Sports

NFL players' struggles to adapt off field too often end in tragedy

At least 7 players have died violent deaths since 2010; veterans and experts say harsh transition a factor

A former Miami Dolphins medical consultant who regularly met with Junior Seau several years before his 2012 suicide points to the “significant, emotionally charged life changes that a career in football can bring.”
Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images

Seven years before the NFL All-Pro linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide, he asked to speak with the Miami Dolphins’ mental-health consultants, who had been hired by then–head coach Nick Saban. Seau was sidelined with an injured calf, but he had issues deeper and potentially more devastating than a leg injury.

Shelly Mullenix, an athletic trainer and medical consultant, met with Seau, along with a psychiatrist. The despair poured from Seau, Mullenix said, because he could not play football. He said he felt helpless standing on the sidelines and was struggling to find a role with the team while he healed.

“When I heard the news he had died and they blamed it on concussions, I knew it was more than that,” Mullenix said. “Nobody doubts the relevance of concussions, but it shouldn’t overshadow significant, emotionally charged life changes that a career in football can bring.”

The NFL has layers and layers of support for players through its player-engagement and transition-assistance programs, but Mullenix said the intensity and competitiveness of the league make it difficult for athletes to cope with those changes. It is a multibillion-dollar business, and the competitiveness and passion that are part of the essence of the NFL can also be significant hurdles.

It’s why Mullenix meets regularly with freshmen at Louisiana State University, where she is the senior associate athletic trainer and director of wellness, and works closely with a sports psychologist. Almost every player recruited by LSU has dreams of playing in the NFL, and she counsels athletes routinely about issues other than football.

Paul Oliver, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in September.
NFL Photos/Getty Images

“You can tell the ones who are going to have trouble after football, and you can tell the ones who are going to succeed,” said Mullenix, who had a two-year contract as a medical consultant with the Dolphins while Saban was the team’s head coach after having left LSU. “The ones who are going to succeed after football are going to allow themselves to be vulnerable and ask for help.”

On Sept. 24, former San Diego Chargers defensive back Paul Oliver, 29, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In the police report, his wife talked about how he was having some financial distress and a difficult adjustment to life without football.

Oliver was at least the seventh former or current NFL player to die a violent death since 2010, USA Today reported.

After the cheering stops

Twan Russell, 39, is the director of youth and community services for the Dolphins. He played in the NFL for six seasons and before that played for the University of Miami when it was a national powerhouse in college football.

He said there is an electricity to football and unplugging from it can be a challenge.

“If you have played sports all your life, not just football, when people are cheering for you, clapping for you, there is something in your body that changes when the applause goes away,” he said. “A lot of these men go through this chemical change, and it’s ‘What do I do?’ It’s like an addiction. They need to find it through something else.

“I found something through what I do now with the Dolphins. I’m probably more satisfied now than when I played. They have to find something that gives them the same passion, whether it is (being) a mortgage broker, a teacher, an accountant — something that gives them the same reaction as when they ran out of the tunnel.”

Troy Vincent, the NFL’s senior vice president of player engagement, said in a lengthy email that the league has researched the issues of identity crisis among players and based its findings on four pillars: research, education, prevention and intervention.

The NFL’s work with players starts with rookie symposiums and continues through their playing career, with each team having a player-engagement director and, post-career, access to the transition-assistance program. The NFL’s initiatives are extensive but are a challenge because of the culture of the football locker room.

That culture was on display last week when Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin, who is 6 feet 5 inches tall and 312 pounds, left the team because, he said, of racially charged bullying. Reporters in the Dolphins locker room interviewing players about the incident have found more support for the alleged offender, offensive lineman Richie Incognito, than for Martin. Teammates said Martin violated the code by going outside the locker room with his complaints about Incognito. The football locker room is a family, and the family makes the rules and crafts identities.

Marcus Stroud, who was a three-year All-Pro defensive lineman with the Jacksonville Jaguars and played for three NFL teams during an 11-year career, said it is a challenge for players to create an identity outside football while they are still playing because the game is so demanding and competitive.

