superpunk
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It's also a nice article. 
:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/12/AR2007051200926_pf.html
It is mid-April, in a restaurant in SoHo. The father is enveloped in the currents of memory, the son fortified by the illusion of invincibility afforded by youth, money and a sinewy frame. They are 18 years apart, but in this instant both are beautiful, simultaneously in their primes.
"If you ran to my side," Shawn Springs says, "I'd take you on, pick you up and throw you aside, just like a rag doll."
The father laughs the laugh teenagers use to put the neighborhood sprouts in their place.
"You keep on thinking that," Ron Springs says, proud of the holes his 6-foot-2, 220-pound frame opened for Tony Dorsett during his own glory years of the 1970s and '80s. "There are guys who played in the NFL who never walked straight again after I ran into them."
Each dart exudes the can't-lose bravado of the professional athlete, but age stalks Shawn Springs. It nags at him professionally. Despite verbal assurances to the contrary from his bosses, Springs, 32, has spent the offseason uncertain whether the Washington Commanders still consider him an elite player, or if Coach Joe Gibbs believes time has claimed another victim and the team will move on without him. The result is a passive-aggressive dance between Springs and the Commanders that, to the consternation of Gibbs, saw him not appear for the first week of the team's voluntary workouts.
On the one hand, Springs has been bolstered by the Commanders' offseason moves. When the team drafted safety LaRon Landry with the sixth pick in the NFL draft, Springs sent out a cryptic text message to friends that read "3-5-9-6." The numbers denoted the draft order of the projected starting secondary: Springs was selected by the Seattle Seahawks with the third pick in 1997, Sean Taylor by the Commanders with the fifth in 2004, Carlos Rogers by the Commanders with the ninth in 2005 and now Landry.
"LaRon's going to be a good player," Springs said on draft day. "That's a hell of a move."
Yet despite feeling better about the Commanders now than he has in months, Springs says he will not arrive at Commanders Park until the first week of June.
And through the lens of his father, age talks to him personally. "Once you turn 32, they'll think you're finished. They treat you like a machine," Ron Springs said. "The way these guys train, they can play a long time, but the old mind-set remains. When you get hurt and they're paying you a lot of money, they don't like that. They depreciate you the way they do a machine."
At the Mercer Kitchen in SoHo, surrounded by the sleek and the swanky, Springs sits to the left of his father, who is only 50 years old but ravaged by diabetes. The talk may be big, but mortality is a concept very real to the Springs family. During lunch, Shawn Springs cares gently for his father, whose hands are curled into fists that cannot uncurl because of muscle fibrosis. Ron Springs drinks a glass of iced tea by balancing his glass between his forearm and chest, sipping through a straw.
Ron Springs sits in his wheelchair, laughing in their imaginary confrontations. He says he'd crush his son in the open field, but today cannot use the men's room without assistance. His lunch arrives: a luscious 8-ounce steak resting on five bright spears of asparagus. His wife, Adriane, sits to his right, always ready to assist, but in a poignant moment, Shawn's face softens, and the macho football talk wanes. The son leans forward without speaking, picks up a set of utensils and gently slices his father's steak into bite-size cubes.
The next night, at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, Springs leaned back into a leather chair, sipping a mojito. Sweet rum and mint leaf passed through his straw and he ruefully held it for a long moment before swallowing.
"Over the past 10 years, my father looks like he's aged 50 years," the Commanders cornerback said. "I me an, it wasn't that long ago that we were playing basketball together."
* * *
In two face-to-face meetings with Gibbs this offseason, Springs believed his Commanders career was disintegrating. No one in the organization told him so exactly, but Springs sensed an uneasy momentum.
The team's assistant head coach-defense, Gregg Williams, and secondary coach Jerry Gray said just the opposite, that Springs was still the best cornerback on the team. Gibbs told him the same, reiterating to Springs his importance to the Commanders. The coach told Springs that the Commanders were at their best when Springs was on the field.
