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You are never to be alone in a bedroom with a male.”
She snorted. “You have no say over who I have in my bedroom. If I want to invite the entire Miami Dolphins team into my bed and have a big orgy while covered in chocolate sauce, you have no say in that whatsoever.”
The brief image set fire to his blood, but he kept his temper on simmer, unwilling to let her bait him. Still, he kind of wanted to hunt down every player on the football team and turn them into stains on the Astroturf.
“My house,” he gritted out, “my rules. No chocolate NFL orgies in my keep. I think that’s a reasonable request.
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Larissa Ione (Lethal Rider (Lords of Deliverance, #3; Demonica, #8))
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Sadly, the Trump right is just as intolerant of people who vary from their narrow set of beliefs and values as the most fervent Social Justice Warrior on the left. They’re just as dedicated to suppressing speech they dislike; ask Michelle Wolff or any NFL player who took a knee to protest police misconduct.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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Players grunt, coaches yell, and pads and helmets crack, creating a frightening symphony of future early-onset dementia.
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Nate Jackson (Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile)
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Billy tries to imagine the vast systems that support these athletes. They are among the best-cared for creatures in the history of the planet, beneficiaries of the best nutrition, the latest technologies, the finest medical care, they live at the very pinnacle of American innovation and abundance, which inspires an extraordinary thought - send them to fight the war! Send them just as they are this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat, send the entire NFL! Attack with all our bears and raiders, our ferocious redskins, our jets, eagles, falcons, chiefs, patriots, cowboys - how could a bunch of skinny hajjis in man-skits and sandals stand a chance against these all-Americans? Resistance is futile, oh Arab foes. Surrender now and save yourself a world of hurt, for our mighty football players cannot be stopped, they are so huge, so strong, so fearsomely ripped that mere bombs and bullets bounce off their bones of steel. Submit, lest our awesome NFL show you straight to the flaming gates of hell!
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Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
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Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE.
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Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
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If it's to be, it's up to me!
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Cecil Martin former NFL player
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On top of it all, the NFL decided to replace all players who refused to stand during the National Anthem with other players who would, and those replaced players were banned completely from ever playing again.
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Willow Rose (Girl Divided)
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If the population is dissatisfied with the condition of society, then the leaders will invariably find a symbolic issue to channel the people’s focus away from any action that threatens the powerful. 'You’re poor? That’s a real shame. Well, look at that rich NFL player who won’t kneel for the national anthem! Doesn’t that disgust you? Aren’t you pissed off about that? Pay no attention to the system that keeps you in poverty, even though you work 40 hours a week and so does your spouse. Instead, focus on Colin Kaepernick not respecting our national theme song and refusing to grovel before our national rag! Don’t be disobedient in your own interest, instead turn on someone being disobedient in his own interest! That’s the American way!'
Make no mistake, for the people upset at Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, that fight is a moral issue. They’re genuinely incensed that someone doesn’t show proper respect for the very same country that’s fucking them over, especially when it’s someone who has it better than them. 'What does he have to complain about? He makes 20 million a year! I’m stuck in a shitty job! Fuck him!' No. Fuck the corporation who doesn’t compensate you fairly for your shitty job. Fuck the country that lets them get away with it. And most of all, fuck you for being so easily distracted by symbols and pageantry that you don’t stop to take a look at who your real enemies are.
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T.J. Kirk
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NFL in general: Millionaire babies taking to the field to shuck, jive and juke for elderly billionaire plantation masters. The players who do take a stand by kneeling are vilified, nullified and ostracized. And fans continue to subsidize this cirque du soulless in some publicly funded, corporate-owned stadium with the audacity to charge ten dollars for a cup of warm beer, eight dollars for cold hot dogs and ninety dollars for jerseys bearing terminally concussed gridiron legends’ names and numbers.
