After everything I went through, I still felt like something was missing. It was like things were upside down and I wasn’t sure which way to turn. It just felt strange and I didn’t know what to do about it. I’ve been very fortunate to get my life together but something still doesn’t feel quite right.1
Why doesn’t retirement feel right for so many NFL players? They undergo many of the same processes of role exit that confront other retirees, but something’s qualitatively different. The sports retirement literature suggests that most elite athletes are likely to move successfully out of their sports and into other satisfying life endeavors.2 While this is largely true for NFL players, too many of them never seem to “get over it.” Otis Tyler, for example, has done very well for himself. He has a rich family life and a healthy local media career. But ask him about his 25-year transition into life after football: “Oh, God, I think we are all still transitioning. I feel like I’m doing OK, but I’m not there yet. . . . We’re out there on an island, just drifting. And that can last for a long time.”3 Why? Drew Raymond, a wide receiver from the 1990s, has an answer: “Man, when that bubble breaks, you just don’t know what to do. It’s all you know. You never get used to that new life.”4
The key here is the “new life.” When they speak of transition, former players seldom focus on new jobs or different roles. Instead, they lament the passing of a way of life that they’ve experienced since they were boys. An anthropologist overhearing their conversations might say former players were experiencing something akin to “culture shock.” Culture shock is the process of disruption and adjustment to an unfamiliar environment that sets off emotional, behavioral, psychological, and cognitive crises for those involved. It can arise in any new situation—moving to a foreign country, going away to college, taking a new job, even entering a new relationship—that has consequences for patterns of behavior or identity. Under these circumstances, we lose our cultural cues and bearings, the familiar signs and guidelines that keep us “on course” in dealing with our daily lives and interactions. When this happens, a person can feel like a “fish out of water.” With familiar cultural props removed, anxiety and frustration set in.5
It’s easy to see NFL players experiencing culture shock at the end of their playing days. They’re not just out of the game; they’re out of the bubble. But culture shock is generally short-lived, a passing phase. Why might it persist for NFL players where others seem to adapt more quickly? Again, we’ve heard the answer before: “When that bubble breaks, you just don’t know what to do. It’s all you know.” Is this overly dramatic? People from other walks of life manage major life transitions without as much lingering trauma. But very few individuals exist in an environment so completely captivating as the NFL bubble. The bubble establishes patterns of acting and interacting that are deeply engrained. Its way of life is all encompassing. It provides players with a cultural toolkit that they habitually use to craft the everyday features of their lives. At the same time, however, the bubble also insulates players from other ways of seeing and doing everyday life. Players are short-handed when it comes to adapting to other circumstances. We’ve seen how undisciplined spending, “livin’ large,” uncertain job prospects, flagging social support, and injury pose serious challenges as players move out of the NFL. These can certainly be daunting problems. But not all players succumb to them. Nor are these challenges the source of many former players’ disenchantment with life without football. And it’s not just losing jobs or changing roles. These can be radical changes, to be sure, but viewed simply, they are parts—not the totality—of players’ lives. Something more radical is going on. Perhaps the scenario resembles the circumstances where military personnel are discharged from active duty, or even when prisoners are freed from incarceration. When they leave the bubble, NFL players change worlds. They literally swap realities, often against their will and frequently not to their liking. The cultural imperatives inside the bubble are so pervasive and enduring that, as a practical matter, they’ve become the very structures of a player’s consciousness.6 Some players are lost without them.
This may seem exaggerated. Is the bubble, with its player ethos and locker room culture, so unique and powerful that players can’t adjust to other circumstances? A recent locker room controversy offers a unique window into the cultural milieu that dominates NFL players’ lives. In November 2013, offensive tackle Jonathan Martin—an African American—walked away from the Miami Dolphins’ training complex to seek treatment for emotional distress. Through his agent, he said that he could no longer tolerate the emotional abuse he was taking from Dolphins teammates. Debate immediately erupted on several fronts, often centering on whether Martin was simply unwilling or unable to put up with the typical “hazing” to which younger NFL players have traditionally been subjected. Some argued that he was being maliciously “bullied” by veteran teammates. The conversation took a serious turn when Martin released an incendiary transcript of a voicemail message left on his phone a few months earlier by teammate and fellow offensive lineman Ritchie Incognito, who is white.
Hey, wassup, you half-nigger piece of shit. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I’ll shit in your fuckin’ mouth. I’m gonna slap your fuckin’ mouth. I’m gonna slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. Fuck you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.7
Incognito has a longstanding reputation as an NFL “badass.” A key member of the Dolphins offensive line, he was voted into the 2012 Pro Bowl. But he is also known as one of the NFL’s dirtiest players and most outrageous characters. Throughout the controversy, no one challenged this depiction, nor did Incognito deny his actions or words. For his part, Martin was known as a “soft” player who seemed strangely out of place in the tough-man’s world of the NFL, even though he had been a two-time college All-American and second round draft choice. Initially, the bullying accusations seemed entirely plausible, given Incognito’s background and the damning voicemail, and he was quickly suspended by the Dolphins.8
As time passed, however, new pieces of the puzzling story began to emerge. Fellow Dolphins reported that Martin and Incognito had been close friends. Black and white players alike denied that Incognito was a racist. Alternate explanations recast acts of intimidation in terms of practical joking and solidarity-building rites of initiation. Moreover, Martin himself was portrayed as willingly going along with the jokes. Indeed, teammates said Martin had played the incriminating voicemail for them, and they laughed along with him. To them it was one more instance of Incognito’s outrageous “macho man” persona. Evidently, no one at the time—including Martin—took Incognito’s rant seriously. Indeed, text messages were ultimately released in which Martin exchanged seemingly light-hearted, vulgar insults with Incognito that approximated the tone and content of those sent by Incognito.9 Eventually, teammates began to explain the entire mess within the context of everyday locker room banter and a request by the Dolphins organization for Incognito to bring Martin out of his shell and toughen him up.10
Regardless of what develops out of this scenario, the terms of the discussion provide telling insights into the culture of the NFL and its inner sanctums. This cultural environment—the NFL bubble—provides players with a field of consciousness that is so different from other everyday social worlds that former players are lost and disoriented when they have to fend for themselves. If the worst impressions prevail, they would underscore a racist strain that runs through the league. But that’s certainly not a version to which most players subscribe. Indeed, players, black and white, commonly say that there’s less racism in the NFL than in any other setting they’ve experienced.11 Fellow players dismissed Incognito’s racial slurs as familiar, good-humored banter—almost terms of endearment—between teammates that demonstrated a genuine lack of racial animus rather than racially motivated contempt. Nevertheless, Incognito’s words still stand, “nigger” prominently among them. Racist or not, they inscribe a crude vulgarity upon the NFL scene.