Marcus Stroud, an 11-year veteran of the NFL.
Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

“It’s a fine line you have to walk, because if you’re not consumed with it, there is always someone there trying to take your job,” said Stroud, who retired in 2012. “If you are not paying as much attention to the details — and they push that into your head, it’s all about the details — if you don’t pay attention to the details, you are not going to be as good as you want to be.

“You want to eat, breathe, live football, but you have to realize it can be taken away in a blink of an eye. It’s not like a regular job, where you might get written up three times (by a supervisor) and you have to go to the boss before you get fired. In the NFL, you may have a bad game and come in the next Tuesday and your locker is cleaned out.”

He was still in high school in southern Georgia when he started forging an identity outside football. He did not want to be known as Marcus Stroud the football player. He wanted to be known simply as Marcus Stroud. Over the last 15 years, he developed a passion for fighting childhood obesity and created the Marcus Stroud Foundation.

“I looked at myself as a complete person who happens to be good at football, a player who knows how to do other things,” he said. “I always knew this thing could end at any given time and I was an injury away from not playing. I have always been comfortable being Marcus Stroud and not Marcus Stroud the football player.

“I loved playing football, but I had other passions, and you have to have other things to do so you will not be consumed by your football career.”

Stroud recently received his degree from George Washington University with the help of the NFL.

Money as a complication

When a player struggles to transition to real life after his career, money invariably enters the equation.

Travis Daniels sat down next to a teammate at the start of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2011 training camp and listened to the man’s despair. His teammate was making $500,000 a year in the NFL, divided into weekly paychecks of approximately $31,000, but he was burning through his money and could not stop.

“Man, I’m down to my last $30,000,” Daniels said the player told him.

Daniels, a cornerback who retired in 2012, was astonished, but he knew it was a true and familiar story. From his experience in the NFL, Daniels estimates that 7 in 10 NFL players struggle financially, which makes their transition to life after football more difficult. Even with the NFL’s programs, he is concerned for his NFL brethren because of what they will encounter when their careers end.

“A lot of trouble after football is financial and not getting prepared for life,” said Daniels, 31. “Some of them get degrees that do not help them get jobs, or they want to live the life of Puff Daddy. I live near South Beach in Miami and see all the yachts and multimillion-dollar homes, and I try and point out to my friends, ‘Those people with that stuff didn’t get it playing sports. They got it through business and investing wisely.’”

He said that after he retired from the NFL, he did not have the financial pressure of having to take a job. He invested his money and can do creative things, including photography. He also invested in his post-NFL career by earning his degree while he was still playing.

But that was a risk, he said, and he did not use the NFL’s education-assistance program to pay for online courses for fear of repercussions. He paid for the college work himself.

“I could have gotten some help through the program,” Daniels said. “But coaches want your mind to be dedicated to football and only football and nothing else. I didn’t want to go to the NFL and have assistance because then everybody knows what I’m doing.”

“You have a bad day at practice and that coach is saying, ‘It’s all these classes he is taking.’”

Getting prepared

Jessica Leonard, a graduate student at West Virginia University who is doing research for a Ph.D. in counseling psychology, said the end of a career in sports is viewed as a retirement and a loss.

“The research has shown that the higher your athletic identity is, the lower your career maturity is,” Leonard said. “You are stuck in this identity foreclosure for anything outside your sport. You are stuck. You’re not even looking around for a career because you love your sport too much and (are) working on it constantly.”

That culture of football takes root in high school and college, not the NFL, said Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

“Too often in elite athletes, academic preparation was minimal,” he said. “Too many schools just kept them eligible, and they leave without real skills, or they received a degree without substance. So little is expected of them academically, even going back to when they were in high school.

“To some degree, the athlete has to take responsibility for transitioning out of football, but if everybody around them, including family and friends, is pushing them to be a great NFL star, that’s what they believe their reality is. Everybody, including the people who love them, is pushing them into being a star. Transitioning can be difficult.”

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