Is There Life After Football? Read online

  The sports and entertainment media provide plenty of sensationalized, sweeping generalizations and judgmental conclusions about life after football. An anecdote here and there is usually deemed sufficient to warrant the claims. But an empirically narrow, predetermined focus often distorts players’ lived realities. It’s likely to ignore complexity and discount the mundane. Life after football is as complex and variegated as it is in any other segment of society. It’s just lived in a spotlight, or under a microscope, but there’s more to discover if we recognize and honor the complexity, nuance, and paradoxes of ex-players’ lives that defy easy characterization.13

  Recently, head injuries have been the big story. Prior to that, money dominated the discussion, with reports of monumental TV deals and collective bargaining agreements juxtaposed with lurid tales of profligate spending and bankruptcy. Crime, domestic violence, social relationships, sexuality, isolation, and addiction claimed the sidebars. But none of these issues emerges in a vacuum. Nor do they develop in stereotypic lockstep with media images. Like everyone else in 21st-century America, former NFL players live at the complicated intersection of race, social class, gender, and the economy. Everyone faces the mundane challenges of getting by from day to day in a world of jobs, bills, ailments, and relationships. Life after football is no different. If the challenges are distinctive, it’s due in large part to the radical social changes that players encounter when they exit the game. When NFL players leave football, they encounter a version of culture shock. They aren’t just retiring from a job or a career. They’re leaving a way of life, entering a world that is foreign to them. They know the language—sort of—but they speak a distinctive dialect. They’ve seen the sights from afar, but they’re no longer tourists or disinterested onlookers. Now they live in the neighborhood. The world after football for some players is so different from what they’ve experienced for their entire adult lives that it leaves them disoriented.

  NFL players are tough, talented, and well-compensated. Their lives revolve around competition and commitment. Violence and injury lurk around every corner. Teamwork, loyalty, and camaraderie are transcendent themes, juxtaposed with individual glory and respect. Beyond question, the NFL is a man’s world, where masculine pride and character are constantly challenged. Even though players occupy the spotlight much of the time, they also occupy a private world, shielded, if not isolated, from the mundane world of everyday life around them. They live in a “fishbowl”—an arena where they are scrutinized, but also insulated from many of the routine demands of everyday life.

  When a player leaves the league, everything changes. It’s not just the money or the lifestyle. The codes and principles by which players live in the NFL bubble no longer apply. Players are no longer part of the locker room culture. Everything they’re used to is up for grabs. But old ways die hard; the NFL imprint is deep. How players adapt to radical post-career changes can be excruciatingly personal, even if they might seem avoidable, trivial, or absurd to outsiders. On top of that, former players are challenged daily to work things out at the intricate nexus of celebrity and oblivion.

  George Koonce’s personal story provides a point of departure for examining these changes. As informative as his accounts are, however, they aren’t definitive. Instead, his experience provides the narrative anchor for telling the broader range of players’ stories. Koonce faced his fair share of challenges and changes. He’s met with plenty of setbacks and successes. But his story isn’t everyone’s story. Sometimes it confirms broader patterns; sometimes it serves as instructive counterpoint.

  To grasp the range of challenges, we must carefully consider what life was like while players were still in the game, as well as the standards to which ex-players compare their post-NFL experience. Players’ lives both before the NFL and while they played serve as the backdrop for their lives after football. Understanding how players carve their niches within the NFL and embody the game’s culture helps us to appreciate how they make their peace with life after football.

  1

  PURSUING “THE DREAM”

  I had dreams of being a football player since I was a little kid. It was something I wanted from as far back as I can remember, something I’ve been striving for from the very beginning. Sometimes it was all that mattered.1

  NFL careers start with a childhood dream. On NFL draft day, absolutely the most frequent comment by players just drafted is, “It’s a dream come true!” Of course, most American boys at one time or another dream of being football players, firefighters, or superheroes. But NFL players have devoted their lives to pursuing their dream through a combination of work, talent, and opportunity. George Koonce recalls his dream.

