For NFL’s Jason Taylor, Playing Through Pain Was Part Of The Game

When Jason Taylor played professional football, his name struck terror into opposing quarterbacks. Now that he’s retired, that name may soon adorn a plaque in the Hall of Fame.

For a reason why, look to seasons like the one Taylor had in 2006, when he was playing defensive end for the Miami Dolphins. He was named the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year that season, racking up 13.5 sacks, recovering two fumbles and even returning two interceptions — quite a feat for a lineman.

In that same year, though, he also played through a gruesome spate of injuries. In his own words: “A bad back and broken right forearm; tore both plantar fascias; multiple dislocations on fingers, thumbs; broken collarbone; … MCL [medial collateral ligament] sprain several times.”

He also suffered from compartment syndrome that year, a condition in which internal bleeding causes pressure to build up in one of the body’s “compartments” — either an arm or a leg, or another enclosed space in the body.

In Taylor’s case, it was his left leg. The injury led to 9 inches of nerve damage, a staph infection and 10 months of terrible pain. At one point, doctors even warned that Taylor might need surgery to remove his leg entirely. Luckily, he avoided amputation; it was still his worst injury in a 15-year NFL career.

Just one of those injuries would cause the average person to take some time off work. But Jason Taylor is not your average person. He tells NPR’s Audie Cornish how playing through such pain has become ingrained in the game of football, and how bearing it is often necessary to keep a job.

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Interview Highlights

On why it’s difficult for football players to admit when they’re hurt

Everybody’s hurt. That’s what you have to understand: Everybody’s hurt. The day you play football will be the last day you’re pain-free. It’s a physical game; you’re going to be hurt. But being injured and hurt are two different things. …

Guys will certainly be apprehensive about disclosing some injuries. Unfortunately, when you see a situation like Alex Smith, so to speak — out in San Francisco, when he was the starting quarterback. He missed a game because of a concussion. [Then-backup quarterback] Colin Kaepernick came in and played well, and that was the end of Alex Smith in San Francisco — for being out one week. It makes that 52nd guy on the roster kind of worried.

On “manning up” and playing through pain

It’s part of life. I mean, when you sign up to play a game like football, you have to deal with certain things and a certain level of being uncomfortable and a certain level of pain. …

Some guys have higher pain thresholds than others. I’ve always been a guy that has a high pain threshold and also refused to accept not trying, or losing, based on being uncomfortable or in pain. I probably have a bit of a twisted outlook on playing through things like that, but everybody’s different.

“I don’t think football is ready for [an openly gay player] just yet. In the coming decade or two, it’s going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it’s still a man’s-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room.”

— an anonymous NFL affiliate, in response to Michael Sam’s August 2013 announcement that he is gay

Hearst’s New York Journal and Advertiser, Nov. 7, 1897, describing “How Young Hasche’s Life Was Crushed Out,” “How Von Gammon Was Killed by Concussion of the Brain,” and “How Gordona Was Killed at Bayone, NJ by a Fracture of the Skull”–one of many criticisms from the press in football’s earliest years, when the sport took as many as 20 lives per year.

Hearst’s New York Journal and Advertiser, Nov. 7, 1897, describing “How Young Hasche’s Life Was Crushed Out,” “How Von Gammon Was Killed by Concussion of the Brain,” and “How Gordona Was Killed at Bayone, NJ by a Fracture of the Skull”–one of many criticisms from the press in football’s earliest years, when the sport took as many as 20 lives per year.

Artist Spotlight: Will Davis, Director

What does this play mean to you?

To me, Colossal is a play about feats of strength, what it means to perform a feat of strength and what a feat of strength looks like.  When I think of this play, I think about how we begin with this performance of a particular kind of virtuosic strength, of these boys in pads and helmets crashing at each other, dropping down to the ground and doing perfect push ups or whatever may be inside that virtuosic physical macho football language. And then at the end of this play, we have a father and son trying to find some way to come together and heal a wound between the two of them; the physical moment on stage is a father and son who hold each other, a father who helps pull his son to standing. And between those two bookends, this play touches on every other possible permutation of that idea.

Why is this play important to tell?

I think Colossal is important in a couple of different ways.  Colossal is a highly theatrical play, by which I mean it’s the kind of play that can only exist only in the theater. There are other plays that can exist in other forms, but Colossal is a play that requires a live audience. When I think about Colossal, I think about it as more of an event than a play. You’re coming to see the event that is Colossal.  So I think it’s important in that way, because it lifts up our form as theater artists and theater practitioners. It requires the dialogue between performer and audience, and it’s the kind of play that is memorable because it is on stage.

I think Colossal  is also an important play because we’re in a very particularly moment in terms of homophobia in the NFL. There’s a line that happens later in the second half of the piece where Marcus, Young Mike’s love interest, is responding to something that Young Mike says to him: “Everything’s going to be fine. You and I can maybe enter into the relationship and everything’s going to be fine”; Young Mike says to Marcus, “Things are changing,” and Marcus says back to him, “Changing ain’t change.” I think of that line of Marcus’, and I think about what we’ve just been watching through the last round of NFL draft picks and Michael Sam’s drama play out all across ESPN. I think about what it means to have just a little bit of access and transparency to the idea that there is no way that you can gather a group of people that would constitute a football team and they would all be straight. It’s just actually impossible; the math of it’s impossible.  To have just this little view in on one person’s particular drama, but to also see how that door swings shut on top of it immediately…There’s so much about the institutions of organized sports that have practiced systemic homophobia, how it’s part of how the game is played and part of the politics of everything.

I really think Colossal is an important piece because I think it’s speaking to this pivotal moment, this pivot point that we’re on culturally in terms of what it would mean for more players to be openly out and what the cost of that might be, which is what the play deals with, but also how, perhaps culturally, it might turn out it doesn’t actually matter. So I think it’s an important piece in that way, because it gives us a chance to think about what the outcome of this particular cultural moment might be.

“The Twelfth Player in Every Football Game”: Early campaigns against football violence

“The Twelfth Player in Every Football Game”: Part of a sensationalistic campaign against football violence in 1897, published in “The World.”

‘Hypermasculine’ attitude in sports may lead to aggression in teenage relationships

BY Shereen Jegtvig for Rueters Magazine, March 2014

Teenage boys who played football, basketball or both were about twice as likely as other boys to have recently abused their girlfriends in a new study from California.

Researchers say the “hypermasculine” attitudes encouraged in some sports may foster aggression off the field, but the locker room can also be a place to teach boys about healthy relationships and avoiding violence.

“We need to create a safe place for our youth to discuss healthy masculinity, healthy relationships and the idea that violence never equals strength,” said Heather McCauley, a researcher at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, who led the study.

In the U.S., women experience 2 million injuries from intimate partner violence each year, and nearly one quarter of women experience violence by a current or former spouse or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Recent research suggests that one in three youth experience physical, psychological or sexual violence in romantic relationships, McCauley and her coauthors note in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“To those who think that bloody noses, torn ears, blackened eyes, bruises or sprains, or an occasional scalp wound are mighty evils, the game must always be an objectionable one. But to those of us who believe that in the life of a boy the occurrence of injuries not severe enough to leave permanent traces is not necessarily an evil, but often even a positive good by encouraging fortitude, manliness, and high spirit, the question as to the danger of football in our colleges is only to be answered by absolute statistics.”

— J William White’s defense of college football, published in North American Review, 1894

The cover of a 1889 issue of “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper”

“Football is the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of a dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hopes of permanence” — W. Cameron Forbes, coach at Harvard, late 1800s