Writer's Tale Captures NFL Hustle

Sports Commentary

Of all the ostensibly untouchable sports achievements, George Plimpton's summer of 1963 should have been the least vulnerable. An Ivy League grad and literary editor on the cusp of middle age, Plimpton had never played a down of football when he joined the Detroit Lions for training camp and tried to become their "last-string quarterback."

In the four decades after Plimpton wrote "Paper Lion," players became bigger, faster and more specialized. The NFL turned into a corporate behemoth, running on maximum secrecy and minimal humor. Stefan Fatsis, an Ivy League grad and writer past the cusp of middle age, made one big concession to the times and his surgically reconstructed knees. He set out to be a placekicker, not one of the players who have to run all over the field and routinely get hit.

After sending out pleas to an array of NFL teams, including the Baltimore Ravens, whom he cheekily calls media sluts, Fatsis finally got the OK from an unlikely franchise. The tightly controlled Denver Broncos welcomed him to their 2006 offseason workouts and training camp.

The resulting book, "A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-foot-8, 170-pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL," has just been released. Fatsis pays homage to Plimpton, using his name in the title of the opening chapter, but makes it clear that he doesn't see his time in the NFL as a lark.

He truly believed that he could succeed, maybe not as much as when he played world-class Scrabble for his previous book, "Word Freak," but enough to kick at least one 50-yard field goal. Fatsis didn't acknowledge his limitations until the adventure was over.

"It's like Jeff Hays, the Broncos' kicking consultant that summer, said to me: 'Too old, too slow, too weak,'" Fatsis said by phone last week. "There were certain things I just couldn't overcome, and that was deeply, deeply disappointing to me."

His frustrations won't resonate with certain readers. First of all, Fatsis did make a 40-yarder. Second, I know I envied and admired his ability to talk his way into football's inner sanctum far too much to sympathize when he failed on the field.

But, as head coach Mike Shanahan pointed out, Fatsis had to put himself under the kind of pressure the players feel every day of their careers if he wanted to gain their confidence and some real insight into their world. Many of them, in the end, did come to trust him. Some became friends. Fatsis said he expects to stay with tight end Nate Jackson when his book tour goes through Denver, and Micah Knorr, a journeyman punter who eventually applied to become a schoolteacher, asked Fatsis to write a job recommendation for him.

Some of the best revelations are small, but they act like pins letting the air out of some big stereotypes. One young player hopes to be a stay-at-home dad someday, because he wants to support his wife's ambition to be a college athletic administrator. Jason Elam, the Broncos' star placekicker, takes his family to visit the Holy Land and then stays on, amid bombings and gunfire, to work as a volunteer delivering goods to a refugee camp in Gaza.

The book is a compassionate, respectful look at the players, and a detailed illustration of how the NFL became the No Fun League.

"It surprised me how much resentment toward football these guys feel," Fatsis said, "not so much that it's brutal or that 'oh, we have to practice twice a day in 100-degree heat,' but more about how inept the NFL is as a workplace, how bad the communication was between coaches and players and front offices, how few outlets the player have to address their fears, how the players are treated like little kids."

None of the players specifically criticized the Broncos. In fact, they said they knew they were treated better than they could expect elsewhere.

"It makes you wonder what it's like with the really bad teams," Fatsis said, "since the Broncos are considered one of the best in the NFL."

Still, one Denver player says he took some comfort in an injury because he knew the team had to pay him for doing nothing, and head coach Mike Shanahan's list of 29 team rules includes this demand for Stepford conformity: "No distractions because of religion, politics, business or personality."

One player, backup quarterback Bradlee Van Pelt, made the team uneasy with his radical decision to live in downtown Denver.

"The NFL wants these guys to live like middle-aged suburbanites," Fatsis said during our interview. "'Don't go out. Don't have any conflicts.' It's sort of like 'Live in this bubble.' It makes coaches' lives easier to try to minimize distraction, but the players resent it because they are thoughtful people. They are socialized and opinionated."

At the same time, Fatsis came to believe that the Broncos, if not the entire NFL, have achieved an enviable blindness to race. One explosive moment seemed shocking because it was so out of place.

"I never felt that anybody was judging anybody else based on their race. So when that incident happened where there was that fight between the two wide receivers and then one of them said, 'You're getting the white privilege,' it was like 'Whoa,' he said. "It was this sort of moment, a moment that everything just stopped."

The most famous player to befriend Fatsis was Jake Plummer, the now-deposed quarterback. Something of an enigma in Denver -- where John Elway remains the golden-boy standard by which all Broncos quarterbacks will be measured and found wanting -- Plummer impressed Fatsis as a brilliantly unconventional leader.

"Within the team, Jake was adored," the author said, concurring with the players. "I love him. I admire Jake Plummer. I admire his candor."

Plummer disdained the stifling paranoia that rules a football team. When a coach tried to hide some of what he was teaching players, Plummer called him on the absurdity of the subterfuge. The quarterback also told Fatsis about an assistant coach who assigned the wrong route to a receiver, then let the head coach ream out the player for the mistake.

By the end, instead of seeing Plummer as a failed heir to Elway, the reader just might wish to be his teammate and, in a moment of Fatsis-like insanity, want to suit up and play alongside the man. But that can't happen. Plummer has retired, and opportunities like the ones Plimpton and Fatsis created are like comets. The next one won't be along for 45 years.

Gwen Knapp is a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.