Stronger in the Broken Places

You watch the NFL and you start to make silent compacts with your own sense of morality.  You tell yourself it’s okay that dudes get crippled and end up finger-painting in a home while nurses spoon feed them apple sauce and they coo like babies at age 48 because they make millions of dollars and blah, blah, blah . . .

I’ve written about this before and I’m not much interested in analyzing those little shell games we play with ourselves to keep from vomiting into a bucket at the realization that we’re little more than assholes in togas sitting in the stands at the Coliseum giving the thumbs down gesture while Ray Lewis or whoever screams “Are you not entertained?” and then does that stupid bird dance before cutting a dude’s head off at midfield.  What I’m interested in talking about is the weird way those mental gymnastics have contorted our own sense of appreciation for what these dudes go through physically on a day to day basis.  I’m not talking the sort of life-altering mashed potato brain injuries that are all the rage these days.  I’m talking the subtle deterioration of the physical shell itself.  Because for as much as we’ve learned to mourn at the altar of brain injuries and appropriately tear our hair and beat our breasts for the lost brains of a generation of young men, we have become if anything even harder and more savage and demanding when it comes to other sorts of injuries.

I’m thinking particularly of Louis Delmas.  We all love Louis – or at least the idea of Louis – but the lack of actual Louis other than as a perpetually injured avatar for What Could Be But What Isn’t has driven most fans to bitter sniping.  Whether it’s blaming him for the audacity of trying to deal with his body falling apart or bitching him out because they think he’s stealing money somehow or shaking their heads in righteous indignation because he dares to get frustrated when he doesn’t have the answers to the same questions every reporter has been asking him seemingly since some hydrogen atoms fucked around and formed the sun, fans are all over his ass morning, noon and night.

This sucks because, trust me, no one is more pissed or frustrated by this sad state of affairs than Louis Delmas himself.  It’s a brutal league.  In some sense, every player knows that before they even suit up.  But for as much as we make a compact with our own sense of morality, these dudes do it a million times more.  They’re forced to live in at least some form of denial just to avoid weeping into their Cheerios every morning at the inevitability of their all too early physical destruction.  It’s not like they can just tell themselves “Hey, fuck it, I’ll die at 55 after pulling a gun in traffic because my brain doesn’t work but lol what the hell . . .”  No, they have to pretend just like we pretend and so when their bodies don’t cooperate it very likely comes as a shock to them.

And when it does, it’s got to be an impossible thing to deal with because all their lives their bodies have been the one thing that’s set them apart from everybody else.  These guys aren’t just decent athletes.  These guys are phenomenal athletes.  Their bodies are instruments of their singular will.  They have spent their entire lives telling their body what to do and then watching as the body carried out its orders.  It’s not something you can really understand unless you are athletic yourself.  And when that day comes when you keep barking out orders to your body only to have it laugh at you and say “Fuck you, buddy, I’m going home,” it’s absolutely awful.  You’ve lost not just an important part of who you are but perhaps the defining part of who you are.  Your body no longer works right and when you have spent your entire life running faster than a speeding bullet and jumping higher than the highest mountains, all while laughing and building your life around it, it’s got to be devastating.  Nobody wants to see Superman in a wheelchair, and no one less so than Superman himself.

I have at least a small bit of understanding when it comes to this issue.  I’m a pretty good athlete.  Not great, but good enough.  I’ve played lots of different sports, and been pretty good at most of them.  I understand my body’s movements, have always had excellent muscle control, and all that horseshit, and when my body is behaving itself I can kick all sorts of ass.  (While I’m bragging like a horse’s ass, I am also an excellent dancer with a terrific sense of rhythm and invented the Moonwalk when I was a baby.  Okay fine, that might be a slight exaggeration.)  I don’t say this so you’ll think I’m a jerk who enjoys blowing himself in print – although that’s probably true – but so I can set up the flipside.  You see, when I was a kid my feet and hands started to bother me and my friendly neighborhood doctor said something to the effect of “Well son, I’m afraid you have arthritis.  It’s a hereditary thing and you can probably take medication that will make you feel like shit but really, you’re fucked.  Here, have a sucker.”