Amidst all the protestations, players tacitly acknowledge that the NFL locker room tolerates virtually any form of aggression as long as it contributes to a winning edge. There’s a “take no prisoners” attitude that’s demanded in the NFL. As players interpretively packaged the Incognito–Martin rift as an instance of normal locker room behavior being misunderstood or gone awry, the powerful contours of the NFL player ethos became obvious. Toughness is the foundation of the ethos, so, from players’ perspectives, Incognito wasn’t culturally out of line. As the discussion evolved, it quickly became apparent that no one thought it was OK for one player to bully or seriously harm a teammate. But it was just as clear that crude language and rough treatment—especially cloaked in humor—aggression, and intimidation are bywords of the NFL locker room. It’s a world where it’s normal for veterans to use intimidation to toughen up the new guys. While many players initially thought that Incognito may have gone too far—perhaps lost perspective on how much “razzing” Martin could take—the practice of “toughening up” itself was never fundamentally questioned. It’s OK to use threats and humiliation to further team ends. “Winning’s the only thing.”12
There were several other culturally revealing twists to this scenario as well. Many players and observers asked why Martin didn’t fight back. Why didn’t he just punch Incognito in the face? Said teammate Tyson Clabo: “If Martin had a problem, he didn’t show it. . . . I think that if you have a problem with somebody . . . [you should] stand up and be a man.”13 Others point out that the NFL is full of bullies. That’s how they got there and that’s how they keep their jobs, through aggression and intimidation. Those are supreme virtues when directed on the field, and if they spill off the field, well that’s part of the package. Every player in the NFL is a little crazy, they all admit, and sociopaths are often vital to winning. Backing down, on the other hand, is a sign of fatal weakness. “You can’t let [a bully] see that it [hazing and intimidation] got to you,” comments Mike Golic. “If you let this be known [that there was hazing or bullying going on], if you go public, you won’t be able to go back into the locker room.”14
In the NFL scheme of things, being soft is a greater sin than being crazy, crude, or barbaric. From this perspective, it’s Martin who is culturally out of step. Former Dolphins teammate Lydon Murtha virtually damned Martin when he characterized him as shy and standoffish, with “a tendency to tank when things would get difficult in practice.”15 Martin came off as the antithesis of Incognito’s “badass.” After all he’d majored in classical studies at Stanford and came from a long line of Harvard graduates. Coy Wire, a former Stanford and NFL player, knows what that might mean: “If you don’t fit into the mold, and the culture in the locker room, you won’t last. Sometimes, in a gladiator sport like football, intelligence can be perceived as being soft.”16
And perception matters. As Mike Greenberg, Golic’s media sidekick, notes, “The NFL is probably the only place where having parents who went to Harvard, and you went to Stanford, is something you have to ‘overcome.’”17 In the warrior culture of the NFL, one can’t even appear to be soft. “This is a game of high testosterone, with men hammering their bodies on a daily basis,” says Lydon Murtha. “You are taught to be an aggressive person, and you typically do not make it to the NFL if you are a passive person. There are a few, but it’s very hard. Playing football is a man’s job, and if there’s any weak link, it gets weeded out.”18
If toughness is the coin of the NFL realm, loyalty also carries considerable currency. Not surprisingly, after initial outrage from a few players not associated with the Dolphins, Incognito’s teammates—black and white—rallied to his support.19 To a man, they said that Martin should never have taken his complaints outside the locker room. Players stick together like a “band of brothers, like a fraternity” says former coach Brian Billick.20 “It’s a brotherhood, a pure brotherhood,” adds Ray Lewis.21 Airing dirty laundry in public is a cardinal sin. “Keep it in the house,” says Martin’s teammate Bryant McKinney.22 Remember, the code of the NFL is “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.” When Martin sought outside help, he was not only admitting to weakness, he became a traitor to the cause.
Some compare the NFL code of loyalty to the code of silence and allegiance of gangs, prisoners, the military, or the police.23 By exposing the situation to the media, says Murtha, Martin broke that code. “It shows that he’s not there for his teammates and he’s not standing up for himself. There might be a team that gives him a chance [to play again in the NFL] because he’s a good person, but the players will reject him. They’ll think, if I say one thing he’s going to the press. He’ll never earn the respect of teammates and personnel in the NFL because he didn’t take care of business the right way.”24 According to Murtha and others, the Dolphins aren’t unique. Conflict breaks out routinely, but there are routine ways to handle it. “This racial slur would be a blip on the radar if everything that happens in the locker room went public,” claims Murtha. “All over the league, problems are hashed out in-house. Either you talk about it or you get physical. But at the end of the day, you handle it indoors.”25
This is the culture of the NFL: the world of the tough guy, the loyal teammate, the gladiator. Commentators often dismiss locker room culture as an immature, ephemeral anomaly into which otherwise respectable men sometimes slip for good fellowship and light-hearted respite from adult responsibilities. But in the case of the NFL, it’s much more. It’s the quintessence of “team,” and its ethos is the heart and soul of its inhabitants. The local culture is fully embodied in players’ attitudes and lifestyle, which they carry with them wherever they go. It’s not that they are compelled to act this way. Rather, they opt to hold themselves accountable to the ethos, using it to justify a very distinctive set of behavioral habits.
Of course, all this might easily be dismissed as the outlandish behavior of a rogue ball player—an aberration. Richie Incognito could be the exception to the NFL rule. Indeed, it’s this sort of extreme case—the deviant or outlier—that actually helps society identify the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable.26 It would be easy to characterize Incognito as such a boundary setting renegade, an anomaly. Tellingly, however, his behavior is not beyond the pale—at least not in the NFL. Incognito has been voted the league’s dirtiest player. He was dismissed from two college teams for inappropriately aggressive behavior. He’s appeared on national TV ranting vile obscenities and racial slurs in a bar.27 He was investigated in 2012 for sexually harassing a woman at a Dolphins golf tournament. According to police reports, a 34-year-old female volunteer told police that Incognito had been intoxicated and molested her with a golf club.28 Incognito routinely uses the term “nigger.” Despite all this, he was still a teammate in good standing. He wasn’t considered a deplorable anomaly, one who stood beyond the boundary. In fact, teammates considered Incognito more than acceptable as a member of the locker room brigade. He was a leader, an exemplar of the player ethos. In 2013, before the controversy broke, he was a member of the Dolphins’ leadership council.
All of this speaks volumes about life in the NFL. If Incognito is “within bounds,” what might be “out of bounds”? Where are the limits of normal or acceptable in the league? Where are the lines drawn separating the upstanding from the intolerable? The NFL culture and player ethos not only abide Incognito’s demeanor and behavior, they honor them. At the same time they question Jonathan Martin’s character because he’s mild mannered and not loyal to the core. To listen to players comment on the controversy, it’s Martin who sets the standard for unacceptability. He’s too soft and disloyal.
