Today I didn’t.
We are conditioned early. Set into our bones is that old, primitive voice that demands we prove we are the fittest, the surest, the bravest of all. We are warriors on that field, dancing to a song that lives inside our DNA. It’s the same angry, primal call that sends men into action, that makes us fight and bleed and crawl to victory because we must. It began drumming in my head the day Liam Johnson tried convincing me I wasn’t big enough to wear his brother’s shoulder pads. Six years old and nearly as tall as my mother, I wore those pads because Liam said I couldn’t.
That summer, I’d saved up enough allowance for my own pee wee pads and wore them in the tub, to bed at night, and at the kitchen table with my mother fretting over where those pads would lead me. She never mentioned that her worry concerned my father and how, at even that young age, I was already so much like him. That confession would come later. Since that summer, football equipment of some sort was always near or on my body.
Today I thought it might be last time. Today Aly’s long-ago uttered curse came true.
There was no light in the room except for the low watt bulb in the bathroom to my right. My ankle was wrapped and icing. X-rays had been completed and the doctors had examined me. The worse news came first—another concussion and the possibility of IR whispered in low tones as my coaches and Kenny, my agent lingered outside in the hallway. Injured Reserve. I knew what that meant. It was the beginning of an end and with how muddled my head had gotten after this third concussion and how jacked up my ankle was with the torn ligament, the beginning of the end was coming fast.
“Damn it, Aly.”
It’s a risk we all take the second we sign contracts. As a player, you give up your body to the beast. You sacrifice your health, your freedom and parts of yourself you don’t want anyone to have just for time on that field and the potential of the legend you hope to become. My career had demanded my blood, sweat and effort. It had cost me plenty.
It had cost me Aly.
I never understood how she could be so callous. How she could walk away with no promise of coming back. To her, it was just a game. To me, being the primitive champion the game demanded, I was invincible, unstoppable. That made it so much more than a game.
Only, I wasn’t invincible or unstoppable. Not anymore.
If this went the way I suspected it might, then I’d become a failure. I’d be a statistic that no man ever wants to read about. My body, my size, the years I spent practicing, learning, growing, improving, would all fall by the wayside because of one bad tackle from a rookie offensive lineman eager to rack up his stats.
The room was cold and the shiver on my skin moved around my limbs, coating me in chills, giving me the sensation of a fever that would not break. Outside the room, there was no noise at all. I was in a hospital that catered to an NFL team. Yet there was nothing outside that door. No more coaches. No teammates. No doctors. Nothing but my godfather and his partner, pacing and fretting until the doctors confirmed what was on that X-ray.
It was then, in that silent, freezing room, that I realized how much I’d entangled my life with this game. My job, my home, my service projects, my friends, they all centered around my team. Even my damn housekeeper came to me from the team support staff. A kid called Jeff who made sure our towels were clean and our water bottles were filled had sent his auntie to me. She needed a job and I needed a housekeeper. Everything, absolutely everything I was, connected me to the team. It hadn’t always been that way. Once, not so long ago, Aly had been the center I returned to. She was the anchor that kept me from drifting too far from shore. Now even she was gone.
Nearly three hours I lay there, thinking about how damn bad my head hurt, how my ankle throbbed like a blister, how I wanted to be home, how I might not have a home to go back to if I couldn’t play anymore. And if I couldn’t…then what? Who would I be away from that field?
It felt like a death. Maybe it was. Maybe I felt weak, wounded because I had been injured far worse than I ever had been before. Maybe because I was older, I wouldn’t heal as fast. Maybe I stood outside myself and watched the beginnings of illness, like a corpse who had not yet died but damn sure was on his way to it. My career was now a malnourished body, too wrecked, too damaged to fight the illness killing it
Jesus, I sounded pathetic.
Still, I knew, despite what I’d told her over the years, all those times she tried to tell me what the game would do to me, Aly had been right. It was her warning that I ignored and it was my ignoring it, disregarding her worry, that made her leave.
So all of this, how I sacrificed her, was fucking pointless. In the end, I’d be without a Super Bowl ring, without a championship and, worst of all, without my woman.
Fuck.