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Stephen Mack Jones (Dead of Winter (August Snow #3))
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The largest culture shock was being Black in this atmosphere. We had white coaches, and they wanted the Black players to be the embodiment of who they were. They would tell us to wear our pants or shoes a certain way; this is what it meant to “be a man.” They thought our path to manhood was to be found in skinny jeans and a tucked-in shirt. (Although now Migos, getting “Bad and Boujee,” has all kinds of young players dressing like that by choice. Go figure.) But they never understood or tried to understand us. They projected their morals and thought processes onto young Black men without figuring out who we were. This struck me as a recipe for our continually being misunderstood, misguided, and misjudged, ingredients for disaster and rebellion, or at the very least for stress and self-destruction and the creation of the very PTSD that afflicts players when it’s all over.
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Michael Bennett (Things That Make White People Uncomfortable)
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Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE. That’s sobering and frightening, but it’s extremely important to keep in mind that this study involved former players who already showed personality and mental changes consistent with brain injury. It was not a random sample of NFL players, most of whom never show such changes despite having experienced concussions.
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Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
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Many professional athletes make a lot of money quickly. They also spend a lot of money in a short time and very often declare bankruptcy quickly. About 16 percent of NFL players file for bankruptcy within twelve years of retirement, despite average career earnings of about $3.2 million.9 Some studies say the number of NFL players “under financial stress” is much higher—as high as 78 percent—within a few years of retirement. Similarly, about 60 percent of NBA basketball players are in financial trouble within five years of leaving the game.10 There are similar stories about lottery winners losing it all. Despite their big paydays, about 70 percent of lottery winners go broke within three years.11
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Dan Ariely (Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter)
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The NFL determines your worth as a player, but only God knows your true worth. Players work long and hard through pain and suffering, injuries, and pushing themselves further than they imagined going—then poof ! A dream is gone. That kind of treatment can really mess with one’s self worth. Getting cut can be deemed a failure, the loss of a lifetime goal.
Thankfully, as Christians our worth is not determined by mistakes we’ve made, either accidentally or by stupid stuff we’ve purposely done. Neither is it determined by what anyone else thinks. Our worth is determined by what Jesus Christ has already done.
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Jake Byrne (First and Goal: What Football Taught Me About Never Giving Up)
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Bloom found exactly the opposite to be the case. The teams with the greatest levels of pay inequality performed worse than those with less inequality. Similar effects were found in an NFL study: Football teams with greater inequality won fewer games. This research also revealed an interesting wrinkle: Higher pay inequality was associated with higher team revenues. The most likely explanation for this finding is that spending huge amounts of money to attract superstars increases fans’ willingness to pay for tickets and media to watch these celebrity players, even if their expensive contracts undermined the team’s overall performance.
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Keith Payne (The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die)
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It gives the whole game away that college football is so popular in the SEC, where the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation is so powerful, and now they worship Black football players who make no money and are out there providing entertainment. The university people and the networks intentionally create this fake feel—they use the football field to miseducate people with a fictional portrayal of life off the field. The fiction is that because all these white student fans are cheering majority-Black teams, the dynamic is somehow postracial. It creates an illusion for both the fan and the player—the student and the student-athlete—so they don’t have to face how messed-up this country is. You’re not Black on the field. You’re a representative of your school. There’s no New Jim Crow when you’re on the field. There’s no Donald Trump. There’s no Trayvon Martin.
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Michael Bennett (Things That Make White People Uncomfortable)
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The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.
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Rich Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football)
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After graduating early from high school, I carefully listened to the quarterback during my first play in college spring ball. My mind was on the very basics of football: alignment, assignment, and where to stand in the huddle.
The quarterback broke the huddle and I ran to the line, meeting the confident eyes of a defensive end—6-foot-6, 260- pound Matt Shaughnessy.
I was seventeen, a true freshman, and he was a 23-year-old fifth-year senior, a third-round draft pick. Huge difference between the two of us. Impressing the coach was not on my mind. Survival was. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. I wasn’t cursing. I was praying for help.
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray ( James 5:13).
That day Matt came off the ball so fast. Bam! Next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, thrown to the ground. I got up and limped back to the huddle.
Four years later...standing on the sidelines in my first NFL game, bouncing on my toes, waiting for my chance to go in, one of the tight ends went down. My time to shine! Where do I stand? Who do I have? I look up and meet the same eyes I met on my first play in college football.
Matt Shaughnessy! ...
