The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (60 page)

 

The football facility pulses with the rush of building, and through a series of decisions and coincidences, Meyer has somehow managed to go back in time. He feels like he felt in the beginning: unproven, energized by the challenge. Beneath the surface is the idea that maybe this time, with his father's absolution and the lessons he's learned about himself, he could return to 1986 and not make the mistakes that led him to 2009. There's joy in starting a climb, for a 48-year-old coach and for the newly arrived freshmen sitting in the team meeting room, waiting for Meyer to welcome them to Ohio State. The recruiting class, Meyer's first, is nervous, unsure what to expect. He senses their fear and stands at the podium relaxed and calm. All their dreams are right there, waiting to be grabbed.

“I've seen life-changing stuff happen,” he tells them.

He describes walking across a graduation stage, your family in the crowd crying, and when you reach out to shake the president's hand, there's a fist of diamonds: championship rings. Meyer bangs his fist on the podium, asking if they've ever heard how much noise five rings make when they hit something.

“I'll do it for you sometime,” he says. “It's loud as s—. Some guys get to do that. I've seen it.”

Eager faces stare back. He does not tell the story about his dad threatening to disown him for quitting. Reflect, he says. Look around this room.

“These guys will be in your wedding,” he says.

They will come back to Columbus as grown men, bringing their sons and daughters to this building, walking the halls. They will point at old photographs, smile at out-of-style haircuts, telling stories about 2012.

But even in his new world, nostalgia must be earned. Contentment must be bought with work, with sacrifice, and, since competition is still black and white, with wins.

“That team that goes 4-7, how many reunions do they have?” Meyer says. “How many times does that senior class come back? You never see 'em.”

This is the difficult calculus of Meyer's future, of any Type A extremist who longs for balance. They want the old results, without paying the old costs, and while they'll feel guilty about not changing, they'll feel empty without the success. He wants peace
and
wins, which is a short walk from thinking they are the same.

“How about that 2002 national championship team?” Meyer says, his voice rising, the players leaning in. “All the time. When they hit their hands on the table, what happens? It makes a lot of noise. It makes a lot of noise. Let's go make some noise.”

 

Another coach is on the phone, asking for advice about a player who got into trouble. Meyer gives his honest answer, a window into the murky, shifting world of big-time athletics, into how nobody emerges from the highest level of anything with every part of himself intact.

The first year at Bowling Green, Meyer tells him, he'd have cut his losses. His fifth year at Florida, when he needed to win every game, he'd have kept him on the team.

The caller asks about the Buckeyes. “I like it,” Meyer says. “I don't know how good we're gonna be, but I like it. We've got one more week, and then we get on the ship to the beaches of Normandy.”

 

On the northwest side of town, Shelley Meyer sits in their new house, praying, literally, that this time will be different.

He's made promises before.

She believed his first news conference at Florida in 2004 when he said his priorities were his children, his wife, and football—in that order. She believed in 2007 when she told a reporter, “Absolutely there's a change in him. There's definitely an exhale.”

She wants to believe today. His willingness to admit the possibility of failure is oddly comforting. He knows he could end up back in 2009, which is worth the chance to reclaim 1986. “There's a risk,” he says. “What's the reward? The reward is going back to the real reason I wanted to coach.”

There's confidence in his voice. She's heard it, seen how calmly he handled the arrest of two players or his starting running back getting a freak cut on his foot.

“Man, I just feel great,” he'll say.

“But you haven't played a game yet,” she'll remind him.

Shelley moves to the bright sunroom overlooking the golf course, with pictures of the girls when they were little, grinning with Cam the Ram, the Colorado State mascot. There's a Gator on the table and Ohio State pictures on the walls. Another room contains a helmet from every school where Urban has coached and all the memories, good and bad, evoked by each. Once they sat in a gross apartment with a possum over the television, young and in love, wondering where their journey would lead. It's led here, to this dividing line. All the things they want are in front of them. So are all the things they fear.

“I've seen enough change already,” Shelley says. “I'm convinced. We still have to play a game, though.”

She bites her fingernail and sighs.

“The work he's done,” she says, “the books he's read, people he's talked to. He's gonna be different.”

She stops between sentences, little gulfs of anxiety.

“He's gonna be different. I totally believe it . . .”

“. . . I'll just kick his butt if he's not.”

One more hopeful pause.

“But he will be.”

 

The door shuts, and his last meeting of the day begins. For the first time, the freshmen and veterans gather, the 2012 Buckeyes in full. Meyer sits calmly at the front of the room, as composed as the crisp lines on his shirt. A quote on the wall is from Matthew, 16th chapter: “What good is a man that gains the world yet loses his soul?” Behind him in his office, there's a blue rock and a pink piece of paper. He's been at the facility almost 12 hours. Breaking number 4—working no more than nine hours a day—couldn't be helped. Meyer lived up to all but one of his promises today.

His calm lasts until a player giggles.

From the back of the room, it's not clear who laughed, or why exactly, only that the players were making fun of a teammate while an assistant coach gave a speech. Meyer listens, waiting for the coach to finish, stewing, simmering, slowly beginning to burn. If he were transparent, like one of those med school teaching dummies, maybe you could see exactly where his rage lives and how it spreads. In imagination, it's a tiny, burning dot, surrounded by his humor and love for teaching, by the warm memories of 1986, by his desire to grow old and gray with Shelley, and the dot spreads and spreads until there's nothing but fire.

Meyer rises and interrupts the flow of the meeting, looking out at his team. His voice holds steady, but he says he's struggling not to climb into the seats and find the offending giggler. The fire is growing. He paces, back and forth, back and forth, waving his finger toward the center of the room. The air feels tense. Nobody makes a sound. There is one voice.

“Giggle-f—s,” he says.

He slips, his language rough and mean, giving himself over to his rage: f-bombs, a flurry of curses, pounding on the soft and the weak, the unworthy who'd rather giggle than chase something bigger than themselves.

In 43 days, he says, Marotti will hand him a piece of paper with a list of names. “Grown-ass men,” he says. That's who belongs on his team. No “giggle-f—s,” he promises, pointing toward the big pictures of Ohio Stadium to his right.

“We're talking about our season,” he roars. “We're going to that place.”

His mind is there already.

The players will gather in the tunnel, walking out in scarlet, sunlight blinking off their silver helmets. He'll raise his fist and call the first-team defense. He can see it, a personification of his hopes and fears, of his contradictions: first the grown-ass men moving as one, then the giggle-f—s who can destroy what he spent months building. The sun will shine on silver helmets. The crowd will roar. The band will play. Maybe he'll slip off his headset for a moment, feeling the hot rain. Nothing else will matter. The helmets will sparkle, and the Buckeyes will advance, an army of gray. Standing before his players in the meeting room, he can smell it, hear it—feel it even, in places he doesn't understand and can't control. Nobody makes a sound. Meyer's shirt is wrinkled, untucked a bit. Thick veins rise on both sides of his neck. He squints out at the team, his eyes dark, hiding everything and nothing at all.

PAUL SOLOTAROFF

FROM MEN'S JOURNAL

 

H
ERE COMES THE PAIN AGAIN
, extra-strength, a loud, blue blade down the shank of his left arm, carving from spine to wrist. Sitting in a clamorous Midtown steak house a block from his studio at SportsNet New York, Ray Lucas goes into pneumatic shakes, like a kid who's stuck his pinkie in a light socket. The 40-year-old ex-quarterback of the New York Jets—six-foot-three, 240 pounds, and still built like a mine shaft nine years after retirement—puts his head down on the table for several moments, waiting for the sizzle to stop. Seated beside him in the booth, Jennifer Smith, the player-program director of PAST (Pain Alternatives Solutions and Treatments), a consortium of surgeons and specialists who repair the bodies of NFL veterans free of charge, lays her hand on his shoulder and says nothing. There's little to do but wait with Lucas and count off the days till his next surgery.

