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

by Michael Strahan

  My first Toradol shot came in a game against the Falcons in 1999. Injuries forced both Keith Hamilton and me to end up sprawled out in the trainer’s room in the middle of the game. The Giants were left with virtually nobody but viable backup linemen. Hammer had torn his Achilles and I felt like I’d blown out my back. We were both lying on the trainer’s table and Hammer turned to me and said, “Strahan, we’ve got nobody left. One of us needs to get back out there.” Well, who do you think that somebody he meant was? Hmmm, let me think…one guy’s back hurts while the other has a torn tendon. You’d eat shit if the doctors told you a pile of shit will magically get you back on that field.

  I told the trainers to do whatever they had to in order to get me back out on the field. To them, that meant hitting me with Toradol. The stuff takes about thirty minutes to kick in, but once it kicks in, damn, it kicks in. Next thing I knew, me and my friend Vitamin T were back out on that field for the second half of the game. Not only back on the field, but playing like nothing happened to my back in the first place!

  Before there was Toradol we got shot with lidocaine—pretty much a novacaine for the body. If rubbed on the skin in gel form, it blocks the pain from your nerve endings. But when it’s shot into the body, it blocks the pain from everywhere.

  I’ve always felt that lidocaine was more dangerous than Toradol because at least with Vitamin T, if an injury worsens, we can still feel it. But with lidocaine, it completely numbs the injected area. It’s reasonable to fear a lidocaine shot. If you shot some into your side for a cracked rib, and if the rib then completely broke, you wouldn’t feel it. Even if a broken rib punctured a lung, you might not feel it.

  Prior to a play-off game one year, they shot Bettis with a numbing agent right before the game. Well, the doc who did it hit the wrong spot—actually hit a nerve in his groin area—and Jerome’s whole leg went dead. Here he was thirty minutes before game time, a play-off game no less, and the guy has drop foot because the doctor hit the wrong spot.

  On a side note: We as players make mental crib sheets of each of our docs’ track records for injections. If a guy is hit or miss, we’ll remember that. We had one doctor who injected us with IVs (intravenous shots of saline solution to prevent dehydration or cramping) and his aim was so bad, our former star running back Rodney Hampton used to joke, “Don’t get the IV from him because he’ll stick you about thirty times before he gets your vein.”

  But again, the needles and the lidocaine fall under that “eating a pile of shit” notion most players feel. If it works to keep us out there, no matter how long it takes to get the right area for the shot, we’ll do it.

  At one point my shoulders were so bad I’d get lidocaine shots in the AC joints right on top of both shoulders just to be able to make it through a game. The doctors would tell me the injuries couldn’t get worse so I’d tell them to shoot it. That’s morally acceptable inside the NFL: If it can’t get worse, just shoot it and deal with as much pain as you can.

  Unfortunately, after about the third game of getting shot with that stuff, my body started to adjust to the meds. They might as well have shot me with water. At that point I still got injected because I thought it would help. Even though I realized the effects had worn off, I wouldn’t dare surrender the security blanket they provided my mind. They help put my worries at ease.

  While it’s considered morally acceptable and even honorable to get shot in order to play, the Giants doctors never do it out in the open. Getting shot before the game requires a certain amount of discretion. You don’t announce it, but you BETTER shoot that damn thing and get your ass out there. Hell, we’ll get pissed at a young guy if he can play but but won’t even try to shoot it. It just goes with the territory. It’s part of the unwritten job description.

  In fact, it is so discreet inside our locker room that if you were blind to it all, you might not even know it goes on. It’s done literally in a back room. They need to keep it out of view; otherwise it will demoralize everyone in the training room.

  Not every locker room is that discreet. In fact, before our Sunday night game against the Bears this past year, my old partner in crime Jessie Armstead was recalling how the Giants at least hid the shots. When he went to the Redskins, Armstead said their docs would just walk around the locker room openly and stop at each guy’s lockers to drop, aim and fire.

