The Painful Transition to Life After Football : It’s a Game Many Former Pros Lose

Fuzzy Thurston, the former Green Bay Packers guard, once said that in his lifetime he would suffer two deaths--the first when he was forced to leave the game he loved and the second when his life actually ended.

Mike Carter never knew Fuzzy Thurston, but he has known football death. His passing occurred shortly after 1973, Carter’s last season with the San Diego Chargers and the National Football League.

Now 40, Carter, has yet to recover from the spiral. Life after football has left him with more questions than answers, more fears than friends, more pain than gain, more confusion than cartilage.

Every three or four years, at a cost of $15,000 to $30,000 to his insurance company, Carter takes his battered knees in for surgical tuneups, “like maintenance on your car,” he says.

He says he can’t walk more than 100 yards at a stretch. He is recently divorced, which he relates to “football hangover.” He says the emotional scars run even deeper than the unsightly ones on his legs, and those prompt him to leave his sweat pants on at beach parties.

“When I say spiral down, I mean it can get to the point where you can’t take it and want to take your own life,” said Carter, who was a wide receiver. “It’s difficult to put into words, but I can see how people can do it.

“They might send people in white jackets after me, but this divorce hit so hard that I thought about it. If I hadn’t had family close to me, to grab hold of me, yeah, I might have. You spiral so fast you don’t know how to stop, you don’t think it will ever end.

“My wife’s gone, more than half my life, 80% of my possessions. I’m 40 and I’ve got to start over. I can’t go for a walk or lie on the beach, there are so many cuts all over me. I can see how guys would say, ‘Why hang on?’ Who would miss me?”

Carter is not alone. In a Times survey of 440 retired NFL players, 54% responded that they suffered emotionally in the transition out of the game, 42% said that the transition was smooth and 4% had no answer.

Although many of those questioned considered the change smooth, and football a boost to a post-playing career, the majority cited feelings ranging from abandonment, financial hardship, loneliness, paranoia, helplessness, despair and loss of self-esteem.

Some blamed the transition for failed relationships, unemployment, addiction to alcohol and drugs. Others admitted to needing and receiving psychiatric counseling. Many said they were unprepared and untrained for life outside football. Others wondered why the NFL wasn’t there to help.

“My transition was made with alcohol,” Paul Rochester, a 10-year NFL veteran, wrote.

Several compared their plight, to a lesser degree, to the postwar stress syndromes suffered by Vietnam veterans.

One former player told a psychotherapist: “When you leave pro football, it’s like you’ve got AIDS. Nobody will pay attention to you or get anywhere near you.”

Several players said they had contemplated suicide.

Jim Nicholson, an offensive tackle with the Kansas City Chiefs and now an attorney in Hawaii, almost didn’t make it through the year after his retirement in 1980.

“There was a period of time between the end of football and law school that I really didn’t want to live,” Nicholson said. “You don’t have that burning desire to go out and achieve. We’re basically trained killers as professional football players. We’re trained to hurt people. To try and turn that off and step into the real world is a difficult task.”

Some never make it. According to the National Football League Players Assn., 78 vested NFL players have died since 1960 and three of those were suicides--Jim Tyrer, Larry Bethea and Charles Janerette.

“Out of the guys who committed suicide, how many names do you recognize?” Carter asked. “You can go from an idol to some kids to absolute obscurity. It’s a tough pill.”

The emotional strain tends to have a more pronounced effect on the marginal players, those who are forgotten soon after they leave the game. Those players, of course, represent a majority. For every player who turns fame into a network announcing job, there are hundreds of others who, as one veteran player said, “have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Tom Neville spent 13 years with the New England Patriots from 1965 to 1977. When he called the Patriots’ office two years after he retired, he was asked by a secretary to spell his last name.

“The dance is over,” Neville said to himself.

According to league sources, the NFL has lost track of 840 former players who are eligible for benefits but have either not come forward or not been found.

“They have all the problems you’d speculate any of us would have if all of a sudden somebody wiped out your career right now,” said Tony Bober, a Newport Beach psychotherapist who has recently concluded his own study on former NFL players.

