The Pain Game

always been: Deny, deny and hope we die. That's the part fans don't know about. My wife says most fans don't want to know. She says, 'They don't want to hear about you guys being hurt, Dave.' She said they don't want you to kill Santa Claus for them. They just want to watch their games."

When Heidi Pear arrives home, she finds Dave in bed in his winter coat, curled up, with his old college blanket over him. "This is what we have in front of us for our future," she says. "All these years Dave has had this, and how long was football really? Six years? And only four really good years?" She laughs casually, a coping laugh. "All that for football? The good days were so long ago. They don't feel real anymore."

Heidi and Dave met as students at the University of Washington in the early 1970s. She was blond and pretty, with a bit of a hippie streak, and he was a defensive lineman on the football team. "I just thought, He'll do this in college and finish up," she says, "and then we'll get on with our normal lives together."

But the Baltimore Colts selected him in the third round of the 1975 NFL draft, and, after his rookie year, he was picked up in an expansion draft by the fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who went winless in Pear's first season. But, amid the team's miseries, Pear swiftly mastered his role as the defense's nose guard. "It helped that I had a pretty high pain threshold," he says. "I was willing to do anything to be successful, anything. When I got hurt, I just made sure to get myself back into a game as soon as possible. It was

do-what-you-have-to-do, and I did it all."

That attitude was helping him to build a reputation around the league. "I play every play like it's going to be my last one," he said to Tampa media. Buccaneers officials praised his toughness. "You could cut off one of Dave Pear's legs, and he'd still be out there every Sunday, giving everything he's got," Buccaneers Coach John McKay told the St. Petersburg Times in 1977.

Pear loved the attention. After sacking a quarterback, he enjoyed standing over him and lifting his arms toward the crowd, in the way of a victorious Roman gladiator asking the mob to decide the fate of the prostrate foe. "It was like, 'Do I let this guy up, or do I end it for him now?'" he remembers. "The crowd loved it. I loved it. Football was like battling in the Colosseum." With his antics, his long, flowing brown hair and his selection to the Pro Bowl team, he became a favorite of Tampa fans, who created a fan club in his honor and regularly staged parties for him in the stadium parking lot after Buccaneer home games. He boasted of his success to a local newspaper. "Personally, I feel I'm the greatest nose guard in professional football," he said. "They double- and triple-team me every week, and they still can't touch me."

The physical punishment he endured never worried him in Tampa. "My feeling then was what every player's feeling is," he explains. "If you think you might get hurt, you could never strap it on each Sunday and be King Kong out there . . . If I saw a guy get hurt during a game, I thought, 'That doesn't apply to me -- never gonna happen to me.'"

By then he was living with Heidi, who did not relish either his popularity or

personality change. "The early years were tough," she remembers. "He got a bit of the big head there. But I think it comes with that kind of athletic life. Everybody was telling him how great he was."

In early 1979, after his Pro Bowl appearance and three seasons in Tampa, Pear told the Buccaneers that he wanted a raise on his contract that paid him less than $100,000 annually. The Buccaneers said no and traded him to the Oakland Raiders, who agreed to pay him $115,000 for his first season and slightly more for additional seasons. Pear was ecstatic. "I had what I thought was financial security," he says. "And then it happened. One play changed my life."

It came on September 16, 1979, as the Raiders found themselves losing badly on the road to the Seattle Seahawks. A frustrated Pear, thinking he had been subjected to illegal blocks through most of the game, was looking for a measure of payback when Seahawks running back Sherman Smith got the ball and found a hole. Pear filled it. "I

really wanted to nail somebody, and here comes Smith," Pear remembers. "He was a big guy, 230 pounds at least, maybe bigger. I didn't care. I was really gonna get him. I hit him. But I got the worst of it. I knew the instant it happened something was wrong. My neck felt like lightning. I felt the disk in there come out -- you don't really know what a disk is until you hurt it, and then you know, you feel this thing coming almost out of your neck. I could feel it move against a nerve. I was in agony. I was thinking, I wish I hadn't done that. And that was it. I was never the same again."

He lost playing time and, by the next season, was second-string. By then, his back and spine, first injured during his Tampa Bay years, were plaguing him, too. He says the Raiders regularly tried to treat his pain with shots and pills, including Percodan, but that he never felt real relief. In desperation, he turned to Heidi to administer shots in the evening. She injected his neck with a drug that Pear never had tried before. "Dave got it somewhere," Heidi remembers. "It was a drug they gave to horses or something."

None of the drugs helped. His second year with the Raiders would be his last with the club. After the Raiders' triumphant 1980 season and their Super Bowl title the following January, Pear went to Raiders owner Al Davis and explained that his damaged neck had made it impossible for him, at 27, to play again. He had a contract, but nothing in it was guaranteed. He says he asked Davis if the Raiders could see their way toward paying him for the following season in 1981. "I said to him, 'I'm going from here to get a neck operation -- I got a ruined neck playing for you,'" Pear recalls. "And Davis said to me, 'I'm not taking responsibility for your injury.'"

Davis has not talked publicly about the matter, and messages requesting comment from him for this story went unanswered. Raiders public relations director Mike

Taylor released a statement that, while never

mentioning Davis, said the "Raiders organization" treated Pear fairly. The statement

alluded to an arbitration in which the club paid Pear for several games into the season after his retirement. In an e-mail response to Pear's charge of "unfair and uncaring treatment," Taylor wrote that Pear's "extracurricular activities" with the Raiders needed to be "taken into account."