Being a stupid kid, I brushed this off and figured it was just something that would catch up to me in some ambiguous future.  My body still mostly behaved and everything was cool.  Of course, I would joke with my friends that I would probably end up in a wheelchair by the time I was 30 – both because of the doctor’s grim prognosis and because I lived like an utter hedonist jackass who would run through a brick wall just because it was there – and we would all laugh because the truth was that it seemed remote and distant.  Sure, sometimes my arthritis would creep up on me and my doctor and family were always after me to take drugs to postpone the inevitable but they weren’t the sort of drugs I was interested in at the time and besides, I didn’t want that stigma, that one that hangs over your head like a big neon sign flashing the word BROKEN over and over again for all the world to see.

And so I tried to outrun it, tried to make my body behave through sheer force of will.  Today, I am just past 30 and I’m not anywhere close to being in a wheelchair.  But I also hurt every morning when I get up, my hands and feet fucking hate me pretty regularly, I have to think long and hard before I decide to do something so simple as take a long walk on the beach for fear that by morning I’ll feel like an 85 year old man and so it goes.  So it goes.  It is what it is and it’s something I have to live with, both because it was in my genetic gift basket and because I lived like a fool for way too long.  The thing is, is that no matter how much I tell myself that it’s something I simply have to live with, there are some days that it hurts so bad that I literally scream like an idiot and start trying to make deals with devils to give me my body back.  To everyone looking on, I seem fine.  I hide it pretty well, mostly because I’m vain, but there are times when I just want to tell everyone to fuck off and then separate myself from my body and slam it against a bunch of jagged rocks.

So, yeah, I get what Louis Delmas is going through – at least a little bit.  I can’t imagine how horrifying it must be to have that happen when your body is literally the one thing that gets you paid.  To know what you’re capable of, to feel it, to think it, but then for your body to fail you when you try to execute – and not just fail you because of age but fail you before your time was supposed to be up – is a horrible, horrible feeling.  I’ll never bash Louis Delmas for having to deal with all this bullshit because he spends plenty of time bashing himself.  Trust me. 

This all feels overly confessional and I’m tempted to just delete all of this nonsense because this is not something I really like to talk about, and I’ll probably never mention it again after this.  You do it and people start looking at you like you’re somehow less than what you used to be – and in a sense, you are.  Some people scoff at you and act like it’s all in your head and that if you just tried harder everything would be cool, and some people pity you and act like you’re made of glass.  Both reactions suck, and I guarantee you that some of you reading this will have your perceptions of me altered by this.  You’ll say they won’t, but they will.  They will.  They just do.  I don’t want you to think of me as some feeble cripple because I’m not.  Like I said, I can still do everything I’ve always done, it just takes a little more thought and planning now.  I seem perfectly normal and can hang with everyone on the court or on the field still, it’s just that when I need that extra gear that I always had, everything sort of malfunctions now and there are days when I just have to shrug and say “I can’t go.”  It’s a pain in the ass.  I’m still an excellent dancer though.

The point is, is that’s what Louis Delmas has to go through every day.  His body has told him to fuck off but he’s not ready to fuck off.  Inside, he still feels the same as he always did and there are moments, glorious moments, when he can run flat out and nothing will hurt and those are the best days.  But there are days when he’ll wake up and he can’t seem to do anything without a limp or without feeling like a tiny little demon is gnawing at him with teeth made of fire, hatred and swords.  When that happens, it’s impossible really come to terms with any of it, because those good days prove to you that you’ve still got it and it feels so good that even the idea of walking away from it seems ludicrous.  You’re not a broken down old man, you’re just a dude who has some bad days, and as long as there are more good than bad you can hold your breath and hope like hell that every day will be a good one.  That’s what Louis Delmas deals with.  He knows he can still go, his coaches know he can still go, and his doctors know he can still go.  They all just have to hope like hell that tomorrow will be one of those days and not one of the little demons with fire sword teeth days.

And on top of that, he knows that the moment that those days outnumber the good ones, the moment the Lions have to tell him “Sorry bro, but you’re just not reliable anymore” he not only has to eat the humiliation of that moment, the feelings of failure that come along with it and the horror that comes from knowing that you are no longer irrevocably in control of your own physical destiny, he has to try to come to terms with the fact that it also means that his career is over, his life’s work finished.  And then what?  And then what?  He gets to sit home feeling like a broken failure, haggling with the team he once called his family over worker’s comp like poor Zack Follett while fans treat him like some sort of malingerer and talk shit about him all over the internet. 

So yeah, sometimes that will make a dude a little ornery.

Nobody wants to be healthier than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to be able to run on that field and launch himself like a missile at some poor fool more than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to look a reporter in the eye more than Louis Delmas, smile and say “I feel good, bro.  I feel good.”  Trust me.