  Armstead is the greatest example of a player who used the stuff as a badge of honor. I’ll never forget once when Jessie tore his ankle. Now when I say tore, I’m talking about his foot damn near flapping in the wind. The docs wanted to shut him down but he pretty much told them to shut up and shoot it with anything they can, and let him take care of the rest. He took those shots before a game and ran out on the field and you could literally see his ankle filled with fluid and that foot flopping all over the place. The man never missed a game. He never missed a series.

  Here’s a guy whose hamstring once tore and rolled, his ankle once broke, and his knee was once damn near unhinged, but come game day Jessie never missed a game. For some guys like Jessie, the shots helped much more than others. Some guys take the Vitamin T or lidocaine and it still doesn’t help enough. At that point it’s probably a combo of the drugs and simple pain tolerance for three hours on Sundays.

  Jeremy Shockey is the same way. He’ll get dinged with stuff that would put out 90 percent of the league, but Shock takes whatever is necessary to take the edge off enough for him to bite the bullet and somehow suck it up for 180 minutes per week.

  That’s the great hypocrisy of the NFL: You want to beat a guy’s ass if he’s using the wrong stuff, like street drugs, but at the same time you want to beat a guy’s ass if he’s not willing to take the legal stuff to get himself out there with us. If you know a guy is using heroin or smoking crack or snorting coke you look at him with shame. If a guy is banged up and doesn’t use the legal stuff to get himself out there, you shake your head at him with the same shame. I’m not saying the confines of our locker room is a perfect world, but it’s the reality of our psychology.

  What’s the most painful locker-room procedure? Technically, it’s not an injection. It’s the process of drawing fluid from the body—usually the knee. You know how you can tell who is getting his knee drained before a game? He’s the one screaming his head off in the trainer’s room. Sometimes he’s screaming so loud some of us just start laughing. The more he screams, the more we laugh. In some strange way it is funny. But it’s not really funny. Here’s how it is done. They snake a needle into the inflamed knee, which already feels like it’s on fire. Then they draw out enough fluid so that the knee doesn’t look like somebody shoved an ostrich egg under the kneecap. Then they send the guy’s ass out there for game time. The hope is that after the game and during the ensuing week, anti-inflammatories combined with enough ice and treatment will prevent the knee from having to get drained again. But there are guys who have to get it done every week for an extended period. Every once in a while, a guy will need it more than once a week. Man, you watch them snake that probe in and suck out the fluid, but sixty minutes later, you won’t even remember they did it when you’ve got the quarterback zeroed in your crosshairs.

  In the days bracketing game day, the necessary drug of choice is Naprosyn or Indocin. You take them with food every four hours. Honestly, without them most of us couldn’t practice during the week.

  There is one thing that goes along with the drugs that I will truly give the team and doctors credit for and that most people have no idea about: For every guy who is on the anti-inflams, the team has someone from a medical lab come in every month to draw blood in order to monitor the levels of the stuff and make sure our kidneys and livers are still healthy.

  I’ve never read about this anywhere and I’m surprised people have no idea this goes on. But it certainly makes it more acceptable to us. At least we believe the docs are taking care of us for the long term. If the levels are too high, they’ll switch us to another med or take us off them complet
ely. As the corporate ad goes, better living through chemistry—with a little Bill Nye the Science Guy meets American Gladiator.

  When the Indocin or Naprosyn anti-inflams have a bad effect or the docs need to change them for us, sometimes they switch to a three-day cycle of prednisone. Five pills the first day, four the second and three the third takes away the swelling…you hope.

  Vicodin is also pretty big, but personally that stuff scares the shit out of me. It’s great for the throbbing pains, but it also acts as a depressant. It gets you soooo up, but when you come down you really feel lousy and depressed. That’s why guys can easily get hooked on it. Most guys who don’t take Vicodin will take the generic brand, hydrocodone, because it’s mixed with acetaminophen and that takes the edge off even more. Hydrocodone got quite a bit of attention last year with the whole T.O. suicide attempt fiasco. For anyone who has never taken the generic form of Vicodin, let me explain its effects, which will clarify why I don’t think T.O. tried to kill himself after taking three hydrocodone pills.