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Jake Byrne (First and Goal: What Football Taught Me About Never Giving Up)
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ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday tried to recruit a delegation of 20 former NFL players who were visiting Israel to oppose a nuclear deal with Iran. The group on a trip led by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft included Curtis Martin of the Jets and Patriots, Thurman Thomas of the Bills and Tim Brown of the Raiders. Netanyahu used football lingo to encourage the players to oppose a nuclear deal the Obama administration and allies hope to strike with Iran. "Iran is one yard away from the goal line," he said.
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Anonymous
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officials would acknowledge that only 317 out of more than 10,000 eligible players were receiving benefits. Brain injuries were viewed as the hardest sell.
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Mark Fainaru-Wada (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth)
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Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye, it struck me that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people mad about renewables: even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom. They demand that we adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will with brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources are NFL football players, bashing away at the earth, then renewables are surfers, riding the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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The average career for an NFL running back, according to the NFL Players Association, is just 2.57 years. If I’d chosen to focus on my fears of a career-ending injury, I probably would not have lasted fifteen seasons. Injuries occur in football, and players have little control over that. All we can do is strengthen our bodies and play as smart as we can. I chose to focus on what I could control and developed the warrior mentality of David, the shepherd boy. I managed my fears and doubts by putting my faith and trust in my heavenly Father. Then I fought with all my heart to be the best I could possibly be. Probably
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Emmitt Smith (Game on: Find Your Purpose--Pursue Your Dream)
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President Trump has changed the presidency by speaking for himself. A signature aspect of this characteristic is his facility with quick denunciations of melting intensity. In June 2017, the president criticized the mayor of London for being soft on terrorists just hours after his city was attacked. He dinged California forest management officials in the middle of record fires that were scorching acres in November 2018. The president sent twenty-seven tweets about NFL players protesting racial injustice by choosing to kneel during the national anthem, a practice he found repugnant. He tweeted eighty-four times suggesting that President Obama was not born in America. Whether his target is a federal judge, Gold Star parents, or weather-battered officials in Puerto Rico, Donald Trump says what is on his mind immediately and doesn't sweat the nuances.
By contrast, the president's six tweets in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence never referred to racism or bigotry or white nationalism.
When Trump is passionate about something, it's unmistakable. So why did the president lapse into vagueness when it came to Charlottesville?
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John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
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John Patrick “Pat” McInally found fame in his native Usa as a punter and wide receiver for the National Football League’s Cincinnati bengals from 1976 to 1985. a Harvard graduate, he remains the only footballer to have achieved a verified perfect score on the Wonderlic Test, the intelligence test given to prospective players by the NFL.
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A.A. Milne (The Winnie The Pooh Collection: First Edition)
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Do you always run this hot and cold? Besides, there's another NFL player on my list to stalk. Tell Jasper I'm coming for him. He's more fun anyway." A spike of possessiveness rises. "No Jasper for you.
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Ilsa Madden-Mills (Princess and the Player (Strangers in Love, #2))
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Pete Carroll isn’t a saint; he’s a coach. After losing his job as an NFL head coach in the 1990s, Carroll stopped imitating what others did and followed his own path. It may sound like he’s an easygoing “player’s coach” who is “soft” on his team, but Carroll is one of only three coaches in history to win both an NCAA championship and a Super Bowl. He also believes in toughness.
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Steve Magness (Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness)
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As the years progressed, I stopped discussing positivity with the Jacksonville Jaguars or US soccer players or NFL draft trainees and focused on simpler tenets such as habit formation, behavior interpretation, goal direction, and conscious competency. There is a term for this: anthropomaximology. It started with the Soviet Union’s Olympic machine in the 1970s.
