Category Archives: NFL

Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, PEDs, Ryan Braun

The Modern Arrogance of PEDs

As a society, it feels like we are always operating under the assumption that modernity is good, that being a part of a modern era means that we are advancing. Perhaps it is experience gained as we age, or perhaps it is because of all the technological and communication advancements made make us just feel so efficient, so intelligent, so very advanced as people.
Or perhaps it is just arrogance.
We find value in purpose if we convince ourselves that we are “better” people than those who came before us, those insufferable rubes we call our ancestors.
Just look at us now, with our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds, our Vine videos. We think we’re pretty special, taking pictures of our food with camera filters. We think people care to know what we think of the latest scandal in 140 characters or less.
But we’ve missed the point of the social media medium. It is not the technology that is too blame, instead it is how we use it. Communication and connection were made easier by these software applications – how we implement them is another manner entirely.
What does this have to do with sports, you might be wondering?
Really, it has everything to do with sports, especially right now, as the sports world as we know it sits bathing in performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Almost daily, another user is identified, another lab busted, another player suspended or under suspicion of use.
Are all of these men and women, accused or proven guilty one and the same? Most assuredly not. Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong and Ryan Braun are in a different world from the junior tennis player who took the wrong over the counter medication and tested positive.
We should all fear the kind of athlete, like Braun or Armstrong, who not only seeks to gain these advantages, but maliciously works to destroy those who stand in their path.
This is simply modern arrogance transferred into sports. We are scrambling to justify players using PEDs with a litany of fun excuses: hey, it’s just part of the culture of sports now; it’s really not that bad; does it matter if everyone is doing it; if they want to risk their health for my entertainment, who cares?
Rationalizing the use of PEDs in this manner is almost adolescent in nature, which is to say, does not make us very advanced.
Those excuses sound like lectures parents dole out on their kids during teenage years: if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you? What does it matter if my friends Johnny and Tommy are doing it as long as I am not? Hey, it’s just what the kids do now.
So many of us have grown weary of this issue, the collective groan could be heard on the moon every time another story breaks.
Speaking of the moon, how would we feel if we heard Neil Armstrong had taken something that enhanced his ability to get to, and walk on, the moon? Cheapened a little? Like maybe we believed in something that wasn’t entirely real? Here is a landmark in the accomplishments of man, a moment that people of every race, faith and stature can point to and say, “humans can do anything.”
With the asterisk: as long as we take something to enhance our performance.
Look, I get it. It’s a tired and seedy story. It’s a slippery slope. It’s an argument we’ve all had in offices, living rooms, sports bars across the nation. What defines the line? Wouldn’t any drink that isn’t water that replenishes nutrients faster be categorized as a performance enhancer? Are all supplements bad?
There is most definitely no easy answer. No real, concrete line. How do we justify taking prescription drugs or medicines that improve your health when sick, physically or mentally, but stand on a bully pulpit when it comes to PEDs?
After all, those drugs allow you to perform your job better and possibly get a raise. They hide your mental or physical flaws from the outside world, giving off a false image.
