Pigskin Pariah

The 2005 football season at my university started off as one of the best ever. Camp went by like a breeze, we upset the number one team in the nation, and I found the woman that I want to spend the rest of my life with. At the time, I was a junior/senior—a junior on the field and a senior in the classroom. Things had been going great. Our team was just coming off of a conference championship from the previous season, and I was excited to be a part of it all. I was only a long snapper, sure, but I had played every game for the past two years, and I looked forward to another season of good playing time—what little of it a long snapper gets. We’d been fed so much hype and so much propaganda about being a “brotherhood,” about being “family,” that I was only happy to buy into it all. But as with all things, it had to end.

The beginning of the end came innocuously enough. It was the fifth week of the regular season when I started with the high fever—no sniffles, no nausea, just a 102 degree fever for no apparent reason. I suffered through it Monday, but on Tuesday I opted out of practice because my head was spinning and the fever made my body ache like someone had gone to work on me with a ball pin hammer. The next day I went to doctor—sat in the waiting room at Doctor’s Care for an hour just so the doctor could tell me that it was probably the flu. Still, I convinced her to take some blood and urine samples just to be sure. The blood work would take a few days to get back, and my pee was a dark honey-brown color—unnatural for sure, but the doctor didn’t think so. She claimed it was the meds, like Tylenol ever did that to anyone. Almost as a precaution against wasted money, she said that it would probably pass in time, and that I should take it easy for a while.

But take it easy? During football season? That was a cardinal sin. I knew I wouldn’t be worth anything at practice, so on Wednesday, I again sat at home while the team went to work. I managed to keep the fever down with a drug cocktail of ibuprofen and acetaminophen. I took 1000 milligrams of painkillers every two hours, alternating the drug of choice each time. I probably ended up taking about fifty pills a day—actually, I know I did, ‘cos that’s how the math worked out. And I had to do it on time every two hours, or the fever would come back, hammering away at me as if hadn’t even slowed down. It was no wonder that little mixture did the trick—I was so wound up on drugs that I would have had a hard time feeling it if someone stabbed me in the kidney.

Thursday came around, and things weren’t any better. I kept on dropping my medicating regimen to see if the fever had finally passed, but each time it came back with renewed vigor. Finally I had to face facts that I wasn’t going to be able to travel on Friday for the game that week. I had to tell the Head Coach—give him the heads up so that he could tell my backup that he would be traveling in my place. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought that I was being a team player.

But when I told his receptionist, all I got was a blank stare—like this little girl who had graduated from college just to be a glorified secretary, was already judging me for being weak—for being a pussy.

“You’ll tell him?” I asked again.

Time seemed to drag on interminably until she nodded slightly. “Yes. I’ll tell him.”

I smiled my thanks and headed for the door, grateful to be out of the office.

After that, I thought it was over. I thought I’d done the right thing. I thought Coach would be proud. But that wasn’t the end of it, not by a long shot.

Friday night, my fiancée and I were sitting on the couch in my house—me with a blanket over my lap and a fresh round of Advil coursing through my veins. I don’t remember what exactly we were watching, but at about ten, my cell phone rang. Looking over, I saw that it was one of my “friends” on the team. He always liked to give me a hard time, but I didn’t picture him as the kind who would make fun of the sick and dying.

I picked it up. “Y’ello?”

“Why ain’t you here?” No preamble, no “hey how are you?” Just straight to the point.

I got straight to the point, too. “I’m sick.”

“Bullshit. You need to be here.”

“I told you before, I’m sick.”

“Well then suck it up.”

I’d had enough and hit the disconnect button. A few seconds later, the phone rang again. I just switched it off.

Again, I thought that would be the end of it. But I was wrong. The full repercussions of that would be felt later, but more would come before that happened.

On Saturday I was feeling a little better. I watched our game on TV—a game that we won by a single point in the last minutes of the contest—and then my fiancée convinced me to go to a restaurant to get a bite to eat. The drugs were still pumping hard and heavy, so I was feeling relatively well. I agreed, and we went to a burger joint/sports bar to enjoy a bite to eat.

While we were there, my fiancée said she thought she saw one of my teammates at the bar. I craned my neck to look around, but couldn’t see him anywhere. I just shrugged and turned back to the TV, listening to the Clemson fans all around me raising hell at some bad call I hadn’t really been paying attention to. After that we went home, and I spent the rest of the weekend in a drugged-up daze.