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Trevor Moawad (Getting to Neutral)
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The “domestic violence” label was attention-grabbing fodder for the media, though. Columnists rushed to compare Solo with Ray Rice and Greg Hardy—two male NFL players who had recently been accused of horrific assaults on their female significant others—and demanded that Solo be kicked off the national team. Once the details of the arrest started to make the rounds, Solo posted a message online apologizing for “an unfortunate incident” but vowing she would be cleared of the charges, even if she couldn’t share her side of the story:
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Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
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The result of racial fixation is surreal: the NBA and NFL have taken up the social activist cudgels in embracing “taking the knee” during the national anthem and lecturing the nation on the need for inclusiveness and diversity—even as the players, the owners, and often the coaches comprise the most nondiverse racial profiles of any major American institution.55
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Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
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The game of football evolved and here was one cause of its evolution, a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of thing. All by himself, Lawrence Taylor altered the environment and forced opposing coaches and players to adapt. After Taylor joined the team, the Giants went from the second worst defense in the NFL to the third best. The year before his debut they gave up 425 points; his first year they gave up 257 points. They had been one of the weakest teams in the NFL and were now, overnight, a contender. Of course, Taylor wasn’t the only change in the New York Giants between 1980 and 1981. There was one other important newcomer, Bill Parcells, hired first to coach the Giants’ defense and then the entire team.
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Michael Lewis (The Blind Side)
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Franklin, back in the legislative chambers where he had announced the indictment of Gardner, could not have got his presentation off to a weirder start. Making perhaps the soberest and most consequential appearance of his career, he wanted to talk about the NFL running back Gale Sayers. “Good afternoon. Before I get to the Gardner matter, I just want to acknowledge the passing of one of the living legends who lived in Omaha. Some of you all know that I’m a huge Chicago Bears fan, and Gale Sayers is one of my all-time favorite football players and the running back who I personally consider to be the greatest running back in the history of the National Football League. My father would argue with me all day about the fact that he thought that it should have been Jim Brown. But his passing is meaningful to me and I just felt like I needed to acknowledge that.” There was an awkward silence.
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Joe Sexton (The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy)
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Next time you dream about the dead, ask them questions! Who was behind JFK’s assassination? What’s in Area 51? Does God hear NFL players praying before games? If so, does he have a favorite, because it seems to me the Patriots have some sort of upper hand.
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Wendy Webb (The Haunting of Brynn Wilder)
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Regarding the importance of injuries and their effect on overall team performance, here’s a great example from the NFL: Tampa Bay’s offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs usually wouldn’t be considered a high-impact player. But when Tampa Bay met the Los Angeles Rams in the 2022 playoffs, Wirfs was injured and, because of the unique set of circumstances involving that game, his absence had a major impact. The Rams, led by all-world defensive tackle Aaron Donald, had a ferocious pass rush, and Tom Brady was not the most mobile of quarterbacks. Wirfs, who we normally graded at 1.3 points or so in the regular season, suddenly became a lot more valuable because of his injury—maybe worth as many as 6 points. Here’s why. With Wirfs out, his backup (normally worth 0.3 points) was also injured, but playing. Therefore, with an injury, he was worth no points. We knew the cumulative totals of that injury, along with Wirfs’s absence, were going to have a significant impact on the Bucs’ performance and the outcome of the game. Add the disappearance of wide receiver Antonio Brown, who had left the team weeks earlier, the loss of wide receiver Chris Godwin, and, therefore, the need for tight end Rob Gronkowski to stay inside to help block the pass rush, and I knew the Bucs were in trouble. I wagered accordingly and won the bet, largely because I knew that an injured offensive line was going to change the dynamics of this game. I would have acted differently in the same scenario if the team had a more mobile quarterback or a stronger running attack. Again, these are the special situations in which you have to understand the value of each player, the quality of the opponent, and the overall impact on the score of the game.