The only response I can offer is this: there is a big difference between taking those kinds of drugs, which allow you to get back on a level that everyone else is on, and PEDs. If you are depressed, for example, not everyone around you is. A drug that helps level out the chemicals in your brain to a normal range simply put you back on par and allow you to live a life close to what many others enjoy.
They do not falsify your accomplishments and put you above the rest of your peers who are not doing the same things.
But I suppose, just ask yourself, do you feel something isn’t right about drinking Gatorade? About taking daily vitamins? Probably not.
Look, I take supplements. Just not the ones that improve hand-eye coordination, increase my muscle mass considerably and allow me to recover faster than people who aren’t taking them. Whether or not you’re just trying to get back out there and you owe it to the team, using HGH does still imply you are gaining an edge. You can call it speeding up your recovery, if it helps you convince yourself you weren’t looking to cheat – but it is still an edge over every other injured player who isn’t using it.
And there’s the rub, really. This is why we call something cheating: doing something that someone else in a similar position is not. It’s not so much about the morality of right and wrong, we blur those lines all the time.
Really, this is another mixture of PEDs and our society. We distinguish all the time what we will tolerate and what we won’t.
Barry Bonds was a noted jerk, as now is Braun and Rodriguez. However, guys like Derek Jeter use “good” steroids like cortisone to recover and we cheer their gutsiness. David Ortiz was caught with a positive test, and we just smiled. He’s Big Papi, so he’s cool. And I’m sure it was just for a little while to recover from something.
And this says a lot about our society, too. What kind of person you are, or portray yourself to be, will largely determine how willingly we accept or forgive you for a future issue. Do what we expect, based on what we know, and we will react accordingly.
This war, this battle in sports on drugs and PEDs, is driven by the media, and by people like me, too. Sons of old school fathers, fathers to young athletes. The last thing I want my three sons and daughter doing is taking something that enhances their performance to gain an edge on somebody else.
Remember the Ice Cube movie, “Friday”? (Oh yes, I’m going there.) Ice Cube is getting ready to fight the dude who played Zeus in “No Holds Barred” and wants to grab his gun. His father begs him to do it without the aid of a weapon, outside his fists.
I’ll give you another example, from an episode of the last season of “Boy Meets World” (yes, I’m going there, too). Cory and Topanga are just married and living in a dump. The pipes are spouting brown water, the place should be condemned and there’s a screaming baby in the apartment next to them.
They beg his parents for a loan to buy their dream house. Cory’s dad firmly says no, with little explanation of why they won’t. Later, Cory fixes the pipes himself (without deer antler spray), takes a clear glass of water from the faucet and demands his father drink it.
Finally, Cory gets it. It’s not that they couldn’t help – or did not want to. But if they would have, it would have robbed them of something that can’t be completely explained, that sense of accomplishing it on your own, of figuring it out, or doing it.
My argument against using PEDs and my reasons for continuing to wish for a cleaner sports world cannot be explained much better than that, with a hokey reference to a TGIF show and a the only semi-serious part of a comedy starring Ice Cube and Zeus.
Call me self-righteous and tell me I am naïve. Tell me I need to get with the times and just accept where the world is now, that all the athletes do it and have been for 20 years. Call them gentleman’s rules, unwritten guidelines, or just fair play.
Without that, what are we doing this for anyway? Money? Fame? Glory?
If that truly is the case, then we are far from advancing our society and culture.
Modernity is a myth for us, or at least it will continue to be, until we actually fix the faucet ourselves.

