“Look! Over there! That was my first apartment when I moved here to play for the Broncos.”
My son could not have cared less about the “playing for the Broncos” part. “Were you on the top floor?” he asked.
“Almost," I said, which was not really a lie. We drove on, along the same route I had driven every morning in the brand-new Denali I bought my first week on the practice squad, in September of 2003—in hindsight, a foolhardy purchase. The average NFL career is just over three years. We soon passed a community of single-family homes, one of which I had moved into next, in my fourth season. Why stop at only one foolhardy purchase?
“There, that’s the one I lived in," I said. You really have to know where to look to see it through the trees, but my boy wasn’t concerned with trying. He was holding a few of his favorite monster trucks—Soldier Fortune and Bakugan Dragonoid—and was running them over a track on his lap.
I looked up toward the back of my old house, seeing a collection of strange items on my old patio. “Do you wish we lived here instead?” I asked him, ridiculously—trying to get him engaged with my old life by connecting it with his own.
“No," he said, and then, sensing my desperation: “Maybe both?”
“Yeah, maybe both,” I said, and we continued on to our destination for the day: the Broncos’ facility, now called "Broncos Park powered by CommonSpirit." It was a few weeks ago, the middle of training camp, and team alumni were invited to come watch practice. The kid in the back with the monster trucks was my plus-one.
Ever since taking ownership of the team three years ago, the Walton-Penner group, of Walmart fame, has made a concerted effort to reach the Broncos alumni, and that isn’t easy. Former NFL players are good at disappearing. But the owners are making inroads. They’ve only been in charge for a few years, but they’re the richest owners in the league, and they've acted like it. They saw that the stadium needed some work, so they threw a couple hundred million at it. They saw that youth football participation in Colorado had been waning, so they started a program that outfits 277 high schools with state-of-the-art helmets. They saw that the practice facility needed an upgrade, so they’re building a new one. And they saw that the alumni were scattered and disconnected, so they’re reaching out and pulling us back into the fold. Today is the first time I’m bringing my son to any of it. He’s 5 and a half now. I guess it’s time.
He’s a fast, aggressive kid. He loves to wrestle and jump off of things. He gets bumps and bruises and doesn’t remember how. He shrugs off falls and never seems to get tired. When we play a game called “You Can’t Knock Me Over," where I get on my knees and repeat the phrase in a sing-song taunt, while he gets a full head of steam and tries to—you guessed it—knock me over, he runs through the tackle in a way that would excite any football coach. The only thing that makes him skittish is if you put shampoo in his hair. In short, he’s a football player, and yet, he’s shown almost no interest in the game, other than curiosity, when he sees a yellow penalty flag, about who's getting "in trouble."
Not like he doesn’t know I played for the Broncos. I have a few helmets around the house, a few pictures. He knows. Every Sunday, Daddy watches some football. When there’s a Broncos home game, Daddy’s gone all day, carrying out his duties as the NFL’s Uniform Inspector. It’s a job I used to scoff at as a player, and that you are free to scoff at me for it. And that’s fine, laugh all you want, but those socks don’t stay up unless someone reminds the players to pull them up, understand? You need me on that wall!
That drive from my old house to the facility takes under five minutes, which is the main reason I bought it. That, and the view. I loved that house. It held me in its arms for many years, but eventually—and I’m talking long after the playing stopped—I needed to get out. It was the graveyard of my football journey, each corner, each step, alive with the memories of a different life, one I lived alone, and one that took its toll on me. My wife didn’t know me back then. We met in California, after I was fully entrenched in the next phase of my life as a thinker/typer guy. I took her to Denver as we were falling in love, and showed her that graveyard of mine. She walked through it like she was in a museum. When we were watching TV that night, she stuck her hand between the couch cushions and pulled up a fake fingernail. I knew I had to make a choice: Try to bring her into my old life, or start a new one together.
