The Perfect Spiral
Part 1
I cannot recall how I thought it would end, but I did not imagine this. We spend our entire lives thinking about endings, anticipating the moments when the floor will give out beneath us. Why are we still surprised when things do, in fact, end?
I am in the passenger’s seat of our white, 2001 Hyundai Sonata. My mom is at the wheel. Outside, Florida is merciless. The late-summer sun blasts against the windshield and roasts the dried, dead love bugs, affixing them to the hood. Inside is no better. When we entered the car twenty minutes ago the interior exhaled a red-hot breath and the seatbelt metal burned our skin. Now, after our efforts to extinguish that fire, the car is freezing, just like all the indoors down here. It is an unpleasant contrast, but a familiar one.
Coach Caputi’s number is dialed into my phone, which chokes between my fingers and bounces restlessly on my leg.
“The bull runs into the storm, Jim.” I nod and exhale, and as my shoulders drop, the soaked underarms of my t-shirt press their chilly print against my ribcage. This is one of the many quotes my mom saw somewhere and decided to materialize. She hand wrote it on an index card, bedazzled it with a drawing of an exemplary bull and a contemptible one, and taped it to my bathroom mirror. No maxim was ever safe. One by one, she plucked them from magazines, conversations, CNN broadcasts, and taped them up. That mirror held my gospels. At its height, there was only a small patch of unmarked space I could ever use to look at myself.
At last, something compels me to press the call button. Coach Caputi answers after the first ring.
“Hi, Coach. I called to talk about this season.” I pause, recognizing that this call is so very different from any other that he and I have had. Once I had committed to play football at Bowdoin, he and I rarely, if ever, spoke on the phone. Prior to that, I spoke routinely with him and other head coaches through the division three recruiting network. The memories flooding into my head now, at the worst possible time, are from that recruiting phase, the time when we both were committed to showing the best faces possible. From my end, those phone calls were a terror. I would go into my bedroom closet, turn off the lights, cover myself with pillows, and fondle a lollipop from my grandpa’s red St. John’s jacket (a lollipop he intended to eat but never did). This was, quite literally, the only way I could bring myself to speak with someone like him, who I believed wielded the power to fragment me or to keep me whole. But on this day, in the cold car in the hot parking lot, I am without the luxury of hiding. I snap back, and realize I have to plow through this discomfort.
“As you know, I had some” – I pause – “bad injuries last year. To be honest, I’m really scared about the long-term impact of all of this. I met with someone today and they said they can’t advise me to continue playing. I’m sorry but I have to let you know that I have to quit.”
He responds in his chirpy, New England way: “Uh huh, uh huh, right, uh huh. O-…Ok. Are you sure? Thanks for letting me know.”
And it ends just like that. No blowout, no negotiation, just a three-minute conversation. In the time it takes to burn a bag of popcorn I lay to rest a life’s passion. Perhaps Coach Caputi heard some finality in my voice, or perhaps he knew this is part of the business of it all. Either way, I let go, I self-fragment, and he lets me.
My mom starts the car and tells me she is proud. She carries on about the bull. We pull out of the parking lot at the neurologist’s office and drive off. The sun that before was a regular hassle now casts a blinding sideways glance. There is only one way home though, and we follow it. When we get back to the apartment, I dump out my luggage and start packing all over again. So many of the things shoved in first, at the bottom of the suitcase, will now be obsolete when I return to campus next week.
Part 2
The Roskamp Institute in Sarasota, Florida is one of the small ripples in life that has an outsized effect. Like a gulf wave rolling gently in your direction that, because you misjudge the tide, ends up coming too close, sogging your sandwich, and drowning your phone, that facility snuck up on me. “Ok,” you say, “the mission statement lays it bare”: The Roskamp Institute is devoted to understanding causes and finding treatments for brain disorders. But I had never heard of the place until my mom brought me for a visit that summer back in 2013. She made the appointment, and the appointment slipped onto my calendar casually. I did not fight back because I expected them to give me a tired lecture about the risks I faced if I continued to play football. In other words, I doubted the visit would have serious teeth. Still, around this time, conversations about CTE and other head trauma-related diseases had entered the mainstream; they were beginning to take on some real weight in football circles, too. So considering the freshman season I had just had, where I collected two diagnosed concussions within five games, I was open to the visit. Perhaps I thought I could learn something about recovery and prevention.
