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Trent Williams, leaving the field of play.
This NFL season has seen a chasm develop between the Washington, D.C., football team whose name is a racial slur and arguably its best player, an offensive lineman named Trent Williams. This might seem like an odd topic for a column in The Progressive, but the story behind it demands both examination and amplification.
It turns out that Williams, a seven-time Pro Bowler having a Hall of Fame career, turned against his team not over the normal issues of money or managerial problems, but over health care. It’s a story that stinks to high heaven. As the thirty-one-year-old lineman put it, “There are some things that happened that are hard to look past.”
Williams, you see, noticed a frightening-looking growth on his scalp six years ago. It turned out to be a very rare form of cancer called dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans. Speaking for eighteen minutes in front of his locker, Williams told the D.C. media why he was a holdout from the team. It was a harrowing tale that began with his asking the team medical staff about the growth and being told that it was nothing.
“I mean, the lump continued to grow over the years. It was concerning, but there was no pain involved,” he said. Moreover, “the very people I put my career in the hands of” were saying he was just fine.
But a few months back, the team’s medical staff told Williams to see a specialist. Once he was speaking to doctors not on the team payroll, he received quite the second opinion. Now he learned that this growth was not only cancerous but that he was just weeks away from seeing it metastasize to his skull and brain. The attendant surgery was dangerous enough that Williams, before going to the hospital, got his affairs in order and said goodbye to his two young daughters, ages nine and five.
After the surgery in Chicago, Williams said he needed 350 stitches and 75 staples on his scalp. No team officials visited him while he was hospitalized.
The story is a reminder that a team’s medical staff—particularly in a violent sport such as football—is not there for the players. It is there for the team, to get and keep players on the field, not to look out for their health. It’s a grotesque perversion of the Hippocratic Oath, and yet we don’t think twice about it.
It’s not only fans who choose to be ignorant of the imperatives of team health care. Tragically, many players see team doctors as their primary care providers. They see themselves as immortal, impervious to anything that some Vicodin and cortisone—and, of course, marijuana—can’t fix. Then, when their careers end, they experience the bitter fruits of what happens when the team has the last or only say on their medical care. It’s why so many players experience more health problems after retirement.
I am reminded of something former linebacker Dave Meggyesy of the one-time NFL team the St. Louis Cardinals once told me—that when you retire from the NFL, you graduate from being young and strong and go on to being elderly. Your body entirely bypasses middle age.
This is so true. I’ve been to retirement dinners where players no older than I am walk with canes, their backs hunched over, their faces each a rictus of pain. This is an issue not only for players but for the union, the National Football League Players Association. Players should be told that team doctors are first and foremost for the team, and should have access to independent doctors.
Washington placed Williams on its injured reserve list, meaning he will not be playing at all in the 2019 season. It was an almost inevitable result, given the rift that was opened between Williams and his team. As Williams expressed it, “There’s no trust there.”
Nor should there be—not from him or any other NFL player.