Chapter 2: Twenty-Nine
WHO AM I WITHOUT THE GAME?
At the end of the 1993 Canadian Football League season, nine months before I went to work at Northeastern University with Richard Lapchick, I decided to retire from football. After eighteen years of playing the game, I felt the time had come to walk away and I was determined to control the inevitable. In the months that followed, I parted from my seasonal nomadic lifestyle, confined myself to one residence, and turned full attention to one career. For the first time since elementary school, I had to consider a daily schedule that did not involve a purposeful physical workout. I was adjusting nicely, back on Long Island and doing work I loved.
I truly believed I was done with the game, then I received a phone call from Adam Rita, the new head coach of the Ottawa Rough Riders (now the Redblacks). Fifteen minutes into our thirty-minute call, in my head I was already back in a familiar routine: planning the next day's workout. The following morning, I was in the gym preparing for season number nineteen.
A few months later, I arrived at training camp in Saint-Jean, Quebec, a small town an hour south of Montreal. But it was quickly evident that I had overstayed my welcome in pro football. One of the most difficult things for an athlete to do is retire from their sport on his or her own terms. Most athletes have to be told that it's time to retire by a coach or organization; or they realize themselves their heart is no longer in it; or, worse, their bodies succumb to time or injury, forcing a reluctant surrender. My career essentially ended through a combination of all three factors. My mind was elsewhere, and my heart was no longer committed to the work necessary to prepare my body to play. I lacked the enthusiasm I once had for the game. I thought I could "fake it" and survive on talent and experience.
In many ways, I was the same player I had been earlier in my career. But as training camp progressed, my waning desire to prepare became evident even to those with whom I was playing for the first time. For those who knew my career, it was obvious. Unfortunately, those people were Coach Rita, the team's general manager, and the owner. Each of them had expectations of me far greater than the production I showed in training camp. After camp ended and the team returned to Ottawa, I was summoned to a meeting. Every football player dreads that moment you're told to attend a meeting with team management and to "bring your playbook." The playbook is the only thing you have left that they still want. It was a foreboding sign of imminent dismissal from the team.
However, this meeting was different—not as fatal as I anticipated. To ease my anxiety, they immediately told me that they did not want to cut me from the team. But they could not justify my contracted salary as the number-three quarterback on the roster. They offered me the league minimum salary to stay with the team. After considering their offer for a brief moment, I began to cry.
I was well aware of why I was crying, and it was not the demotion or dramatic reduction in salary or the end of my career. In fact, it would have been a relief if they'd cut me and sent me home to get on with my life—for that I was prepared. Instead, the tears expressed an irony that cut deeper than I was willing to examine. Despite my great love for football, I never wanted the game to define who I was as a person; yet, for all the opportunities and privileges it provided, I realized in that moment how limiting that privilege had been to my life as a whole. At that moment, I was forced to recognize and understand the person I was without the game of football.
Most athletes have three names they go by: their given name, used by family and close friends; their media name, used by fans; and the name their teammates call them that signifies camaraderie, affection, and style. I have always been "Donald" to my family, "Don McPherson" to the public, and "Donnie Mac" to those guys who were my brothers in the game. Donnie Mac still wanted to hear his name called by teammates, for it was that fellowship that made football the game I loved. So I accepted the league minimum salary and remained with the team.
I spent most of my time that season in earnest reflection on my relationship with the game and, more specifically, the business element of sports that changed the game I played in my youth. In the early 1990s, media were advancing the business of sports in a way that made the game unrecognizable to me. In other words, I rationalized that it was not me but the commercial focus that dimmed my passion for the game. I wasn't ready to consider my frailty and vulnerability. That I was no longer physically capable or mentally focused or tough was an inner truth I was no more capable of understanding than I was prepared to confront. Those were questions for the feckless and weak to face when they failed. As a successful athlete, I was an archetype—a consummate model of the powerful and privileged athlete. However, I was forced to face the inevitable questions: Was I ready for a life without football? What would happen to "Donnie Mac" when I left the game, and would "Don McPherson" be equally as interesting and effective in the classroom talking to young people without the mantle of "athlete"?
