You Rest When Your Career Is Over, and Other Lies My Body Told Me

Monday night I sat pissed off on my couch watching Belgium pick the United States apart. Somewhere around the third goal, after launching my hat across the room in anger, I started doing what every 46 year old former athlete does...diagnose an entire sport from a sectional while eating something my doctor would definitely not approve of. Then Christian Pulisic limped off in the 59th minute, and after the game stood in front of a camera and said it was frustrating to end like that, but now he has time to rest, so it will be okay. That one sentence set the whole country on fucking fire. Carli Lloyd said you rest when your playing career is over, period. Pundits called it a loser mentality. Fans threw their jerseys in the trash on camera. And I sat there, a diehard USA fan who has watched this shit my entire adult life, feeling something I did not expect to feel, which was torn right down the middle.

The fan in me completely understands the outrage. When you pull that shirt over your head, the badge is supposed to mean everything, and you push through 90 minutes for your country because that is the deal you signed the moment you dreamed of wearing it. And this team gave me a glimpse of something I had never seen from us before…and I’ve been watching since 1994 when Cobi Jones and Alexi Lalas graced the cover of my Sports Illustrated for Kids. The result was the same Round of 16 ceiling we always smack our heads on, but that first performance had an intensity to it…and you could feel that something in the culture had flipped. So when the face of the whole program talks about rest a few hours after getting bounced from a World Cup on home soil, I get why people my age lost their shit. We were raised in grind culture. Grinding was a religion.

Now let me tell you what a decade of that “religion” looks like at 46. I have a titanium knee I picked up at 44. I have elbow tendinitis, ankle tendinitis, a back that files a formal complaint every morning when I try to get out of bed, and about twenty scars spread across my body like stamps in an old passport. That is the receipt for grinding. And before anyone gets shit twisted, I am glad I did it. I would sign that deal again tomorrow without a single hesitation. But because I lived it, I also understand exactly what Pulisic is describing, because I lived that part too.

Look at his last twelve months. The AC Milan season ends and he rolls straight into national team camp. His World Cup ends on July 6 and he probably has a few weeks before he reports back to Milan, or wherever he ends up playing, for preseason. There was no offseason hiding anywhere in that calendar…and from experience, walking into a season with an empty battery is a freaking nightmare. You see the same thing in the NBA every summer. A player wins a championship in June, flies off to the Olympics, gets maybe six weeks of nothing, and then training camp opens and everyone on television wonders why he looks flat in November. So where exactly do we draw the line? Is the man supposed to be a fucking robot who keeps going until the wheels fall off? Because I can tell you from personal experience where the wheels end up. They end up in an operating room, getting replaced with titanium, while a surgeon who has never played a minute of professional basketball shakes his head at the mess you’ve made.

This whole debate hits close to home for another reason, and she is currently upstairs in her room with an attitude. I was a late bloomer. At fifteen I was six foot two and 150 pounds, sitting the bench on my high school team, playing multiple sports, trying to be popular, and slowly becoming a very good player on my own clock. Nobody had me in a private facility at eleven, or pick one sport by twelve. That freedom is a big part of why I lasted a decade in this world…because I arrived at professional basketball with a full tank and a hunger most had lost by that time.

My daughter does not get that world. I watch her navigate youth sports right now and the pressure is crazy suffocating. If she wants to be anything in basketball, the expectation is total commitment at an age when I was still figuring out which sports I even liked. Specialize early, train year round, join the elite AAU circuit, and treat every other season like a distraction. The system has made it nearly impossible to be a late bloomer, and that’s going to be a huge fucking problem. These athletes have been in a professional grind since middle school, so by the time they hit their late twenties, which is exactly where Pulisic is right now, they have been doing this for fifteen straight years. The battery has been draining since sixth grade.

And then there is the whole killer debate…whether this generation has the same killer in them. I wrote a chapter in my first book about the Jordan Mentality. While my friends showed up to dress down days in fresh Jordans, I was rocking corduroys and LA Gear, idolizing Dennis Rodman and wanting people to like me. I had to build my toughness slowly, through benchings and growth spurts and getting my ass kicked in hot gyms. Which is exactly my point. You cannot develop a killer in captivity. Killers get made in the wild…playing in pickup games, and second sports and unsupervised summers. Now, for the past twenty years we have been raising our best athletes in cages built from showcases, rankings, and training schedules. Then we hand them the badge and act shocked when the hunger looks different than ours did.

So I remain torn…the fan in me wants Pulisic to say the badge means everything and rest can wait until he is my age and broken. The former athlete in me, the one who needs ten minutes and a carefully worded prayer to get out of bed most mornings, hears a young man telling the truth about a machine that never stops. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I fucking promise you…we are going to see this debate again in every sport, because the commitment we now demand from twelve year olds will catch up somewhere. I do not have a clean answer. I just know I got the chance to bloom late, my daughter's generation might never get that chance, and the athletes we are roasting today were the first full class raised inside this machine. Maybe the machine is the conversation worth having.

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