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American culture, culture war, Dodge Ram, Jeff Daniels, NFL, Paul Harvey, Society, Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl XLVII

Americans Made a Country


An interesting thing happened during an interesting fourth quarter of an already interesting Super Bowl on Sunday night: I felt the urge to get some dirt on my hands.
Thanks to Dodge, the voice of Paul Harvey and some of the most clever and emotional advertising we’ve seen in years, we got a clear winner of the Super Bowl ad wars and a really, really good commercial that wasn’t just selling a product, but doing so much more.
It was causing us to think. 
After a weird power outage in the Mercedes Benz Superdome during the early moments of the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, the Baltimore Ravens saw their momentum evaporate as the San Francisco 49ers nearly eliminated a 22-point deficit, before pulling out a victory in a thrilling finish. And it was then, as the game came down to crunch time, on a night with all these interesting stories and subplots, that something much more interesting, impactful and profound occurred.

God made a farmer, Dodge made a commercial and America made its growing division all the more evident.

[You can view the video by clicking here].
The culture war in America became even more evident in the moments following Dodge’s two-minute, still picture and old voice-over ad. Just examine the reactions to the spot itself. Half the country probably had tears in their eyes while the other half were rolling their eyes. Some thought it righteous (in a good way), others thought it ridiculous.
It goes beyond how brilliant the marketing strategy itself was, though make no mistake, someone at Dodge is getting a massive promotion over this. It’s the ultimate “duh” moment: who buys trucks? Farmers! What do they value? Um…let’s see…hard work, pride in how straight they plant their fields, church, passing down a farm through generations.
Who doesn’t care about any of that? Urbanized populations, big cities, corporations, people who care about gas mileage or the environment, atheists and perhaps, mostly, non-whites? Does Dodge care if they don’t care or if they don’t buy a truck? My guess is most of the people that fall into these categories weren’t driving trucks prior to viewing the ad, anyway. And if all they got out of it was Googling “Paul Harvey” to find out who he was, then really, we all came away winners.
Yet I can’t stop thinking about the reaction to the ad, the division of America and our ever-expanding cultural war.

Most commercials, especially during the Super Bowl, try a clever new way to sell you a product. And certainly, Dodge wants to sell Rams. But this, this was different. It spoke more directly to the values of middle class Americans. Think of the images they used: a church, a flag, a family praying before a meal, tractors, plows, dirty hands, open fields.

