About A Few Seconds of Panic

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In the summer of 1963, three months after I was born, the writer George Plimpton embedded with the Detroit Lions as a “last-string quarterback” in training camp. The book that resulted, Paper Lion, was a landmark of sports journalism and participatory journalism. Plimpton took readers someplace they’d never been: inside the NFL, which had just landed its first TV contract and was growing in appeal. In the forty-plus years since, an insatiable PR and media machine has escorted fans inside huddles and locker rooms. But we rarely seem to go inside the minds of the people inside the NFL. I wanted to do that, but I knew I couldn’t as just a reporter; the wall between athletes and writers is just too great. So in the winter of 2005, I decided to try a modern Plimpton, not as a quarterback—I’m way too small and they’re way too big—but as one of the least understood, least heralded, and most important players on a football team, the placekicker.

I didn’t want to just show up and kick, though, “to see how one got along and what happened,” as Plimpton put it. So I hired a no-excuses personal trainer to whip me into shape and enlisted a Rocky-loving kicking coach to undo years of soccer mechanics teach me how to kick a football, far. But team after team—around twenty of the NFL’s thirty-two franchises—rejected my entreaties. The common reason was one that helps form the image of today’s NFL as a closed society: A reporter in the locker room would be a distraction, I heard time and again over the course of a year, and distractions are to be avoided at all costs.

One owner believed differently. Pat Bowlen of the Denver Broncos thought my background as a sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal might insulate me from the normal suspicions players harbor toward reporters. Bowlen’s two-time Super-Bowl-winning head coach, Mike Shanahan, liked that I wanted to play and not just observe; he recognized that was the only way I could gain the players’ trust. So at the end of May 2006, I joined the Broncos. I was with the team for two short camps and the three-week training-camp slog. I had my own locker and uniform—No. 9—and did what the players did: kicked, lifted weights, balmed and wrapped my sore legs, recuperated in the ice pool, attended meetings, obeyed the many rules, dressed for preseason games, tried to win the respect of my teammates on the only place that matters, on the field. And I talked, for hours, with the players, coaches, and executives who run the Broncos.

A Few Seconds of Panic tells two stories. One is the Everyman tale of a forty-something guy absurdly attempting to play professional football. I took my job as rookie kicker seriously, and if I didn’t pose a threat to the Broncos’ veteran incumbent, Jason Elam, I was determined to demonstrate that I was an athlete, too. The book’s second storyline is about how an NFL team functions, from the front office roster machinations to the locker-room anxieties, the stress, fear, paranoia, boredom, and frustration that govern the lives of the players. The two stories converge when I am summoned to kick in front of the team and more than a thousand fans in training camp and I discover what it means to play in the NFL, and why players tolerate the misery that comes with the job.

As the first writer granted passage to the NFL’s forbidden zone since Plimpton, I felt a responsibility to tell a story that couldn’t be written in the third person, that couldn’t be assembled through sources and observation. I was granted something every fan (and writer) dreams of: a chance to play with the pros. But I wanted to go beyond the fantasy-camp thrill of wearing an NFL team uniform, of running down the tunnel and onto the field before a game, to understand what shapes the culture of America’s most popular and powerful professional sports league and give voice to the people most affected by it, the players. I also wanted to bang a few 40-yard field goals and prove that, deep into middle age, I belonged in a place where logic dictated that I didn’t.