Published September 18, 2012 - 8:41pm
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If you ask your average sports writer what the most controversial thing going on in football right now, they are sure to launch into a soliloquy regarding the NFL replacement refs. The NFL is greedy! They’re ruining the game! They don’t care about health. Stop it, already. The replacement refs are fine.
While the media grandstands about refereeing, an important and controversial story within the SEC is going largely unnoticed.
That story is about Missouri’s quarterback James Franklin and his unwillingness to take a painkilling cortisone shot last week for his injured shoulder. By refusing the injection, he was choosing not to play in the Arizona State game.
Despite winning the game, his coach Gary Pinkel essentially called him out in the post-game press conference:
“It was too painful for him, and he didn’t want to play… (I) was hoping James could play, but he didn’t feel like he could do it.”
Pinkel has of course backtracked and said that he wasn’t taking a dig at Franklin, but when you hint at a lack of toughness when it comes to football, there’s no way around it. You’re taking a dig at your player.
Franklin handled the dig with grace and didn’t inflame the situation. His dad then told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the following:
“Guys are medicating themselves and running into 300-pound people, and now your body is numb to it, and then after your career is over it comes back at you and you can’t even spend time with your families because your body’s breaking down,” said Willie Franklin. “So one of the things we want to do in our family is look after ourselves, stay healthy. It’s self-preservation. There is life after sports. One day you want to have a family and enjoy your kids so you look after yourself. You take care of yourself. So any decision he makes, I support him 100 percent.”
For anyone to criticize a young college kid for refusing to take medication to numb the pain is ridiculous. For a fan who sits on his butt 7 days a week to criticize a kid who takes hits throughout the year for not being tough is so stupid, it’s not worth even arguing.
Earlier today, Franklin chimed back in the conversation via his Instagram account:
I want to feel the pain so I know when something is wrong. I don’t like taking pills and I don’t like getting injected. I never knew not wanting to do those things was such a big deal. Just like many of you were, I was raised to say no to drugs.
Pinkel clearly stepped in it with his post-game words, but there’s a bigger issue here. The bigger issue is painkillers in football, and unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like this story is getting the traction necessary to get a real conversation going about the issue.
Last year, ESPN did a great Outside the Lines segment regarding the abuse of painkillers by NFL players – specifically, retired NFL players. In conjunction with the episode, ESPNNewYork.com interviewed former Tennessee quarterback Erik Ainge. As Ainge explained to ESPN, he was addicted to painkillers throughout a big portion of his career at Tennessee and during his stint with the New York Jets.
Ainge explained:
Throughout that process, I became hooked on pain killers. I got them from the team doctor. I went through the prescriptions pretty fast. After he had been giving them to me for quite a while, he said he couldn’t give them to me anymore.
I was hooked on them and I was playing football, and there was no way I was going to cancel my senior year by going to rehab. I started getting them from people, buying them, getting them off the street. I wasn’t the only player on the team that was doing it, so we knew people. It wasn’t, like, super sketchy or anything. We knew people who had them, and we were Tennessee football players, so they pretty much just gave them to us.
After a point, it got so bad that I was in the throes of addiction pretty quickly. That led to … one drug to the next drug to the next drug. Then I moved up to New York with a bunch of money, and it was where everything started falling apart.
My drug problem went from bad to worse. My rookie year, I failed a drug test for taking Adderall and got suspended four games. Adderall is like Ritalin, an amphetamine. I started taking Adderall back in high school, just to stay awake — a lot of kids take it.
But most of my rookie year, it was painkillers — and lots of them. I was taking 25 Percocets at a time. Five hours later, I’d do it again. Another eight hours, and I’d do it again. A drug dealer, a guy I knew, had them. There were other social, party drugs I would do, but I was addicted to painkillers.
Recently, former USC Trojan Armond Armstead sued his former school saying team doctors gave him painkillers which caused a heart attack and damaged his future earning potential.
It’s a disturbing aspect of college football that does not get enough coverage. What happens in the team locker rooms and training facilities is far away from cameras and reporters. Kudos to Erik Ainge and James Franklin for not being afraid of discussing this issue in the open.