Not one single shot of the truck until the end. Not one mention of Dodge verbally, and only visually when the truck appeared. Just a tag line: “For the farmer in all of us.”
Those who chided, bristled and mocked the ad and its contents are missing the point. This wasn’t just about farmers and it wasn’t just about trucks.
There is a farmer in all of us, and probably through the generations, through our ancestors, we were all, indeed, farmers. Farming itself is an ideal and a visualization of something different: feeding people, clothing people, an honest day’s work. The open fields represent the possibility of what’s to come, of freedom, of opportunity, of doing something on your own.
Make no mistake, this message resonates with many in this country.
One part of our nation yearns for this kind of commercial, of this kind of code of ethics.
Another part of our culture posts snide remarks on social media and jokes about not knowing Paul Harvey.
One side is thankful that God was brought into our living rooms during the Super Bowl, another is offended.
And it’s this striking difference between these two groups that says the most about where we are as a society. We’ve gotten less serious. It’s why we don’t wear dresses, suits, ties and hats as we once did. We’ve desensitized ourselves to violence and sexuality. It is why we can watch the GoDaddy make out commercial without losing our lunches now.
So why is this ad about farmers and trucks, invoking so much praise and backlash at the same time? Because it serves as a rallying cry for one side of our American culture, an offensive example for the other.
The negative reaction was immediately what you would expect: too many white people, too much God. Give us more CGI-entertainment, they demanded, and don’t begrudge everyone a Carl’s Jr. commercial with some model’s chest covered in hamburger grease. Nobody seems offended when Mercedes Benz shows off its new luxury model being driven by a white 40-year-old, with meticulously coiffed hair, in Brooks Brothers clothes. The same as no one seems to mind how young and affluent blacks are targeted by Puff Daddy in Hennessy ads.
In turn, the positive reaction was also in line with generalized expectations: farmers loved it, rural populations and those from rural areas thought it was brilliant. Ignore that many migrant workers weren’t accurately represented. That’s not the point, either, really.
We’re just looking for ways to be offended so we can complain about it. And we are becoming further and further entrenched in our viewpoints. We’re so self-involved we’ve ceased to evolve.
No, we were never perfect as a nation – a far cry from it. We’ve got quite the history. But while we strive to be evolving socially, we’re losing out morally and ethically. We’ve just plain stopped striving to be anything more than novice social commentators, being snarky about power outages and Super Bowl ads. We do all this through unemotional ways of communicating and we wonder why we’re facing such a massive disconnect with each other.
We’ve come to a point where we are so singularly sure ourselves, we skip over the part of becoming informed. Newspapers and magazines and books are dying not because of technology, but because we’ve simply stopped reading. And what we do read is of vampires, werewolves and adolescent magicians.
We already think we know everything and therefore we learn nothing.
The same half of our country who thought that the “God Made a Farmer” ad was racist, stupid or just plain didn’t concern them will remain oblivious to the fact that, according to recent studies, the world’s food production must increase between 75 and 90 percent by the year 2050. Not sure if Wall Street or pharmaceutical giants can find a way to make up that gap. But we could always ask Siri on our iPhones to do a search on the Web.
Can you determine who liked the ad based on what they do or where they live, what they value and what they stand for – flaws and all? Certainly.
At least it clear who they are, what they do and what they value in the ad.
If I had been watching American news, however, from a foreign nation the past few months, I’m not sure what I would be able to determine about America based on recent events.
So they honor freedom, but they incarcerate the largest number of people per capita in the world? They claim to support freedom from tyranny, but they shoot each other in public schools, theaters and walking down the street? They demand and beg for innovation, yet teach their children to be employees, not entrepreneurs? They want people to venture out and start small businesses, but then the government will tax you exponentially for becoming successful and tell you that you didn’t build it? They say to give them the poor, the weak, the huddled masses that cannot defend themselves, but they allow abortion and pretend the homeless don’t exist?
Chances are, you got lost in some buzzwords there: abortion, incarceration, taxes, gun control. But odds are you missed what might be the biggest point of all: that we teach ourselves and our children to be good employees, not entrepreneurs.
Collectively, we’ve ceased to have vision or to dream – the very things our country was founded upon. No matter what generation, race, creed, religious affiliation, we dreamed and innovated and worked for things in this country. No one ever said I want to be project manager or a software security analyst when they were little. And that’s where we’ve started to lose everything else we did, or have, or should hold true.
We can shift in our seats, squirm uncomfortably and cringe when we hear God used in a TV ad about trucks, scoff at farmers and what they do, or what race makes up the majority of this working group. But as Jeff Daniels said in an epic speech on the show Newsroom a few months ago: “The first step to recognizing a problem is realizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”
But it can be. We can get it back. Even if farming and Dodge trucks aren’t your thing, that’s fine.
To change our future and to make what matters most to us matter again, we’ll need to make ambition, education, truth, honesty, compassion, fairness, faith, belief, hope, logic and common sense in much larger quantities.
We can make all of these things prevalent and valued again. But we have to drive our plows straight. We have to check for weeds in our fields. We have to get up early and stay up late. We have to care for our children and others as much as we do ourselves. We have to go to the school meetings, put the flag out front and build a future where the fields are wide open with possibility. Our collective tools don’t have to be plows and tractors and trucks.
So God made a farmer. And Dodge made a commercial.
Now, our culture needs to make up its mind: what do we want to be? Let’s at least get our hands a little bit dirty, work together and find out how well Americans can make a country. 

Sounds better than another domain name commercial, doesn’t it?


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Derek Jeter, Drew Storen, Ed Reed, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, MLB, NBA, NFL, Peyton Manning, Ray Lewis, Steve Nash, Tim Duncan, Tom Brady

The Grind


Here’s to The Grind.
Or more importantly, here’s to the ones who went through it and excelled in it.
Because you can survive The Grind, but it changes you forever. If you don’t know what The Grind is, quite simply, it’s the torturous side of sports. The pain, the hurt, the injuries, the travel, the hard work, the rehab.

It’s the nights in an empty gym while your friends go out on dates. It’s the sunny afternoons of summer spent in batting cages, on dirt fields under a blazing sun, while others soak their feet in a pool. It’s the mildly grotesque smell of a weight room, which you strangely learn to embrace. The Grind is the scars, the rock hard calluses on your feet and toes, the lack of hair on your knees from floor burns.

And there’s a secret to it, that only the best of the best learn, which is simply that The Grind cannot be beaten, it’s barely survived and at your best, you simply manage and muddle your way through it.
The Grind is the journey, and it’s rarely understood by those who merely watch.
We are about to embark on a period over the next few years where some of the best in their profession – of all time – will step away from The Grind and reach The End. They survive it, embrace it and succeed in it.
The first comes Sunday, as Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis will retire – win or lose – following the Super Bowl. Whatever you think of Lewis as a person, or how the media lovefest has gone a little overboard the past month, considering, you know, this, it doesn’t change the fact that Lewis is indeed a warrior and a throwback NFL player along the lines of a Butkus or a Singletary. Ultimate competitor, passionate, and perhaps most of all, maximum effort at all times.
And he lasted 17 seasons in the NFL, a place where brain damage and physical disability are rampant after retirement. In 2011, a study found that the average NFL career was 6.86 seasons, a major league baseball player, 5.6 years, and in the NBA, ballers can expect to last on average 4.8 years.
That’s not very long. And that’s because of The Grind.
As spectators and as fans, we see the glitz, the glamour, the fame and the money of professional sports. And never mistake that they are well-paid. But few, very few, make it to The End. The Grind often ends it for you.
It becomes less and less about the money, but more and more about the legacy and about a unique competitive drive few can understand.
Within the next few years, many other outstanding, Hall of Fame caliber NFL stars could be joining Lewis: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Randy Moss (again), Tony Gonzalez and Ed Reed. Each of these players changed the game, impacted it in some significant way and broke records. Each will be a Hall of Fame player. Heck, maybe Brett Favre will finally hang ‘em up, too.
In baseball, guys like Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki (basically, the New York Yankees roster) and David Ortiz will call it quits. And in the NBA, there’s this list: Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, and Steve Nash. All are winding down MVP-heavy, record breaking, Hall of Fame careers.
We’ve watched, we’ve enjoyed or hated them as members of rival teams, but we don’t know a thing about them, really. And we don’t know about The Grind.
Some of these athletes have been playing professional sports that span over three presidents – the second term of Bill Clinton, all of George W. Bush’s years in the White House and now, with Barack Obama beginning his second term as commander-in-chief. Cell phones weren’t heavily used, Justin Timberlake was in a boy band and we still feared the Y2K bug.
Just think, where were you in 1996, when Ray Lewis and Kobe Bryant started their NFL and NBA careers, respectively?
Simply put, the world has changed, but many of these guys haven’t. Think of what they’ve endured? To start, I think of how my story is 1/100th of theirs.
I am a has-been, former high school hoopster, and tried to play college ball at the D-III level. In my early 20s, I played pick-up ball a couple nights a week for a few years, didn’t do anything for a few in the middle and then played Y-League ball on Sundays for eight weeks, once or twice a year, for three years. Didn’t play again for awhile and now, over the past four months (in much better shape finally), I’m playing once a week again.
Keep in mind that fact – that I’m 33, haven’t spent the last 15 years in a 6-to-8 month season, traveling, maintaining, playing two games in three nights, back-to-backs or doing a West Coast road trip.
But I played. I’ve had my version of The Grind.
Frankly, I hurt more than I’d ever admit verbally, mostly in the mornings. And that’s mainly because I don’t want to be a whiner, a complainer and partly because those around me can’t understand.
In the winter, due to way too many ankle sprains, my feet just plain ache. They pop and crack constantly. They’re typically always cold, unless the calendar is between May and August, due to poor blood flow and bad tendons and ligaments. My wife shudders when my feet brush her leg and says they feel like ice cubes.
My back hurts, my left shoulder slips out of socket occasionally if moved the wrong way, or slept on for too long, from three separations. After diving for a loose ball once and landing on my elbow, I basically split my elbow cap into four or five pieces of bone. I’ve played with what amounts to a black and blue golfball on the side of my foot – several times and on each ankle. I’ve played in an Aircast, a shoulder harness (that I wouldn’t wear except for one practice), and routinely stuck my legs from the calf down into 5-gallon buckets of ice water.