  When I was a kid, I was going to be a football player, a basketball player, something like that. When I was nine years old, but even before that, I used to play behind the houses. I would go to the high school football games with my sister. I would be up under the bleachers with a bunch of kids. I wouldn’t really be watching the game. I was trying to play my own game with other kids of my own age. But I really got involved at nine years old officially, when I started playing Pop Warner. Then it was official, when I had a uniform and there were guys [referees] out there in pinstripes. About that time, I started thinking about it seriously. My mom was going to night school to become a beautician, going to cosmetology school. Like a lot of parents, she told me, “You stay out of my room when I’m not there!” Well, I went into her room, and I turned the television on and there was a Monday Night Football game on. I went and got my shoulder pads, my uniform, and put it on while I watched the game. Howard Cosell was up there talking. I think the Houston Oilers were playing. I said, “I’m gonna play on Monday night!” From that day forward, I said I am going to do everything I possibly can to make that happen. I watched the Sunday games and read the papers. I would save my money and get the Street and Smith [magazine] from the grocery store. I would ask my grandma to buy me sport magazines. I didn’t know anybody personally who ever played, but I knew from watching on television that being a big-time player was special. For whatever reason, I thought I was special, and I wanted to be a part of that scene.2

  Compared to some, Koonce started dreaming late in life. Retired quarterback Brett Favre claims he got his first football uniform—complete with helmet and shoulder pads—when he was one year old. “By the time I was in second grade,” he adds, “sports were my life.”3 Journeyman running back Brandon Gold’s dream was just as poignant, and perhaps more prescient:

  I always knew I was going to go to the NFL as a little kid. Even from the second grade, I signed my autograph and said, “You better keep it,” because I had dreamed it and thought it, and I knew I was going to the NFL. . . . I wanted to be an NFL player. That is all I wanted to be—period! So, that is when I made my goal. . . . I wanted to go to the Pro Bowl. I wanted to go to the Super Bowl.4

  Gold accomplished everything he dreamed of, but simply wanting it isn’t enough. Initially, the excitement of the fantasy propels the dream, but eventually physical talent, opportunity, encouragement, and hard work take over. Growing bigger, stronger, and faster than the other kids is usually crucial. Prospects for five-foot-three, 113-pound high schoolers are pretty dim. Of course, not all big, fast kids turn into elite athletes. They need direction, as Koonce recounts.

  I really fell in love with the sport once I got involved. That was because of my mom. She thought maybe I needed something structured. Needed something that would keep me out of trouble. She knew I was aggressive growing up. She didn’t want to—she actually used these words—she didn’t want to lose me to the streets or to prison or anything like that. So she thought the best way to keep me busy and keep me out of trouble was to get me involved in sports. And that was genius on her part because she didn’t have any models for this but she came to it on her own. She just felt like, hopefully, it’s something that can keep him occupied. . . . She thought if I wasn’t involved in sports she didn’t know what I would get in to.5


  Opportunity and encouragement set the table for Koonce. He grew big, strong, and fast, and with his mother’s foresight and guidance, the dream took shape.

  At first, I had no plan. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what the steps were at nine years old, but as time went on from talking with different coaches as I went from Pop Warner to middle school, from middle school to high school, it became clear that to get the dream that I saw when I was nine years old in my mom’s room, there was a process. There was a lot of work. And college had to be a part of that, to get to Monday Night Football. You had to go to college to play in the NFL.6

  Other players didn’t see real career possibilities until they had some life experience and organized sports under their belts. Former defensive back Charles Nobles, who played cornerback for several teams during his 11-year career in the 1990s and 2000s, speaks about his turning point: “It was high school for me. Coming from a poor family, you realize you only have so many different ways out of getting yourself that education. My football dream came from a high school that was a pretty much football school, and I knew that was the start of it right there.”7

