It’s One Last Joyful, but Painful Season

Just another little town. It could be anywhere. It’s two hours from the big city that sends its football team there every July. Anyone driving into the town passes under a canopy of spreading oak trees planted in another century. Big houses stand along asphalt streets that once were dirt. Pickup trucks with dogs in the bed are parked around the courthouse.

Just another linebacker. He could be anyone. He came to this little town every July for 13 years. Then, one night, he knew it was over. He couldn’t sleep, kept awake for the 13th consecutive year by tractor-trailers zooming by on the interstate next to the team’s motel. Why the team stayed there, he had no idea. He figured it meant money to someone who didn’t need money. “Always money,” he thought. And with that thought came the realization that it was over for him.

He’d never been a star. The great ones had him by half a step and 30 pounds. He’d simply been good enough to keep his job. Still, if you keep your job even though the devil/coach tries to give it to some kid every July, the money gets obscene. And he knew the money cut both ways. The more he made, and the more he wanted to keep making it, and the more vulnerable it made him to losing his job.

The easiest way to make room under the salary cap is to dump a veteran’s salary and replace it with a kid’s. He’d survived every July because he worked out four times a week through April, May and June. Even the kids didn’t come to the little town in better shape than the old linebacker.

In 13 years, he’d done everything, even the kamikaze work of special teams. He once told a sportswriter, “It’s insane what we do to our bodies.” He knew about the famous Raiders center with 19 knee operations. He knew about the Chiefs linebacker who needed spinal surgery before he could so much as lift his newborn child. That one he knew because he saw the operation on television and saw a doctor use a hammer and chisel to chip calcium deposits off the linebacker’s spine.

The old linebacker played with phlebitis, though a doctor warned him that a blood clot in his leg could come loose and kill him. His fingers had been broken and dislocated so many times he’d stop counting. Insane? His team’s star quarterback popped uppers, saying, “You think I’m going out there alone?” The old linebacker slathered Tufskin inside his mouth. After games, he sometimes arranged himself so the shower water wouldn’t wash away blood accumulated on his face. “We’re proud of our pain,” he said.

The pain was a minor nuisance dealt with by taking the needle: an injection of the painkiller Xylocaine. Or he’d take the needle to drain blood pooled at a bruise or a muscle tear; those times the trainer plunged a foot-long needle in, took the top off the syringe and let the blood spew out, a gusher of blood. Once, for laughs, he shaved a tuxedo stripe through the thick hair down the side of his legs. The head coach noticed it. He was superstitious. His team had won the week before, so the coach, seeing the stripe, said, “Shave the front, too. We’ve got the Giants this week.”

Just another July. But the old linebacker knew it was his last. He knew it late at night when those tractor-trailers kept him awake. That’s when he realized what had happened that afternoon, in the 90-degree heat of another July in this little town. It happened in a way that only he knew, and even he didn’t really know it until late that night when he thought, “I made myself get up.” He’d been knocked down by the multimillion-dollar brute at right guard. On the ground, with the smell of grass and dirt in his nostrils, he’d wanted to stay there. For a millisecond, he thought, “Why get up?”

The thought passed so quickly he’d forgotten it until that night, when he replayed the day’s work in his mind. Why get up? Such a question. A football player gets up so he can knock somebody else down. That’s how he’d become an old linebacker. By getting up all those years without asking why. Kids don’t ask why. Kids barely hit the ground before they’re on their feet again. The old linebacker once said, “Game days, I feel like a little kid going to Disneyland. It’s like Christmas morning, a kid who can’t wait to see what Santa’s brought. Saturdays, your adrenaline’s on a roll. Sunday, the minute you wake up, you’re on. You can feel it. It’s a zzzzzzzz.”

The electricity drives the old linebacker. “It’s not natural for people to slam into each other at full speed, and people get sick of it. There’s gigantic pressure, and there’s no job security. Half the guys you play are bigger than you, the other half are faster, and they’re all trying to make you look bad. You just have to hit as many people as you can while not letting them hit you. So if I see somebody looking at me, I leave him alone. But if he’s not looking, then I hit him. Sundays, I live for Sundays.”

Just another July, just another little town. Every afternoon, after working out for the devil/coach they call “S,” short for Satan, three or four linebackers sat under a ceiling fan in the cool back-room darkness of Bernie’s, a dusty tavern where Bernie the barkeep runs pitchers of beer to their table.

Something had changed in his universe, something inalterable. He knew it late at night. But in the afternoon of another July, he also knew that on Sundays he could still play. So he sat in Bernie’s and talked as if he were a kid now and forever. “College, we’d draw up plays in the dirt,” the old linebacker said. “But satellites are the thing now. Won’t be long everybody’ll have a radio in his headgear and we’ll get formations and pass coverages beamed down to us from 30,000 miles up. Just wait. Next year, maybe two. S will scream at us from the sky. And I’ll scream back.”