In February 2014, NFL-appointed investigator Ted Wells issued a report on the Dolphins’ situation that concluded that the team’s locker room supported a “culture of intolerance” and a “pattern of harassment” directed at Martin as well as another young Dolphins offensive lineman and a member of the team’s training staff. The Wells Report verified most of Martin’s claims, but stopped short of castigating the locker room culture that fomented the situation. It implied that the locker room ethos sometimes got out of hand, but the report never condemned the culture as pathological. At least for the moment, the discussion adopted the terms of inappropriate workplace “bullying.”29
Reaction among NFL players was decidedly mixed, echoing arguments made earlier. The league itself offered pubic displays of grave concern, and even raised the possibility of penalizing players during games for any use of the “N-word” (although never publicly voicing the actual term “nigger” that was ostensibly to be penalized). Ultimately the discussion was tabled on the grounds that the use of racial slurs was already covered by unsportsmanlike conduct rules. The issues of locker room culture, threatening conduct, and racial animus were set aside in order to debate changes in the “extra point” rules.30
The Wells Report is conspicuously noncommittal in assessing underlying factors precipitating this particular incident. “Our mandate did not include setting standards for what types of behavior should be permitted or prohibited within the Miami Dolphins organization,” says the report.31 For their part, the Dolphins vowed to continue reviewing relevant team policies and procedures to seek “areas of improvement.”32 Ultimately, we’re left with the report’s summation:
The behavior that occurred here was harmful to the players, the team and the league. It was inconsistent with a civilized workplace—even in a professional football league and even among tough football players whose very profession is defined by physical and mental domination of players across the line of scrimmage. There are lines—even in a football locker room—that should not be crossed, as they were here. We leave the determination of precisely where to draw those lines to those who spend their lives playing, coaching and managing the game of professional football.33
Such a conclusion essentially downplays the larger cultural issues underpinning this situation. If NFL standards for what’s “normal” allow for Richie Incognito’s extremes—or anything in the vicinity—how do they guide players operating outside the locker room? Of course most NFL players don’t act like Incognito. Many of them think he’s a jerk, even if they do respect what he brings to the game. But with standards established so far out on the periphery, nearly any excess seems tolerable. It’s no wonder players feel disoriented when they’re evicted from the locker room. The rules of the game radically change. Excess is called into question. It’s no surprise when things seem upside down, that former players don’t know exactly what to do. That’s culture shock: the disruption of the familiar, the loss of cultural cues and bearings. If Richie Incognito signals what’s “normal” inside the NFL, there may be problems when players step outside.
Richie Incognito also helps set the parameters for what it means to be a real man in a tough guy’s game. The term “macho” was coined with him in mind. Masculinity is the bedrock of the NFL player ethos and in an environment where one’s manhood is challenged on a daily basis, Incognito pushed the limits. It was certainly the subtext of the controversy involving Jonathan Martin. To call Martin “soft” was essentially saying he wasn’t man enough for the NFL. As Lydon Murtha reminded us, it’s a “high testosterone” game.
Just as the NFL ethos thoroughly conflates toughness and masculinity, it uses homophobia and misogyny to further highlight the contours of being a man. Homophobic slurs—such as “fag” or “faggot”—are so commonplace as terms of generalized derision that they lose their ostensible pejorative connection to sexuality. If players are suspected of malingering or refusing to play though pain, for example, they’re labeled “faggots.” Players don’t really believe that the targets of such remarks are actually gay. They simply use the slur as a way of condemning behavior or character that’s perceived as insufficiently masculine.34
This practice was underscored throughout the Incognito–Martin controversy. The Wells Report documents multiple instances where Dolphins players (including Martin) “teased” a fellow teammate about being gay (although there’s no evidence confirming the teammate’s sexuality), calling him, among other things, “fag” or “faggot.” Other taunts were far more vulgar and sexually suggestive. Even members of the coaching staff participated. The report also revealed that the Dolphins kept an unofficial “fine book” that recorded players’ finable offenses, including being a “pussy”—which apparently referred to being “soft” more than sexuality.35
It remains to be seen if such manifestations of locker room masculinity will thrive in the future. In February 2014, Michael Sam, All-American defensive end and Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year, publicly announced that he was gay. Initially considered a near certainty be taken in the NFL draft, Sam would become the first openly gay player in the league. While many players were immediately supportive, there were plenty of skeptics as well. Forbes contributor David Lariviere wrote that “With the recent announcement by Michael Sam . . . that he is gay, it is even more urgent that a tolerant atmosphere exist throughout the league. The frequent use of homophobic insults undermines this goal.”36 Some NFL executives were more explicit: “Outness” they suggest, is “an employment hazard” in a “man’s man’s game.” Drafting Sam will be a risk, one said, because “there’s nothing more sensitive than the heartbeat of the locker room.” A more general sentiment among NFL general managers was that Sam would probably still be drafted, but, that all things being equal, they preferred not to draft players who brought with them unnecessary “distractions.” This is the same caveat often used when discussing players with criminal records or histories of substance abuse, suggesting that being gay carries a stigma comparable to breaking the law or using illicit drugs.
Eventually, Sam was drafted at the end of the seventh round by the St. Louis Rams., the 249th out of 256 players drafted. For an SEC defensive player of the year to slide this far down the draft board is nearly unprecedented. At the same time, however, the consensus among NFL personnel evaluators was that Sam’s “tweener” size, mediocre “measurables,” and lack of fit with conventional NFL defensive schemes diminished his value. Regardless, official reaction to Sam’s drafting from the league, the Rams, and the national news and sports media was extremely positive, embracing the occasion as a groundbreaking, historic moment. Still, a few players and former players offered strong negative comments implicating Sam’s sexuality. Sam was cut at the end of training camp but performed well enough that he may still catch on with an NFL squad. The extent of the league’s acceptance of an openly gay player remains to be seen.37
The objectification and vilification of women plays a similar role in fortifying the NFL’s culture of toughness and masculinity. Locker room banter and sexual braggadocio is legendary. Players use outlandish and derisive comments about mothers, sisters, and girlfriends both to humorously denigrate one another and to distance themselves from all things feminine. Indeed, to be a man often seems to require demeaning women. During the Incognito–Martin controversy, for example, Martin’s attorney, David Cornwell, alleged that an unnamed Dolphins teammate reportedly directed the following remarks toward Martin and his sister: “We are going to run a train on your sister. . . . She loves me. I am going to f*** her without a condom and c** in her c***.”38 The Wells Report offered additional graphically demeaning examples. These remarks almost assuredly had nothing to do with Martin’s sister personally. They are simply depersonalizing and degrading slurs aimed at challenging Martin’s masculinity by debasing his sister. Once again, we see just how far behavioral boundaries are stretched in the name of “normal.” As former NFL quarterback Danny Kannell observes, players simply treat race, gender, sexuality, and toughness in ways totally different from how they are handled in other work places or social settings.39
Sociologist Michael Kimmel would certainly recognize the rites of masculinity in an NFL locker room. Indeed, he might suggest that we see their roots in the everyday pursuit of manhood across the landscape of 21st-century American society. Based on years of field research, Kimmel argues that contemporary young men occupy a social world he calls “Guyland.”40 It’s a phase of life and social arena dominated by “buddy culture,” with minimal demands from parents, partners, and casual outsiders. Its occupants skirt the responsibilities of mature adulthood and the nuisances of everyday life as they try to develop mature masculine identities. Largely in the company of other young men, they test and prove themselves as men and develop the defining attitudes and self-images they will carry into mature adulthood. In Guyland, peer approval and tacit adherence to the “guy code” are the prime forces in shaping young men’s behavior and identities.
