Before the torn tendon in his groin that kept him out of the Eagles’ final two regular-season games. After he had suffered his third diagnosed concussion since entering the NFL in 2013. After he missed three games last season because of depression and other mental-health issues. After the injury to his ankle, one that led to surgery to repair his deltoid ligament and that caused him to miss 13 games in 2019 and 2020 and that left his leg looking as if a large man with bad intentions had taken a baseball bat to it. After an unknown number of strains and sprains and days when the darkness in his mind fell over him like a black wet blanket … and he took the field anyway.
In late October. At his locker inside the NovaCare Complex. Lane Johnson burned many of pro football’s myths to the ground.
Those myths hung thick last week and will again this week ahead of the Eagles’ matchup Sunday against the 49ers in the NFC championship game. Johnson put off surgery on his adductor — the muscle that stabilizes the pelvic area — and returned for the Eagles’ divisional-round game against the Giants, and was damn near perfect: He pass-blocked 26 times in that 38-7 victory without allowing a pressure, a quarterback hit, or a sack. “He’s a true warrior,” Jalen Hurts said. And Hurts was right. Johnson is a great right tackle, and he is playing, and excelling, through an incredible amount of physical pain and emotional pressure.
But as the locker room emptied on that afternoon, Johnson stripped all the NFL Films glory away from his job, from what he had done and what he would later show he was willing to do. He was watching from a distance as Tua Tagovailoa yo-yo’d in and out of the Dolphins’ lineup after multiple concussions. He had heard Brian Dawkins admit to having contemplated suicide and seen others — Junior Seau, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson, Rashaan Salaam, more — die by it. He could read the breaking-news stories that reveal the cold inhumanity with which the NFL often treats its former players — the bitter legal battle that led to a billion-dollar concussion settlement, the racial bias in that settlement, revelations about brain trauma and disease, abuses in the dispersion of disability benefits.
He knew he could someday be next in that long line of helplessness and misery, and he wanted to break the chain before it shackled more of his predecessors. Before it stretched to him.
“The ex-players need the voices,” he said. “I feel like those are the ones suffering the most. Technology’s a lot better now than it was back then, so those guys didn’t have near the equipment, and the protocols weren’t the same. Their practices were two-a-days. Their [bleep] was a lot harder than our stuff. [Bleep,] those guys were left in the cold.
“There are a lot of former players who are suffering, some who used to play here that I know of. I’m not going to give any names, but they’re in pretty damn bad shape. I don’t know, man. They’ve been playing football their whole life, and now they get out and they’re suffering. They have bad anxiety or depression. It affects their wives. It affects their children.”
So what would be the greater burden for Johnson: the damage to his body that he’ll have to withstand to play this Sunday — or any Sunday — or the guilt he would feel if he didn’t? It’s more than the possible medical connection between the concussions he has sustained and the anxiety that has, at times, overwhelmed him. It’s the trap so many athletes fall into: defining themselves solely as athletes, so fearful of failure that they’re paralyzed by the demands and expectations that their coaches, their teammates, they themselves, and even perfect strangers place on them.
“It’s the world we live in now,” he said. “I think phones got everybody [bleeped] up. I really do. I think social media has everybody deluded. It’s a different time we’re living in. Back in the ‘90s or ‘80s, those guys didn’t face near as much scrutiny as we do now. I don’t know. Everybody has their real life, and then everybody has their life on social media. Now they’re starting to get blended into one. I wasn’t alive in the ‘80s, but I figure the ‘80s would have been a nice place to be.
“You’re under pressure. You’re under the microscope. You’re in a place that, if you talk and say you’re struggling, everyone’s going to look at you like you’re a [coward]. That’s what people were scared of: getting judged.”
Johnson began grappling with his mental-health issues, he said, when he moved from high school to junior college. That was 2008. That was the year after Apple introduced the iPhone and Facebook and Twitter went global.
“I think that has a correlation,” he said. “And football does, obviously. You’d be ignorant to think you’re playing lineman and it doesn’t have anything to do with your health. It’s all factors, but I would think just a lot of us, a lot of players, your whole identity’s football. You get wrapped up in that, and you don’t really have life outside of that. You can get lost.
“You know who said that was Junior Seau. He said, ‘I only am what my coaches say I am.’ That’s a [bleeping] sad story, but there’s a lot of great players going through that. [Bleeping] Dawkins had bad [stuff], suicidal thoughts in his career. You can’t achieve your way out of it. Guys suffer in silence.”
Lane Johnson has decided he won’t. He will be out there Sunday. He will be a warrior. It is admirable, for certain, and if the Eagles win the Super Bowl, his effort and sacrifice will be woven forevermore into the tapestry of this team’s championship run. He already is and will continue to be a story within this story. The man himself has become a myth. But the best way for the NFL and the people who love professional football to honor him and everyone like him is to never ignore or forget the lasting and inconvenient reality of the price he is paying, and the price he might yet.
