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Their financial interests, their rooting interests or both welcome to the real life of an nfl player. Welcome to the pain, the stress, the heartache, welcome to the hours spent trying to mend a broken body to the point that it can keep running into that garage door. Welcome to the challenges of realizing your peak earning potential well before your 25th birthday and the demands from family and friends who believe that the fountain of cash will last forever, or at least a lot longer than it actually will welcome to life as a candle that Burns quickly and has an unknown supply of wax one year, two years, three, four five, maybe and only a handful can stretch it out much longer than that and every year there’s a new crop of players younger, cheaper, healthier, fresher, they’re coming to take. What’S yours, eventually, one of them will until that happens, you get to worry about the inevitability of it along the way. Everyone is watching everything you do.

 The reward for success is a life led in public, with constant requests for photos and autographs and tickets and phone calls. It sounds great at first, but it gets old quickly very quickly, there’s a story that has made the rounds for years in league circles that a female fan once approached hall of fame defensive, tackle warren sapp. While he was eating dinner and said, i hate to bother you, but can i get your autograph sapp pushed his chair back as the legend goes glared at the woman and pointed at his meal? Do you see any peas on my plate? Sap said the woman confused by the question looked at the plate.

 No, she said, do you know why there’s no peas on my plate, sap said i don’t know she replied because i hate peas, sap exclaimed. So if you hate to bother me, why are you bothering me and that’s just a sliver of life as an nfl player for nearly every player who makes it there? It’S the realization of a lifelong dream that dream in many ways can quickly become a nightmare, especially after the players retire to face decades of worry about potential physical and cognitive problems that they’d never even have thought about if their boyhood wishes had been different. If their circumstances and natural gifts had led them to become chemists or doctors, or even pro athletes in a far less grueling game, although success in any professional sport will invite many of the issues that nfl players confront. Few exact, a physical toll so extreme that some must wonder whether it was all worth it most will say.

 It was because what else can they say deep down? However, many of the men who emerge from a career in the nfl with mangled joints and scarred flesh and empty bank accounts and fingers that point in every direction other than the proper one and memories that, if they’re, lucky mix, good and bad almost equally know that The reality simply didn’t live up to the dream, so remember, all of this, the next time you’re inclined to heckle an nfl player or to tweet insults or threats at him or to otherwise mock or deride his performances most. If not all nfl players are doing the best they can with the talents they have while facing the most talented football players in the world. For many players, the will required to handle the hatred and abuse without becoming jaded or cynical reflects a much rarer quality than the skill needed to make it to the highest levels of the game and be grateful that the lack of supreme physical abilities saved you from The realities of a life playing football in all probability, it’s not the life you think it is. This book covers a wide variety of topics about life in the nfl, or at least what it’s been about for the past 20 years.

 Although the players are the game and the game is the players, the game is much more than that. The game is a multi-billion dollar business that continues to thrive in many respects because of itself, and in many more despite itself the nfl loves to say football is family, football isn’t family, football is business and it’s good for business.

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