On Monday, I got a call from the doctor’s office. They said my blood results had come in and I had a low white blood cell count. It meant there was some kind of infection—a kidney infection, if the color of my pee was any indication. They asked me to come into the office and get a shot of antibiotics to knock it out.

It was about damn time something happened, so I headed down there as quickly as possible. They doctored me up, jammed the needle in, and sent me home with a wad of cotton-balls over the puncture wound in my ass. It was all worth it, though, because that night, I immediately started to feel better. The coaches kept me out of practice the next couple days to make sure I was on the road to recovery.

Later that week, my first day back at practice was less than pleasant. I walked out onto the field to stretch with the rest of the specialist squad—the guys who do kicking, punting, and snapping—to the sound of silence. They didn’t utter a word, just sat there stretching, not even looking at me.

For a while I just went about my business, trying not to pay any attention to it, but finally I broke the silence.

“So how are y’all doing?”

The leader of them gave me a predatory grin, his shaved head gleaming slightly in the mid-October sun. “We had a bet as to how long it would take you to say something.” He laughed, trying to pass it off as a joke, but I wasn’t fooled. Something was going on.

“So what’s the deal?” I asked suspiciously.

Baldy gave me an exasperated look. “We’ve been over this so many times, I don’t think you want to hear what we have to say.”

Funny. He was the only one speaking, but for some reason he used the word “we.” Was that how it was going to be? Fine. We’d air it all out. My stomach wouldn’t stop churning until everything had been said.

“Let’s get it out in the open,” I said, my voice steely. “You think I should have played while I was sick?”

Baldy barked a laugh. “You were sick, huh? Well we heard that someone saw you eating out while we were playing in Orangeburg.”

My stomach lurched, my mind going back to the past Saturday when my fiancée had thought she had seen someone from the team.

“Do you deny it?” he asked—as if he was a prosecutor and I was on the stand.

I shook my head. “Nope. We went to get some food, ‘cos I was tired of eating soup and crackers. Why is that a problem?”

“If you were well enough to go eat somewhere, you were well enough to at least come to the game.”

“Sitting down to eat is a lot different than driving four hours there and back, and sitting on the sidelines for a three hour game.”

“That may be so, but we just feel like you hung us out to dry.”

“Does everyone feel like that?” I asked, looking around at the assembled group.

No one else made a motion. Only the weasel-faced one—Baldy’s preferred sidekick and the one that had called me that Friday night—gave a nod of assent.

I wanted to shout, to deny all their petty assumptions and tell them that I was sick. I was sick! I had a kidney infection for Christ’s sake. But instead I justheld my tongue. It felt like I was standing in front of a band of Peters, averting their eyes from me as if to deny my entire existence.

Instead of firing back a petty retort, I picked up my gear and moved to another part of the field so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the silence. At that moment, I didn’t think that anything would come out of it all. I thought that life would go on as usual—I would do my thing in practice, get the start again, and that would be the end of it. But I didn’t take into account the fact that Baldy had our head coach wrapped around his little finger. I’d meant to go to Coach and explain everything, but Baldy beat me to it. He bent his ear and spoke venom into his mind, poisoning him against me like a serpent lurking under his pillow.

I found out later that day in practice. The special teams portion of practice came upon us, and I strapped up, heading out onto the filed. But a word from Coach stopped me in my tracks. Actually, it was a name. The young man—whom the name belonged to—had transferred in the previous season, and since then he had ridden the bench. Up until that moment, that is. After that, we traded places. After that, he was the one playing in the games, and I was the one sitting on the sidelines. The initial blow hit me pretty hard. I passed it off as a test of my resolve—just trying to punish me for being “weak.” I thought it would pass.

But, as with everything else up to this point, I was wrong. As a week (and a game) passed, the same treatment continued. I finally had enough and decided to have a talk with my coach. After a position meeting one day, I lingered behind the others as Coach dismissed us from his office.

“Hey Coach,” I said, “do you think I could talk with you a minute?”

He gave me a fake smile underneath his Freddy Mercury mustache. “Sure, Jonathan. Have a seat.”

He only used my first name when he wanted to sound sensitive—like he hadn’t already hit me with a sledgehammer. I knew whatever I said, it wouldn’t matter a lick, but I sat down anyway and plunged into it.