At the time, I didn't see how the privilege afforded me by my success as an athlete was a blind spot to understanding myself as a whole person and man. Although I never took my talent or the opportunities for granted (I was deliberately and intentionally working to leverage my football career for a professional life after the game), I also had never prepared for the chapter of my life when my physical identity could longer mask my emotional, psychological, and intellectual identity. I cried that day in Ottawa because I had allowed myself to be duped by that privilege and the culture in which it was nurtured. At that moment in time, both were unquestioned and unexamined.
If you asked me what it was like to play in the CFL, I would have spoken from the perspective of an American living in Canada and a former NFL player. Both "American" and "NFL" cultures served as the comparative lens with which I held personal attitudes and expectations about living in Canada and playing in the CFL, respectively. If you asked me what it meant to be a football player, I would have pridefully lamented the hard work, discipline, and accountability to team that defines the culture of the game, something that friends and fans never witness. If you asked about being a quarterback, I would have given a painfully nuanced account of the noble loneliness of leadership and strict attention to detail. If you asked me what it meant to be a black man, you would hear me identify with my generation. Born at height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I witnessed and internalized the ways that my generation understood and confronted the assemblage of violent racism throughout society.
I was, and remain, fully aware of the indelible influence these cultures had on me. I wore them like the football jersey that represented the school or city for which I played, or the color of my skin that could not be shed when the game ended. They were my psychological and emotional appendages, unique parts of me I used to navigate my daily life with explicit intent and purpose. However, if you asked me what it meant to be a man, that description would have been less complex and would've lacked a sense of ownership. So much of being a man, I thought, was something you just did; there wasn't much to feel or think about. But that was about to change in the next stage of my life.
A few weeks into that final season in Ottawa in 1994, Richard Lapchick phoned and asked if I'd be interested in a position at the Center. When he called, I was in a restaurant with a few teammates. I excused myself and took the call in my car. It was raining heavily as I sat in a dark parking lot in an unfamiliar section of Ottawa. The setting was completely foreign and the moment was equally strange: I was accepting a (real) job offer that would alter my life as profoundly as the game of football had.
Once back in the restaurant, I immediately informed my teammates that I was moving to Boston to work with Richard Lapchick. They could see my excitement as well as my realization that my desire to play football had never been there in Ottawa. In a phone call, I had done what many athletes never achieve: I transitioned out of the game on my own terms and with a passion for what came next. Although I was thrilled, my decision initially conjured more fear and insecurity than the day I tearfully accepted the league minimum salary to stay with the team.
BOSTON
For many athletes, transition is a way of life; adjusting to new teammates, coaches, and cities is a constant and often as unpredictable as opening the sports section of a newspaper to the "transactions" column to learn of players who have joined or been released from a team. Athletes themselves can learn of their departure in exactly that manner—the harsh reality of the business is literally in "black-and-white."
By the time I reached professional sports, transition was as routine as off-season workouts. As a freshman in high school, I decided to transfer to another school that had a more successful football program. Every subsequent move to another city was, likewise, made for the sole reason of advancing my football career. The game dictated every move, and my identity and social status as a football player preceded me. I attended Syracuse University on a scholarship to play college football, joined NFL teams in Philadelphia and Houston, and lived in two Canadian cities, Hamilton and Ottawa, to play for the CFL. Boston was the first city I would live where I was not playing football, something I had been doing since the age of ten.
Initially, it felt routine; the privileged and charmed life of an athlete provided me a soft place to land. I was working in an organization that valued my sports background and professional aspirations; I was hired as codirector of a national AmeriCorps program at the Center called Athletes in Service to America. I joined the sports radio team at WBZ, the number one radio station in Boston, covering NFL games. My arrogance led me to believe it was business as usual. Then one day I received a call from Fran Charles, a local television sports news anchor. He had heard me on the air and learned that I was working at Northeastern University. He wanted to do a "Where are they now?" segment for the evening news. As I hung up the phone, I remember thinking it was odd because I never played football in Boston, so why would anyone care? I was a "has-been," a trivia question for sports junkies. Still, there was a veneer of confidence I had developed over the years that portrayed something more like cockiness and bravado. As a retired athlete, I thought, it was better to be a "has-been" than a "never-was." I did the interview and was suddenly back in the spotlight as an athlete. Although my days as an athlete were behind me, it still had a social currency that I was happy to embrace.
In the professional world, however, I was a "never-was," a neophyte. It was like I was fresh out of college in my first real job. But I was twenty-nine years old. Working on a college campus, I felt even less adequate; professionally, in a field flush with academic achievements and degrees, my primary credential was work experience as a professional athlete. While I felt welcome among the learned professors, researchers, and administrators, it was clear I was an intellectual lightweight and not a member of the academic elite. Though I had worked on social issues for several years, in the greater professional community in Boston, I quickly realized I was, in many respects, an anomaly.
Despite a litany of insecurities and daily life adjustments, I didn't give up the social habits of the privileged life I had led as a young professional athlete. It was not long until I discovered Grille 23 & Bar, which was walking distance from my office on campus. Grille 23 remains my favorite restaurant in Boston and is the quintessential steak house with servers in lab coats, white linen tablecloths, and a menu of hefty steaks, Scotch, and cigars (smoking was permissible and encouraged). It reeked of cigars and privileged masculinity. It was decidedly not the typical hangout of the new employee earning an entry-level salary from a local university.
One evening after work, I sat at the bar to have a cigar and a glass of Scotch. Sitting next to me was a man several years my senior, enjoying the same exorbitant vices. He was charming and intelligent, with silver hair and impeccable style. After a few exchanges regarding the cigar maker and Scotch vintage, he asked what I did for a living. Knowing there were very few, if any, patrons in Grille 23 who spent the day considering how to deliver dating violence prevention programs to middle school students, I felt a rush of insecurity. I crafted my response accordingly: "I am codirector of a federally funded initiative to mobilize college students to address men's violence against women, racism, and academic success, housed at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society." He nodded with an unexpected and knowing look of approval. He worked in the health care field and acutely understood some of the challenges of the work I described. He continued with several questions, most of which centered on my personal path to that particular field, which was quite unusual at the time. When he asked questions about my ideological and pedagogical approach, I gave answers that were sufficient but lacked depth. He was observant and quickly realized that my pursuit was not an intellectual one founded on extensive research or policy analysis. Showing sincere interest, he asked what I did before coming to Boston. Sheepishly, I revealed that I spent the previous seven years working with community-based programs in schools in New York and . . . playing professional football. The look on his face went from curiosity to bewilderment.
In 1995, there were relatively few men actively engaged in the work to prevent men's violence against women. There were even fewer (well, none, actually) who had retired from professional football to do so. Three decades later, I get the same look and the same questions. Did something happen in my life? To me or someone I loved? Was I a perpetrator?
I never minded the questions—in fact I understood. Primarily because I did not fully understand myself. It felt like a natural progression in my work, using the platform of sports to address important social issues. But now I no longer had football as a platform, and I began to ask the same questions of myself. Why was I passionate about the work? Why had I chosen this field to leverage my experience as a professional athlete?
LOOKING BACK FOR GROWTH
I wish I could say my transition from football was completed within that seven-hour window between cleaning out my locker at Lansdowne Stadium in Ottawa and attending my first staff meeting at Northeastern University. But it was not that simple or linear. My transition took place during a period of immeasurable change and growth. It didn't unfold as I expected, as a carefully charted course for the future; instead, it was an honest and detailed interrogation of my past.
I was no longer the gladiator whose armor told the mythical story of a warrior-athlete. Nor was I an experienced professional with a résumé of accomplishments to support the confident and self-assured demeanor with which I approached my work. I recognized immediately that I had to understand the source of my confident demeanor if I was to fully understand the work I was about to take on. So I began reflecting on and learning about my privileged masculinity, including how I learned it and how it served as the greatest influence of my life.