"You're going to have people for whom the age thing is scary," Gray said. "I got to that point. He may think that, but I don't think he's gotten that perception from any of the coaches. When he's on the football field, we're a better team."
Yet to Springs -- who seems to make a clear distinction between his affection and respect for Gray and Williams and his feelings about the Commanders' front office -- the conversations did not go well. Despite the verbal bouquets, the Commanders mentioned his reputation for fragility -- he played just nine games last year, his lowest total since 2001, when he was with the Seahawks -- and in turn asked him to accept a $2 million pay cut.
In between the conversations, according to league sources, the Commanders also were in trade talks with the Detroit Lions. They wanted to replace Springs with Dre Bly and make Springs a reserve. Had the Commanders been able to acquire both Bly and Fred Smoot, sources said, the Commanders would have cut Springs. Washington managed to get Smoot, but Bly wound up in Denver.
During the NFL owners' meetings in March, Springs met with Gibbs for breakfast at the Arizona Biltmore resort. Gibbs assured Springs that the team wanted to move forward with him. The pay cut, the trade talk and the possibility of a June 1 cut -- the latter having weighed on Springs's mind for months -- were all off the table.
Late last week, Gibbs reiterated his position that Springs remains a valuable member of the team and expressed disappointment that Springs had stayed away from the team's workout at Commanders Park.
But by that point, Springs had already made his own decision: He was going to work out as hard as he could, on his timetable, on his terms, to protect his career.
Springs, 6 feet, 204 pounds, works out in a flat, characterless office park that sits anonymously against striking red clay mesas in North Scottsdale, Ariz. At Performance Enhancement Professionals, each of his 90-minute workouts is dedicated to a specific area: lower body big muscles on Monday, upper body on Tuesdays. Wednesdays focus on the small muscles of the upper body, with the lower body small muscles on Thursdays. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Springs adds Bikram yoga, also known as hot yoga: 26 traditional yoga exercises designed for flexibility and mental cleansing with one grueling twist -- the 90-minute sessions are performed inside a 100-degree room.
"I can't," Springs said one March morning panting to regain his breath, "let any of these young guys think they can take my job.
"The whole key to playing cornerback in this league is being able to run," he continued. "When you look at a guy, and you start to assess whether he's losing it or not, the first question is whether he can run. Can he cover? I can still run. If you can run, you can play. . . . I can play five more years, at least."
He pulls 45 pounds of dead weight, driven by the appearance of vulnerability and the shadow of age. Days earlier, he celebrated his 32nd birthday. These flexibility drills, he said, will sharpen his burst, his quickness.
"I'm going to have the best year of my career. I have to," Springs said between explosiveness drills, sounding like a boxer in training. He is talking to himself as much as anyone else in the room. "Everybody thinks I'm finished. The only way to prove them wrong is come out and ball."
Springs's personal trainer, Ian Danney, a former Canadian Olympic bobsledder, thinks Gibbs's decision to allow veterans to work out on their own rather than at Commanders Park last winter will pay dividends for Springs this year.
"There are decisions that are made for the team, and decisions that are made for the individuals," Danney said. "The Commanders wanted everyone in Washington for team building, but Shawn really needed to be here. He's at that stage where athletes can go in either direction. If you stay dedicated to it now, you can keep playing. Shawn is a professional. His dedication keeps going. If you don't, that's when guys fall off. But it starts here."
On the stretching table at the gym is Ryan Clark, the former Commanders safety who signed as a free agent with Pittsburgh following the 2005 season when the Commanders would not match the $1.5 million raise the Steelers offered. (Brandon Lloyd, the Commanders' wide receiver, also works out with Springs.) The Commanders are a sore subject with Clark, who never wanted to leave Washington.
"I don't have too much to say that hasn't already been said," Clark said, his Bluetooth cellphone receiver blinking in his right ear. "This is a business. The Commanders made a business decision. Sometimes this game is a business."
Springs corrected him.