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Billy Walters (Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk)
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Home-run hysteria peaked in 1998 when the Cards’ Mark McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa battled to break perhaps the most sacred record in all of baseball, Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs in a single season. Both players didn’t just break it; they shattered it: McGwire hitting seventy home runs and Sosa sixty-six. La Russa managed McGwire when he broke the record, and McGwire admitted that during the season he had taken a steroid precursor known as “Andro,” short for androstendione. Andro was available over the counter at the time, although the NFL and the Olympics had banned it. McGwire made no attempt to hide his use of it. He kept a bottle on the shelf of his locker in plain view, and La Russa does not believe that McGwire ever used anything other than Andro (he also stopped taking it in 1999 and still hit sixty-five home runs). He was big when he came into the league in 1986 and over time became dedicated to working out as often as six days a week in order to prevent further injuries. In the early 1990s, he actually lost weight to take pressure off a chronically sore heel; weight loss runs counter to the bloated look of someone on steroids. But the same could not be said of Canseco. Despite a body that ultimately metamorphosed into an almost cartoonish shape—Brutus meets Popeye—he denied throughout his career that he ever had taken steroids, until his playing days ended in 2002. Two weeks later, ever the performer, he admitted with much ballyhoo that he had indeed been on the juice. Rickey Henderson was another high-profile player who moved to his own brooding rhythms. In all of La Russa’s years of managing, no player in baseball has ever been more dangerous than Henderson with his combination of on-base percentage and base-stealing skills and power. Impervious to pressure unlike any player La Russa had ever seen before, he became a marked man around the league because he could beat you in so many ways, and he still starred for almost the entire decade of the 1980s.
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Buzz Bissinger (Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager)
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Sean drove down to Ole Miss to have a word with Coach O. He didn’t think he could talk him out of sticking Michael in the starting lineup, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to anyway. He thought it would be good for Michael to see right away what he was up against—to learn that natural ability might not be enough to “get to the league.” But he worried that Coach O might not fully understand what a challenge big-time football would be for Michael. Michael had just turned nineteen. He’d never lifted weights or trained for football in the way that serious football players usually do. He hadn’t had the time. He had played fifteen games in high school on the offensive line. In less than a month, he’d be starting in the SEC, across the line of scrimmage from grown men of twenty-two who had spent the past four years majoring in football, and were just six months away from being drafted to play in the NFL. As these beasts came after him, he’d need to think on his feet. Coach O wasn’t one for sitting behind a desk. When he had people into his office at Ole Miss, he’d install them on his long black leather sofa while he marched back and forth, giving pep talks. The subject of Michael Oher brought out the student in him; when Sean came, he sat behind a desk. Coach O actually had a yellow pad to write on. He didn’t get up. He didn’t answer the phone. He too
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Michael Lewis (The Blind Side)
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Soon enough, MobilityWOD had morphed into our present company, The Ready State, and we were working on movement and mobility with all branches of the military; NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL players and coaches; Olympic athletes; university sports teams; Fortune 500 companies; individual CEO types; and thousands of others.
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Kelly Starrett (Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully)
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Leati Joseph "Joe" Anoai was born May 25, 1985. American professional wrestler, former professional Canadian football player, and a member of the Anoai family. He is signed to WWE, where he performs under the ring name Roman Reigns, and he is the current WWE World Heavyweight Champion in his third reign. After playing collegiate football for Georgia Tech, Anoai started his professional football career with brief off-season stints with the Minnesota Vikings and Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League (NFL) in 2007. He then played a full season for the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos in 2008 before his release and retirement from football.
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Marlow Martin (Roman Reigns: The Roman Empire)
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Anoai played football for three years at Pensacola Catholic High School and one year at Escambia High School. In his senior year, he was named Defensive Player of the Year by the Pensacola News Journal. He then attended Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets football team along with Calvin Johnson, who later became a wide receiver in the National Football League (NFL). Anoai was a three-year
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Marlow Martin (Roman Reigns: The Roman Empire)
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He wondered how much had really changed. Mike Webster had gone mad and died. Junior Seau had gone mad and died. How many more players were out there? The league had embraced BU’s researchers and given them money. When the NFL didn’t like the message, it cast BU aside and picked another partner and shelled out more money.
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Mark Fainaru-Wada (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth)
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You show me any athlete at any level who gives maximum effort, and I will show you a player who will excel. It is not a matter of talent. It’s not a question of where you went in the draft. The question is do you have the heart of a champion? And at the heart of every champion I have ever coached is a dedicated effort to be the absolute best you can be. Results are important. But results don’t define who you are as a man. Success is not being a first-round draft pick. Success is using your God-given ability to give maximum effort every day—whether you’re in the NFL, teach school, or work construction.
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Rick Rigsby (Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout)