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NY Times, Oct. 27, 2019
A Player With Shoulder Pain, and a League Happy to Turn Its Back
By Michael Powell
The Jets are their usual dispiriting mess on the field, but in the
executive suites their leaders sound testosterone-infused, insisting
that their players manifest the manly virtues of playing through pain.
Of late the Jets confronted the challenge posed by Kelechi Osemele, a
6-foot-5, 300-plus-pound offensive lineman who has the accumulated scars
of an eight-year-long N.F.L. life. He’s had sprained and twisted toes,
knees and ankles, and his back can creak like an old wooden door.
Sometime in the past year, perhaps in August and perhaps earlier, he
tore the labrum in his right shoulder. A magnetic resonance imaging
exam, he said, showed the muscle had torn clear off the shoulder bone.
The Jets shrugged. Be a manly man, they told this two-time Pro Bowl
selection. He took Toradol, a brand name version of the painkiller
ketorolac, and it was suggested that he consider a cortisone shot or
two. As cortisone is known to weaken cartilage and mask pain, doctors
often recommend against it. Osemele passed.
On Friday, Osemele ignored the Jets’ advice and had surgery. On
Saturday, the Jets doubled down on their foolishness and released him.
Osemele, who spoke with my colleague Danielle Allentuck and other
reporters this week about his frustrations with the Jets, said his no
mas moment arrived in early October. The shoulder throbbed and he was
playing against fellow 300-pound men who bench-press 500 pounds. He told
the coaches he could not practice, much less play.
Insisting he just tough it out, the Jets began to dock him a game check
of $580,000 per week, the maximum penalty for the crime of sitting out.
Coach Adam Gase acknowledged that he hadn’t bothered to talk with
Osemele about the situation.
So a $15 billion industry flogs another of its players like a worn-down
donkey. Osemele, to his credit, sought another opinion, and then
another. The most recent doctor recommended surgery, and Osemele went
under the knife on Friday, when, his agent said, surgeons found more
extensive damage than expected. In consultation with the N.F.L. Players
Association, Osemele’s representatives may take legal action against the
team’s doctors.
The Jets were not amused; after initially saying that they would dock
Osemele the remainder of his salary for the season, they instead cut him.
There’s so much that is revealing here about the heart of our culture’s
most popular and brutal sport. The owners of the N.F.L.’s 32 teams are
fine socialists among themselves, splitting the gilt disgorged by
television and digital contracts, ticket and jersey sales and, soon,
gambling, lovely gambling. They work cooperatively to shake down cities
to build stadiums.
But when it comes to their players, they become wonderfully 19th-century
capitalists. A majority of football players work on nonguaranteed
contracts, which is to say that when your local team says it has signed
a player to a sweet deal, it pays to read the fine print. Very often
that same player can be released if his performance falls off, or if a
few too many sprains and blasts to the head slow him down. (Contracts in
Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. usually come fully guaranteed,
which explains why Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson can afford to most
likely sit out the full season that is needed to rehabilitate a ruptured
Achilles’ tendon (Durant) and a torn knee ligament (Thompson).
The N.F.L. Players Association, though, is a weak vessel taking on
water, and for years its contract with the league did not allow players
to seek a second opinion. The sport was a company town, and the team
doctor’s word was law. More recently, the union secured for players the
right to seek second and third opinions. But that contract still did not
let players act on those opinions.
Robert W. Turner II comes to this discussion from multiple directions.
He is a former professional football player, an assistant professor at
the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Science and
the author of “Not For Long: The Life and Career of the NFL Athlete.”
“The players have gotten a modicum of control, but it’s not enough,”
Turner told me. “The players are starting to challenge the team doctors,
and that’s great. But if the player and the team cannot agree, the
player has to risk his salary to take medical action.
“Culturally, the owners have always looked upon players as commodities.”
The medical ethics are no less disheartening. Team doctors are paid by
the team, and historically too many medical professionals have ridden
rhetorical shotgun for the owners, backing up the deadly refusal to
acknowledge the effects of concussive and sub-concussive hits on
players’ brains.
“I’m glad that a professional athlete is sane enough and taking control
of their autonomy that all of us are entitled to,” said Stephen Casper
of Clarkson University, a historian of science and sport.
Players have little reason to trust teams. Osemele spoke of living with
the sensation that his body was breaking down, one injury piled atop
another.
“I’m 30 years old. Let’s be realistic about this: I’m in a lot of pain,”
he said this week. “My pain tolerance probably isn’t the same that it
used to be.”
That may be just as well. Sucking it up for the team may be dangerous to
your health. I went to websites and looked at the side effects of
Toradol. The National Institutes of Health said it “should not be used
for longer than five days, for mild pain, or for pain from chronic
(long-term) conditions” and that it “increases the risk that you will
experience severe or uncontrolled bleeding.”
It’s worth noting that Osemele would have had to rely on this drug to
get through the season, which has two months to run. As he lies in a
surgical unit, released by the team which questioned his mettle, Osemele
can take comfort in knowing he put his health over the macho arrogance
of team management.
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