"Sometimes during this business," he said, "we play a game."
* * *
At the Kona Grill in Scottsdale, over mojitos and dragon rolls -- cooked eel and avocado atop a rectangular prism of rice with crunchy shrimp tempura inside -- Springs cannot escape the subtle messages he feels the Commanders have sent him. There also are questions that remain a mystery: Why didn't he have surgery following the 2005 season, when he suffered from a sports hernia? Why did he play -- or why did the Commanders allow him to play -- in the first preseason game last season against Cincinnati, when days before he had undergone an MRI exam on his groin?
"These types of injuries don't go away," Ron Springs said. "Shawn missed it. The Commanders missed it. Now they have to deal."
According to Commanders Director of Medicine Bubba Tyer, the team saw no reason to consider surgery. Springs had played in the Commanders' 20-10 loss to Seattle in the NFC semifinals and had not missed any of his offseason benchmarks. The injury did not flare up again until a week before the Cincinnati game.
When he did return two and a half months later, he said he felt like the old Shawn Springs. Like many of the frontline Commanders defensive players, Springs believes in Williams and does not think Williams's defensive schemes or approach were the primary reason for what became a Commanders collapse last season. Springs is part of the camp that thinks the Commanders simply were not talented enough.
"My dad used to tell me if you want to see where you fit, take your team against any other team and look at them position-by-position," Springs said. "Which starters on your team would you replace with theirs and vice versa? That's how you know if you're measuring up. If they've got more talent than you, then you have to ball out: hit harder, be tougher, make more plays and get turnovers. We didn't do that."
Springs talks and time taps him on the shoulder. The last time his team won its final game was the 1997 Rose Bowl, a 20-17 Ohio State win over Arizona State. He looks at the Commanders and sees opportunities sprinting past, and his mood darkens.
"Sometimes I get so depressed talking about the Commanders," Springs said. "You know, during the season, when I talk to guys who are going to be free agents, you know how they talk about the Commanders? They talk about getting paid. I want to win. I want to win football games. That's why I don't have a problem with Gregg [Williams]. Gregg wants to win football games.
"Hell, let's talk about something else."
Springs snared a wedge of eel on a soft bed of rice and changed th
subject.
* * *
Ron Springs, who learned he had diabetes shortly after he retired at age 34, had his right foot amputated, followed by three toes on his left foot. His former Dallas Cowboys teammate, Everson Walls, donated a kidney to Springs earlier this year. The transplant has Springs saying he feels like "a car with a new battery."
He was in New York last month because leading diabetes foundations were so taken by his ordeal and his subsequent candor that they asked him to explain, virtually naked in front of the world, how he did not care for his body and how he is paying a high price.
His son calls the consortium the Dream Team, the powerful group of diabetes experts -- the National Kidney Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind, the Amputee Coalition of America, Mended Hearts and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists -- that saw his father on television after the kidney surgery.
"We've learned a lot over this," Springs said. "You know how difficult it would be for someone who is used to being so strong to come out and do this? Most football players, most guys, period, would crawl into a shell. They wouldn't want anyone to see them like that. My dad is a really strong guy."
Springs was disappointed when the NFL Players Association took a hard stance against providing more money to former players like his father. That made the call from the diabetes foundations all the more urgent. Issues such as pensions and disability coverage, things that don't matter when you're young and powerful with 4.5 percent body fat, suddenly are real to Springs.
This is the reason why Springs doesn't accept pay cuts, because a half-million dollars in medical bills with no safety net could one day stare him in the face, too. These are considerations more important than the color of any uniform, he says.
"Look at the guy in Washington, Willie Wood," Springs said. "Hall of Famer, Green Bay Packers, gave his life to the game. What's he doing? He's on assisted living in D.C. That's why you have to take care of these things. That's why you don't forget it's a business. That's my father they could be talking about. My dad is 50. Everybody my father's age is dying. That's why we're trying to do something. I'm not going to let that stuff happen to him."
:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/12/AR2007051200926_pf.html
It is mid-April, in a restaurant in SoHo. The father is enveloped in the currents of memory, the son fortified by the illusion of invincibility afforded by youth, money and a sinewy frame. They are 18 years apart, but in this instant both are beautiful, simultaneously in their primes.
"If you ran to my side," Shawn Springs says, "I'd take you on, pick you up and throw you aside, just like a rag doll."
The father laughs the laugh teenagers use to put the neighborhood sprouts in their place.
"You keep on thinking that," Ron Springs says, proud of the holes his 6-foot-2, 220-pound frame opened for Tony Dorsett during his own glory years of the 1970s and '80s. "There are guys who played in the NFL who never walked straight again after I ran into them."
Each dart exudes the can't-lose bravado of the professional athlete, but age stalks Shawn Springs. It nags at him professionally. Despite verbal assurances to the contrary from his bosses, Springs, 32, has spent the offseason uncertain whether the Washington Commanders still consider him an elite player, or if Coach Joe Gibbs believes time has claimed another victim and the team will move on without him. The result is a passive-aggressive dance between Springs and the Commanders that, to the consternation of Gibbs, saw him not appear for the first week of the team's voluntary workouts.
On the one hand, Springs has been bolstered by the Commanders' offseason moves. When the team drafted safety LaRon Landry with the sixth pick in the NFL draft, Springs sent out a cryptic text message to friends that read "3-5-9-6." The numbers denoted the draft order of the projected starting secondary: Springs was selected by the Seattle Seahawks with the third pick in 1997, Sean Taylor by the Commanders with the fifth in 2004, Carlos Rogers by the Commanders with the ninth in 2005 and now Landry.
"LaRon's going to be a good player," Springs said on draft day. "That's a hell of a move."
Yet despite feeling better about the Commanders now than he has in months, Springs says he will not arrive at Commanders Park until the first week of June.
And through the lens of his father, age talks to him personally. "Once you turn 32, they'll think you're finished. They treat you like a machine," Ron Springs said. "The way these guys train, they can play a long time, but the old mind-set remains. When you get hurt and they're paying you a lot of money, they don't like that. They depreciate you the way they do a machine."
At the Mercer Kitchen in SoHo, surrounded by the sleek and the swanky, Springs sits to the left of his father, who is only 50 years old but ravaged by diabetes. The talk may be big, but mortality is a concept very real to the Springs family. During lunch, Shawn Springs cares gently for his father, whose hands are curled into fists that cannot uncurl because of muscle fibrosis. Ron Springs drinks a glass of iced tea by balancing his glass between his forearm and chest, sipping through a straw.
Ron Springs sits in his wheelchair, laughing in their imaginary confrontations. He says he'd crush his son in the open field, but today cannot use the men's room without assistance. His lunch arrives: a luscious 8-ounce steak resting on five bright spears of asparagus. His wife, Adriane, sits to his right, always ready to assist, but in a poignant moment, Shawn's face softens, and the macho football talk wanes. The son leans forward without speaking, picks up a set of utensils and gently slices his father's steak into bite-size cubes.
The next night, at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, Springs leaned back into a leather chair, sipping a mojito. Sweet rum and mint leaf passed through his straw and he ruefully held it for a long moment before swallowing.
"Over the past 10 years, my father looks like he's aged 50 years," the Commanders cornerback said. "I me an, it wasn't that long ago that we were playing basketball together."
* * *
In two face-to-face meetings with Gibbs this offseason, Springs believed his Commanders career was disintegrating. No one in the organization told him so exactly, but Springs sensed an uneasy momentum.
The team's assistant head coach-defense, Gregg Williams, and secondary coach Jerry Gray said just the opposite, that Springs was still the best cornerback on the team. Gibbs told him the same, reiterating to Springs his importance to the Commanders. The coach told Springs that the Commanders were at their best when Springs was on the field.
