will they have more? Will it even be worth it to become an NFL head coach ten years from now? I know for me it wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Needles, Painkillers, Anti-inflammatories and Other Ways to Hide the Pain

  December 3, Cowboys at Giants

  It was my favorite week of the year, Cowboys week, and I didn’t want to miss another shot at Tony Romo. This week for the first time in a month my foot felt pretty decent. I was going to give it a shot today.

  Our team doctors and trainers are very conservative. They made it explicit that they were staunchly opposed to my trying to play. Two hours before the game, our medical staff took me out to the Giants Stadium turf to put me through some drills. All the drills were designed to test my foot.

  That first run? I felt pretty good. Oh, baby, Romo, here I come. I’m actually going to be able to pull this thing off today. Second pass wasn’t bad, but not great. I can still see Romo in my sights. Unfortunately, my celebration came to an abrupt halt when they asked on the third drill to plant and cut on the sore foot. Running straight ahead was no problem, cutting was a much different story. The moment I planted I felt a stabbing pain in my arch, but I needed to put on a good show. I figured if I could just fake it long enough and make it through one or two more drills, they would clear me and I’d go into the locker room and take care of the rest with some of my favorite m
edicinal helpers.

  My good friend Jerome Bettis once said it best. “You try to strike a deal with pain. Me and pain…we got a pretty good understanding.” Sometimes, unfortunately, you need to bring a third party into the negotiations. That third party goes by a variety of names. I like to call it the Law Offices of Toradol, Lidocaine & Vicodin, LLC. Sometimes we also place a call to Indocin & Naprosyn and then there’s this little private investigator named Prednisone.

  Toradol, lidocaine and Vicodin handle the pain; Indocin and Naprosyn are anti-inflammation drugs or anti-inflams, as we call them. While most of our drugs are administered in pill form, Toradol is one injection that has gained great love inside our locker rooms. This stuff sprouted on the scene over the last five years, but it’s become so popular it even has its own nickname—Vitamin T. I could shoot you with a syringe full of Vitamin T and hit you square between your legs with a crowbar and you’d probably just laugh it off. It’s wild stuff, because it seems to affect you only from the neck down. You can always tell a guy is on Vitamin T because he’ll have a little blood stain in his pants by his ass, or after a game in the shower you can see the guys with a Band-Aid on that area.

  I can watch a game on television and sometimes spot the Vitamin T users. In Week Six of the 2006 season the Chiefs quarterback Damon Huard took a shot before the game to deal with the pain of a strained groin. How do I know? The huge blood stain on his rear end spelled T-O-R-A-D-O-L! It was probably about four inches in diameter and had some dirt rubbed on the area, too. Hey, it’s a badge of honor, except it’s red, sticky and we don’t pin it on our lapels—we pin it where the sun don’t shine. The stuff is so good that some guys now rely on it, even if they don’t need it. It’s become a mental crutch for some. It dulls the pain so much that even when guys don’t need it, some guys doubt themselves if they march into battle without it. I don’t take it unless I’m in serious pain; but there are lots of us who take the shot game in and game out. We’ve asked if there are serious long-term health ramifications and thus far I’ve never heard of any. Still, we usually only take it for games—rarely if ever before practice.