The guy code exhorts a commitment to relentlessly masculine attitudes and camaraderie. Kimmel describes it using a widely known indigenous shorthand: “Bros before hos.” The code is simple: Be a man among men (no sissies allowed). Be important, successful, and powerful. Be reliable and loyal. Be daring and aggressive. The camaraderie of Guyland is key. Male bonding and a commitment to a “band of brothers” are scaled-down versions of the masculine fellowship that emerges in wartime combat, or among the ranks of the police and firefighters. The social world of Guyland revolves almost exclusively around other guys. In Kimmel’s terms, it’s a “pure, homosocial Eden, uncorrupted by sober responsibilities of adulthood.”41
Does this sound familiar? The NFL locker room is Guyland on steroids, where players aggressively exaggerate the “guy code.” Masculinity lives large, with the volume turned way up. It’s hypermasculinity. Just as individual men aren’t the virtual embodiments of Guyland, not all NFL players are fully committed to locker room masculinity. In the bubble, they strike their own deals with the pervasive normative order. But the NFL culture definitely leaves its masculine imprint, even when players leave the game. The bubble packs a more powerful cultural punch than the more amorphous Guyland, leaving lasting habits that shape not only what former players do, but how they see their worlds, even when they are out of the league. Out of the game, it’s difficult for players to find their hypermasculine-identity bearings, to know society’s limits.
At the same time that the NFL culture offers an exaggerated version of masculinity, it also provides unique cultural cues about race and race relations. The manner in which players rallied to deny Incognito’s racism elucidates a unique aspect of NFL culture that’s sometimes an additional source of culture shock. In fact, the entire controversy offered a rare glimpse into racialized interactions between NFL players, as well as into some of the ways that race is insinuated into NFL culture.
The topic of race was almost never volunteered by anyone associated with the NFL in all the narrative materials we’ve collected about life in and after football. Periodically, league and union officials and self-appointed watchdogs assess the state of racial parity in the NFL, offering statistical analyses of percentages of white and non-white players, coaches, and administrators.42 There’s been a longstanding conversation about “stacking” black players at particular positions (i.e., assigning them to positions demanding extreme athleticism but excluding them from “thinking positions” and positions “close to the ball,” quarterback in particular). Today, the general tenor of the discussions is that the NFL is far from perfect, but has made steady progress over the decades, and is presently at the forefront of institutional race relations in the United States. With the exception of outright ownership, African Americans have been prominently and successfully represented throughout the NFL, including upper management (there have been a small handful of black minority owners/partners). The fact that most current players (and a growing proportion of alums) are non-white, however, receives relatively little critical inquiry.
This can’t be ignored when we ask how race affects players’ transition out of the NFL. The answer, however, is somewhat oblique. Players and former players virtually never explicitly mentioned race as a factor in their discussions with us. We’ve found nothing substantial in media accounts. Players frequently refer to the problems that emerge when families descend upon players who’ve signed big contracts, and they implicitly suggest that this is more of a problem for black players than whites due to the relative economic needs of the two groups and the perceived differences in kinship structure.43 When Bart Scott, an African American, says, “Getting money sometimes is like turning the lights on in a dark house in the ghetto. It exposes a lot of roaches and rats,” it’s hard not to infer racial connotations.44 But that’s as close as most former players come to invoking race as a post-career factor. Still, we’re reluctant to conclude that race simply doesn’t matter. As the Incognito controversy shows, race is important, but perhaps not in conventional ways.
For example, at first, Incognito drew the ire and indignation of nearly everyone who heard his racially charged voicemail message to his black teammate: “Hey, wassup, you half nigger piece of shit.” While the media is loathe to even print the term, the focus was squarely on Incognito’s use of the typically redacted word “nigger.”45 As vile as the term may be, we explicitly use it here to make a set of important analytic points relating to race, culture, and meaning.
Incognito was initially castigated throughout the sports media—indeed throughout the sports world—by both blacks and whites. For two days he was vilified as a racist. The overwhelming consensus was there was no place in football for language and attitudes like his. Indeed, there were indignant calls to uproot a locker room culture of racial animus and bigotry that was clearly infecting the NFL. But in an unanticipated turn of events, rejoinders from NFL locker rooms—again from both black and white players—turned the discussion upside down. Player after player—mainly Dolphins, but also from other teams around the league—rose to object. Ritchie Incognito was not a racist, teammates (black and white) proclaimed. He was a good teammate, one who embraced all his “buddies” in the locker room with the sort of camaraderie and fellowship that built team cohesion. Like his black “brothers,” Incognito used the word “nigger” as a way of signifying solidarity that crossed—even dissolved—racial lines.46
Why, when the Anti-Defamation League was calling for investigations into NFL locker rooms, were Incognito’s black teammates dismissing the racist allegations? One of his black former teammates sums it up:
Richie is honorary. I don’t expect you [reporter] to understand because you’re not black. But being a black guy, being a brother [in the NFL] is more than just about skin color. It’s about how you carry yourself. How you play. Where you come from. What you’ve experienced. A lot of things.47
The importance of this and related exchanges isn’t about Richie Incognito, per se. Rather it’s about cultural understandings of race in the locker room more generally. Player after player insists that the NFL is “the least racist environment I’ve ever been in.”48 But significantly, players don’t say that locker rooms are color blind, that race doesn’t matter, that the environment isn’t racialized. The NFL is among a very few formal organizational environments that’s dominated by black men—rich, powerful black men. A large majority of the players are black. Team leaders are black. Most of the star players are black. Even the new generation of star quarterbacks is predominantly black. There are black coaches and general managers. NFLPA leaders are black. The locker room culture can’t help but reflect this fact. Certainly there are racial animosities. Race is sometimes invoked to explain perceived inequities. But NFL players also believe deeply that the league is a pure meritocracy. It’s part of the ethos. Talent wins out over everything else. For players, it’s an arena and an opportunity where anyone can achieve the American Dream on a level, multiracial playing field.
Players leaving the league are probably never going to encounter such an environment again. They’ll return to the small towns of white west Texas or the black neighborhoods of Miami. For those who jump into the corporate world, they’ll find nearly all white colleagues, as well as increasingly more women. How does this affect former players’ retirement transitions? Black players, especially, but whites as well, will be venturing into new social territory. It’s not necessarily hostile or threatening, but it’s different. Players are imbued with the NFL culture and ethos as it pertains to masculinity, gender, and race. They are fluent in the language—both literally and figuratively. But locker room culture, demeanor, and behavior are out of place in the corporate world where “loose talk” about race, gender, sex, and sexuality are decidedly out of place. While many organizational environments leave much to be desired in this regard, they hardly compare to the NFL locker room, even at its worst.
After inhabiting a culture where masculinity and race distinctively define social relationships in somewhat unconventional ways, former players may simply find the world outside the NFL to be “out of the ordinary.” Perhaps encounters with broader cultural standards regarding race and masculinity don’t constitute full blown “culture shock,” but, for former players, there’s a fundamental cultural “strangeness” with respect to these pillars of American social life that may be disorienting. Considering the extreme limits of cultural acceptability within the bubble—what’s “normal” in the NFL locker room—former players may understandably feel like “fish out of water.”
While the notion of culture shock helps explain the initial displacement and disorientation experienced by former players, another factor contributes to prolonged transition troubles. Culture shock usually dissipates, sooner or later. A different sort of disjuncture, however, may compound the lingering malaise that plagues some former players. It’s a form of social disconnection or misalignment that’s known in classic sociological terms as “anomie.”
