Only weeks after witnessing one of his teammates die on the football field, Billy Silva ticked off a list of his own ailments, health problems that he has shoved to the back of his mind throughout his career in an effort to remain on the field. Chipped wrist. Broken leg. Separated Shoulder. Hyperextended elbow.
He can’t even keep track of them anymore. But he’s sure of one thing: The death of Rashidi Wheeler has in no way altered his resolve to abuse his body in the name of football.
“The way we are is the way we are – we’re going to act the same, whether tragedy hits our team or not,” Silva says. “I’m 21 years old, I’ve been taught to do it one way and that’s go hard.”
The 6-foot-3, 250-pound linebacker mournfully looks down at his open palms.
“I can count the games I’ve got left on both hands,” the senior said.
So he doesn’t intend to miss a single snap, even if it means smashing into a running back with his chipped left wrist, or reliving the burning pain in his neck and down his arm from a separated shoulder sustained two years ago.
That attitude isn’t unique to Silva, or even the other seniors on the Northwestern football team. While most top-level football players swear by a play-through-pain mantra, that creed surprisingly remains on a team where that it may have claimed a life.
Despite eloquent exhortations from The Rev. Jesse Jackson and painful pleas from Wheeler’s mother, Linda Will, not much seems to have changed for the Wildcats. Not on the football field, and certainly not in the players’ minds.
“It’s an intense situation out there, and you try not to show weakness,” redshirt freshman Dan Pohlman says. “That’s the mentality of the players in the game. It’s not like anyone forces you to do it, it’s just that people play this game because they’re aggressive people.”
Wheeler collapsed on Aug. 3 while participating in coach Randy Walker’s trademark conditioning test, a grueling series of progressively shorter sprints separated by increasingly shorter recovery times. After he completed 10 100-yard sprints, eight 80s and six 60s, Wheeler couldn’t make it through the final leg of 40s.
As he went down, his teammates continued to run. Wheeler had to leave the field with what appeared at first to be merely another of the 30 or so asthma attacks he had fought through during his career at NU.
As he was being assisted off the field by head trainer Tory Aggeler, Wheeler made one of his last statements.
“No, no. I’d like to try and finish.”
Minutes later, he died.
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Two weeks after Wheeler’s death, the Cats opened preseason camp in Kenosha, Wis., by running 10 100-yard sprints. The drill wasn’t quite the same – NU Director of Athletics Rick Taylor asked Walker to put his conditioning test on hold until the university has completed an internal review of Wheeler’s death.
But the message was still driven home.
“We didn’t quit conditioning now,” Walker said. “I don’t think I let the pedal up any.”
Walker expects that fans will see the same late-game stamina out of his starters that produced fourth-quarter and overtime wins against Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin last year. And although the Cats haven’t yet faced a close game with the clock ticking down this year, Walker pointed to his team’s performance in its season-opening 37-28 win at UNLV. During that game, center Austin King played 100 snaps and running back Damien Anderson was on the field for 95, all while the mercury rose above 90 degrees.
Asked if his own mentality has changed after of Wheeler’s death, Walker said his response would be no different today if he saw a player struggling on the field.
“Honestly, I don’t know that this year has been any different – I haven’t consciously been different,” he said.
The rules haven’t changed, Walker said, and he will still defer to his medical staff if a player needs to leave the field.
“None of that is any coach’s decision, ever,” he said. “We trust our medical staff so much to make these calls.
“I don’t think we’ve ever put a kid in a position that’s unfavorable to him. I’m certain of it.”
Because of the players’ refusal to voice health concerns, the job of targeting potential problems is complicated, even for NU’s medical staff.
Lingering on the gridiron at the end of the first week in Kenosha, offensive lineman Jeff Roehl explained that he would never open his mouth. An overwhelming mix of machismo – “football takes a special breed of man” – along with the desire to play for a championship and the fear of losing a starting job have imbedded that attitude in him.
Roehl still wears a pink scar above his right hand after breaking his wrist during his senior year of high school. He heard a pop during the first preseason practice, but played out the season with a “sore” wrist. It wasn’t examined until after the season was over, and Roehl wore a cast for the next four months.
For players like Roehl, pulling himself out of a drill or off the field during a game will never be an option. In fact, the act is almost a sacrilege.
“You don’t do that,” Roehl said. “You stay on the field until they drag you off. Until you’re on the field and you can’t walk off by yourself, you stay on the field.”
While Roehl waits for his coach to pull him off and Walker defers to team trainers and doctors, everyone else on NU’s staff expects the players to call for help themselves.