In one respect the transition felt easy because, although I was not 100 percent focused on the game, I was certain about why I was done. I had spent my final season of football examining how the business of sports was changing the game I played in my youth. Primarily, I had observed the change in the attitude and behavior of young players who, responding to the evolving commercialism of sports, seemed less interested in the history, tradition, and love of the game and more focused on their place in the business. This experience soured me and left me grasping to find altruism and "transferable skills" in the game that applied in the real world and had redeemable social value. Ironically, the more the sports media tried to make the next generation of athletes seem more accessible, the more distant they became, with every interaction solidifying a relationship between them and the public that was almost entirely commercial in nature. In many ways, as I've stated, as football players we become less human and more like caricatures of masculinity—
tough, strong, unemotional warriors who are locked into the zero-sum proposition of sports ("I win, you lose"). Yet, now that I was retired, I could see how this perspective is valued by the greater culture, even though it doesn't mesh with life at home or in the workplace.
I thought again of the fifth-grade boys I had encountered, the ones who cared more about my salary than my athletic skills and experiences. If their interpretation of sports and who I was as an athlete did not align with what I valued or intended to deliver, what other messages were being conveyed that I was unaware of? Despite my insistence to the contrary, how much of my identity did they have right? After all, I had returned that final season to keep "Donnie Mac," a character in my head, alive. In order to be effective in talking to boys, did I have to confront the very culture that gave me identity and privilege? And was I prepared to do that?
LINEAGE OF LIES
The more time I spent with Jackson, Byron, and the MVP program, the more I began to see how I had been duped, how narrow my understanding was of masculinity, and how significantly it shaped my identity. I not only questioned my former perspective but considered the men in my life who blindly adhered to the same perspective—my father, uncles, brothers, coaches, and teachers who had all been raised by and passed down the same set of narrow, dogmatic rules about what it means to be a man. I should say that while none of those relationships were perfect, I would characterize them all as loving, trusting, and caring. However, in every given moment the men demonstrated and enforced the rules of masculinity and its specific behaviors, often in uncomfortable, threatening, or violent ways.
I began to see masculinity as a set of mandated behaviors that are part of a performance for the approval of other men. Like most men, I never questioned the narrow rules—doing so would be antithetical to obedient and disciplined masculinity. As an athlete, acute discipline served me well; being unemotional and tough, ignoring one's pain and that of others, remain hallmarks of highly competitive sports. But the same rules of masculinity applied to men who were not competitive athletes. This is partly why I became a caricature: I had to serve the vicarious experience of fans who viewed me and so many male athletes as representative figures of masculinity.
During this journey of reflection and introspection, I often wondered, How did I get this far in life without fully considering or understanding masculinity? As a leader of fellow athletes and an educator of young people on important social issues, how did I miss this critical analysis and perspective? More profound was my realization about the "why": the culture of masculinity made me blind to why I never recognized or felt compelled to confront it. I was a man in a man's world. It was as if my masculinity was this invisible force working on my behalf and for my benefit, yet without my permission.
The invisible force is patriarchy!
The more I learned and understood how the narrow rules of masculinity are learned and maintained, the more clearly I saw those moments in my life when my wholeness was suppressed. Looking back, I often feel like Malcolm Crowe, Bruce Willis's character in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense, in which he dies and becomes a ghost in the opening scene, though that fact is concealed from the audience until the film's conclusion. He remains invisible to all except a boy with the gift to see dead people. Audiences were stunned to finally learn that Crowe was a ghost for the entire film. The illusion works because it is rooted in the assumption that he, like all men, is emotionally impotent. An evasive communicator, emotionally tormented and work-
obsessed, Crowe the ghost is not too dissimilar from living men.
Reflecting on my life revealed a series of emotionally incompetent moments that lived deep in my memory. They told a greater story I needed to examine. These moments were not traumatic, but they did fully display my emotional incompetence, even though I felt wholly empowered as a man.