I sold the house and moved to California to start that new life, not thinking I’d be turning around three years later. You see, a decade on from wearing a helmet, I no longer smelled like a football player. I no longer had the juice. People didn’t say yes to my ideas any more. Meetings led nowhere. Emails went unanswered, and then COVID hit and LA turned into a nightmare.
“You’re so much more than a football player,” my mom would tell me, and yet my options seemed to indicate otherwise. I couldn’t get anything going. Then came an opportunity for another job I used to laugh at as a player: sports talk radio guy. But there I was, with a wife and a kid now, and my football money had run out. As much as I wanted a new life, the old one was dangling a carrot, and I was starving. I convinced my wife to give it a go, and we packed up that same old Denali and headed back over the Rocky Mountains to start my new job as a super enthusiastic sports talk radio host.
So far, the radio thing hasn’t really panned out. Sure, I have opinions, but I’m not really a sports fan. I don’t watch games every night. I don’t have DraftKings on my phone. I don’t listen to Pat McAfee. I don’t say “Sundays are for the boys.” I remember telling my brother that I would never get into sports media because the last thing I want to do is talk about other people playing sports. I just like to play them myself. I don’t have hot takes. Not even warm, really. My mom says I’m good, though. She likes the way I explain things. The Program Director who hired me did not.
“Yeah, Nate,” he’d say after I talked about some Broncos loss or other. “But whose fault was it?”
“It’s not that simple.” I’d insist.
“It should be. This is radio. We need to point the finger.” He’d say this while standing in his office doorway in an oversized jersey, holding up a finger that he, apparently, wanted me to point. Behind him in his office, Star Wars posters were visible on the wall, bobblehead dolls and action figures filling his otherwise empty bookcase. He had a beard but was a child, and a Broncos fan his whole life, and now, after some fortuitous departures, found himself at the helm of one of Denver’s most venerable radio stations.
“That 2005 team you were on, Nate, is low-key my favorite Broncos team ever. I was so invested in that team. And you were single during that time? Oh I can’t imagine how many stories you have, Nate.” And his eyes would twinkle.
He might have enjoyed having me around, but when the big job opened up on the drive-time show, I wasn’t just passed over—I was fired.
Still, my son got to hear me on the radio for a few years. Now when we get in the car and the radio is on, he asks, “Are these your friends?”
“Yes," I say, “these are my friends,” because the truth is more complicated than he needs to hear.
My palms were sweating as we walked past the check-in desk at the Broncos’ facility, behind the Field House and alongside the turf field towards the big, covered stands set up for camp, overlooking the two grass fields where we used to get dirty. That memory never really leaves you. The nervousness, either.
Football practice is very intense, but for someone observing, it can be boring as hell, especially the first hour. A bunch of dudes standing around, listening to coaches, stretching, doing little drills, installing plays at half speed, working on obscure technical stuff. The team is split up on two fields. There's a water break, and a field-goal period. Sporadic rap music is playing, and it is 96 degrees out. Not the most exciting spectacle.
Still, with a guide like me, I knew my son would find it all fascinating. It was in his blood. He’d have a genetic memory of the sweat and tears that fertilized this very grass. I was sure he was finally ready to fall in love with this beautiful game, just like I had. I was so excited for him. But as we got situated and I introduced him to people and pointed out things around us, I realized that something else was happening. Here we were with a front-row seat to the operation of the most popular sport in America, the hottest ticket in town, and some of the best athletes known to humankind, and my kid just wanted to drink his Gatorade and eat his cookie.
His interest piqued briefly when the defensive linemen jogged over in front of us and started going through drills, activating the confusing pieces of machinery lying around. There was a row of three large padded scarecrows fixed to a sled, blocking dummies on powerful hinges that take great force to collapse—BANG!—then snap back when released. Lots of bangs. Lots of power. Raw and explosive. Impressively dynamic. “Why are they doing that, Dada?”
It was a good question, one I had a hard time answering to his satisfaction. I faced similar difficulty with his next several queries, too, until he lost interest altogether and started asking when we were leaving. We had been there maybe 15 minutes.
