“Get Back Out There”

The NFL, a nonstop parade of drugs and brutality.

Other players describe an off-camera NFL that is darker than the carefully scripted show presented during Super Bowl week. Their recollections, based on playing careers that touched every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s, include:

– “Midnight snack” buffets at a team hotel the night before games that would consist not only of food and drink, but also painkillers so that, as Rory Graves, an Oakland Raiders offensive lineman from 1988-91, puts it, “The next day, you feel like a kid. You could run into a car – no pain! You didn’t feel nothing.”

– Cans of beer tucked into airplane seat pockets before players would board, so they’d have something at the ready to wash down the prescription drugs such as the painkiller Vicodin (commonly called “footballs” by players because of their oblong shape) or the muscle relaxant Flexeril (“home plates” because they’re pentagons) disbursed freely by someone coming down the aisle on team flights. “We took those drugs because we wanted to play, but there was nobody stopping us,” Turley says. “We’re young. We’re 10 feet tall. Nothing can harm us. If you’re giving it to us, we’re going to take it.”

– Widespread and regular use of Toradol, a medicine intended for pain relief, generally after an operation, and a central part of one of the lawsuits that says the drug could put someone with a head injury at increased risk. “If it wasn’t torn or it wasn’t broken, to me, Toradol fixed it and allowed me to keep going. I was so used to using it that I wanted to make it a weekly ritual to make sure that if I did get hurt, I wouldn’t have to be taken out of the game,” says Joe Horn, who estimated he got four or five concussions during a career in which he caught more than 600 passes for the Chiefs, Saints and Falcons from 1996-2007. “To be honest with you, we were kind of – what’s the word for it? – addicted. But I always thought it was OK; the NFL doctors were giving it to us.”

– Being scorned by teammates or coaches if unable to return to a game because of injury, and a seeming total dismissal, particularly in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, of the notion that head trauma could cause significant problems, immediately or long term. “Get back out there” was a phrase repeated by the ex-players, citing words they heard during practices or games. As Joe Harris, a linebacker with five teams from 1977-82, says: “I know I had nine or 10 concussions, because I played through them. A lot of times, I’m out there and I was dazed, and I heard guys say, `He’s knocked out, and he don’t even know it.’ And then you talk to your coach, and they bring out smelling salts. `Give him a hit of that, and put him back out on the field.’ And they show you fingers, and you say it’s three when it’s two. And they say, `Get back out there. Just hit the one in the middle.'”

– A day-to-day, post-football existence that is difficult because of, for some, depression, dementia, migraine headaches, memory lapses, along with balky hips and knees and shoulders. “My body hurts all the time,” says Mark Duper, who caught more than 500 passes as a wide receiver with Dan Marino’s Miami Dolphins from 1982-92. Duper is more concerned, though, about the ringing in his ears, the loss of memory, “having a conversation and, all of a sudden, I just forget what I’m talking about.”

“I try not to take medicine. I don’t want to be a zombie,” Duper adds. “What little left I’ve got in my brain, I want to keep it normal.”