Emile Durkheim famously invoked the term to refer to social circumstances where standards or expectations for behavior are confused, ambiguous, or missing. It’s often called a state of “normlessness.” Anomie emerges when community standards no longer regulate member’s activities. Under such circumstances, rules on how people ought to behave don’t seem to apply and people don’t know what to expect from one another. Without normative guidelines, individuals can’t find their place in society.49
Robert Merton modified Durkheim’s term to refer to social conditions whereby adherence to cultural imperatives is thwarted by social structural circumstances. In Merton’s terms, anomie is a disjuncture between culturally prescribed means and socially valued goals. Culture instructs individuals in the acceptable ways of pursuing societal objectives: acceptable means to valued ends, so to speak. Those ends are legitimate aims for the group’s members, the things worth striving for. Anomie exists when means and goals fail to align, producing a cultural-structural disjuncture resulting in social strain that provokes individual adaptive responses.50
When players leave the NFL, they carry the insider’s ethos and the bubble’s norms with them. Outside the bubble, however, the norms no longer apply. Former players find it difficult to act “instinctively” or naturally because the larger social world doesn’t honor the code to which they’ve become habituated. They experience their own version of normlessness. At the same time, former players’ value structures are also in flux. The goals of dominance and winning don’t necessarily disappear, but they’re transformed, and become less clearly defined. The outside world has no direct counterpart to winning a game, a championship, a Super Bowl. While there are analogous socially valued goals such as financial success, personal accomplishment, or celebrity, they aren’t as clear-cut as those that NFL players pursue each Sunday.
In this state of anomie, social accountability falters, feelings of belonging weaken, and the sense of a coherent social world evaporates.51 The structures of former players’ experience are suddenly in flux. Being in a state of relative normlessness doesn’t mean that former players now inhabit a world without norms, however. To the contrary, they’re well aware of the normative expectations and constraints that characterize the NFL bubble; they’re deeply internalized. But former players realize that the standards of the bubble don’t necessarily apply in the world outside. So they’re carrying the ethos of the bubble around with them, with no way to live up to it. They don’t have the same opportunities to “live large,” compete in the extreme, or be a tough guy anymore. It’s ingrained in them—the essence of who they once were—but now they have no legitimate means to pursue those goals or live by their former code of ethics.
The psychological consequences of anomie are sometimes called “anomia.” This is a mental and emotional state whereby a person’s sense of social belonging is broken or disrupted. Anomia is the feeling of disorientation, accompanied by a sense of emptiness or apathy—a sensation of meaningless, accompanied by anxiety and confusion.52 It was part of George Koonce’s state of mind as he worked out for months on end, keeping himself in shape for the opportunity to get back in the NFL—an opportunity that never came. It’s the emotional place in which he found himself as he drove aimlessly to the beach, not knowing what he was looking for, and when he took that turn too fast in his Chevy Suburban, just to see what would happen. It’s the psychological space where Otis Tyler and Drew Raymond occasionally still find themselves.
Former players’ responses generally aren’t as dramatic as Koonce’s. Merton, however, would not have been surprised. In circumstances where original goals or aspirations are out of reach or have been abandoned, some individuals persist in their futile pursuit. They adhere to culturally prescribed conduct, even though it’s pointless. Continuing the old ways approaches a compulsion, especially when there is no payoff in sight. Merton calls this adaptation “ritualism.”53 We’ve heard myriad accounts of former players ritualistically rehabbing serious injuries, working out hours each day, “running laps” from training camp to training camp, all in the futile pursuit of a withered dream. Merton tells us to expect something like this when the individual’s social status and worth is largely dependent on a particular kind of achievement, as is the case in the NFL. Most players move beyond this in a year or two. The unrealistic goals succumb to the reality that no NFL team is going to call and the comeback attempts and the ritualistic workouts cease. The cost to former players, however, is considerable delay in getting on with their lives. In some instances, the inertia established in the first year or two out of the league keeps some players from moving on to something new with any enthusiasm or momentum.
Merton also wouldn’t be surprised by former players who seem to give up altogether. When a loss of goals combines with a perceived lack of avenues to success, individuals turn away from social engagement. Merton calls this “retreatism”—the abandonment of both cultural goals and institutionalized practices.54 It’s an extreme response to acute anomie, where there’s been an abrupt breakdown in the familiar and accepted normative framework and where goals are suddenly out of reach. This is often the case when individuals unexpectedly become exempt from role obligations, such as with military discharges, leaving the priesthood, or being deselected from the NFL.
The most common symptom of retreatism, according to Merton, is a generalized apathy. Retreatists simply don’t connect with society. The most extreme manifestation is suicide. Although infrequent, we’ve seen it far too often among former NFL players, and we’ve noted many examples of despondency and several suicide attempts. Sometimes we hear accounts of players breaking ties completely with the league, selling their memorabilia, and avoiding all contact with former teammates. Some simply languish, without serious attempts to establish new careers or pastimes. Such adaptations certainly resonate with Merton’s model.
As with culture shock, we need to consider why responses to anomie can be so extreme among former NFL players. Again, the answer lies in the degree to which football has dominated players’ lives. The culturally exalted goals have been with most players since childhood. The socially structured means to these ends have been in place for nearly as long. And they’re all encompassing. Players’ entire lives have been structured around their NFL dream. When that structure disappears, there’s little to which former players can cling, nothing left to shoot for. The social disjunctures at the end of NFL careers are serious fractures, not minor fault lines.
Former NFL players confront myriad challenges on the social psychological front, too. Retirement places their identities at stake. Viewed abstractly, the ways in which players experience, apprehend, and appreciate their lives after football are filtered through the ways that they conceive of and evaluate their selves. The social objects that individuals understand themselves to be provide the experiential anchors for making sense of their lives. We live by and through those selves. Associated identities claim our places in the world around us.55 But when these selves are in flux—when identities are challenged—the ways we navigate everyday life, and the way we feel about our experience, are put to the test.
If feelings of disorientation and distress derive from the cultural shock of leaving the NFL, there’s even greater cognitive and emotional turmoil when players’ fundamental sense of who they are is cut adrift. This isn’t just a sense of cultural confusion or normlessness. It’s a loss of personal bearings. Certainly losing the central role in players’ lives is unsettling, but the persistent feeling that something’s wrong or something’s missing signals greater social psychological upheaval than simply role exit or job loss.
