As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not really into sports. I played basketball for a few years because my parents forced me. I was horrible. I never took an interest in baseball. Then, my freshman year of high school, I decided I wanted to go out for football. Football had always been the only sport I watched on TV. It was the only one that looked like any fun to me at all. It was the one sport that I would wander away from my computer to go watch - yes, I was am a nerd.

 For a freshman, I was a big guy - about 6 feet tall and 180 lbs. Even though it was my first year playing, I quickly got the starting position as right defensive tackle. I struggled to learn the plays and strategies, and I was more worried than I should have been about getting my hands crushed, but I was big enough and strong enough to knock guys around and make holes for our linebackers.

I’ll never forget my defensive coach telling me that if I was just willing to do the work, I could be incredible at the game. I had the natural size and strength, and I was pretty quick, I just needed the training.

But I had a big problem - I didn’t have the discipline, and more importantly, I didn’t have the desire. Football was fun. I loved every game. But I didn’t eat, sleep, and breathe football. The next year, I had the opportunity to get an after-school job at a hardware store, and I chose pocket money over sports.

There have been days, especially when struggling financially, when I wondered what would have happened if I had dedicated myself to that game instead of more academic pursuits. By the time I was in college, I was 6′4″ and 250lbs., and I might just have been able to build on that and get myself a well-paid career in football. I would have been small to be a lineman, but I was open to other possibilities. To use the cliche, I found myself thinking, “I could have been a contender!”

I came across an article this week in Men’s Journal, however, while looking through some client-related media coverage, and it gave me pause.

Entitled, “The Casualties of the NFL”, the piece looks at the brutality of the game from a perspective I hadn’t ever considered. Coaches and team physicians, forcing players to play through the kind of injuries a man might sustain in a head-on car wreck, leave bodies and minds broken and lives shattered at a young age, and the NFL is apparently notorious for its unwillingness to pay disability or pensions to men who lost their ability to function physically playing America’s most dangerous game.

He came off the snap and started upfield, the linebacker dead in his sights. Brian DeMarco — 6-foot-7 and ripped at 320 pounds; the rare pulling guard who could run like hell and bench press 500 — led his tailback, Corey Dillon, into the hole. DeMarco, with a full head of steam, was set to bury the linebacker, put a helmet between his numbers, and plant him, when someone tripped Dillon from behind. Dillon fell crosswise on the back of DeMarco’s legs, pinning his knees to the turf. In slo-mo DeMarco was falling forward himself when the linebacker lowered his helmet and drove through DeMarco, knocking his chest downfield as his hips went upfield, practically cleaving him in two.

“I heard the pop in my back as I was going down and just felt this pain like I’d never felt before,” says DeMarco, who had recently signed with the Cincinnati Bengals after four solid years with the Jacksonville Jaguars. “I’m at the bottom of the pile under a thousand pounds of guys, and I’m thinking, I’m never getting up. I’ll never walk again.”

In the grand scheme of things, he’d been hit harder: shots that broke ribs and left them slapped on sideways; head-to-head collisions that knocked him senseless and smashed the orbital bone around his eyes; blows that sheared knees and turned elbows inside out. None of those, however, had managed to shove his spine forward on his pelvis and shave off bits of vertebrae like ice chips. Here was terror: DeMarco couldn’t work his legs, and the pain between his hips sawed him in half.

They got him to the sideline, where the trainer and his staff laid DeMarco on the bench and tested his legs. He wasn’t, in fact, paralyzed, though he couldn’t sit up. And so the doctor stepped in and did what doctors have done since the banzai days of Vince Lombardi. He produced a four-inch needle, hiked the player’s jersey up, and injected him several times with lidocaine. The numbness set in, DeMarco got to his feet, and, minutes after breaking off bits of spine, reentered the game. He was 27; in a few months he would be out of the sport, a young man with an old man’s body.

De Marco is just one of the athletes profiled in the piece: on-field warriors who were put back in after shattered ribs, broken necks, serious concussions - only to wind up spending the rest of their lives in excruciating, unrelenting pain, and not being paid enough to afford medicine, let alone food and shelter for their families.

My heart goes out to these guys. If true, the allegations in the piece against the NFL Players’ Association are scandalous. Whatever your thoughts on the paycheck sizes of pro athletes, nobody should be left like this after sacrificing their health for their teams, only to be left with nothing.

As a Giants fan, I was saddened to see Tiki Barber retire this year. After reading this, I’m starting to believe he may be one of the smartest men in football.

And I’m also starting to think that maybe getting fat in my office chair isn’t so bad.

Filed under: Grrr!