Of course, the term football career is fast becoming a contradiction of terms. Because of increasing NFL injury rates, the average NFL career lasts only 3.2 years, which puts most players back in the work force before they reach 30.

“It can be tragic,” said Tom Beer, a former tight end who runs a nutrition and health care business in New Jersey. “I see it with associates. I see guys that are not on track, who are out there wandering around with no secure job, no family.

“Something has to be done from ownership to counsel these guys and get them prepared for the future. It doesn’t do teams a bit of good to open the papers and see that a guy has shot his wife and kids and committed suicide. They shouldn’t see that, or Ernie Holmes (ex-Pittsburgh Steeler) sitting on a freeway shooting at cars.”

Bober’s interest in studying NFL players was coincidental. He happened to meet Frank Woschitz, NFLPA director of public relations, on a Caribbean vacation cruise three years ago. Woschitz made the trip with three retired players as part of an NFLPA-sponsored promotions tour.

Bober sat with Woschitz and Ray Nitschke, former Green Bay Packer linebacker, at dinner one night. A study was born.

Bober was asked to speak at a retired players’ convention, at which he conducted a pilot study concerning post-career adjustment problems.

Inspired by the results, Bober conducted his survey in conjunction with Ball State University. The results will be published later this year.

He mailed 1,511 questionnaires and got back 670 (43%), an extraordinary return rate, Bober said. He said that his survey will show that most former players suffer “significant” emotional trauma in the months and years after retirement.

“When a guy comes out without experiencing problems, it is the exception as opposed to the rule,” Bober said.

He found there was a “three-year window” after retirement during which players either make the transition or founder, a contention supported by The Times’ survey of players.

Dennis Franks, formerly of the Philadelphia Eagles and presently awaiting trail on cocaine distribution charges in Pennsylvania, calls the transition period “the hesitation step that gets you killed on the field.”

Franks would know. He was caught frozen in his tracks. A cocaine user as a player, Franks was 29 when he was released by the Detroit Lions in 1981 and said his fear of leaving the game’s inner circle after retirement contributed to his demise.

“It was the emotional trauma of just not wanting to get away,” he said. “It’s probably what pulled me into handling cocaine.”

Franks knew where to find clients.

“Let’s just say a percentage of players use cocaine,” he said.

Franks faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. His best-case scenario is probation and community service work.

The Ball State study will also show that emotional and physical problems have increased significantly since 1970, and that those problems may be related.

Bober’s survey reveals that 28% of the respondents who played before 1970 said they left the game because of a disabling injury. The number jumped to 42% for players who left the game after 1970. The increase in serious football-related injuries often limits mobility and opportunity in the work force, several players told The Times.

Roger Stillwell, a former defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears suffered a serious knee injury in 1977. He is still fighting the NFL in his quest for a permanent disability pension.

A series of operations since the initial injury have been unsuccessful. Stillwell claims to be totally disabled and unable to pursue a career in insurance.

“My work experience has been nothing short of humiliating,” Stillwell wrote in a 1985 deposition. “Yet I was caught up in a never-ending rat race in which I get further and further behind. My physical condition gets worse and worse with the added pressures and anxiety.”

Paradoxically, significant increases in player salaries in the last decade can sometimes negatively affect the transition period.

Franks, for example, said he made almost $100,000 his last year in the NFL. His first job after football, working for his former agent in a sports management firm, paid $200 a week plus commissions.

“It was a real culture shock,” Franks said. “You have your house payment, your standard of living. It took me a year and a half to figure out what life was all about.”

Players relying on their pensions for support have been largely disappointed. The NFL’s pension plan lags far behind those of baseball and basketball. Until last year, players who played in the NFL before 1959 got no pension at all. Now, they receive $60 a month for each year of vested service.

Players who leave the game are often left debilitated, unemployed and forgotten. In both the Ball State study and The Times survey, several players imagined the post-NFL experience as being similar to that of returning Vietnam veterans.

“One guy told me that football is not a contact sport, football is combat,” Bober said. “He said that’s all it is. He said it and it made sense.”

