The Athlete Gene, Brett Favre and Cliff

So, I spent last weekend at Chris's summer house. The usual fantastic banter with ciggys, grogs, and the purchase of some wonderful lobsters from a true islander named Jimmy set the tone for the visit. After getting comfortable with us for approximately 30 seconds, Jimmy starts throwing around f-bombs like eggs on Easter Sunday as he tries for the 4th time to add up our order. Finally Chris does it for him, we grab our chow and are on our way.

We live it up well into the evening, hit the rack, and awake early in the AM. As I walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, I feel three things; my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, a painfully full bladder and an overwhelming sense of self-disgust. As I attempt to temporarily scrub my sewer breath away I realize that the self-disgust is entirely justified. Let's just say that my 38 year old body is not what it used to be. A glimpse in the mirror is all that is needed to confirm the notion - A few random hairs on my ears,  Phil Mickelson type boobs, and a gut draped over my new J Crew underwear.......waist 37-40. This is when I say to myself "how the hell do these guys 35 years and older still play professional sports"?

The aging athlete can be a train wreck. You watch the guy your whole life, now he is an old mess, hanging onto glory, for one last season.........or 5...........not these guys.

Nolan Ryan pitched well into his 40's collecting his 5000th strike out at age 42, his 6th career no hitter at age 44, and he won the ERA title at age 40. 

Jerry Rice had 92 catches at the young age of 40 while playing with the Oakland Raiders, he also had 1,211 yards receiving that year and went on to play in the Super Bowl.

George Foreman may be better known for selling his grill, but at age 47 he won the Heavy Weight Title and managed to defend it 3 times.

Gordie Howe scored 103 points at the age of 41.

Michael Jordan was the best NBA player of our time, and at age 40 he averaged 20 points a game and scored over 40 points numerous times that season.

Roger Clemens, steroids or not, is truly a remarkable athlete, this guy did more after 40 than most pitchers do their entire career. 

I purposely did not mention any golf or tennis players because the guys listed above took a beating day in and day out, maybe not the pitchers mentioned so much, but try throwing a tennis ball against a brick wall 30 times, see how you feel the next day. For those of you over 35, think about suiting up for a professional hockey game.....getting slammed into the boards, taking a puck to the shin, or forget the game.......how about just walking around with that gear and skates on for an hour. Can you imagine running a rout over the middle and getting hit by a 23 year old d-back........talk about bleeding internally. 

The juxtaposition between aging athletes and aging males in general was recently brought to the forefront of public discourse as I, along with 90% of the nation's sports fans cursed Brett Favre for pondering a comeback. I mean, where does this guy get the balls to think he can come back at his age and continue to play at an elite level? Give it up. You're ancient, man.

Then it hits me. "Wait a sec. I'm the same age as Brett Favre." As the logic unfolds in my mind, I realize that I've officially reached the worst age to be a sports fan. When you're a kid, you look up to the pros with a sense of unmitigated awe. Then, during and after college, these guys are either your peers or oldsters that you grew up watching. On the other side of the divide, once you hit 45, if a guy your age is still playing, he's generally acknowledged to be a freak of nature and you can feel free to throw out the "Imagine a guy my age still playing pro ball?"-line and refer to all athletes as "kids" for the rest of your life. At 38? Not so much.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I haven't kept up the type of fitness regimen one would presume would be necessary in order to pursue a career in professional athletics, but then again, going on anecdotal evidence alone, I spend infinitely less time going to strip clubs, getting DUI's and testing positive for marijuana at work than these guys do. I have thus concluded that there exists a specific gene which allows men to punish their bodies severely and shake off results that would put a mere mortal in a wheelchair in the same manner as you or I would recover from a mosquito bite.

In discussing the issue with Chris, he was kind enough to remind me of the bachelor party we threw for James a few years ago. It was to be a day of softball played in one of Manhattan's Astroturf-ed municipal parks followed by an evening of furious imbibing at a local German bier garden. The game begins - a bunch of guys in their mid-thirties and a few cases in each dugout. What could be more innocent, right? By the time we reached the bier garden, Cliff had broken his hand, Carter had a fractured leg and Ted had pulled a hammy badly enough to not be able to make it to the office on Monday. For my own part, in my first at-bat, I lined one sharply into left-center, took a wide turn at first and... my knee gave out. It wasn't injured or anything. It just seemed to be saying: "Really? We're running bases? What the fuck?"

Not only does this party illustrate my point about the "athlete gene", it also establishes the connection between this gene and the "bounce-back" gene, as in, the amount of time it takes a person to recover from egregious bodily abuse. Favre was an alcoholic at one point during his playing career, and seemingly dozens of NFL players get pulled over for drunk-driving every year -during the season. While playing with the Wizards, Chris Webber was stopped by police with a lit joint in his ashtray on the way to practice! WTF! A couple of excess grogs on a weeknight usually equate to an hour's worth of late arrival to work for me the next morning.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not invoking the pathetic "Can't put ‘em away like I used to" excuse. I can consume as much alcohol now as I could when I was 20; it's just that, I need a little extra time to shake out the cobwebs.

As definitive evidence that the "athlete" and "bounce-back" gene are related (indeed, they may be one in the same), I offer a follow-up story on one of the participants in the fateful afore-mentioned softball game.

At the time Cliff was the father of two (soon to be three) lovely daughters. As any married male with children knows, a day of debauchery like the one briefly mentioned above comes with strings attached. The setup is usually in the form of you being able to go to town on Saturday in exchange for watching the kids while your wife runs some errands solo on Sunday. Given the shape Cliff was in after the game and a near all-nighter in the bars, a bad answer to "Are you okay to watch the kids?" would be a groggy "yeah, yeah, I'm going to take them to my parents' house". A worse answer? "Honey, we need to call the babysitter. I'm going to alternate puking and sleeping all day." A terrible answer is flashing a pair of bloodshot eyes and some chapped lips, holding up a crumpled and suddenly obviously broken left hand and saying "Uh, I think I need you to drive me to the hospital."