VULNERABLE WARRIORS
In 1988, when I was a rookie in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles, we traveled to London to play a preseason game. During the week prior to the game, we were offered an assortment of opportunities to experience and enjoy London. Keith Jackson, the great tight end from the University of Oklahoma, was the first player picked in my draft class with the Eagles and my roommate during training camp and on road trips. He was one of the most gifted athletes I've ever known and a man of strong faith and a generous heart. Keith and I were the only two on the team who chose to attend the world's longest running musical at the time, Les Misérables, at the Palace Theatre. I don't think either of us had any idea what the play was about—just that it was a unique thing to do in London and was as far a departure from football as possible. It was a fairly sophisticated activity for a pair of twenty-two-year-old NFL players to choose.
There is a powerful moment in the play when the main character, Jean Valjean, is visited by the ghost of Fantine, who died earlier in the play and returns to escort Valjean to heaven. When Fantine died, Valjean pledged to care for her daughter as his own, and now Fantine has returned as he is about to die. It is a poignant and highly emotional moment. As I felt the tears welling in my eyes, my thoughts immediately turned to Keith, concerned that he would see me crying. I leaned back in my seat and looked at the ceiling, believing perhaps that gravity would force the tears back. I wrenched my neck to see if Keith noticed, only to see him with his head down and pressing his thumbs between his eyes, looking for the button that makes tears dry up. The scene we were watching was an extraordinary display of human redemption through faith and obedience to God and love for others. It was a perfectly legitimate moment to be human and respond emotionally. But we visibly struggled to show our emotions as it violated an ingrained rule of being a man that had been reinforced all our lives.
One of the primary rules of being a man is that one must respond to emotionally charged moments with steely indifference. Crying is never allowed. This is one of the great ironies of masculinity: it takes courage and toughness to live authentic and emotionally competent lives; shutting down or hiding from our truth and wholeness is more of an act of cowardice than it is of courage. Granted, there are a few special exemptions—if Keith and I were to shed tears of joy for winning a championship or of despair for losing one, our emotion would be acceptable. However, in the context of showing empathy, vulnerability, compassion, or love, our tears were stifled, our emotions muted and ignored. We chose to attend Les Misérables out of authentic curiosity and interest, but sitting in the Palace Theatre that evening, we chose to be guarded and less authentically whole.
I remember that moment vividly, as I remember so many other times in my life that I ignored and suppressed the wholeness of my humanity for the "performance of masculinity." The performance never felt authentic—that is the very essence of a performance. It is about following a script, a set of rules and expectations provided in advance that govern how we as boys and men behave and interact with each other, thus creating the "culture of masculinity."
For many years, I never considered how profound that moment in the theater with Keith was. If I ever told the story to others, it was because it was funny. But while the story of a couple of NFL players fighting back tears at a musical may sound like the setup of a joke, the inability of many men to recognize and understand their feelings and live as emotional beings is a troubling reality that can lead them down a lonely, painful, and often tragic path.
Several months after our trip to London, I went out with a few friends to a nightclub. It was a quiet night and I decided to go home early. When I got in my car, I received a phone call with the news that a college teammate, Wes Dove, had fatally shot himself. Most people who knew Wes would quickly describe him as a "gentle giant." He was six foot seven, muscular, and as kind and unassuming as a man of his size could be. He was also quite intelligent. The news was paralyzing. I could not drive, and sat in stunned silence trying to grasp the fact that he had killed himself in such a violent manner. It made no sense and left me in a place of confusion, sadness, pain, and anger.
I eventually composed myself enough to drive and did so aimlessly before stopping at a diner where I sat over a cup of coffee and searched for meaning. I was despondent, staring into space between measured outbursts of emotion. I was also rather conspicuous, still dressed for the nightclub in a half-empty diner, crying over a cup of coffee. A police officer took the stool next to me. He asked if everything was okay, certain that I was drunk, high, or coming off some traumatic altercation. He was looking for physical evidence of my trouble while I was searching for an understanding of Wes's emotional pain and torment.