  Dreaming of a lucrative NFL career is a relatively recent phenomenon. Members of earlier generations of NFL retirees dreamed of playing an exciting game at an elite level of competition, but big money wasn’t yet part of it. Their dream was relatively innocent, highly romanticized, and almost never commercial or economic. In his autobiographical reflection on football in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural historian and former Kansas City Chief and Notre Dame grad Michael Oriard argues that football captured his boyish imagination like no other sport or game because of its “heroic” qualities.8 From the perspective of a young boy, football was more exciting, dangerous, and intense than other sports. Players were more courageous, braver, larger-than-life heroes in outsized body armor. But Oriard never thought about the money. Others, such as Will Siegel, whose ten-year NFL career spanned the 1950s and 1960s, never gave football as a livelihood a second thought: “I really didn’t think about it [playing in the NFL] until my senior year [in college]. I didn’t anticipate going that far. I think we all thought about it, but never thought it would come to reality.”9 A dream was merely a dream.

  Television, marketing, Pete Rozelle, and Joe Namath changed all that, as the NFL became “America’s game” by the 1970s. It was Monday Night Football, after all, that inspired George Koonce. Oriard and Siegel grew up in the infancy of televised sports, before it was a multibillion-dollar industry. Subsequent generations came to know football as a grand spectacle with great financial allure. For Koonce, football was heroic, but it also promised a way to make a better life for himself. Like Charles Nobles, he learned that football had financial promise, that it was a way of getting an education, of improving his lot in life.

  As the NFL’s financial promise blossomed, the dream took on new significance in relation to the dreamer’s socioeconomic status, social class, and even race. Middle-class kids’ dreams of making it big in sports are often simply fantasies. For poor kids—often African Americans—the dream has more practical significance. If pursued with purpose, it has a compelling material payoff. So when poor kids dream of becoming NFL players, they may very well be plotting a practical life course that middle-class kids don’t necessarily contemplate. The upshot, of course, is that boys of relatively limited means may actually invest more of themselves in the pursuit of their dreams than do middle-class kids.10 This isn’t necessarily the case for everyone. NFL players from middle-class backgrounds—Michael Oriard included—worked hard and sacrificed to bring their fantasies to life. But they probably played out those dreams alongside other dreams, if not plans, for adult success. Ultimately, these differences permeate the ways that players approach their NFL careers, and eventually, their lives after football.

  The Path to the Dream

  The dream doesn’t come easy. Childhood play turns into practice, commitment, and conditioning. For George Koonce, this meant honing his focus and specializing his efforts. A good all-around athlete, he started out playing all sports, but by high school, his priorities changed:

  After my sophomore year, I basically just quit basketball. I didn’t want to play varsity. I just wanted to concentrate all of my attention on football. I was probably about 185 pounds and six foot tall, and I knew that I needed to get bigger if I wanted the chance to play at the next level in college. . . . My mom didn’t like it. She asked me what was going on with me. I said that I just wanted to concentrate on football. She said, “Are you sure?” I went like, “Yeah.” And she said, “OK.” I said I want to join a gym, and after school I went there and worked out. . . . I thought that it would better my chances of going to college. I needed to truly concentrate on just one sport. And I focused on football all of the time.11

  Today, such dedication is common. Boys with athletic potential know that it must be finely honed, not squandered in mere “play.” Elite athletes “work” at their craft, on playgrounds, in gyms and weight rooms, and at elite sports camps, their dreams turning to goals. Work to be bigger, stronger, faster. Develop their skills, their games. Get “known” in order to improve their prospects of moving to “the next level.” It may not be this way for all former NFL players, but for most of those growing up after the 1960s, football became as much a job as a game.

  Sometimes the dream becomes a virtual reality itself, played out across myriad forms of communication media that originally inspired it. For example, De’Anthony Thomas, who eventually played for the University of Oregon, was a standout as a 12-year-old youth league player. Before long, hip hop superstar and entertainment mogul Snoop Dogg took a special interest in this “superstar,” christening him the “Black Mamba.” By the time he was 17, Thomas was reading in Sports Illustrated that he was already a sports legend on his way to a spot in the NFL and an acting career after that.12

  Thomas isn’t the only “kid” in the limelight. Friday Night Lights, H.G. “Buzz” Bassinger’s detailed chronicle of Odessa (Texas) Permian High School’s 1988 football season, became a major motion picture and long-running NBC TV series.13 The nonfiction book illuminates the degree to which local cultures elevate prep football players, highlighting their importance to the life of the community. Boys become heroes to grown men, public icons upon whom the self-esteem of the entire community depends. This is all part of the football “career” of many NFL players.