  One hydrocodone pill, even for a guy who normally takes one, may make some guys loopy. Two will make you feel like the dentist turned up the nitrous gas on high, walked out of the room for thirty minutes and then returned to crack a bottle of wine with you. Three? Hell, you’ll say anything on three of these suckers.

  “Are you into sheep, Mr. Owens?”

  “Ummm, yup.”

  “Do you wish you lived on Mars, Mr. Owens?”

  “Umm, yeah.”

  “Are you depressed, Mr. Owens?”

  “Umm, uh-huh.”

  “Did you try to kill yourself, Mr. Owens?”

  “Ummm, sure, why not?”

  My advice to the younger players: Go as long as you can without needing this stuff. After fourteen years in this game, I need them. I need them mentally and physically. I never wanted to become dependent on them because I always looked at football as a short period in my long life. I never wanted to pay for it later on in life but, man, it’s a difficult conviction to keep. It sounds great standing on my soapbox, but as I said earlier, you do whatever it takes to play.

  If they ever told me that I had to get off painkillers, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’m not sure how I’d get through a week anymore. During my thirteenth year, I’d take one Indocin on Friday night, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday morning with my breakfast to dull whatever soreness I had left. The hot tubs, massages and gels can only go so far. Even though I’ve taken the anti-inflams I’m still a little sore. There really is nothing that will completely take away all the years of pounding.

  You definitely, especially as you get older, need the pills and the shots. You need to at least believe in your mind that you’re about to wage battle with the help of something that has numbed the pain somewhat. Why? Because we all know three hours later we’ll have a whole new roster of bumps, bruises, scrapes, contusions, swelling and open wounds. We’ll have to book a whole new appointment that’ll require the services of the Law Offices of Toradol, Lydocaine & Vicodin and their associates Indocin & Naproxen. Do I have a fear of what they’ll do to me for the future? Sure. But I have a stronger fear of not playing. I have a stronger fear of disappointing myself and my team. It’s sad but true. That fear paralyzes the player’s common sense.

  Eight paragraphs ago I was harping on how football is just a small part of life as a whole, but, man, it is hard to think about long-term pain when the short-term pain of not being on the field can scare you more. The fear of not being on the field is overwhelming. It invades and corrodes the mind and the body. Think of how demented it is to say to myself, “I know this drug or that drug could be bad for me in the long run, but let me take it anyway because I’m willing to roll the dice on the future.”

  Sometime in my fourteenth year, I began taking the anti-inflams during the week. I figure that my body may be able to handle it for a few years since I didn’t use them heavily earlier in my career. This is just another mind trick to convince myself that it’s OK. Soon they were entering my bloodstream on Thursdays and soon after they showed up on Wednesdays. By the early part of 2006 I had completely erased any line between days I took the pills and days I didn’t. I didn’t wait until the weekend because just getting through the weekly practices became a grueling chore. Monday I felt fine. Actually, I usually felt great. For some reason my soreness set in on Tuesday. So come Tuesday night, I started taking the meds just to get through Wednesday and Thursday’s practices.

  I guess that’s when you know the game is winding down for you. When there is no longer a line between relief and pain, the window is definitely closing. We look at it as a badge of honor, but I’d much rather not have such medals. You’ll see guys at the Pro Bowl and sometimes we’ll compare war wounds, but later on in life, who will be there to compare them with me? Ten years from now, my wounds won’t be honorable…they will just suck!

