There is nothing quite like the off-season to bring out a professional athlete’s insecurity.
He’s either in free agency and the interest level is not what he expected, or he just signed a mega-contract and pauses in midcelebration to wonder if he can live up to it. Or he’s approaching his contract season and worries if he can put together a career year. Or maybe he’s young and no longer stupid and just coming to the realization that very little of this business is within his control at all.
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The Bears feature several guys who spent much of the last few months with growing babies and expanding mortgages and stomachaches, guys who took stock of their careers and made changes or just became a little more disillusioned with it all.
Bobby Engram turned down a four-year, $10 million offer from the Bears to test the market, only to come away with $4.9 million over three years to stay in Chicago. He’s been walking around Platteville looking like anything but a happy camper.
You can’t blame him for having higher expectations. Most players with any ability look forward to testing their value on the open market, and after spending the last few seasons as perhaps his team’s most valuable player, Engram had to figure this was his big chance to cash in. But, like Todd Perry, Engram’s expectations and timing were off. The NFL receiver du jour looks like Marcus Robinson, catches like Randy Moss and has sprinter’s speed. No room for a guy Joe Paterno called the best football player he ever coached.
All Perry did was literally cripple himself for seven NFL seasons, only to be told when he was ready to re-up that he was on the decline, and no one seemed to need guards anyway.
“That was a very humbling experience,” Perry said. “I couldn’t get a single team to give me an offer, including the Bears. But it allowed me to sit back and really evaluate my situation, and I realized a lot of it was my responsibility.”
Perry had been playing with a back so twisted that he had lost all extension. You know that lower part of your back that curves inward? His was straight. And he has not been able to push off on his right leg the last three years either. Just a few minor details that kept him in constant pain.
“I had kind of accepted it with the mentality that, well, a seventh-year offensive lineman, that’s how you’re supposed to feel,” Perry said. “Then after last year, I just made up my mind that if I couldn’t go into this season fully healthy, it was too frustrating to go on. I should be a player in my prime. Instead I was at a crossroads in my career.”
Perry feels confident he has remedied the situation by finally addressing his health issues–mostly through osteopathy–so he could throw himself back into the strength and conditioning regimen he needed.
“This is the first time since ’97 that my back hasn’t hurt,” he said. “Now I feel like I have a new lease here and I definitely have something to prove, that I’m not a player in decline. … That’s my goal.”
Cornerback Walt Harris’ goal is to have the kind of season predicted for him since the Bears traded up to get him with the 13th pick of the ’96 draft.
The trouble with Harris has been that while people were wondering why he couldn’t put his superior talent to use, he was busy compensating so much for the lack of a pass rush that by the fourth quarter of most games, he could barely breathe.
“I was tired,” Harris acknowledged. “And when you get tired you lose all technique, and that’s what hurts you. But the fatigue was there because I didn’t have a good off-season work ethic and conditioning.”
Harris remedied that by going back to his college routine of running hills in the off-season. A little fear ran along with him; Harris, a father of two, enters free agency after this season.
“I try to keep it in the back of my mind,” he said. “You don’t want to say, `I’m going out just for the contract year.’ Then you’re being selfish. … but it’s always in the back of your mind.”
It also dawned on Harris that as he approaches his fifth NFL season, he is not exactly a kid anymore.
“It’s very precious,” he said of the opportunity to play pro football. “The average career now is five years, and it goes so fast you have to take every moment and make the best of it.”
Alonzo Mayes would like very much to make it to that point. But after two unfulfilling years in the league in two different offensive systems, “I was playing like a mechanical robot last year,” Mayes said.
His solution was to take control of his career. Mayes looks to be in the best shape of his life, and he hopes it translates onto the field. “You can’t be led around by a leash all the time,” he said. “Sometimes you have to bite that leash and go your own way.”
After all the soul-searching, it usually comes down to facing reality and taking responsibility. That, and a leap of faith.
“You’d love to just say, `I’m going to be a Hall of Famer,’ but I had to get back to what got me here,” Curtis Enis said. “And that was just hard work, shut my mouth and do what needed to get done.
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“I’ve been down for two years and I figure it has to turn around at some point. You’re not supposed to spend your life chasing your dream and feeling miserable.”