“Recently there have been some things going around the team about my being sick and the events of the last week. I just wanted to get everything out in the open.” I didn’t say everything that I wanted to—that Baldy had taken it upon himself to ruin my athletic career and bend our coach to his will. Coach knew what I was getting at, but he didn’t say as much. I knew he wouldn’t give up his golden boy. Instead he chose a different route.

“Well Jonathan, the issue for me was that when you came in here on Wednesday and told my assistant that you didn’t think you would be able to travel.”

“It was on Thursday, not Wednesday,” I said coldly. “I told you that day because you post the dress list on Thursday after practice. I did it so you could put my replacement on list and he could be ready. I was trying to do you a favor and let you know ahead of time.”

“Yeah, but the game was two days away. A lot can happen in two days. You just don’t know.”

“Yes, but I did know. I didn’t get any antibiotics until Monday. I was still sick on Saturday.”

The Pharisee’s resolve was unphased. He never would admit he was wrong, and he still won’t. “That was another thing I wanted to ask you about,” he said. “Why did you wait so long to get on your meds?”

The audacity of the question floored me. Like I had any control over the doctors taking their sweet time. I wanted to shout the answer, but I forced my voice to stay calm. “They didn’t get my blood work back until Monday. Up until then, they kept telling me I had the flu.”

“Oh.”

I stared at him as pregnant silence reigned, daring him to say anything to the contrary—daring him to be a man and apologize for his assumptions. But he didn’t. I was a fool to even hope that he would. Instead he made the pretense of clearing his throat.

“Well, as long as you get out there and hustle on the practice field, you can win your job back.”

And that was the end of the conversation. He would broach no further discussion. I got up and left, heading for the locker room and another fine day of practice.

The next few weeks went on slowly, without change. Each Monday I would start practice with the hope that perhaps I would finally get to play again, but by Friday, that hope had been sucked out of me by my teammates. I never got another play on the field, but Coach made damn sure that I dressed out for every game so that I could waste my weekend with the team. I call it a “waste” because I had become a pariah. Most of the people on the team either didn’t know, or didn’t care about the incident, but my closest friends on the team, those specialists like me, shunned me like a leper. Anything football related became a chore I simply wanted to be done with.

The team kept winning games without me, illustrating dispensability. By the tenth week of the season, they had increased their record to eight and one, but I hardly cared. My body was still there, but my mind was long gone. I was looking forward to the summer when I would graduate from college and get married. I thank God that my fiancée was there with me at the time. If I didn’t have her on which to lean and focus my attention, I don’t know what I would have done. I certainly would have been more despondent about the whole situation. But at that time, I had put it all behind me and simply looked forward to the end of the season. The only reason I didn’t up and quite right there was because I refused to give those lying bastards the satisfaction of beating me. I cared nothing for the playoffs or championships. I just wanted it to be over.

The tenth game was our last home game and senior week, when the players and fans would say goodbye to the graduating seniors. The Friday night before the game, we had our team meeting like always, but this one was more concerned with the seniors. Coach spent time blowing smoke about each one and handing out parting gifts, then cleared the floor for the seniors to speak. More than a few of them got up there and blubbered about loving the game, missing it when it’s gone, and remembering that those four or five years in college would be the most meaningful of your life.

As I sat there impassively watching the blubbering display, I began thinking to myself. My thoughts took a meandering route, shutting out any more of the sentimental crap spouting from the mouths of the assembled players. I thought about various things, but they all led to one conclusion: that football was a cult. The only thing that can so completely wrap up someone’s will and attention over such an unimportant matter is a cult. How can anyone think that a simple game deserves such devotion? How can you claim that throwing around a leather ball is more important than getting married? Than having children? At finding solace in a higher power?

At that supreme moment of epiphany, I pitied them. I pitied them and everyone else who placed so much importance on such an insignificant portion of life. After that realization, I sat there and watched it all go by without seeing any of it. I had already closed my mind to anything any of them had to say. When Coach finally dismissed us, I was the first one out the door. I couldn’t wait to put as much distance between me and those people as possible.

The next day rolled around quickly enough. It was a noon game, so I had to be up pretty early. I went through pregame prep and warm-ups like a zombie, just doing what I had to do and not caring about anything but seeing another game over and done with. After the kickoff and the first drive, I knew it was going to be a slaughter—not for us, but for the other team.