“I think it’s our responsibility to keep a very close eye on our players, to know them well enough to know when something’s wrong,” defensive backs coach Pat Fitzgerald said. “But it’s our players’ responsibility to open their mouth, let us know and communicate.”
Fitzgerald then stated – as if it should be assumed – that he never took himself off the field during his own playing days at NU. He left only when a broken leg ended his 1995 season.
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Assistant strength and conditioning coach Tom Christian has been an integral part of NU’s program. He helped install a speed training regimen that has produced lower 40 times, faster footwork and a team capable of riding the non-stop, no-huddle offense to a Big Ten championship.
He’s also one of the few people who seems to understand the potential danger in Roehl, Pohlman and Silva’s attitude.
“It is a concern,” he said. “There’s more important things in life than football. I hope that players will have the right perspective and priority that football doesn’t become so important they’re willing to damage themselves for the rest of their lives.”
Christian cherishes the many experiences his own football career brought him. Although he wouldn’t change anything about his playing days, Christian is unable to run for the rest of his life because of a hip ailment similar to the one that ended Bo Jackson’s football career.
“It’s a calculated deal between benefit and cost,” Christian said. “That’s a very personal decision that athletes have to make.”
For players on the 2001 NU football team, the stakes are even higher in calculating that cost. The rigorous conditioning program – and the attitude that accompanies it – may have brought the team tragedy and an onslaught of lawyers this year. But last year it produced a conference championship.
Walker repeatedly attributed last season’s success to an improved level of conditioning. Fitzgerald, who joined NU in July, called the Cats the best-conditioned team he has encountered.
As the speed coach, Christian has worked during the last two years to implement football-specific training. Instead of having a player build up endurance by jogging around the field five times, he has developed drills that prepare for the five-second bursts of action during a game. The now-infamous conditioning test Walker brought to NU is based on that same concept.
But in developing the drills, Christian said NU doesn’t consult medical references as much as it relies on “speed gurus” around the nation.
The Cats’ improvement was immediate last year. The season’s trio of last-second victories literally made the difference between a postseason trip to San Antonio and a winter break spent with the rem
ote and a few comfy couch pillows.
So asking Roehl, Pohlman and Silva to show a little more regard for their bodies, even after Wheeler’s death, is more difficult.
Roehl demonstrated some perspective. While the preseason prognosticators were all picking NU to repeat its championship, Roehl joked about the life of silent concerns and screaming pains in training camp.
“The first thing I always say, if I had a son or could do it all over again, is that I’d either learn how to kick (a football) or pick up a golf club,” he said.
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Jeffrey Potteiger was surprised to learn about Rashidi Wheeler and the deaths of a handful of other high school, college and pro football players in August.
“If you look back, it’s unfortunate,” said Potteiger, the director of the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But generally what comes out of it are more rigorous guidelines about what kind of work the athletes are doing, what kind of practices they’re having. It’s unfortunate that it takes a tragedy to set new guidelines.”
The greater surprise, however, has been that relatively few new guidelines have emerged. At NU, Silva emphasized that he feels safer with new medical precautions, such as oxygen tanks on the sidelines. Before the start of the season, Walker said the team had also instituted an improved method of distributing water to athletes on the field.
But changes in the conditioning regimen itself have not arrived. And knowing the difference between training and over-training can be one of the hardest challenges for coaches and trainers, Potteiger said.
“That’s what coaches are paid for: knowing that fine line,” said Potteiger, who is also a fellow at the American College of Sports Medicine. “That’s part of the beauty and science of coaching – how much can you get out of an athlete without over-training him?”
An over-trained athlete becomes just about as useful to a football program as the players on crutches wearing orange jerseys. And the danger of creating such an athlete is increased on a team like NU, which is so devoted to conditioning.
The symptoms include fatigue, listlessness, and a lack of both mental and physical energy. Only problem is, those characteristics could describe just about any college athlete who knows the pain of two-a-days. Therefore, recognizing when an athlete is beginning to hurt himself can be a nearly impossible task.
That is why – if larger changes in conditioning programs aren’t implemented – it is even more important for athletes to communicate.
“We preach to these individuals all the time, if you quit you’re weak,” Potteiger said. “We need to get away from that. We need to identify what’s good about conditioning, without giving up the coach’s responsibility to train.”
Not a whole lot can be done, though, as long as players refuse to alter their code of silence.
“Unfortunately,” Potteiger said, “I don’t know if you are going to be able to change that.”