The visit, however, was not casual. Instead of a warning about my future, I received a grim look at my present. I recall hearing a summary of the various ways the researchers could discern that football had already begun degenerating my brain. It was a truth card I was unprepared for, and it left me completely disarmed. The floor was gone. Their narrative brought me to do what was unthinkable just moments before walking through their doors.
Strangely, so many details of the day – where we were, the researchers’ faces, the appointment’s itinerary – slipped away from me in the aftermath. It was not until recently, when I overheard a stranger tell an odd story, that certain questions, or memories, really, about my trip to the neurologist surfaced.
This stranger was living in Boston and was looking for a way out of the city’s grips. One day, as they were walking from the store to the T stop with a week’s worth of groceries in hand, a jar of Ragu sauce slipped from a bag and smashed against the asphalt, sending a mini explosion of red and glass in every direction. That was the straw they could not anticipate, and the one they desperately needed. Within a month, they had broken their lease and relocated to rural western Massachusetts. At the time of telling, they were living their dream: a lovely old home, a partner / best friend, and plenty of space to adopt as many dogs as they would like.
Ragu does not advertise “this will change you” next to “low sodium” on its label. Yet, a jar of sauce set in motion a complete life overhaul for that person. The intentions met a mismatched outcome. Over the next few days, as I sat with this story that was never meant for me, I thought back to the Roskamp Institute and saw another conflict of intent and outcome. I intended to have my world expanded by my neurologist visit. I was not so foolish to think it would be a cheery conversation, but the Ragu sauce jar version of events was world shattering. The institute was, and forever will be, the place that ended my near decade-long football career; it will also be the place that set into motion another decade-long search for something to fill the void.
Maybe that is why endings still come as a surprise. Even though we try our best to visualize an ending before it arrives, we can never see the scene in its entirety. There is no way to know you will be on the couch scrolling Instagram when that news comes. Or that you will be in a busy crowd, unable to hear your phone ring. Or that you will be alone.
The journey to understand the ending, the moment of rupture, surfaced questions I did not think would be difficult to answer. What did I like about football? Why was quitting so difficult? Why do I watch my high school highlight film still? Why do I struggle to develop a fitness routine nowadays? Answering these questions, or at least attempting to, brought me back into the mud.
Part 3
As far as I can recall, I had three diagnosed concussions during the nine years I played football. You must understand though: very (very) often, a hit on the field would send the same kind of shockwaves through your body and brain, but would not leave you stumbling, or unconscious, or unable to pass the concussion questionnaire: your name, the date, the current president, where in the world you are. Thus, back onto the field you go.
These hits, “ringers,” as they are called in the industry, were part of the appeal for many of the young boys and young men I knew growing up who were serious about their craft. A ringer was a reward for a job well done. To achieve this degree of derangement requires a cultish buy-in, an intense delusion. I am under no present delusion that football is unique in this way. Every civilization, save maybe for those with truly pacifist religions, has had some fucked up way to kill time by killing brain cells.
The buy-in that football asked of me did not come quickly or naturally. In fact, I tried to quit just weeks after I started. I was in fourth grade when Evan’s family signed him up. Whatever he did, I did. As I recall, Evan did not particularly love those first few weeks either, but for me, football arrived like an allergen. It began working its way through my systems, hurting my small body and scattering landmines of anxiety around my mind.
- Morning: Wake up to learn which of yesterday’s pains will be today’s, too.
- Lunch: A time-capsule I will uncover after wind sprints later.
- The school bell: I blink, and the unyielding rapids of time thrust me from 2 pm to 5.
