Slow Getting Up

"I am meat, traded to the highest bidder: the only bidder. Fine, I'll be your meat. I'll be whatever you want me to be. Just give me a helmet."
--Nate Jackson, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival From The Bottom Of The Pile

Last fall, I watched PBS' League of Denial. I didn't do the swearing-off football thing. I didn't tell myself I'd never see the sport the same way again. But I did predict that it would be harder for me to watch football and ignore what I had already sort of known: that these men kill themselves and each other for my fleeting pleasure. I had said and written as much myself prior to that. But after absorbing League of Denial, I now had too much human evidence bouncing around in my skull to go back to how things used to be. I may still watch, but with different eyes, I told myself.

Ten days later, I was apoplectic over the Bears' chronic inability to stop allowing easy first downs (that was the game at Washington, for anyone keeping score).

In Slow Getting Up, former NFL role-player Nate Jackson gives a first-hand account of how injuries took him from middle-of-the-road receiver to formerly-serviceable tight end. And how, even toward the end, he couldn't quite face the obvious warning signs that his dream (a word he uses a lot) was dead.

"I still believe in the beauty of the game. This above all else is true. But to be a fly on the wall, or to be [Jackson's rehab trainer] Derek, is to be struck in the face with how delusional a man scorned by his lover can be. Here I am telling him all the reasons why I hate her, in between sets of an exercise specifically designed to lead me back into her arms. I am sick."

That first sentence is easy to overlook. Football, like any decent sport (not you, curling), is beautiful. It just happens to have a staggering human toll. I tell myself that the players know what they sign up for, that they take it as a job hazard. But even with the possible (major) exception of what players know about concussions and other head injuries, Jackson's story indicates that a player can't possibly account for everything his body will endure. We worry about the obviously gruesome injuries (like Navarro Bowman's during Sunday's NFC Championship game). But who anticipates Nate Jackson tearing nearly every muscle in his groin clean off the bone? And in a universe where "there simply isn't time to pay attention to the individual athlete's body," where things move "too quickly for... conscientious objections to keep pace," how often are other, more minor injuries allowed to fester and conspire with other injuries to dismantle world class athletes?

For the record, Jackson never suffers a concussion and credits this miracle to the shortness of his career, writing of guys with longer tenures in the game, "they stay healthy longer, play more, smash skulls more, die younger." I guess if you have to choose one or the other...

Jackson was a notch above the average NFL'er: one of the guys you don't think about, the guys whose short rides give us that unglamorous statistic that says the average NFL career is about three years long. Three years of service (closer to eight, in Jackson's case), with a body degraded a decade or more beyond normal because of a commitment to the game they love. And it their commitment. It's only for the fans in the sense that they have to say it's about us. It's their competitiveness that straps on the helmet, not the fans. We just benefit. The owners do, too.

It's not fair to compare our blindness to theirs. For Jackson and his compatriots, the destruction is so much more intimate. It's not us at a training camp in Arizona, making one last Hail Mary attempt (I see what I did there) at a career via the short-lived United Football League, running a standard fade route and feeling his hamstring explode one last time. We get to keep on watching from a distance. And now so does Jackson. He has no regrets about pursuing his dream. And he shouldn't. Anyway, it's not like he could convince a younger version of himself not to go through with it. They all think of themselves as invincible, the same way others view them as disposable, the same way fans view them as an abstracted combination of the two. And so the games go on, distracting us from... themselves.

I haven't gotten round to watching the game differently, as I predicted. At least, that new eye hasn't developed the way I thought it would. But seeing guys like Nate Jackson as something other than invincible, disposable meat, put on this planet for my entertainment, is a start.

I wonder if that'll make the games too hard to watch.

Grade: B+