Twenty minutes in, 20 minutes out. After pulling them out, with my feet still a blue-ish purple color, I’d do ABCs with my feet, then, plunge them back in for another 20 minutes of torturous cold that cannot be described, only experienced.

Once, I got 12 stitches in my calf after diving for a ball and landing on the jagged metal edge of a bleacher – but I didn’t notice my sock was covered in blood for nearly two minutes. And I didn’t notice that muscle and fat from my calf were slightly exposed from the gash.
But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
The Grind can give you an adrenaline high, a natural charge from competition that you can’t really replace, a euphoria that you’ll spend trying to replicate. The Grind can hurt. I’ve got friends with knees that have been repaired or scoped three, four, five times. Herniated and or bulging discs in their back. Some have addiction to pain killers, to alcohol, to Tylenol, Advil or nicotine.
I’ve done it, too. They are simply numbing agents to offset The Grind and its effects.
And our stories – especially my stories – are literally nothing but a drop in the bucket of those mentioned above. Think of the amount of needles endured just to play. Lewis is coming back from a torn tendon in his arm that he suffered in October. Imagine that rehab. Surgeries and pins placed into bones. Kobe flew to Germany to have a controversial surgery on his knee, where they put new blood platelets in, because The Grind had made his bones, well, grind.
And that’s just before they are done.
At some point, though, it ends. And that’s when the mental aspect, not just the physical, begins. An identity crisis, or sorts. Who are you without (insert sport name here)? Some, like me, only did it for 12-15 years. I thought I had a hard time. Guys like Kobe, Duncan, Jeter, it will have been for 25 or 30 or more. You don’t remember a time when it didn’t revolve around the game. Your life is defined by it, you are who you are because of it.
The younger you are, the less painful the transition I imagine. Those who get it and did it, no matter what the level, have their demons related to giving it up or losing it. And it’s harder to understand for those around them. The competitiveness is wired into you, somehow, perhaps before birth or at a young age and you can’t turn off will and desire.
It cannot be replaced. The beast cannot be fed with desk jobs or investments, or even announcing and analyzing games on TV. Some do well with post-sports life, like Larry Bird, others, like Michael Jordan, not so much.
Some don’t want The Grind, which is when they get The Filter. That’s why they quit their high school teams, to go out and do their thing. They date. They party. They grow their hair out and spend their summers in flip flops, going to concerts and pool parties. There are more who wave it off after they get to college. Not worth it, too much. Or they don’t play as hard. They quit diving for loose balls or line drives in the gap, quit chasing down receivers 15 yards downfield. The funnel gets tighter the higher you go in the sporting ranks.
Until we are left with the few you can survive all The Grind has to offer. Twenty or more years, from childhood on, of aches, pains, missed dates, failed relationships, lost friendships over wins and losses, the travel, sleeping in chairs, living in training rooms with ice wrapped around every limb, doctors, surgeries, and rehab.
The Legends, they’ve been hurt, too, far worse and for far longer than many of us can even comprehend. Broken feet, torn ACLs. Dislocated this, that and parts in between. Peyton’s neck, Brady’s knee, Kobe’s knee, Jeter’s ankle. Paul Pierce was nearly stabbed to death. These are just the big ones, the ones that we know about. We don’t know anything of all the nicks, bumps, scraps, twists and turns. Banging into bodies, diving on the ground, on the floor. Flying from city to city, sleeping in cycles of naps on planes and buses.
At The End, if you’re lucky, you got a few rings to show for it.
This weekend, I heard rising star and young Washington Nationals pitcher Drew Storen speak. He was encouraging many in the audience, who were young baseball players, to focus each and every day on getting better at one little thing, and how, over time, it adds up to make a big difference.
But he also spoke of The Grind. What he does never changes. There’s just more of it. The same way he played the game at 11, 15,  or 17 is the same way he plays today. He gets just as excited – still gets that rush – to strike someone out, to make them look foolish, like he did his neighborhood friends as a little kid.
“Just more people watch now,” Storen joked.
They watch, but they can’t know. It’s a lonely place, The Grind. Going through it, only few understand. And the further your go with it, the fewer people that know what it feels like. That’s probably why it’s so hard to let it go.
Lately, I have been writing pieces about the moral side of sports, of society and how we view these events, and what’s right and wrong. But you think of it from this lens, of these outstanding few, of The Grind, and you think how many shades of gray enter into someone’s logic and rationale.
I may not agree with the PEDs, with the personal life or off court issues, but I can see why they are there. Why taking something to give you an edge is a tempting devil on your shoulder.
There are not many left after a dozen, 15 or 17 years. So very few can survive that long. That’s what makes these guys special in a sporting sense. We rarely get them, and when we do, they often have baggage near The End. Scars unseen they hide from the world, because frankly, the world can’t understand. It’s too cut and dry by that point for them.
Other times, it’s simply a numbing agent, a way to survive, to press on. Many started out, like Storen, chasing it. And as life often does, so many are filtered out over time. These guys aren’t like us, which is why I’ll tip my hat to them all, no matter who they are, simply because The Grinders reached The End.
And I hope and pray for the beginning of the rest of their life. 
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concussions, Dave Duerson, Dr. James Andrews, Matthew Broderick, Mike Shanahan, MLB, NFL, Robert Griffin III, Steven Strasburg, Washington Nationals, Washington Redskins

