Teddy Bridgewater’s preseason injury was so grim it challenged the NFL’s culture of Next Man Up. This is the story of what his teammates saw, felt and never will forget.
The Men who Agree to Talk about what happened do so reluctantly. Their eyes invariably drift to the spot in question: the grass practice field, somewhere near the 30-yard line, right hash. It happened with the offense heading north, 22 men on the field, no contact allowed.
They won’t talk about what the injury looked like, out of respect. These are men who long ago came to terms with the inhumanity of their game. They laugh about concussions and broken bones as a defense mechanism, the way an electrician might laugh with his buddies about getting a jolt from a faulty circuit. Occupational hazard.
But this is different. They close their eyes and wince, the image flashing in their minds. They shake their heads reflexively, as if they can dislodge the memory and evict it from their brains. They watched Teddy Bridgewater go down on that field on Aug. 30, his left leg separating at the knee,during the first minutes of a Vikings preseason practice. Every time they think about it, every time they stand near this field and close their eyes, they see it again.
INJURIES IN THE NFL are commodified, sloganized, reduced to transactions. They’re interchangeable, disposable, devoid of pain. They’re dehumanized, disembodied, such an expected part of the game that they’ve got their own capitalized catchphrase: Next Man Up.
Check the injury report, adjust your fantasy team. See how easy this is? How painless? One goes down, another pops up.
“I hate that exact saying—Next Man Up,” Vikings guard Alex Boone says. “That’s f---ed up because it makes it sound like we’re barbarians. Like we don’t care: ‘F--- it, he’s hurt, move on.’ It’s terrible to say that. A guy gets hurt and all of a sudden everyone is like, ‘Oh, who was that guy?’ ”
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