  Football stardom often means more than adulation. Certainly not everyone, but plenty of teenaged stars reap tangible rewards for being special. Every high school has its mythology regarding the perks of being a star player: dating cheerleaders, lower expectations in the classroom, rules that can be bent if not ignored. Raised a notch, players get highly paid summer jobs requiring little work. Merchants offer “discounts.” School officials and law enforcement officers are particularly lenient and “understanding” regarding players’ childish “mishaps” or legal transgressions.14

  George Koonce got a few perks early on, but nothing extravagant:

  [I got some] attention from girls, better summer job opportunities. Help in the classroom as teachers gave me more opportunities. Most teachers and staff wanted to see a talented student-athlete graduate from high school and then go on to college. Students were willing to help with classroom assignments and offered assistance as tutors. There were even students in the class asking me if I needed help with a project, or if I wanted to be a part of the smart kids’ group.15

  Onto the “Conveyor Belt”

  Most players realize that going to college is the only route to the NFL. If the odds are astronomically against making it to the NFL, the chances of earning a Division I football scholarship aren’t that much better. Annually, more than one million boys play high school football, but only about 19,500 earn scholarships to Division I and II schools combined. There are roughly 10,000 players on scholarship at any one time at all major college football schools (the Football Bowl Subdivision—FBS) combined. Less t
han three out of every 1,000 high school players will get football scholarships to one of these big-time schools.16 Undaunted, most players set out to become one of the chosen few. For many, college is simply a stepping stone to the NFL, a path that’s entered earlier and earlier every year. De’Anthony Thomas may have been exceptional, but more and more he epitomizes a new rule: “Get the players with ‘the program’ as soon as possible.”

  In the summer of 2012, for example, Southeastern Conference (SEC) powerhouses Alabama and LSU began recruiting an eighth grader. LSU offered 12-year-old Dylan Moses a scholarship to play ball in Baton Rouge. Not to be outdone, Alabama matched the offer. Was this a dream come true for Moses, or had everyone lost perspective? Imagine the scenario of coaching legends Nick Saban and Les Miles—both winners of national championships—pleading with 12-year-old Moses, promising him the experience of a lifetime based on his preteen gridiron talents.17

  From the very inception of college football in the 19th century, special incentives—inducements, promises, and bribes—have been the stock-in-trade of college recruiting. In recent times, “legitimate” recruiting expenses are extravagant. On one routine recruiting weekend hosted by the University of Oregon, the Ducks spent over $140,000 on 25 recruits. The entire point of the weekend, according to Coach Mike Belotti, was to make the young men “feel special.” Dawn to dusk attention is mandatory. Coaches text, use Facebook, and call recruits dozens, even hundreds of times—leading to frequent “improper contact” violations of NCAA recruiting rules over the past few years.18 In February 2013, the NCAA Board of Directors addressed this problem, opening the recruiting floodgates by removing nearly all restrictions on the type and number of contacts coaches can employ in recruiting prospective players.19 By spring of 2013, recruits were reporting landslides of recruiting pitches. The University of Mississippi made headlines by sending at least 54 handwritten recruiting messages to a recruit in one day. All the letters conformed to NCAA guidelines.20 Clifton Garrett, one of the top high school prospects in the country, tweeted: “#OleMiss aint playin no games!! 54 hand written letters today #RebelNation!!” Not to be outdone, Ole Miss defensive line coach Chris Kiffin, the coach responsible for recruiting Laremy Tunsil, exchanged more than 800 Facebook messages with Tunsil and more than 400 with Tunsil’s girlfriend. Ole Miss also had 14 staff members write letters to Tunsil and other people close to him. These tactics are all within NCAA rules, and, with electronic communication restrictions relaxed, they will likely become more and more common in future recruiting classes.21