- Dinner: A 5:30 meal in the car where the smell of chicken soup or a hot pocket mixes ungracefully with the stench of the practice clothes I am wearing.
- Go-time: The 6pm whistle blows and I am fully suited on the sideline, belly newly full of old butterflies.
As I say, early on, I had had enough. I raised this to my mom.
“Ok, well if you want to quit, you have to tell Coach Jerome yourself.”
Fair enough. I pack my helmet, pads, and jerseys into a bag as heavy as me and twice the size and carry them onto the field in the minutes between dinner and go-time.
“Coach Jerome, can I talk to you?”
I am in street clothes, a red flag. He waives “just a minute” to the chatty parents he is charming and we step aside beneath the enormous East Manatee Bulldogs scoreboard. Even powered off it is one of the loudest sights in town.
“I don’t think this is the sport for me, Coach.” This is the line my mom and I drew up, which I practiced a hundred times in the car ride over.
He is not shocked, but he acts shocked. His face unravels: eyes pop open, foreheads crinkles, chin falls to form a perfect o. An awe that says, “the Jerry Rice of Pop Warner is breaking up with me.” I will tell you bluntly what his expression refuses to: my presence, at this point in time, makes zero impact. In fact, my presence is probably net-negative. I run around nearly blind because my glasses do not fit under my football helmet and the world looks like an instrument out of tune. I am also terrified because the rules, to me, are gibberish. In my version of events, no one is on offense or defense but everyone is a potential threat. To get ahead of this mystery, I fall to the turf before anyone can get close enough to introduce themself as friend or foe.
“I’m in the clear,” I think. Coach Jerome, however, has something prepared. Football coaches have a wellspring of tactics to convince you against your nature. He says I am one of the most talented guys out here (clearly untrue) and that they really need me because the roster is so small this year (true). I was determined never to set foot on that field again, but with his rebuttal, I feel my conviction melt like an ice sculpture in August. I love receiving compliments from a man with a barbed wire bicep tattoo, a man who wears sunglasses backwards to protect the eyes on the back of his head. So I agree to stay. I suit up, I go to practice day in, day out, and soon enough, I am hooked.
Part 4
What changed? When in the course of these ritual 6pm beatings did the pain adopt a tinge of pleasure, and then later become an addiction?
The process was not fast. It did not take the shape of a well-written sentence. It was a run-on, a long, winding sequence switching quickly between ideas, with moments of clarity pulled from their grounding by an overarching current of confusion. I would have a terrible practice, getting screamed at for missing this block, for dropping that pass, for screwing up that tackle because I looked at the ball-carrier’s head rather than their waist. I would be exhausted, overheating, cramping, and near tears (or well in them). Then something beautiful would break the rut. A good block, a strong tackle, whatever. And my coaches would celebrate: forty year-olds high-kneeing, throwing their hats, squealing with glee. Helmet slaps and ironic butt slaps from my teammates would ensue. Suddenly, the good from that one play was enough to redeem an otherwise miserable practice. As my season went on, elementary mistakes became less frequent and I started to emerge, against some odds, as a great player. Things on the field just started to click: the schemes, the body mechanics, and most of all, the aggression. I knew where I was supposed to be in the formation, what to do once the ball was snapped, and who I needed to hit in order to get recurring praise. Perhaps not so surprisingly, I chose to chase that feeling. So by the end of my first season, there was no question whether I would be returning the following fall.
The longer I played, the more of the pie it consumed. It ate up my time, my personality, and my vision for the future. Being a football player anchored me. I was other things, too, but everything else shrunk to an addendum: “Football player and a violinist / and a two-hundred-meter runner / and a nice guy.” I found no problem with that, loving the new identity I had muscled into.