A young 18-year old kid trusts his trainer. These kids want to play. When they’re injured, they want to get back on the field. Look at Tyler Wilson last week as an example.
I’m hard pressed to suggest that the NCAA get involved in this arena, since I don’t think the NCAA can really do anything well, but painkillers in football – especially college football – is something that needs to be discussed.
As conferences like the SEC take on the concussion issue, painkiller abuse should be a topic discussed right there with it.
Unfortunately, the media drives much of the discussion when it comes to these types of issues, and right now the media wants to fix the missed pass interference call in the Monday Night Football game from last night.
This is a very interesting article. I appreciate the topic, but I tend to err to the thought that cortisone shots aren’t addictive. That getting treatment for pain is one thing, but prescribing someone morphine or demerol is another. There is nothing wrong with getting medical treament, it goes wrong when one or both parties abuse the treatment. Doctors should be trained to notice the signs of addiction versus need. The reason I say doctors are the responsible ones is because a patient may legitimately need the medication but after time not need it any more and be objective enough to know that they don’t. But cortisone isn’t even in the same ballpark, and I would like to add that there are non-narcotic painkillers out there that do not have mood altering side effects. Thanks for the article.
Doctors are just as fanatical (a fan) of their particular university’s ball team as 24-year-old graduate, cubicle jockey. Heck, big time high school football (particularly in the lower South) is as bad or worse. I know it’s cliched to say, but the game is out of hand when kids from 15 – 22 will take anything (from lines of coke to heavy ‘legal’ narcotics) to get back on the field for Friday or Saturday night. I’ve seen it firsthand.
The pressure to do this to oneself doesn’t come from other athletes or loved ones, it comes from a host of people whose livelihoods or entertainment depend upon whether the best, albeit injured, player is on the field. In this particular instance we have a grown man, an education major – which is equivalent to a physics degree in the modern coaching fraternity – who can’t seem to not drink and drive, who is pulling down 7 figures, who, btw, is publicly trying to shame a kid (who’s making 30k a year at best in tuition/room/board/etc.) to play injured.
Ok, so I don’t disagree with the kids decision. I will say that, you may want to find another team to play for. You are now in the SEC. Which basically means for the rest of your college football days, you will have nothing but 300 pounders infront of you. Maybe football wasn’t the right choice in this case. Maybe he should go play for a pac10 team or something (No offense to you pac fans).They have a saying in the south, we don’t just play football, we live it. All of the SEC teams live for football. Being a champion is more than just a sport, its a way of life. And life isn’t easy.
I’ll start off by saying that I’m a college football player playing at a high level so I have a good understanding of this issue and I had to comment on this because anything other than a players perspective on these kind of things means nothing. I get mad when the media blames doctors and coaches for pressuring players to take painkillers, cortisone injections, or anything else. For me and a lot of guys we’re gonna do whatever we have to to be on the field. We work extremely hard year round, we’re fierce competitors, and we love football so no one is going to influence our decision on wether or not to play, we’re playing.
My career in two words can be described as injury plagued. I weigh 240 pounds and play nose tackle so I’m always going at it with guys who have 60+ pounds on me, I’m also an incredibly reckless player so injuries are going to come. My junior year in high school I had my first major injury, I dislocated my shoulder, tore my labrum, and lost about a quarter of the cartilage in my shoulder in a pre-season game. When you’re a high school kid it’s tough to get painkillers, high school football isn’t big business so I couldn’t find a dr. who would prescribe me painkillers to take through out the season. All of them said it was in my best interest to sit out the season, get surgery, and stay away from painkillers because they’re bad for your liver, addictive, etc. So I went to a drug dealer and bought enough to last me through the season I wasn’t gonna leave my team out to dry or watch someone else play my position who shouldn’t hold my jock. I’ve been taking painkillers, cortisone injections, painkilling injections, nerve blocking injections, and numbing injections consistently ever since with no regrets. I’ve ruptured two discs, torn my quad, torn knee ligaments, re-injured my shoulder several times, had a similar injury to my other shoulder, tore my meniscus, and gotten more concussions than I can count and never missed a snap. Pinkel was right he should have taken the cortisone injection. This issue isn’t the fault of coaches, trainers, or doctors, we’re sick competitors and we’re gonna play.