I told him about Wes, and we talked. I had a million questions, and since he was the first person I was able to unload on, he heard them all. "Why didn't he call? Reach out? What could have been so bad? When does it get that bad . . . ?"
The officer was professional and polite. He listened to my interminable line of questions but soon grew impatient. "Your buddy would want you to be strong," he said. "Have a cup of coffee and get home safe." Although he remained professional, his tone reminded me of my father asking me why I was crying and telling me that he'd give me "something to cry about" if I didn't pull it together. It was a jolt that made me cognizant of my surroundings. Quickly, I pulled myself together and left the diner. I drove home feeling embarrassed about my emotional display yet numb to everything else—incapable of understanding Wes's pain and reluctant to process my own.
Today, if you mention the suicide of an NFL player, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma, is immediately blamed as the culprit. The physical damage done to the brain is easy to comprehend and, in fact, makes sense given the barrage of collisions that football players experience. But since Wes's death in 1989, I have lost more than thirty-two former teammates and fellow players. They weren't merely people I knew through playing the game—they were personal friends. None of them lived to age fifty. Whether their deaths were self-inflicted or caused by some other ailment or life decision, they were all warriors—men who disregarded their physical and emotional well-being to play a game that required they push harder, feel less, and ignore all that distracted them from the pursuit of the game, including themselves. In the end, they were made vulnerable by the very thing that made them warriors . . . and I was no different.
THE REAL IMPACT OF SPORTS
Athletes are routinely praised for the ability to "tough it out," to fight through pain and ignore our vulnerability and fears. But we are no different than most men, who are conditioned to function without using their full emotional repertoire because they lack the emotional intelligence and practical experience to use feelings as essential tools for navigating life. If men display this emotional repertoire, the response from other men is swift and decisive: they view it as a form of betrayal to the power that has been passed on to them by previous generations of men who nurtured them in the performance of masculinity.
At twenty-nine, I began to see how well I had mastered the performance. I accepted the self-inflicted emotional scars and wounds because they were medals of honor that showed I had survived some imaginary battle against weakness or vulnerability. Yet the people who awarded me those medals only valued me as a warrior who performed for their entertainment—at the expense of my full identity as a whole person. I had not survived. Rather, I had delayed the inevitable—that moment every man faces, when he realizes he didn't say "I love you" enough or put away his pride more and hug those he cared about, living in unashamed and vulnerable wholeness.
Admittedly, when I retired from football and moved to Boston, I was not in search of my "unashamed and vulnerable wholeness." Part of me was pursuing a career that would allow me to fulfill what I believed to be my purpose in life, to use the platform of sports to serve others. I believed the rhetoric that proclaimed the altruistic mission of sports: to inspire leaders and build character and integrity. But upon gaining some distance from my experience, I took a more sober and honest look at the evolving role of sports in American culture from every angle (youth sports, parenting, race and gender, media, business, and so on). My analysis, as well as my need to utilize sports as a tool for social good, all led me to a troubling place. As I drilled deeper toward the root cause of each social problem, it became increasingly difficult to glean positive lessons from the culture of sports.
This is not to diminish the tremendous and profound ways that sports impact lives and communities. But as the business of sports evolved and changed the ways in which sports function in our society, it has also become antithetical to many values sports once purported to advance, so much so that I began to wonder if those values ever existed in the first place. I was compelled to honestly examine the true impact of sports on society, especially on young people. I had to answer, with painful veracity, an essential question of whether sports are good for children. Beyond the clear benefits—the feelings of nostalgia, moments of charity, and pride in one's community—what were the neglected priorities of our sports-obsessed culture? What was the impact of the hyperbolic way in which sports are portrayed? What misleading messages were young people—boys, in particular—receiving that were detrimental to their development as whole people?
