“No, I think I want you to explain.” My stomach drops and my biggest fear rises in its place. “Are they cutting me from the team?”
“Cutting you from the team? Of course not. For what? You did nothing wrong, but–”
“But what?”
“I think you should really talk to Coach. It’s not my place.”
“Cap!”
“Damn, okay, they want you to see a shrink.”
“A shrink? I know they think I’m a dirty player, but now they think I’m crazy?”
“You’ve just been through some real heavy shit, man, and you need to talk about it with someone.”
“I’m talking to my captain right now.”
“Talking to me isn’t enough and the front office is making it a requirement. The way I figure it, they’re attempting to cover their assess. In legal’s eyes, you’ve been through a trauma too, and if you want to play football for the Nighthawks again, the team has to clear you psychologically to play.”
“I have never heard of any player being required to undergo a psych eval unless he was on drugs or something.”
“What happened to you and McCall is unprecedented and this is modern day NFL.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“You have to do it.”
“Have to?”
“You know how this works, Dak. Football already gets a bad rap for being a hazardous game. The league wants to be able to tell the world that they did all the right things after this. They’ve even been debating whether to cancel this Sunday’s game and you know that’s unprecedented. Can you imagine what the advertisers must be saying?”
“Why do they want to cancel?”
“A lot of players are shaken up, man. Management is attempting to be thoughtful about things, so they want to give us time to process what happened. They’re even offering counseling to whoever wants it.”
“The key words to that statement arefor whoever wants it, but you’re saying mine is mandatory?”
“According to coach, yes.”
I have a visceral reaction to being informed that someone is going to be poking around in my head without my consent. My thoughts are my own. They are private. Sharing my feelings is not really part of my skill set.
“This can’t be legal, Cap.”
“Talk to your lawyer, but I think I already know what he’s going to say. The NFL is a privately owned organization. They make the rules. If you don’t like the rules, then they give you the right to leave the company and find employment somewhere else.”
“Leave the NFL?”
What kind of choice is that?
“I’m no expert but I bet that no team will touch you if you refuse the psych eval, Dak.”
Football is all I know, and it’s all I’m qualified to do. I can’t lose my livelihood. I’m not ready to leave the sport that I’ve played all my life.
“But I don’t believe in that psychology crap.”
“I get it, man, but you haven’t been picking up your phone, you haven’t left the house, and you didn’t go by the hospital to check on McCall. It doesn’t seem like you’re dealing with this at all, and that’s never a good thing. Maybe talking to someone about what happened is just what you need to put what happened behind you.”
“Are people judging me because I haven’t gone by the hospital?”