When I finally did quit in college, I was cut from that anchor. The needle was pulled from the vinyl. Without football, life dulled. I became what I perceived to be a jumbled mass of mediocre traits and talents. I poured myself elsewhere in the aftermath to see what stuck. I joined Residential Life, the cult of extroverts, and I crashed and burned a semester in. Next, I turned reclusive and painted watercolors of the dying tree outside my dorm room window. Not for me, either. Repeated trial and error to find something else worth getting out of bed for, worth submitting to, worthy to refresh me like the sweet, chilly flesh of a halftime orange used to, was exhausting and fruitless.
What I know now is that these efforts were fit to fill a bathtub, when what I needed to fill was a draining ocean. I wish I could say that as I sit here today, I view this all in retrospect. Yet, ten years from the day, give or take, I am humbled to say that nothing ever took over. Nothing else has ever given me the same drive or provided as much meaning as football did. In my more unreachable moments, I am bitter. Why should what I now reject be the life-source toward which I still bend? Football’s claws left something deep in me: something, it turns out, that distance and time alone cannot exterminate.
Part 5
Football gave my life meaning and distraction. I suppose that is why in the south it is considered, however lightheartedly, a religion. You give yourself over to it, and it opens itself to you with a sense of firm-rootedness, of salvation.
The most lasting effect that football had on me was that it scrambled my values. When I first started, I was told upon arrival that to succeed I needed to smash my kind face into somebody else’s little boy, and to make it hurt. Behavior like that gets the praise, not the stuff that came more naturally to me: volunteering to eat with the new kid at school, playing the violin in the nursing home, helping my mom wither her socks and pouring her glasses of wine when her finger ulcers were flaring. None of what is innate to me is useful under football’s value system. Not in an essential way, at least. I was neither the sport’s kindling nor its burning log; I was the inviting, warm glow of its fire that reels you in despite its raging heat. I was paraded around campus, pointed to as an example, paired with younger children as a mentor, awarded a teacher-nominated prize for the most well-rounded student, all while football was spreading wildfires throughout me.
My coaches all appreciated my compassion – one even once told me that if he ever had a son, he hoped that son would be like me. But I now see that every day was a collision course between my nature and football’s demands. Instead of compassion, football looks for weak points. Are you angry? This is the place for you. Are you vain? The place for you. Are you looking for belong? The place for you. Football boxes itself up as the gift of salvation for all these. You want to hit people? The place for you. You want connection? The place for you.
The self-sacrifice inherent to football has a lot to teach – teamwork, dependability, focus, mission – and there is a lot that can go wrong, too. In my case, it is not that football supplanted my compassionate, others-before-self nature, leaving me cold and dangerous. It grabbed ahold of my nature and stretched it as wide as it would go. It did so by taking over more of my life as the years went on, predating on my frustrating desire to give as much as needed to be accepted. In middle school it was no longer enough to practice after school; we now needed to watch game film outside of practice. And when that was no longer enough in high school, coaches introduced summer training and morning weightlifting sessions during the school year. The more I gave, the less I could give. Football was on course to exhaust its primary resource.
I did not let it exhaust me completely. That is where having a mom who is an outsider to the culture benefited me. To her, football was initially a means to get me tough, and then later a means to college. As someone who did not go to college herself, post-secondary education was the primary to-do for all three of her kids. She read every college resource guide, knew which schools had “dorms like palaces,” which had the politics of an NRA chapter, and which dining hall had the creamiest scrambled eggs. She knew the acceptance rates and admission standards, too. That is why for 10th-12th grade, my Monday’s during the fall: six am weightlifting, school, football practice, early dismissal, dinner and wardrobe change in the car, then three hours of youth orchestra rehearsal. When I arrived at the practice hall, typically a few minutes into tuning, I reeked and my sore fingers were slow to the notes, still trembling from up-downs at practice thirty minutes prior. But that resume was getting built.
That is perhaps one victory, one place where I stood up to football’s faustian offer. I was able to cast a few eggs into another basket. And because I put effort into music, I have had amazing opportunities to do things like play for a cousin’s wedding.
