Medicine Is Always Poison to Something

This has been one of those weeks where I’m convinced I’m the only person who knows the world is round, which I understand is frustrating for the rest of you, but please try and comprehend how frustrating it is on my end. This is my perspective after a heated debate with a close friend over whether or not it is ridiculous that Braylon Edwards, a 27 year old former Pro Bowler whose stats have been achieved with limited quarterbacks or conservative offenses, was a significantly less sought after free agent than Mike Sims-Walker, a thoroughly mediocre wide receiver whose best season (which was two years ago) wasn’t as good as Edwards’s last year as a second target in a conservative Jets offense. Actually, the debate was whether or not the 49ers had essentially stolen Edwards for a $1 million base salary and no guaranteed money, which would slant the debate even further in my favor (I was decidedly pro-Braylon…surprising, I know). Still, I couldn’t make any headway with my friend. Not only did the 49ers not get a very good player at a bargain, the move was, in fact, a negative move, one that wasn’t “worth the risk.” This was my breaking point, beyond which nothing made sense. What could the “risk” of adding a 6’3” speedster who has steadily improved despite the offenses he has been in over the last three years be? Are we supposed to be afraid that Braylon Edwards will drunkenly plow an Escalade through the locker room? Because otherwise, I’m not sure how his "issues" have anything to do with the measurable fact that he is a good, potentially very good wide receiver, young enough to improve and available cheaper than Donte Stallworth, who drove drunk with significantly more serious consequences. You know, stuff that actually matters to whether a football team wins or loses.

All of this would appear to come back to our failure to accept that as much as we hate the idea of wide receivers being “divas”, our misogynist and negative term for anybody who is acutely aware of their own unique specialness, it’s practically ridiculous to think that anybody naturally gifted to be great at the position would NOT have this attitude. Consider the facts: the world moves in slow motion relative to your capabilities, you can likely dunk a basketball, and you are most likely taller than most people around you, and this is before taking into account the sort of body control and hand-eye coordination it takes to be great at the position. And somehow we get upset when players like Edwards bristle at not being appreciated as being special.

You’re damn right they do. And it doesn’t extend only to players whos e circumstances prevent their gifts from translating to success (though while we’re here: I see you Matt Jones). Randy Moss, one of the five best players to ever play the position, may not get into the Hall of Fame on his first try because he was a difficult person to work with. Leaving aside what this even means for a player whose only true “down years” took place in the hell hole that was Raiders football, in what fair world does professional worth become intermingled with “…and we don’t like you very much”? A world in which we’re seriously considering Mike Sims-Walker to be a suitable substitute for Braylon Edwards is not only one in which football is dragged back to 1950, but also one in which we’re all so much more boring because of how careful we all need to be about every damn thing we do. Is sports are escapism from the boredom of our real lives, why are we as fans settling for boredom in the way front offices put our favorite teams together

All of this is to say that I don’t understand how the league let Braylon Edwards slip into the ether of “headaches” the way they did Terrell Owens, an even better receiver who also can’t find work after a 983 yards, 9 TD season. A life lived in fear of what might happen if things go wrong isn’t really worth living. It certainly isn’t worthwhile when we’re talking about a place that should be better than real life, the fantasy world that is sports. And yet here we are, obeying the mantra of Bill Parcells and the Rooney family (who still manage to populate the world’s least publicized unlikable roster) that there is a right way to be great, as if being great wasn’t enough.

Survival of the Fittest

Kerry Collins never made you feel quite comfortable enough for your liking as a sports fan. Certainly, he was built in every “safe” way an NFL quarterback can be built. Standing 6’5” and built with a cannon that had been groomed under one of the sacred cows of college football, Collins burst into the NFL after a single season of dominance at Penn State, taken with the fifth overall pick by the expansion Carolina Panthers. In two years, he led the Panthers to the NFC championship game on the strength of his stellar performance. In three years, his battle with alcoholism thrust him into public shame after an ugly racial joke made in a drunken state resulted in Collins being branded as a racist. In four years, he was benched and cut from the team after telling his coach that his heart wasn’t in the game anymore. After spiraling to the bottom of the castaway barrel in New Orleans, a drunk driving arrest should have been the end of a whirlwind career standing as a lesson in just how fragile everything around us is, and how we are often the engineers of destroying it all in a matter of moments.

That’s a good lesson, and an important one, but it’s less rare than what Collins wound up demonstrating. The next four years were, quite frankly, remarkable even before considering the success Collins achieved on the field. After the Giants took a flyer on Collins in 1999, Collins committed to spending the next four years in therapy. This would be admirable in the everyday working world; in the rigid psychological world of the NFL, where the admission of need or weakness is tantamount to admitting you are Not a Winner (“Not A Winner” is a trademarked property of the NFL media), it’s amazing. Over that time, Collins took the Giants to a Super Bowl, losing to the Ravens after an NFC Championship performance that showed Collins could demolish teams with his talents if given the chance. After a stint in Oakland, Collins drifted to Tennessee, where he once again seized an opportunity to lead that resulted in the Titans having the best record in the league. Over the last decade of Collins’s career, he climbed back to the peak of the NFL by believing that his personal demons and difficult circumstances couldn’t change who he was fundamentally: an unquestionably talented quarterback with a record that proved his ability.

I think we misunderstand how unbelievably difficult that must have been. Too often we look at the second or third chances a person is given and imagine that there is no real net gain for the individual involved, as if they simply return to a place they should have already been and deserve no credit for it. This is based on the fallacy that there are objective, static measurements for the success of a life. The reality, however, is that we make people into neat stories as quickly as possible, and in most cases people just accept them, or at least accept that this is how others will see them. In continuing to exist on his own terms, let alone succeed in the NFL, Kerry Collins earned our admiration. Quitter? Unquestionably defeated by a career of success with three different teams over 14 years. Racist? While there is no definite answer as to how Collins actually feels (the real danger of a label such as this), the idea that Collins would have 14 years of successful, positive relationships in a predominantly black league on five teams’ worth of players makes the accusation rings false. With each passing year, he buried the labels prematurely placed upon him instead of letting them bury him.

We don’t appreciate Collins because his career, despite its various peaks, isn’t marked by any fundamental changes in Collins’s style as a player. Throughout his career, he remained the same prototypical old school quarterback, changing only in terms of usage, not gameplay. Instead, what changed was Collins’s life off of the field. The four years of therapy stand out in particular as an example of a man who knew he needed to change how he approached life if he was going to be who he was at his core with any success. He recognized that if he just learned to survive long enough, his talent would win out, and so he set about the business of survival even when he was young enough that everyone could have expected him to try and change who he was as a player. In short, Collins proved that there is a value to just figuring out how to hang around long enough to be ready for the opportunities given to you. So while we may never look back on Collins’s career and think of any one shining moment of brilliance, there is a comforting glow that surrounds his entire body of work. It is the sense of a job well done, and one that should encourage all of us that if we just keep moving, figuring out what we need as people to remain who we are as professionals, becoming warriors of the mind, victory is never as impossible as it may seem.