"You're going to have people for whom the age thing is scary," Gray said. "I got to that point. He may think that, but I don't think he's gotten that perception from any of the coaches. When he's on the football field, we're a better team."
Yet to Springs -- who seems to make a clear distinction between his affection and respect for Gray and Williams and his feelings about the Commanders' front office -- the conversations did not go well. Despite the verbal bouquets, the Commanders mentioned his reputation for fragility -- he played just nine games last year, his lowest total since 2001, when he was with the Seahawks -- and in turn asked him to accept a $2 million pay cut.
In between the conversations, according to league sources, the Commanders also were in trade talks with the Detroit Lions. They wanted to replace Springs with Dre Bly and make Springs a reserve. Had the Commanders been able to acquire both Bly and Fred Smoot, sources said, the Commanders would have cut Springs. Washington managed to get Smoot, but Bly wound up in Denver.
During the NFL owners' meetings in March, Springs met with Gibbs for breakfast at the Arizona Biltmore resort. Gibbs assured Springs that the team wanted to move forward with him. The pay cut, the trade talk and the possibility of a June 1 cut -- the latter having weighed on Springs's mind for months -- were all off the table.
Late last week, Gibbs reiterated his position that Springs remains a valuable member of the team and expressed disappointment that Springs had stayed away from the team's workout at Commanders Park.
But by that point, Springs had already made his own decision: He was going to work out as hard as he could, on his timetable, on his terms, to protect his career.
Springs, 6 feet, 204 pounds, works out in a flat, characterless office park that sits anonymously against striking red clay mesas in North Scottsdale, Ariz. At Performance Enhancement Professionals, each of his 90-minute workouts is dedicated to a specific area: lower body big muscles on Monday, upper body on Tuesdays. Wednesdays focus on the small muscles of the upper body, with the lower body small muscles on Thursdays. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Springs adds Bikram yoga, also known as hot yoga: 26 traditional yoga exercises designed for flexibility and mental cleansing with one grueling twist -- the 90-minute sessions are performed inside a 100-degree room.
"I can't," Springs said one March morning panting to regain his breath, "let any of these young guys think they can take my job.
"The whole key to playing cornerback in this league is being able to run," he continued. "When you look at a guy, and you start to assess whether he's losing it or not, the first question is whether he can run. Can he cover? I can still run. If you can run, you can play. . . . I can play five more years, at least."
He pulls 45 pounds of dead weight, driven by the appearance of vulnerability and the shadow of age. Days earlier, he celebrated his 32nd birthday. These flexibility drills, he said, will sharpen his burst, his quickness.
"I'm going to have the best year of my career. I have to," Springs said between explosiveness drills, sounding like a boxer in training. He is talking to himself as much as anyone else in the room. "Everybody thinks I'm finished. The only way to prove them wrong is come out and ball."
Springs's personal trainer, Ian Danney, a former Canadian Olympic bobsledder, thinks Gibbs's decision to allow veterans to work out on their own rather than at Commanders Park last winter will pay dividends for Springs this year.
"There are decisions that are made for the team, and decisions that are made for the individuals," Danney said. "The Commanders wanted everyone in Washington for team building, but Shawn really needed to be here. He's at that stage where athletes can go in either direction. If you stay dedicated to it now, you can keep playing. Shawn is a professional. His dedication keeps going. If you don't, that's when guys fall off. But it starts here."
On the stretching table at the gym is Ryan Clark, the former Commanders safety who signed as a free agent with Pittsburgh following the 2005 season when the Commanders would not match the $1.5 million raise the Steelers offered. (Brandon Lloyd, the Commanders' wide receiver, also works out with Springs.) The Commanders are a sore subject with Clark, who never wanted to leave Washington.
"I don't have too much to say that hasn't already been said," Clark said, his Bluetooth cellphone receiver blinking in his right ear. "This is a business. The Commanders made a business decision. Sometimes this game is a business."
Springs corrected him.