I THOUGHT IT MATTERED
In the waning years of my career, I sought to answer some of those questions as I grew more focused on my work outside the game. Initially, the ways in which sports were changing upset me as an athlete, and only became more troubling as I reflected on my role as an educator. The distorted perspectives of the "fifth-grade boys" revealed a value system perpetuated by the business of sports that has eroded the fundamental qualities of sports in our cultural understanding. The "show" of sports and pursuit of exorbitant revenues has supplanted and usurped process and preparation as foundational qualities of participation.
I struggled with this reality in my first few months after retirement. I felt let down by the game, not because of a lack of personal success, but because of how little it actually prepared me for life after the game—one of the fundamental altruistic assumptions was the transferable skills acquired through sports participation. My parents raised me to be independent of their care; my teachers prepared me for life after school; and all the adults in my life, including coaches, attempted to impart lifelong lessons. However, in the end, I realized that as an athlete I was engaged in a self-centered pursuit that I was led to think mattered more than it did. That old familiar paradigm—"I win, you lose"—applied in an intensely competitive game in which the shelf life of a player is very short. The business peddles such hyperbole not to nurture the altruism but to exploit it. The aggregate lessons of my sports experience left me empty, searching elsewhere for compassion, integrity, and a sense of community.
A few months after I retired from football, I began to write an unwieldy manuscript titled I Thought It Mattered. I became obsessed with the business of sports—the thing I believed had robbed me of my passion for it. The book was based on my accumulated experience as a player and as an advocate attempting to harness its social virtues. Its title came from sober conclusions I had arrived at after a process of examining the true impact of sports in my life and the ways its social function had changed. That process revealed what I knew intuitively but had not fully examined—that the aim of sports had never been as noble and altruistic as it was presented to me and widely understood as a social asset. Ironically, I am the beneficiary of the period of sports when, the more the business grew, the more ineffective the game became in delivering on its supposedly altruistic mission.
I wrote I Thought It Mattered over a three-year period that was a cathartic process in which I named, detailed, and liberated myself from my blind loyalty to the strict doctrine of sports. This was not easy or without personal angst as I enjoyed many aspects of the culture in which I was raised and later thrived. I understood how that doctrine served an effective role in my life as an athlete. But as a man, I had to extract myself from it to grasp its impact on the core of my whole identity.
Thinking back on that fateful day in the team office in Ottawa when my football career essentially ended, I remember feeling like a "sucker." I returned for that "one last season" thinking I would find something meaningful: perhaps a sense of closure on a relationship that had consumed two-thirds of my life. I was searching for the payoff that was supposed to come from all that loyalty, commitment, and sacrifice. The things referred to in the inspirational quotes that rang in our heads as athletes, which, in the end, were just used to sell an idea. We constantly heard phrases such as, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," and, "Leave it all on the field," but there was nothing in this rhetoric to prepare me for when it was over. And while one of my favorites, "There is no 'I' in team," is certainly true, what happens when the "team" is no longer there? Who am "I" without the team?
At twenty-nine, I retired from the one thing I thought mattered most. It brought so much privilege to my life that it also made me reluctant to see it as privilege, and to see the flaws that my success had excused. I was forced to acknowledge the extent to which the privileges of masculinity had shaped my identity. As I began to navigate life without that privilege, I saw my masculinity for the first time. And I came to understand the tears of a seven-year veteran of professional football—a grown man as vulnerable and scared to step off the field as an eight-year-old stepping onto it for the first time.
THE ASSUMPTION OF ALTRUISM
At the time I was writing I Thought It Mattered, I was committed to the utility of sports as a tool for social impact. After all, if we didn't believe that assumption, why else would we, as a culture, think sports could help eradicate so many ills and social problems such as racism, drug addiction, breast cancer, obesity, and a litany of others?
At the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, I became part of the culture that expected sport to shoulder that burden without honestly and intentionally recognizing the ways in which sport itself needed to be interrogated, confronted, and held to account for its adverse impact on society. The notion that sports can "fix" social issues, or that its platform is so powerful that it can adequately carry a message of social change, is rooted in the assumption of altruism attributed to sports and supported by the arrogance of sports culture. One of the greatest assumptions about sports is that it is inherently interested in progress and social justice.
