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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October 27, 2019 at 05:23AM
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A Player With Shoulder Pain, and a League Happy to Turn Its Back - The New York Times
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