The concept of “role” is useful in thinking about the various enterprises and activities in which individuals engage, but it’s too limiting and static to capture what it actually means to be an NFL player. There is no script or set of normative role requirements that captures everything that’s involved. By the same token, “role exit” simply doesn’t convey the radical change that sweeps over former players’ lives. They aren’t losing roles; they’re losing selves they’ve known for a lifetime. “I am 48 years old and I still have dreams about it,” says Jamaal McDaniels, speaking about being an NFL player. “You never get that out of your system, man.”56
What they never get out of their systems are the selves and identities that were firmly established during the years in the NFL bubble. As Mike Flynn, a veteran of five NFL teams, recalls, “You come out of that tunnel [onto the playing field], you feel like you’re a god.”57 That’s a powerful self-image, but it’s only one of many that players have come to know. There’s the “football” self—the person identified with being an elite athlete on the field.58 This self encompasses the football player role, to be sure, but goes far beyond into the realm of the self-defining player ethos. Being a player involves far more than suiting up on Sundays. There’s also the “celebrated” self that basks in the limelight of being an elite, highly paid, widely recognized athlete. We’ve also heard of the “gladiator” self—the warrior who fearlessly and violently sacrifices everything, body and soul, for his team and teammates. The gladiator marches into battle with his brothers, the “masculine” or “macho” self, who is all man, all the time. Then, of course, there’s the “large self,” the one that thrives on excess, on “livin’ large” at every opportunity. These are all selves that NFL players live by—socially structured and socially structuring sets of identities, personas, and related practices that serve to ground players’ everyday activities and their notions of who they are.59
These selves are related—siblings of a sort—and the end of NFL careers places them in jeopardy. A seven-year veteran linebacker speaks of what he’s lost to retirement: “It [being a football player] is always what I’ve been and what I’ve done. So there’s a little bit of identity change. . . . You know what I miss is . . . being an NFL football player. That status, that prestige, the respect.”60 Aspects of each identity fall away when players leave the NFL. Former players may grieve for some of them, but never miss others. Some may never go away. But former players’ accounts of their transition troubles repeatedly come back to an ubiquitous loss:
I miss lining up on the opening snap and 65,000 people screaming, and making a big tackle. High-fiving my buddies, getting high-fived and knowing that ‘Man, I played good!’ or I made a good play. . . . I miss men saying, ‘Hey, there goes [player]! He plays linebacker for the [name of team]. . . . I miss the Super Bowl, 850 million people watching you and you only. I mean, nobody else is watching anything else. It’s awesome!61
Patricia and Peter Adler’s revealing sociological study of a Division I NCAA basketball team offers keen insight into the identity implications of playing big-time sports. The “gloried self” is the centerpiece of their story. College basketball players are similar to NFL players in many respects; most importantly, they’re elite athletes who garner considerable attention for excelling at their sport. The basketball players the Adlers studied were campus, if not national, celebrities, perpetually occupying the spotlight. As a consequence, write the Adlers, “The experience of glory was so existentially gratifying that these athletes became emotionally riveted on it, turning away from other aspects of their lives and selves that did not offer such fulfillment. . . . They thus developed ‘gloried’ selves.”62
Like other versions of the self, the gloried self is the product of social feedback. Constantly told that they are great, athletes come to see themselves that way.63 Even the most modest, self-effacing NFL players sport gloried selves. They’ve been celebrated and idolized since they were kids. Consider the impact of seeing yourself—actually being yourself—in an EA Sports Madden NFL video game. In a sense, players can literally become “Prime Time” (Deion Sanders) or “Megatron” (Calvin Johnson). Internalizing all of this, being cheered by millions, and feeling like a god or a video icon, who could resist the gloried self?
The gloried self is also greedy. It elbows aside other identities. The Adlers say it’s intoxicating and addictive. It becomes the primary self through which players process their experience. Once players embrace the gloried self, they’re “all in.” According to the Adlers, they may abandon all other aspirations and identities. They are virtually engulfed in the athletic role, which leads them to center their attention on the present while abandoning any future orientation. Their self-esteem and self-worth come solely from one source of gratification: athletic fame. As this happens, the field of identity options progressively narrows, so that the gloried self is both dominant and one-dimensional. College athletes, for example, ignore their student and social roles, while immersing themselves completely in the athletic role. NFL players are similarly consumed. The gloried self is so closely tied to the NFL life that it can’t survive without it. And therein lies the problem when careers inevitably end.
While most elite athletes struggle with identity loss when their playing days are over, NFL players are especially vulnerable. Their careers stretch back to childhood. They’ve pursued no other options. They’ve made myriad “side bets” on their athletic success, attaching not only their identities, but their financial well-being, their work lives, their social lives, and even their health to their success as football players.64 When careers end, the rest can crumble, and the existential damage can be overwhelming. Their gloried selves dissolve. The Adlers note that the loss is especially sudden and devastating for college athletes, for whom “it’s all over” once their eligibility runs out.65 It’s not quite as sudden for NFL players. They stretch out their departure and milk their celebrity until it runs dry. Nevertheless, while they’ve banked more notoriety than their college counterparts, most former players eventually exhaust their NFL capital and the glory days come to an end, along with their gloried selves.
The NFL is a realm of excess: exorbitant salaries and extravagant spending; unbridled aspirations; hypermasculinity; near-lethal aggression and violence; extreme tolerance for pain; fanatical work ethic; total commitment. The league demands these qualities, and, for the most part, players eagerly comply. Earlier, we called the NFL a “greedy institution.” Perhaps it’s even more demanding.
Another classic sociological concept aptly applies to players’ seemingly total immersion into, and infatuation with, the NFL bubble. Erving Goffman popularized the term “total institution” to refer to institutions that have exceedingly high “encompassing tendencies.”66 These places typically segregate themselves and their inhabitants from the outside world with formal and informal barriers to physical and social interaction. Goffman had institutions such as prisons, mental asylums, and concentration camps in mind, noting that they typically surrounded themselves with high walls, locked doors, and other physical barricades. But he also included nursing homes, orphanages, rehabilitation clinics, monasteries, convents, and the military. The common linkage is their near-complete and intentional isolation from the rest of the world.
The goals of total institutions vary widely, from caring for the infirm or helpless, to protecting society from the dangerous, to providing contemplative sanctuaries or spiritual retreats. Again, what they all have in common is the aim of reforming. In Goffman’s words, total institutions are “part residential community, part formal organization . . . they are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.” Total institutions, he notes, are established to produce particular types of individuals.67
The resemblance to the NFL here is largely suggestive. We’re not saying that the NFL meets all of the requirements for being a bona fide total institution, but there are sufficient parallels to adopt it as a useful analytic guide. For example, Goffman suggests that total institutions aim to break down the separation of typically independent spheres of everyday life by consolidating all activities in one place, under a single authority. All members’ needs are explicitly anticipated and provided for on site. All phases of the day’s activities are highly planned and tightly scheduled, and are concertedly aimed at the institution’s goals and guided by formal rules and strictures. Intense surveillance accompanies the high degree of regimentation. Each phase of a member’s daily activity is conducted in the immediate company of fellow members, who are similarly guided and motivated.68
The NFL isn’t literally a total institution because players aren’t confined to NFL facilities—at least not 24/7. They are, of course, mandated to be at team facilities for early morning treatment, meals, and meetings. And they stay until the full workday is done. They’re fined if they miss meetings or appointments, or even if they are late. And they are “locked up” for training camps, as well as the nights before games. While the accommodations are far better than those of most other total institutions, players are still confined to their quarters, required to observe curfews, and subjected to bed checks. Minor details aside, the NFL has much in common with other total institutions—at least metaphorically.
Like other total institutions, the NFL aims to mold men into institutionally desired forms. It replaces competing agendas with its own. It disrupts players’ alternate behavioral habits, totally and radically reshaping the structural and moral contours of daily living. The resulting “disculturation” renders players manageable, hopefully maximizing their productivity. As Goffman warns, however, disculturation is likely to leave members with a sort of childlike dependency, “incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside.”69
What’s more, Goffman claims that a central aim of total institutions is the “mortification” of self, whereby members surrender outside identities to those preferred and cultivated by institutional authorities. Insulated from outside interaction, immersed in institutional culture and regimens, and surrounded by others undergoing the same process, outside identities are systematically and ceremonially stripped away, to be replaced by selves constructed to institutional order.70 This is more than institutional socialization. It’s fundamental identity transformation, which Goffman says leaves members with severe deficits in “adult self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.”71
Effectively “colonized” by the institutional experience, members of total institutions lose confidence in their ability to function outside institutional confines. Transition to the outside world triggers “release anxiety,” in Goffman’s terms.72 Members simply aren’t up to speed with the cultural guidelines and cues of the outside world. Perhaps retiring players wouldn’t call it “release anxiety,” but they know the trepidations that come with being released. Absent the literal walls of the classic total institution, the NFL erects metaphorical, cultural walls that may be just as confining.