Sports historians and "stewards of the game" will wax nostalgic about groundbreaking sports icons like Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, Jackie Robinson, and Billie Jean King—pioneers whose courage and skills were "allowed" to be displayed. However, when athletes authentically express views that challenge societal conventions and the business interests of sports, the response is less generous. In 1968, Muhammad Ali was stripped of the heavyweight boxing title and jailed for his antiwar position, a position based on his Muslim faith. When Ali died in 2016, he was lionized and praised as the "greatest of all time"—the label he gave himself. But the nostalgia for Ali was revisionist history: sportswriters and other journalists were perpetuating a myth. Ali did not just refuse to serve in the military; he brashly explained to "white America" why he refused, famously stating, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," and, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." This statement and position, taken at the risk of incarceration, makes Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel during the national anthem seem like a minor expression of one's First Amendment right to free speech. However, Kaepernick's actions, taken the same year that Ali died and was widely celebrated, have exposed a hypocrisy about the way sports co-opts social issues to advance its bottom line. For example, the NFL proudly supports breast cancer awareness, cobranding the NFL shield and displaying pink ribbons. It's a worthy initiative but is largely targeted toward a consumer population the league wants to grow—women. Despite its public relations problems with domestic and sexual violence, the league has had a more tepid approach to publicly address this issue. It is easy and safe to appeal to women's need for cancer-screening awareness and not so simple to address the issue of violence against women, without being accountable for the culture of masculinity that is perpetuated by the business of sports and the overwhelming population of men who consume their products.
Kaepernick's protest not only revealed a deep racial division that seems no less healed in the fifty-plus years since Ali faced prison for refusing military service; it also exposed the manipulative tactics sports executives use to thwart social movements and campaigns.
Athletes like Ali who broke racial and gender barriers were not viewed as social justice activists but rather as individuals who demonstrated an indomitable spirit and courage once they were permitted the "opportunity" to withstand people's hatred. Their humanity and identity as citizens were not valued, only their athleticism and talent. That was the real commodity and the only part of their identity that was valued.
Sports were never intended to inspire social change or to work for social good. We assign those attributes to the (primarily) male athletes we admire, and we admire them for how they perform as athletes, not who they are as people. We have placed sports and athletes so high upon a pedestal that we have long ignored or excused the behavior of those whose actions away from the game are antithetical to the ideals we attribute to sports—leadership, integrity, respect, and community.
SELF-SCOUTING
My critique of sports, no matter how harsh, is not meant to diminish the countless amazing "feel-good" stories or outreach programs that serve kids living on the margins of society. I would argue that sports are where inspiration and learning happen not because they are innately good, but because they provide a platform and opportunity for caring adults to be genuine catalysts for change. Indeed, sports can be inspiring, but the assumption that they are inherently a positive influence is not just wrong but counterintuitive.
Every great athlete and team "scouts" their opponent through what is known as a "SWOT analysis"—a rigorous inventory of the adversary's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Athletes also apply that level of analysis to themselves so they may identify and perfect their strengths, but also, more importantly, recognize their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This is called "self-scouting."
At twenty-nine, I completed a thorough self-scouting process, noting how the culture of sports socialized me as a man. The process helped me identify and focus on those things about sports that I truly love and that have made me a better advocate and educator. Twenty-nine was also the age at which I first considered masculinity as the most powerful and significant influence in my life. It may have been happenstance that this process began only after I left football; however, I do not believe one step would have occurred without the other.
Masculinity needs a stage upon which a script, based on a set of expectations, can be performed. The performance is done for the approval of a patriarchal society that wrote that script and assigned virtue to the narrow qualities of masculinity. Every man knows his stage: the family, job, or peer group where he is required to perform and prove he is a "real man." But he also recognizes the stage for what it is, knowing it is not where he can be a whole man. Ultimately, I was fortunate that my stage was football, where the performance of masculinity was visibly exaggerated. Peering through the prism of a successful athletic career, I could more easily do the work of deconstructing the myths of both sports and masculinity.