No, this was not the football I fell in love with as a kid in the ‘80s, watching the 49ers play. If one is to really fall in love with the game, I thought, enough so you would actually lay your body on the line for it, then it wouldn’t be like this, from the inside out, learning first about the technical esoterica and multi-form positional specificity. It would have to be from the outside in, mesmerized first by the ball in flight. The throw and the catch. Running like the wind and chasing that shooting star through the sky—thud—it lands in your open hands as you streak down the asphalt in the fading daylight. That’s how you get connected to the football gods, not by determining the rotational coverage based on the weak side linebacker’s alignment.
If my son has any chance of falling for football itself, and not the pageantry and pedantry around it, then we’d better get the fuck out of here.
Whether or not he is cut out for the violence of the game, or whether his mother will even let him play a sport this brutal, or if our concerns about long-term brain health prove overwhelming—all of these conversations are relevant. I may have met my wife after my football career was over, but we share a mailbox now. She sees the letters about the Concussion Settlement and the NFL’s cognitive impairment benefits. She’s been to the seminars and the meetings. She’s seen the old players limping around. And she’s read my books. Together, they don’t paint the prettiest picture. And yet, although there are a lot of guys in real bad shape out there, I’m not one of them. I mean, I didn’t come out unscathed. I live with pain every day, but it’s manageable. The only thing I can’t tolerate is when someone tries to put shampoo in my hair.
When people ask us if he’ll play football, she instinctively shakes her head no, while I shrug my shoulders maybe. But if he isn’t interested in the game in the first place, then it won’t matter. And if we watch any more of the sausage being made, he won’t have any interest in sausage. It’s not like I want him to like sausage, per se. I just don’t want him to hate it before he tries it.
Two cheerleaders in full game-day costume came up to us and said hi. My son got excited for a moment, but ultimately just held onto my leg; their makeup and very white teeth frightened him. When they asked him who his favorite player was, he thought for a second, and, not knowing any of the players out there on the field, pointed to the only Broncos player he knows—his father. I’m his hero, not because I played for the Broncos, but because I’m his dad.
Out on the field, practice was starting to pick up, but gone was the ubiquitous head-cracking symphony that I remember from training-camp collisions. The players all wear Guardian Caps at practice now. They take them off for games, of course, otherwise the guys on the sidelines with those big parabolic microphones aimed at the action would have nothing to do. The crack of the helmets are like church bells for the gridiron’s Sunday service.
“Dada, I wanna weave,” he said again.
We stood up, snuck back to the truck, and hit the road, passing that old house with the new stuff on the patio and the happy family inside, past that big brick building with that apartment not quite on the top floor.
I got him back to his own summer camp in time for lunch. He put Soldier Fortune and Bakugan Dragonoid in his backpack to share with his friends. Before we got out of the truck, he put on the orange Broncos hat that had been in the swag bag, and he still had the Broncos lanyard around his neck. Well, that’s something, I thought. Maybe it made an impression on him after all. But when I picked him up a few hours later, both were gone, from his person and his memory. As we walked out, a counselor called, “Max, your hat!” and held up a mangled, dirt-covered orange Broncos baseball cap. I grabbed it from her and dusted it off while he ran up ahead.
That night before bed, I asked him to choose a book. He thought about it for a second, and, again sensing my desperation in that way that kids can, grabbed My First Book Of Football.
“This one,” he said, handing it to me.
“Really?”
“Yeah! Because you love football, right, Daddy?”
“Yeah, son, I love football. But that doesn’t mean you have to.”
After I read to him from the book, basically a football instruction manual for dummies that flatly explains the basic rules of the game—not at all a worthy bedtime story—he put it back on the shelf, and drifted off to sleep.
As I sat listening to his deep breathing, I knew I had another choice to make. Well, it’s always the same choice, isn’t it? It just keeps repeating.
I stood up, tucked him in, and on the way out of his room, grabbed that football book and made it disappear. There are better ways to fall in love.