We should be cautious, however, in drawing literal comparisons with other total institutions, because the NFL differs in some very significant respects. Prisons, for example, command every aspect of prisoners’ lives, something the NFL can’t and doesn’t claim to do. Plus prisons are both involuntary and unabashedly coercive, again quite different in degree from the circumstances of the NFL, where there are tremendous incentives to seek membership. Prisoners neither enter nor leave at their own discretion. But they do leave on schedule, another difference from the NFL, where the end is poorly anticipated.
Despite these differences, however, the challenges of “reentry” for prisoners and former players bear significant similarities. Inside prisons, for example, there’s tremendous pressure to assimilate prison norms, which often leads to a sort of “institutional dependency.” Prison life teaches prisoners to rely on the prison structure for all aspects of their existence and the NFL bubble has its counterparts. Prisoners often lose the ability to make their own decisions and cease to realistically envision life after their sentences are up. They can’t plan a new life and provide for themselves when they finally get out. They aren’t prepared to face the social, economic, and emotional challenges on the outside. They even lose the social-relation skills necessary to reconnect with intimates and close associates in the outside world. Taken to the extreme, some prisoners become totally “institutionalized” or “prisonized,” in Donald Clemmer’s famous terms.73 Having forgotten how to live in “free society” with its mundane complexities and demands, they’re ill prepared for the transition they face. They’re essentially incapable of surviving outside prison.74
While former players seldom encounter difficulties of this magnitude, we’ve heard player narratives that closely mimic these concerns. NFL players certainly aren’t “prisonized,” but they encounter many of the same institutional stumbling blocks and parallel transition troubles. The central lesson of the prison experience for NFL players is clear, however. The deeper and more complete the immersion in the institutional culture, the more difficult it is to make the transition to the outside.75
Comparisons between the military and the NFL as total institutions may also be instructive. Entry into both is voluntary and there are significant incentives to join both. Exit is “semi-voluntary” and, like most NFL players, some military personnel are not especially anxious to muster out. We need to be careful to distinguish the experiences of actual combat veterans. They face a constellation of traumas that we don’t intend to compare to those in the NFL. Still, members of the military and NFL players share the experience of “totalization.” And once again we find that discharged armed service members (not necessarily combat vets), like prisoners and NFL football players, have trouble readjusting to the “real world.”76 They must relearn the practical and social skills needed to survive in a less regimented environment. Today’s military attempts to deal with these problems aggressively, conducting discharge preparation programs and manning a web site and online informational brochures in ways remarkably similar to the NFL’s Player Care programs and web site.77
Dr. Ramon Hinojosa of the Veteran’s Administration observes that military personnel also routinely receive preseparation debriefings as they leave active duty. Specially designed programs address the social, psychosocial, and economic challenges that return to civilian life may pose. But many discharged service men, according to Hinojosa, ignore the information or reject the advice, often out of masculine pride, denial, disregard, or ambivalence about life after the military. These responses are symptomatic of a military culture that, in many ways, resembles that of the NFL. In both cases, “exes” insist that they will be fine, although post-retirement evidence says this isn’t always the case.78
While working on this book, George Koonce received a handwritten letter from an officer in a middle-size Wisconsin police force. He’d read a newspaper interview Koonce had recently done on the subject of his post-career transition. This note offers some additional insight into how still another totalizing institution creates challenges similar to those confronted by players leaving the NFL:
I’m just a middle-aged cop in Wisconsin who enjoyed watching you play. . . . Cops are in a similar situation. We spend our career somewhat isolated. Our unique duties, life and death dependency on each other, the 24/7 schedule, shared experiences (tragic and funny) really create that camaraderie that must be similar to a football team. Being a cop sometimes creates an identity that becomes your whole life. So, when we retire, we lose something that can’t be replaced. . . . It can send you adrift, trying to fill that void in many ways—some destructive (which partially accounts for our high rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism, etc.).
The letter is a compassionate gesture grounded in common experience. It’s also a warning about the challenges of stepping outside of totalized environments such as the police department or the NFL bubble.
Perhaps the essence of leaving the NFL with good prospects and positive momentum is to actively resist “totalization.” Players who thrive after football often defy cultural and organizational pressures to become full-blown NFL “organization men.”79 This doesn’t mean they’ve failed as players. Rather, it means they’ve poked their heads out of the bubble occasionally, sheltered aspects of their selves from the locker room culture, and developed talents that might serve interests other than football. In doing so, they’ve inoculated themselves against engulfment, rejecting total institutionalization in favor of personal diversification.
Does this limit their success in the NFL? Perhaps. If they don’t pay the price, they don’t make the roster. If they don’t go “all in” all year round, there careers might be short. But one thing seems certain. If players put all their eggs in the NFL basket, they’re inviting serious challenges when they leave the game because they haven’t built a foundation of post-career options. In today’s greedy NFL, the trick may be to hold football at bay—at least sometimes—in order to keep options open.
Players often claim that the contemporary game demands all their time, but that’s an exaggeration. The NFL is not a voracious predator, gobbling up every second of every day. It’s not irresistible. We’ve seen plenty of examples where planning and prudent time allocation allow players to get college degrees—and educations—while still in the league. And examples abound of players launching second careers while they’re still playing.
Still, players are reluctant to branch out, and for good reason. They don’t want to imperil the NFL dream. Michael Oriard, for one, occasionally wonders if he would have been more successful in the NFL if he’d put more of himself into the game. He speculates that he might have been more than a backup lineman if he’d made greater sacrifices, wanted it more. Ultimately, Oriard concluded that football success wasn’t worth the price that might have been extracted from other dimensions of his life. “How ironic is it,” he notes, “that the better players and the players for whom football has greater personal importance must pay the penalty in a more difficult adjustment to retirement.” “Blessed are the mediocre,” he concludes, “for they shall inherit the future.”80
While Oriard is far too modest about his football career, he still conceives of himself as a football player and this deeply informs his identity. But he also sees himself in more enduring, far-reaching terms:
The long career [as an English professor at Oregon State] is clearly what’s more important, because it was the longer career. . . . I’ve been more successful as an English professor than I ever was as a football player. . . . I’ve written seven books—I’ve been a very productive scholar. I was named a distinguished professor at my university. Of course, that old cliché, that “sports is life with the volume turned up . . .” Well, it’s true that my successes as an academic have been more routine than my going from walk-on at Notre Dame to the NFL. . . . I paid my dues and it all worked out OK.81
Michael Oriard, George Koonce, and countless other players committed major portions of their lives and selves to NFL success, yet they still had enough left over to thrive after football. Indeed, Koonce and Oriard offer exemplary lessons in avoiding “institutionalization,” even though they’re studies in contrast. It’s easy to peg Oriard as the white, cerebral offensive lineman, while Koonce is the black, athletic middle linebacker. It’s tempting to conclude that Oriard’s social background alone predicted life successes that Koonce likely wouldn’t achieve. Probabilistically, that’s the case. The range of choices available to them were definitely conditioned by their socioeconomic, racial, and educational foundations, but each made crucial choices within his range of possibilities—choices that either opened or closed options.