Sometimes, There Are No Winners


Here’s where we start: 60-year-old men who can’t walk, can’t turn the lights on inside their home and can’t stand the pain to the point that some commit suicide.
If that doesn’t grab your attention, I’m not sure what will. Maybe phrases. Brain damage. Multiple reconstructive surgeries. Cognitive breakdowns. Early onset dementia.
These are the real, live dangers of playing football for a sustained period of time in one’s life. Is it worth it?
How can a schlub like me proclaim to have that answer? I can’t, frankly. But the fundamental fact is that across America, mothers and fathers are struggling with how to take the new information on player safety and mesh it with what is best for our sons.
I have three boys. The oldest plays travel football for a good school system. The coaches are fantastic. The medical staff in our community is top notch. And the same could be said for the NFL. The Washington Redskins have Dr. James Andrews – yes, that Dr. James Andrews, he of renown surgical fame.
And Robert Griffin III is still hurt this morning and we’re still pondering if he should have been playing at all.
Part of this is our fault. As fans and media, we eviscerated Jay Cutler two years ago for not playing in the NFC Championship game against the arch-rival Green Bay Packers with a knee injury. We encourage gritty, tough, manly behavior in sports.
But I have to ask, is it manly to eat through a straw, have recurring headaches and forget your own name by the time your 55? Is it manly to walk with a gimp, hunched over and have knees and hips replaced in your 40s?
It’s an interesting dichotomy, to pair the decision of the Washington Redskins to play Griffin over the past month with the city’s baseball team, the Washington Nationals, polar opposite decision to rest the arm of their prized franchise player, Steven Strasburg. The Nationals faced backlash, including from me, for resting him during the final month of last season, just as the team was in the playoff race. And as the Nationals advanced into the playoffs, they refused to budge: Strasburg would not be pitching until 2013.
Strasburg fought this decision, but ultimately accepted it. Griffin, according to both he and his coach, was asked multiple times about staying in the game Sunday against Seattle. He played.
He got hurt.
As Griffin said in his postgame comments, and as other former players point out all the time, you take the risk of injury any time you step on the field. It is not a variable. It’s there. With baseball and basketball – heck, with walking down the street – the risk of injury is all around us. It’s just significantly less possible to get hurt walking down the street than it is playing baseball. Likewise, the gap is roughly the same between baseball and football.
It doesn’t make Griffin more of a leader or a man to play through pain. Or maybe it does to those other players, because they are doing it, too. Football is a different sport, with its own set of protocols and guiding principles. I enjoy what leadership and experience my son gets from football. But can he find it or learn it in other, less dangerous ways?
If this is where we are as a culture and society of sports fans – that a man is measured solely by pain tolerance and his ability to run around on one leg and fight through injury to lead his team – then we’ve advanced no further than the time of gladiators in ancient Rome.
We should be better than this by now. We’re an advanced race of people, with thousands of years of information at our fingertips. We speak of logic, yet confusingly do not show any on certain things.
Remember the 80s flick, WarGames? Matthew Broderick was caught hacking into a sophisticated computer system that interacted with you (basically, what we have now). At the time, this advanced system learned from itself. Eventually, it learned that Global Thermonuclear War could not be won, under any scenario, and eventually just asked to play chess (after scaring the pants of nearly everyone with security clearance).
I’m not suggesting we all just play chess. To be certain, there’s something endearing about the leadership qualities of Russell Crowe or Russell Wilson, when they keep going. You want to instill perseverance. As a father, I know I do. We love it in America when people keep pushing and going despite the odds, despite the injuries, despite the repercussions.
But you have to look at the culture we – all of us, fans, players, coaches, media – are creating. Is there truly a way to win this game when more and more former players end up not winning at the game of life? Substance abuse, violence, suicides; these are not things I want for my boys. I don’t want them to end up like Jim McMahon, who’s forgotten more about his professional football career than anyone who went by the name “Punky QB” ever should.
Griffin’s injury hasn’t sparked new conversation around head trauma or concussions, because it was his knee.
And this goes beyond giving his team the best chance to win over the backup. Was it best for him? Maybe not. Is it his choice or the teams? Perhaps both, in some way. Yet a friend of mine, who’s had five knee surgeries, three of which were of the reconstructive nature, commented how Griffin’s knee buckling didn’t, uh, look good. He would know – my friend’s injured knee came from football.
How will Griffin’s knee hold up over time? That’s not just the concern of the Washington Redskins or fans of RGIII or the NFL. That’s Griffin’s concern, too. And maybe he’s fine with it. He’s a grown man and has signed a contract to go between those lines each week. If he chooses to play on an injured knee that could lead to major obstacles in the ways he lives life after football is his decision in almost all ways.
And you know what’s ours? What we allow our sons to do, the generation of young boys between the ages of 6-13 who really can’t do anything if we don’t allow them to play.
It’s striking that so many former players have said they weren’t sure if they would allow their boys to play football. Kurt Warner caused a stir when he said he’d prefer his sons not play and nearly retired a year before he actually did when his teammate, Anquan Boldin, suffered a nasty concussion in a mid-air collision going after a ball Warner threw. Tom Brady’s father said he waited until he was 14 until he allowed one of the league’s greatest quarterbacks to play the game. All-pro linebacker Bart Scott said he plays football so his son “won’t have to” and Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw, who won four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers, said if he had a son he wouldn’t allow him to play.
It’s the totality of what we see – it won’t go away. Our gut instinct and reaction tell us that something is off. From former players struggling to cope (like Junior Seau or Dave Duerson) to current ones who struggle, too, we’re getting an all too clear picture of the vast differences between modern football and the game that was once played.
They are not gladiators, and this is not ancient Rome. Commendable, endearing and manly as it may be, it’s brutal and barbaric for us to ignore or subconsciously enjoy their suffering.
Are they well paid? Most certainly. But that money will be gone to prescription drugs and doctor appointments between the ages of 40 to 75. If they make it that long.
It’s one thing to watch it all unfold. It’s another to willingly and openly subject my own children to it. We’re supposed to learn from things. And I frankly can’t decide what I will do with my youngest two boys or how long our 10-year-old will play.
Because football is becoming more and more like a modern sports version of Global Thermonuclear War.
The only way to truly win is not to play. 
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Baltimore Ravens, NFL, Ray Lewis