At the time, however, my family outside of my mom and siblings did not get a basket. Before football and then before football became a full-time job, I used to spend summers in New York with my grandpa, the original owner of the St. John’s jacket. All of his children and grandchildren – my aunts and uncles and cousins – saw my seasonal visits as a reason to gather again after a difficult and strained period following a few deaths. We had wonderful parties on Pop’s deck in Breezy Point, where they showered me with all the love and presents they could not give throughout the year, when I was home in Florida. Pop would take me fishing, too, on the dock at the Jamaica Bay. One of his old man friends would yell, “Ladies and gentleman, the Champion Caster is on the dock!” because my greatest talent in fishing was soar so far that it landed way out where the sea meets the sky. After fishing, we would stop at Country Heart Cooking, a little breakfast diner slash bin candy store, and pop would let me get a soda and a few big Swedish fish from the bin.
Then, all of that stopped. I could no longer give my summers away. Instead of spending weeks together every year, returning small doses of the son he lost and the dad I lost, he and I were left to wonder about one another from afar. We did try to color that wonder with phone calls, but after his tracheotomy, the calls fell flat. It was too difficult to decipher his buzzer voice over the phone, and I think he grew frustrated or sad having to repeat himself. The calls downgraded to a quick weather check and a few nervous grumbles, and then eventually, they phased out completely. A year or so after that, he died, just before the end of my freshman year of high school.
Part 6
I suppose that for me, quitting football did not just mean leaving behind an identity of routines and friendships and values. It meant coming to terms with the realities of the sacrifices I made along the way, the moments where football edged out this or that. Family, in particular my relationship with Pop, is certainly one of them. The physical toll is another. With the help of my therapist, I am working to understand that while football may take a toll on my body long-term, I am still a healthy, capable twenty-eight year-old, and I should not let scary prospects prevent me from living happily. The sport’s toxicity is yet another. So often, football rides in the holster next to unappealing cast of neighbors like religious extremism, toxic masculinity, and exploitation, to name a few. There has been plenty to unlearn and learn, and I credit the space I found after quitting with putting me on what I believe is a better track.
But despite the time, despite the space, despite the disgust and periods of self-redefinition, the truth is there is so much that I look back on fondly. Football is synonymous with my childhood, and while it does not own my memories, it is present for just about all of them.
Raspy-voiced coaches with vocal cords I imagined to be scabbed and bleeding.
MRSA- scented practice pants that had not seen a washing machine for weeks.
Long car rides in Pop Warner.
Longer bus rides in high school, and then never-ending bus rides in college.
Pre-game meals where I was too nervous to eat but somehow shoveled in a pound of pasta and garlic knots.
Week-long butterflies leading up to a game.
Nervous rocking, back-and-forth, on the sideline to the tune of the National Anthem.
Waking up on Saturday mornings in Evan’s guest bedroom in the most comfortable bed I had ever
felt and across the room from a Raggedy Anne doll.
Pep rallies during homecoming where younger students in the affiliated schools would wear jerseys and hyperextend their shoulders reaching for high fives from us as we walked proudly through the pomp.
The coach who gave me a few pairs of his own soccer cleats because he could tell we were too poor to buy the cleats everyone else had.
The cleats Evan’s mom bought me my senior year of high school that were our specific school colors, so much so that when they followed me to college because we were, again, too poor to buy a new pair, I colored the powder blue toe box with a black Sharpie before each game while my own teammates gave me pitiful stares on the sideline.
It is these memories, and many more too dull to tell, that drive my nostalgia. I can close my eyes (but I do not need to) and put myself there, or there, or there, and wherever I land may be accurate or it may be mostly misremembered, but what matters more to me is that it is a place where I want to be. These memories are some of the mental terrain I want to explore again and again.
Or, maybe my nostalgia is not for a different time or place, but rather for a different self, a freer self, one who still believes he can do a dangerous thing and be celebrated for it. Whatever it is that is worth remembering, that is worth honoring with the gift of thought, it knocks on my door daily trying to sell me more affection. These days, I know I can refuse it. But sometimes I do choose to buy just a little more.