Dr. Edward Sutton, who performed in the NFL as a player with the Green Bay Packers and in Vietnam as a mobile army surgical hospital surgeon, said the comparison is not that far-fetched.

“It is like war,” Sutton said of football. “And the strategy is analogous to war. Of course, with the Vietnam experience, it took me four or five years before I stopped waking up in a cold sweat and telling myself that it was OK, that I was not going to be mortared tonight.”

In other words, the comparison demands proper perspective.

It’s the mentality of sport and war that Sutton alludes to, the sharing of experiences good and bad; the camaraderie and selflessness that develop with both team and troops. It’s playing hurt and sacrificing.

Some retired players interviewed said that they would play again in the NFL for the same reason a wounded soldier would fight again--for the honor to say they have fought and served.

“You make sacrifices in times of war,” said Larry Bailey, a retired defensive tackle. “I did risk it. We know what nuclear waste does, what the long-term effect may be, yet we still build reactors. There’s a trade-off. It’s one in a million that it’s happening to me.”

Sutton, a former NFL running back who retired in 1961 after five years to return to medical school, said in football you did anything you could to get back to the huddle.

“I had a sergeant that died on the operating table,” he said of his Vietnam experience. “Before he died, he was asking how all his men were. He said he had to get back to the group. It’s an all-for-one thing. It’s beating a common enemy, taking care of each other.”

Football players play together and stay together.

And the repercussions?

Of the players surveyed who believed that football took years off their lives, many were convinced that the early death was stress related.

In the 1988 “Jobs Rated Almanac,” which ranks 250 of the best and worst jobs in America, NFL players were listed as having the fifth-most stressful occupation, trailing only surgeons, astronauts, Indianapolis race drivers and firefighters. Two jobs considered less stressful than football player were police officer and air traffic controller.

NFL players, in fact, ranked in the bottom 10 in five of six categories considered in the almanac--environment, 248; outlook, 243; stress, 246; physical demands, 244, and security, 245. NFL players ranked fourth in income.

In the stress category, the almanac’s comments included: “With little job security, players realize that poor performance, injury and a ready surplus of talented recruits can lead to early dismissal.”

According the NFLPA, only 4% of its players have guaranteed contracts, as opposed to 95% in the National Basketball Assn. and 50% in major league baseball.

The relationship of stress with death has always been controversial.

However, Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper, author of the best-selling book, “Controlling Cholesterol,” contends that evidence is growing in support for stress as a contributor to death.

Cooper cites six major studies that have shown that cholesterol levels rise under different levels of emotional stress. One study, conducted by the University of Michigan, found that cholesterol levels increased in 200 men who lost their jobs suddenly, but then dropped later when they found employment.

“Stress remains a mysterious subject in the health field,” Cooper writes in his book. “But one thing is clear: too much anxiety and pressure in your life can have a negative and even dangerous impact on your psychological and physical well-being, including the state of components of your blood.”

To several players interviewed, the most repeated and disturbing story of post-football trauma remains that of Jim Tyrer, a former All-Pro offensive tackle with the Kansas City Chiefs who, in September of 1980, shot and killed his wife and then himself in his home in Kansas City.

Tyrer, 41, suffered several post-career business failures and was out of work at the time of his suicide.

“He was the best, the most-decorated Kansas City Chief of all time,” Phil Olsen, former Rams defensive lineman, said. “He tried a bunch of different things but never had the success outside the game. I could tell something was wrong. He wasn’t perceived as being a winner.

“This transition period is extremely difficult. The athlete is not trained to do anything but play football. They don’t know how to deal with the real world.”

Players want the NFL to help. But a question raised often is what responsibility, if any, does the NFL have to an employee once he leaves the company, so to speak.

The Denver Broncos are one NFL team that has addressed the problem. The Broncos recently implemented a program called “Active Roster,” designed to match current players and their post-career interests with leaders in the business community. The Broncos have referred to it as sort of a “big brother” program to help players in their transition from the game to everyday living.