  Now, after fourteen years of onfield combat, during the season, I live on these pills. Sunday afternoons have now made waking up every day a pain. Every single day of my life I have to wake up to a checklist of what’s working and what’s not. The second I wake up, I try to figure out what hurts before I can so much as move a muscle. I run down the checklist. My knees have their good and bad days. My back constantly hurts. Elbows? Check! Neck? Check! Ankles…DAMN! Not so good. I’ll be calling upon some artificial help for that. Wrists? Check…no scratch that, they suck today, too. This is every day and sometimes what hurts one day is fine the next and vice versa.

  Again, I know there could be long-term ramifications of the anti-inflams use. But how can I possibly think about the future when I can’t even get out of bed in the morning without going through a five-minute checklist? It makes no sense, actually.

  I don’t think the human body was made for football. But when you are on the field, it feels like that is exactly what it was made for. When 70,000 crazed fanatics are screaming for me as I’m picking Donovan McNabb off the ground and smashing his body onto cement covered by fake grass—man, I’ll take a million pills to get that feeling. But the feeling only lasts for a few seconds. The effects of those pills? Who knows?

  During the games, you feel nothing aside from the initial bump here and bruise there. It could be much worse but you don’t feel it, your body won’t allow it. However, when that final whistle blows, your body’s protection mechanism shuts down and all the pain flows in with a vengeful force. One minute earlier you’re not limping but once the game ends and you can take down your guard, and the adrenaline starts to subside, then everything starts to hurt. Guys limp off the field and into the locker room and sometimes we can’t even get off our stools. How crazy is that? Not five minutes before, you’re running around like a lunatic launching your body into a wall of muscle and mass. Now, you can hardly walk to take a seat.

  For those precious few hours of the game you legitimize the pills and needles and the pain. It makes you feel you’re made for this game. The six other days of the week? You question your sanity. What the hell am I doing this for? Sometimes when it’s not game day, I’ll just wake up, go through my checklist and say to myself, “Don’t move. Your best move right now is to not move at all. Don’t talk, don’t move, the pain will all just go away.” It doesn’t. Hasn’t since halfway through my career.

  On this Sunday afternoon, I tried my hardest to make the pain go away. I tried valiantly to act like I was completely healed. “Good olllllllllllll’ Michael Strahan, how ’bout them Cowboys!” But I never got the chance that Sunday against Tony Romo. I couldn’t act as well as I’d hoped. The medical staff shut me down. I wasn’t fooling anybody, including myself. I should have just stayed in bed.

  But lying in bed would only allow my mind to dwell on the next chunk of NFL reality, one of the main reasons we live through the ups and downs, and the glory and humiliation. Money!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Cautionary Tale: Women, Money and Scams

  Today I’d rather sit in an eight-hour film sess
ion while little elves drill holes into the roots of my teeth than spend my off-day this way. I’d rather practice full speed against a bunch of rookies than participate in this off-field distraction.

  Rather than tackling a running back today, this morning I’m tackling my finances. Rather than bury my head in my playbook, I sit in a room and bury my head in streams upon streams of receipts and financial records with my lawyers, going through a self-audit.

  It was another step in buying my freedom from my ex-wife, Jean. In our divorce she asked for a ridiculous amount of money and as a result I have to account for every dime I made and spent over the less than six years we were married. On the surface, Jean and I were a great couple in love and for a short period we were. But that quickly faded. We’d get into massive arguments and the moment we were around other people, Jean would put on her Oscar-winning performances as if we were America’s sweetheart couple. In reality, we grew apart. We fought much more than we loved.

  Shortly before the Eagles’ Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 against the Patriots in Jacksonville, I knew our relationship was done. We’d had it with each other, and Jean was telling my friends that she was already looking to hire a divorce lawyer. She could never keep her mouth shut about our personal business and, of course, it got back to me, too.

  One night I came home and when I checked one of our bank accounts, I noticed it was short by $1.6 million. Jean had funneled money out of our account. When I confronted her about it, she acted like “I did it and what are you gonna do about it.” I needed to leave the house so the woman wouldn’t bait me into doing something stupid. Before I left I told her, “Jean, I’m leaving and when I return, that money better be back in my account.”