Time was, Lucas could feel it before the nerves at the base of his neck went into spasm. He suffers from, among other ailments, stenosis of the spine—a compression of the open spaces in the canal causing pressure on the spinal cord—the result of blindside shots and face-plant tackles. But now, 18 months after a drug rehab during which he torturously withdrew from the pain pills he was taking just to get out of bed—six or eight Vicodins with his morning coffee, half a dozen Percocets to wash down lunch, double that to make it to bedtime—Lucas has lost his early-warning system and lives at the mercy of these flashes. Off all meds now except for monthly epidurals to dull his pain till surgery, he's facing his seventh operation in less than seven years and is walking around with steel plates and screws in his neck that will have to be replaced at some point.

Still, all in all, this is a
good
day for Lucas, who, when he retired in 2003 after being waived by the Baltimore Ravens, hurt wherever you could hurt and still draw breath. There's relief in the offing—once the surgeons go in and saw down the bones that pierce his discs. More, he's still loved by his wife and three daughters, who've flourished since he weaned himself off narcotics in 2011, shucking the 800-pill-a-month prescription-drug habit that had turned him into a red-eyed monster. And while, yes, he's lost his dream house, his NFL savings, and the small air-conditioning business he built after football, the great, improbable fact is he's still here to tell his story. For that, he can thank Smith, who took his last-chance call when he was in danger of becoming the next ex-NFL player to kill himself.

“I had it all planned: I was going to do it that Sunday, when my wife and kids went to church,” says Lucas. “I was gonna drive straight off the George Washington Bridge, and if I didn't clear the barrier—I got a big truck—I was gonna get out and jump. I was on 17 different drugs: narcotics, psych meds, sleep aids, muscle relaxers, and nothing, man—none of them worked.”

Lucas's intake was extreme, but his story is not. Pain-pill dependence is the NFL's dirty secret, and the next wave of trouble to breach its shore. In a months-long investigation involving dozens of former players, as well as their attorneys, physicians, and addiction counselors, what emerges is a picture of a professional league so swamped by narcotics that it closes its eyes to medical malpractice by many of its doctors and trainers. It does so not because it lacks the will to police its staff and players, but because the game itself could not survive without these powerful drugs. “The wear and tear on our spines and knees—we all had to take that to play,” says Richard Dent, the Hall of Fame terror of those great Chicago Bears defenses of the 1980s and 1990s, who is now hobbled by back pain and headaches. “We got pills from a trainer, and where he got them, I don't know. But we were all involved with that.”

“Your body ain't made to go through a wall 50, 60 times a game,” says Fred McCrary, a Super Bowl fullback with the New England Patriots in 2003, now belabored by daily migraines and bum shoulders. “By week three, they'd give you whatever you wanted—and, still, guys smoked weed for the pain.”

“Our doctors, who've seen everything, were shocked when they saw these guys; their prescription-pill addictions were literally deadly,” says Smith over her seafood salad. Formerly the director of Gridiron Greats, the first nonprofit to come to the aid of disabled retirees from the NFL, she's helped build PAST from a charitable notion into a medical oasis for broken-down vets, offering full surgical care, drug-rehab stints, and long-term pain relief. Funded entirely by one doctor, a wealthy New Jersey internist named William Focazio, it has stepped into the void and saved the lives of men who've been ditched by the richest league on earth. “We've taken guys in their forties who were weeks or days from dying on a 1,000-Vikes-a-month-and-tequila diet.”

“And trust me: we don't quit without a fight,” says Lucas. “I drove this woman crazy with my addict bullshit, stunts she doesn't even know about till this day.”

“Like what?” says Smith, a pale, pretty blonde, checking a BlackBerry that never stops buzzing.

“Like copping a gang of Percs at the Super Bowl and gulping 'em before the plane ride down to rehab.”

Smith closes her eyes, letting this information settle. In February 2011, she'd flown him to Dallas to come clean before the national football media, telling hundreds of reporters during Super Bowl week about the pain-pill epidemic beneath their noses. Lucas did face the writers (who largely ignored him), then hit the streets of iced-in Dallas for one last brain-freeze binge. “That's just friggin' wrong, Ray. If you'd gotten arrested trying to score, or . . . or something worse had happened—”