Oriard grew up in a middle-class family, was an honor student at private schools, and had the luxury of being socially positioned to choose from a full slate of possibilities. His football dream led him to Notre Dame, but not on a football scholarship. What if he’d chosen another university, say, Miami or Michigan? Would those schools have embraced a walk-on who wanted to study physics and English lit? Being middle class or white doesn’t necessarily mean one takes education seriously, or makes the most of one’s opportunities. Remember Jim Harbaugh’s experience at the University of Michigan. Nor does it insure prudent planning. Former first round draft choice Todd Marinovich planned his pursuit of the NFL down to the smallest detail. The son of a football coach, Marinovich had seemingly every social advantage. He made every choice of his young life (or had them made for him) with NFL success in mind. His commitment was as “total” as one could imagine, but these choices left him floundering when football was done with him, with an unfortunate legacy of homelessness, drug abuse, and jail.82
Being poor or black, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily mean that one majors in “eligibility” or “sport and recreation.” It doesn’t prescribe “livin’ large.” Eugene Profit and Charles Nobles testify to this. George Koonce came from modest means, where school was an afterthought to many of his peers. But his parents wouldn’t let him slack off, even when he sometimes lagged behind. When he couldn’t qualify for a Division I football scholarship, Koonce did his time at a community college rather than quitting in despair, laying an academic as well as a football foundation. He got a degree in industrial technology and construction management—a field which dovetailed with past work experience, as well as with his future investment plans.
In a sense, Koonce and Oriard got onto paths running parallel alongside football. Perhaps it was a luxury for Oriard and more of a necessity for Koonce, but both actually had to work for their livings while trying to land positions in the NFL. Once there, Koonce had a far more productive and lucrative career, while Oriard just managed to get by. But Oriard also managed to complete most of his doctoral studies with his NFL income paying the bills. Koonce, on the other hand, had his bouts of minor excesses, but basically trod a conservative path through his playing years. He maintained ties with his alma mater. Keeping true to his roots, he bought rental properties and other real estate and preserved his financial solvency, even though he had some bad investments and terrible luck with injury and non-guaranteed NFL contracts. He didn’t simply blow through his NFL money and end up broke at the end of the line.
Given the chance and the choice, both Koonce and Oriard cultivated varied opportunities rather than immersing themselves totally in football. To invoke a useful cliché, both chose to keep other irons in the fire while pursuing their NFL dreams. “Educate and prepare,” said Hakeem Chapman. “Change the focus from your game to your job. . . . You have everything you need, just refocus it.” Oriard and Koonce got the message. Neither was totally “institutionalized” or completely swallowed up by the NFL and its culture. The NFL player ethos didn’t rule their lives with an iron hand. It wasn’t mediocrity that insured their futures. It was diversification: their defiance of totalization.
Clearly, there’s life after football, and for many former NFL players, it’s full, rich, and rewarding. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Some of the post-career pitfalls we’ve seen leave us with grave reservations. Our qualms stem from seeing players close down options and make short-sighted or poorly informed choices among limited alternatives. The pertinent question, from our vantage point, is what might be done to enhance players’ lives when they finish playing? Can they have better lives after football, where players and their families won’t be overwhelmed by physical injury, financial woes, bleak job prospects, and social voids?
Certainly post-career plans, programs, and opportunities play a role, and the NFL and NFLPA have finally stepped up to take responsibility for helping players transition to the future. They’re encouraging education, work training and experience, internships, media training, investment advice, financial management, and even “life coaching.” While there’s still room for improvement, opportunities are there for the taking.
But there’s even greater need for change within the NFL bubble and its prevailing culture. We’ve argued that one key to successfully transitioning out of the NFL is to resist the league’s totalizing tendencies. That means being wary of going “all in,” even when that’s the optimal strategy for succeeding in the game itself. In nearly all walks of life, when a person is “all in,” it’s challenging to get out with any degree of success.
Prisons and the military are two well-know “totalizing” institutions. Even more than the NFL, they command all aspects of players’ lives; their cultures are all encompassing. Reintegration problems for their “exes” are famously difficult, but they may be instructive. The prison literature, for example, stresses two major “reentry” challenges faced by those going back to the “real world.” First, “prisonization” is a functional adaptation to the institutional and cultural demands of “the inside,” but it inhibits success on the outside. Second, the more “prisonized” the individual, the more difficulty he or she has reentering normal society. Deeply socialized and enculturated, those who are “prisonized” have lost the tools to rejoin society. We aren’t claiming that NFL players are fully “prisonized” and it would be unfair—and maladaptive—to ask them to reject unilaterally the demands of the NFL, its culture and ethos. But in light of recent developments, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that the NFL culture better align itself with wider cultural values, mores, and practices.
We’re not suggesting a wholesale abandonment of the NFL ethos, just a tempering of the violence, coarseness, hypermasculinity, and excess that dominates life in and around the NFL. A continued insistence, for example, on defying injury and emphasizing toughness borders on pathological. Bodies, if not lives, are severely endangered—as the recent concussion controversy demonstrates—in ways that are counterproductive for the game, its players, and its alumni. The crude vulgarity of locker room culture and its hypermasculine, homophobic atmosphere strikes most outsiders as outrageous. The compulsion to live large is hard for outsiders to comprehend. To the extent that the NFL can curb these excesses to bring locker room culture more in line with workplace cultures in the wider world, the better chance NFL players have to succeed in that wider world.
It may increase the NFL’s chances of thriving as well. With today’s concern about the league’s antisocial images and culture of violence—where players themselves resist nearly all safety measures that might impugn their toughness or masculinity—there’s a growing apprehension about football’s future viability. While it appears to be a thriving financial enterprise, a recent NBC poll found that 40 percent of American parents would steer their kids away from playing football.83 Whereas this would have minimal impact in the immediate future, without the conveyor belt from peewee football, to high school, to colleges, the player supply chain might eventually dry up.
In 2014, the NFL finds itself under scrutiny on myriad fronts. The concussion controversy, the Richie Incognito debacle, and the addition of its first openly gay player, however, present opportunities to reconfigure some cultural components in ways that might keep players from becoming so culturally isolated in the bubble that they can’t function outside. It’s a chance for the league itself to check its totalizing tendencies, allowing players to exercise discretion and responsibility in ways that will help them better prepare for life after football. Fifteen-yard penalties for on-field racial slurs aren’t the answer.
For their part, players need aggressively to promote these changes themselves. They should recognize and revamp some of the more limiting and debilitating aspects of the NFL ethos as they expand their own personal horizons. To remain captivated by the “gloried self” is immensely and immediately gratifying, but ultimately, the NFL spotlight fades for most of them. Just as they should diversify their financial and career options, they need multidimensional selves that can serve them well once the cheering stops and they’re confronted by an increasingly diverse social world. Their talent and potential are boundless, and their opportunities today are burgeoning. Former players simply need to move forward to claim new limelights in multifaceted lives after football.