The team was a little nothing division 2 team from out of Pennsylvania, only coming down to see us because we both needed a filler game in our schedules. As the game progressed, the score went up, and up, and up. At the start of the third quarter, Coach told all of his subordinates to make sure that every one of their players got into the ball game. He made sure that everyone else got in, but he turned a blind eye toward me. I said nothing. I told myself that I didn’t want to get into the damn game anyway. I just wanted it to be over. But as each second ticked off the clock in the fourth quarter, my resentment grew and grew.

With forty-three seconds left in the game, the score was 71-8 in our favor, and my anger was about to boil over. As our team went on defense and the last chance for a special teams play dissolved into the thin air, Coach looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. He reached through the throng of players and grabbed my arm, pulling me up to the front.

“Have you been in yet?” he yelled through spittle-flecked lips.

I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, “No, you fuck head! You know good and goddamn well I haven’t been in because you planned it that way!” But I didn’t. I just shook my head mutely.

He glanced back at the field as another play was wrapping up. “Alright. Here’s what I want you to do. Go in there on the D-line. Take the end position.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he didn’t let me. He grabbed me by the back of the jersey and shoved me toward the field.

I hadn’t played defensive line since high school. For the last four years I had only played special teams. As I jogged onto that field and took my position, I was lost with only my raw fury to guide me. For the whole game, it had been coming to a head. The injustice of it all—the blatant attempt to put me in my place—simply infuriated me. It was as if he planned it all along—planned it so that I would get a play in the game, but he would put me in a position that could totally embarrass me, playing me out of position. And that made me even angrier.

I sat there, bent down in a three-point stance and glancing down the line at the pigskin as the other team’s center got down over the ball. My hands worked into the ground, nervously inching closer to the ball. As I look back on it, I can’t remember actually seeing any of it. It was just a big blur as my mind raced through enraged thoughts and pent up anger.

Then the ball snapped. Then I sprang into motion. To be honest, I wasn’t even conscious of what I was doing. I had lost control, giving myself over to blind anger for the first time in my life. The tackle in front of me dipped his shoulder, cracking down on the next defender on the line. Immediately I knew the play was going the other way. Looking up, I saw the quarterback hand the ball off to the tailback. He dove for the hole, but one of the offensive linemen was pushed back into him, standing him straight up like a bowling pin.

That’s when I hit him. I don’t remember how long it took me to get there, but in my mind, it happened in the blink of an eye. In that supreme instant, I unloaded all of my anger and frustration of the past three months. I channeled it all into punishing the hapless kid in front of me, wrapping my arms around him and driving my legs like a pair of steel pistons. With all the adrenaline rushing through my system, I didn’t actually feel us hitting the ground. I just remember rolling to my feet, standing up, and seeing the entire team charging the field as the final seconds ticked off the clock.

It was a proper “Rudy” moment. Yet amid the high-fives, the head slaps, and shouts of pride, I was dead. I was dead to it all. With my rage spent, I didn’t care about any of it. My team mates swept over me, grinning ear to ear, but I remained passive—a stone pillar amidst a sea of humanity. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t care about the glory, or the win, or any of that “great” moment. I only wanted to spend time with my fiancée and my family, and try to forget about everything that had happened over the season.

It would have been a fitting end to the story if it all ended right there. But things in real life rarely wrap themselves up into neat little packages like that. We still had another game to go. As chance would have it, though, the game was for the conference championship. As I had for the rest of the season, I traveled along with the team to watch from the sidelines, but something unexpected happened. We lost. We lost to a team we were favored to win over by twenty points. The best part of all was that we lost because of a bungled call by my beloved Coach.

After all that had happened, it seemed like a fitting end for those Judases who had stabbed me in the back. I would never ever feel sorry for their loss. Call it karmic backlash or cosmic justice. Whatever it was, I didn’t care. As bad as it may sound, I was spitefully pleased that they got a little taste of what they’d given out. But the rest of the players I felt sorry for. I felt sorry for all of those people who had struggled and bled for the team, and had ended up with a crushing loss simply because of Coach’s ineptitude. In the midst of it all—the crying, the beating of fists, and the gnashing of teeth—I couldn’t help but think that maybe the rest of them would learn what I’d discovered over three months of betrayal and injustice: that in the end, football is just a game. Far better things are waiting for you after the game is over.

Thinking those thoughts, I quietly slipped away from the throng and went to find my family and family to be. The “fraternity” of sports had left a foul taste in my mouth. Now I wanted to be with the people that I loved, and that truly loved me back.