A Selective Legacy


The man who told us in 2011 that we would be living in a post-apocalyptic society of violence without an NFL season has decided to not continue his NFL career. 
That’s right, after 17 seasons, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis is retiring.
And so now begins the piecing together of his “legacy”, if you are into such things. 
A legacy is basically defined as “what is left” by the person. However, with most professional athletes, especially with Ray Lewis right now, we’re selective on what he leaves behind for us.
Notably, Lewis won a Super Bowl with the Ravens, played his entire career for the franchise and has continually led one of the NFL’s staunchest defensive units. There are the 13 Pro Bowls, the seven first-team All-NFL honors and the two Defensive Player of the Year awards. There is also the compliments being paid by former coaches, who noted how prepared Lewis was, what a model teammate he was and how his passion for the game evoked the same in others.
Ray Lewis might possibly be the greatest middle linebacker to ever play in the NFL to this point, a high honor considering that includes the likes of Mike Singletary and Dick Butkus. He’s a shoe-in, first ballot Hall of Famer.
But let us not write the epitaph of Ray Lewis’ career without mentioning the murder and aggravated assault charges in Atlanta in January 2000. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of justice after that original indictment.
The details are still sketchy, thirteen years later. But there were two men stabbed to death and the white suit Lewis’ was wearing that night has never been found. His two friends, that he later testified against, were acquitted in June of 2000. 
No one else has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the murders. 
Then, in April 2004, Lewis paid a settlement with the then four-year-old daughter of one of the men who died, preempting a civil lawsuit. He likewise did the same with the other man’s family.
And as many asked then, why? If innocent, why pay damages preemptively? Why can’t he tell anyone where his clothes are from that night? Why can’t he tell us where he was at the time of the deaths?
For those that say this is drudging up the past, it very well may be – but when an NFL legend retires and everyone else wants to do nothing but pay homage to him, it’s at least worth mentioning. This happened. And we don’t really know what exactly it is that happened. He says he didn’t see anything and was involved in earlier confrontations as a peacemaker.
In the years since, Lewis has greatly rehabbed his image. 
He’s been deeply involved with the Baltimore and Miami communities. The Ray Lewis 52 Foundation, a non-profit entity, provides personal and economic assistance to disadvantaged youth. He’s been a big proponent of disabled sports in the U.S. and in developing countries abroad.
But no one who followed the NFL during the 2000 season and subsequent playoffs can forget how awkward it was when Trent Dilfer was given the “I’m going to Disney World” commercial following the Ravens Super Bowl win, despite Lewis being the game’s MVP. No one who remembers that off-season of 2000 can forget how weird it felt to see him touting religion on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2006.
And thus we’re left with the quandary of how to handle athletes like this. This isn’t someone who was involved in drugs and became clean, like say Josh Hamilton, who’s dealt with the awkwardness and tension for longer than Lewis dealt with his accusation of murder.
As a society, aren’t we doing ourselves a disservice by not covering all of a person equally? Just because the last decade happened, doesn’t mean it didn’t occur. I get that we live in a very forgiving society, where second chances are not only afforded, but extended rather easily, depending on what occurred.
But I find our failure over the past 24 hours to cover the entirety of the man’s legacy as quite a shame.
This is not how history should be written, with one lens. 
It began before he retired, with the “Football Life” video, and media personalities gushing about what a fine person he was. We must be careful to imply that he isn’t a fine person, based on this incident 13 years ago, yet we must be tactful and forthright by mentioning the charges were filed and he plead guilty to obstruction of justice. Those are facts.
We don’t need to go to a re-trail. Debating his innocence, guilt or connection is irrelevant. He’s not being charged with a new crime or on trial for it now. But you would think that in the hours following his retirement announcement, it would be mentioned. It’s relevant to discuss when considering the entirety of his “legacy”.
And thus his legacy will not be defined by all of his actions, but rather who covers and writes about his actions and which ones they select. And that incompleteness actually says more about us and our media hero worship of professional athletes than it does about Ray Lewis.
I can only hope that others, including myself, will be so lucky as to have our legacy defined by others in a selective fashion that picks the good parts. I’d be a Hall of Famer in something, too.
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