"Sometimes during this business," he said, "we play a game."
* * *
At the Kona Grill in Scottsdale, over mojitos and dragon rolls -- cooked eel and avocado atop a rectangular prism of rice with crunchy shrimp tempura inside -- Springs cannot escape the subtle messages he feels the Commanders have sent him. There also are questions that remain a mystery: Why didn't he have surgery following the 2005 season, when he suffered from a sports hernia? Why did he play -- or why did the Commanders allow him to play -- in the first preseason game last season against Cincinnati, when days before he had undergone an MRI exam on his groin?
"These types of injuries don't go away," Ron Springs said. "Shawn missed it. The Commanders missed it. Now they have to deal."
According to Commanders Director of Medicine Bubba Tyer, the team saw no reason to consider surgery. Springs had played in the Commanders' 20-10 loss to Seattle in the NFC semifinals and had not missed any of his offseason benchmarks. The injury did not flare up again until a week before the Cincinnati game.
When he did return two and a half months later, he said he felt like the old Shawn Springs. Like many of the frontline Commanders defensive players, Springs believes in Williams and does not think Williams's defensive schemes or approach were the primary reason for what became a Commanders collapse last season. Springs is part of the camp that thinks the Commanders simply were not talented enough.
"My dad used to tell me if you want to see where you fit, take your team against any other team and look at them position-by-position," Springs said. "Which starters on your team would you replace with theirs and vice versa? That's how you know if you're measuring up. If they've got more talent than you, then you have to ball out: hit harder, be tougher, make more plays and get turnovers. We didn't do that."
Springs talks and time taps him on the shoulder. The last time his team won its final game was the 1997 Rose Bowl, a 20-17 Ohio State win over Arizona State. He looks at the Commanders and sees opportunities sprinting past, and his mood darkens.
"Sometimes I get so depressed talking about the Commanders," Springs said. "You know, during the season, when I talk to guys who are going to be free agents, you know how they talk about the Commanders? They talk about getting paid. I want to win. I want to win football games. That's why I don't have a problem with Gregg [Williams]. Gregg wants to win football games.
"Hell, let's talk about something else."
Springs snared a wedge of eel on a soft bed of rice and changed th
subject.
* * *
Ron Springs, who learned he had diabetes shortly after he retired at age 34, had his right foot amputated, followed by three toes on his left foot. His former Dallas Cowboys teammate, Everson Walls, donated a kidney to Springs earlier this year. The transplant has Springs saying he feels like "a car with a new battery."
He was in New York last month because leading diabetes foundations were so taken by his ordeal and his subsequent candor that they asked him to explain, virtually naked in front of the world, how he did not care for his body and how he is paying a high price.
His son calls the consortium the Dream Team, the powerful group of diabetes experts -- the National Kidney Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind, the Amputee Coalition of America, Mended Hearts and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists -- that saw his father on television after the kidney surgery.
"We've learned a lot over this," Springs said. "You know how difficult it would be for someone who is used to being so strong to come out and do this? Most football players, most guys, period, would crawl into a shell. They wouldn't want anyone to see them like that. My dad is a really strong guy."
Springs was disappointed when the NFL Players Association took a hard stance against providing more money to former players like his father. That made the call from the diabetes foundations all the more urgent. Issues such as pensions and disability coverage, things that don't matter when you're young and powerful with 4.5 percent body fat, suddenly are real to Springs.
This is the reason why Springs doesn't accept pay cuts, because a half-million dollars in medical bills with no safety net could one day stare him in the face, too. These are considerations more important than the color of any uniform, he says.
"Look at the guy in Washington, Willie Wood," Springs said. "Hall of Famer, Green Bay Packers, gave his life to the game. What's he doing? He's on assisted living in D.C. That's why you have to take care of these things. That's why you don't forget it's a business. That's my father they could be talking about. My dad is 50. Everybody my father's age is dying. That's why we're trying to do something. I'm not going to let that stuff happen to him."
