Across every sports spectrum, except soccer, you hear the same thing in August.
“Are you ready for some football?”
The fans are ready to go rabid, the ex-players, the has-beens, and the never was-ers.
It’s the time of year when everyone is great, everyone’s a champion, and even people who’ve never played the game tape their angles and put on eye-black.
Add wives and friends and neighbors and the empty stadiums will be packed soon.
What is it about the spectacle of football that drives fans to an extreme mood? The uniforms? The bands? The cheerleaders?
Or is it something more basic? When big people run into other big people, or little people hit little people, we cheer and call it part of the game.
When a big player trucks a smaller player, that’s part of the game, too, the part we like best.
Something happens to us as spectators when the collisions occur. We wince, we flinch, and we’re glad it’s not us.
Is there more?
Injuries are a part of football. They’ve even evolved to the point of sounding like a disease.
“The Miami Dolphins will have a good year in 2014 if they can avoid the injury bug.”
I like the idea of calling a broken knee connecting a player’s lower leg to the rest of their body by only skin a ‘bug.’ It’s not as gruesome sounding as the medical terms which often have tricky names in Latin.
In the past players got inoculations against the injury bug. What was the medicine? Steroids. Get bigger, stronger, and faster and avoid injury. Get on the juice and recover from workouts faster.
Of course there is a downside. Some players transitioned from using steroids to play better, to using steroids to stay in the game longer.
One of the most famous cases for playing better and staying longer was Lyle Alzado of the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and Los Angeles Raiders.
From wiki:
“I started taking anabolic steroids in 1969 and never stopped. It was addicting, mentally addicting. Now I’m sick, and I’m scared. Ninety percent of the athletes I know are on the stuff. We’re not born to be 300 lb (140 kg) or jump 30 ft (9.1 m). But all the time I was taking steroids, I knew they were making me play better. I became very violent on the field and off it. I did things only crazy people do. Once a guy sideswiped my car and I beat the hell out of him.
“Now look at me. My hair’s gone, I wobble when I walk and have to hold on to someone for support, and I have trouble remembering things. My last wish? That no one else ever dies this way.”
Alzado was a classic case of the over-achiever. Good in high school, but not recruited by colleges. Good enough in junior college, but dismissed. Played on an NAIA team and got noticed by a scout looking at film for someone else. And he had his helpers.
In a way, Lyle Alzado looks like the future of players living on the edge. These are guys who do what it takes to stay in the game at the highest level with the most money. If we hear about them after they leave the game, it’s not usually good news.
Ask any longtime NFL fans about life after football and you’ll hear the same thing. “That’s football.”
Hide concussions to stay in the game. Hide injuries to prevent someone from taking your position, your job. Your ankle hurts? Tape it. It still hurts? Shoot it up with pain killers.
From espn.com:
“A group of retired NFL players says in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the league, thirsty for profits, illegally supplied them with risky narcotics and other painkillers that numbed their injuries for games and led to medical complications down the road.
“…former offensive lineman Jeremy Newberry describes lining up in the San Francisco 49ers’ locker room with other players to receive powerful anti-inflammatory injections in their buttocks shortly before kickoff. Newberry played for San Francisco from 1998 to 2006, including one season in which he played in every game but never practiced because of pain from his injuries, according to the lawsuit.
“He retired in 2009, and because of the drugs he took while playing, he now suffers from renal failure, high blood pressure and violent headaches, the lawsuit says.
“…The lawsuit seeks class-action status for any former players who received narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, local anesthetics, sleeping aids or other drugs without prescription, independent diagnosis or warnings about side effects or the dangers of mixing with other drugs.”
You have to wonder if NFL players are the only ones staying on the field at all costs. The short answer is no.
This blogger separated a shoulder on a Wednesday practice during kick off return drills. I was scheduled for my first varsity start on Friday night, a big deal for a sophomore playing on the same team as his all-star older brother. I wasn’t going to miss it, so I hid the injury until pre-game Friday night when I told the coach my arm felt ‘funny.’
Six rolls of tape later, along with a rope tied around my wrist, the other end snaked through a hole in the front of my jersey and tied to my shoulder pads, I got my start and played the whole game.
The next day I couldn’t lift my arm. My parents took me to the emergency room and my season ended. Would I have taken a needle to keep playing?
Reading about Lyle Alzado’s Lake Oswego death in 1992 feels like a current update on the NFL. He was a man gone before his time.
He shares a final resting place with famous Portlanders and another man who still has questions asked about him.
Find Virgil Earp, brother of western legend Wyatt, and Lyle at Portland’s River View Cemetery.
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