“Look at the longevity of a football player,” said Charlie Lee, the Broncos’ director of player and community relations. “It’s four years, which means you have guys 26- and 27-years-old looking for jobs, with no skills. You see guys in trouble. We don’t want to see that. It’s bad publicity. It’s always a negative story. We want to try to help.”

Several former Broncos have suffered post-playing problems, including punt returner Rick Upchurch, who has suffered through business losses and divorce since leaving the team.

“If a guy hasn’t developed any work skills, he ends up doing menial tasks for the rest of his life,” Lee said. “It’s a sad route, a great football player back on the assembly line. And emotionally, you know what happens. He reverts to drugs, alcoholism, then you’re picking up the paper and reading about this guy who was at the top of the pedestal and then boom, it ends--suicide.”

Lee said he thinks the Broncos are better able to implement such a program because of the Denver community’s close-knit, almost love-affair relationship with the team. Also, Denver owner Pat Bowlen has taken a personal interest in the issue since taking over the team in 1984.

“We have to make them aware that their football careers don’t last forever,” Bowlen said. “When you’re in the first or second year of your career, you think you’re going to play forever. But then you’re 31 and there’s a younger player coming up. They all can’t become coaches. They can’t all become television analysts after their careers.”

For all his problems, Mike Carter considers himself one of the lucky ones. When he left professional football, he had a job lined up in the security business. He worked his way up the corporate ladder into a nice position, serving as liaison operations officer of security for the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. Carter said he was making $50,000 a year and had a company car.

He also said, however, that he was not prepared for a corporate world that he found difficult and, at times, unscrupulous.

“Athletes are taught there is a rule book and you live by it,” he said. “I kept looking for the ref. It carries into your private life, into the real world. You realize things are done in gray areas. It leaves you without confidence. You don’t know how to play the game. I was a fairly educated man. I still couldn’t play the game.”

Carter quit his security job in 1984 and is now a youth counselor for high school students in San Jose. A former NFL receiver with the Green Bay Packers and Chargers, Carter said it is difficult even now to discuss his problems after football.

“You’re talking about guys in their mid-30s who are, for the most part, supposed to be macho football players,” he said. “Whose shoulder can you go cry on? You hold it in. The only reason I can do it now is because I’m talking to a voice on the phone. And I’m one of the lucky ones.”

Carter and others like him also consider themselves forgotten ones. They played and fought. For what, they’re not quite sure. And they lost. To them, it’s a case of being out of sight and mind.

“That’s the American way,” said Kenneth Smith, who retired from the Cleveland Browns in 1975. “They want to see heroes. They want macho people and everything. You provide that and the American people want it. Once you get hurt, you’re never heard from or seen again.”

Added Carter: “The price for playing in the NFL hits you every day until you die.”

Since concluding his study, Bober has wondered whether the NFL should include a disclaimer on the side of player helmets.

“There should be a warning, like on the side of cigarette packs,” Bober said. “You know: ‘Warning: this will be hazardous to your health.’ It is. If you’re lucky enough to be the one who smokes cigarettes and lives to be 105, more power to you. But most people aren’t.”

STRESSED OUT

Of 250 jobs rated by “The Jobs Rated Almanac,” here are a few of the least and most stressful occupations. The lower the score, the less stressful the job:

Job Score Rank Musical instrument repair 4.69 1 Industrial machine repair 10.56 2 Medical records technician 14.45 3 Pharmacist 14.79 4 Medical assistant 16.81 5 Typist 20.08 6 Librarian 20.33 7 Janitor 20.40 8 Bookkeeper 20.44 9 Forklift operator 20.45 10 Bartender 37.94 101 Disc jockey 45.35 147 Garbage collector 45.96 154 Major league umpire 53.25 181 Catholic priest 53.51 183 Rabbi 56.12 195 Major league baseball player 58.50 203 Newscaster 58.62 205 NBA player 60.00 207 Senator/congressman 78.60 233 NCAA basketball coach 80.78 236 NFL player 101.53 246 Surgeon 103.55 247 Astronaut 103.71 248 Indy car driver 110.61 249 Firefighter 115.15 250