"Did you know about his personal problems?" Taylor demanded during a phone

interview. When invited to elaborate on Pear's problems, Taylor declined.

Would readers regard an unsubstantiated accusation as part of a smear campaign?

"Writers should use due diligence and find out on their own," Taylor replied.

When Pear heard that a Raiders spokesman made a charge and then declined to elaborate, he said in disgust, "Because there's nothing there."

Pear's departure from the Raiders had left him floundering. Pondering his rising bills and lack of an income, he decided he had no choice but to attempt a football comeback. His doctor officially cleared him to play while privately urging him not to, the Pears remember. In 1982, Pear played in the preseason with the San Francisco 49ers before being cut.

The following year, he applied to the NFL's retirement board for "line of duty" disability benefits, available at the time for players who had suffered career-ending injuries while playing for an NFL club. Pear's claim was denied. "It wasn't that he couldn't play," Upshaw says. "He did play after the Raiders. He just wasn't good enough."

For the next decade, Pear found jobs in sales. By the mid-'90s, while living in Florida, he became scared about his job performance. He was increasingly falling asleep between appointments, sometimes while in his car. And his back and neck were worse than ever, despite several surgeries and related care that, he says, has cost him more than $500,000, because he has been unable to obtain health insurance since leaving football.

In 1995, he believed his working days were running out. He applied for the league's total and permanent disability benefit with the retirement board. The doctor commissioned by the board to access his condition portrayed Pear as a man whose physical ailments left him able to do little. Presented with evidence that included reports on Pear's acute fatigue, the doctor said that Pear would require a job that granted him "frequent rest breaks." He would also need, the doctor added, to be limited to sedentary work. Pear should not stand for lengthy periods, should not bend and could not be expected to lift anything more than 15 pounds, the doctor wrote.

"You tell me how many jobs like that are out there?" Pear says.

The six-man board, made up of an equal number of management and union representatives, rejected his claim.

Three years later, eager to put his hands on cash wherever he could find it, Pear filed for his early retirement pension from the league at the minimum age of 45 and started collecting $484 a month initially. The small benefit came to Pear's savings account at a severe cost: In accepting it, he sacrificed any claim to a disability payment forever, according to the rules of the retirement board plan.

Then, out of nowhere, came what looked like the Pear family's salvation. In the late '90s, Heidi inherited $500,000 from a relative. At first glance, the money seemed to represent financial security, but the more Dave thought about the sum, the more he worried. Perhaps, he reasoned, it wouldn't last in the face of his medical bills and expected unemployment in the near future. He began investing in risky tech stocks, and, when he started losing, he invested more. He lost the whole $500,000. "The pain I was under, the fatigue, the mental stress -- maybe I panicked and wasn't thinking right," he says.

Heidi purses her lips while listening to him describe his anguish. "I told you to get us out [of the market], but we didn't get out," she says softly. "We were supposed to confer with each other."

Dave drops his head and stares at their kitchen floor. "I don't know why I did it. I thought I had to make a bunch of money." He wraps his arms around himself. His voice shakes. "I don't know why."

She looks down at him. "Oh, you were scared, Dave. You knew you couldn't work much longer."

The Pears returned to the Seattle area in 2000, and he found another sales job. By 2002, he was selling shipping containers. As the months wore on, he says, dimensions and sales formulas became elusive concepts for him. Meanwhile, alarmed that her husband was suddenly getting lost on roads, Heidi took him to a neuropsychologist, whose reports detailed his profound memory problems and, worse, made clear that his decline had been particularly swift during the previous two years, his problems gaining a frightening momentum. Dave was a candidate for early onset dementia, said the report, and his nearly constant fatigue was likely a function of a damaged frontal lobe, possibly the result of blows to the head.

"On our way out," Heidi remembers, the neuropsychologist "simply said to me, 'Good luck.' I'll never forget that. It was like, 'The handwriting is on the wall.' Everybody knew where this was going."

The Social Security Administration declared him disabled. Dave's Social Security disability benefits have helped his family, but the money isn't enough for them to keep their house, Heidi says.

She arises at around 5 every morning, teaches fitness classes at a gym until midday, then goes off to her second job as a merchandising representative. She generally works 50-hour weeks, then shops, makes dinner and looks after Dave. Dave is seldom allowed to cook anything because he might forget to turn something off. As Heidi puts it, "Dave is just here."

No ethic counts more in football than a player's willingness to compete in pain while subjecting himself to on-field danger. Since the sport's inception, coaches from Knute Rockne to Mike Ditka have expected it; and players have prided themselves on exemplifying it. It's for good reason that many football men compare their sport not to another game but to war. "You're fighting in a battle, and then maybe you limp all woozy over to the sidelines and see a few guys really injured, and, man, it's like a triage unit in war," says Kyle Turley, an offensive lineman this past season for the Kansas City Chiefs. "You have to put it out of your mind and keep fighting. That's the way you're taught. That's part of what got us into these problems."

NFL players have commonly grown up hearing stories of the game's legends persevering through serious injuries. The homilies carry a powerful message: A high pain threshold is to be emulated. Turley, a veteran of nine seasons in the NFL trenches, recalls being deeply moved by a story he heard about Jack Youngblood, the Hall of Fame Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman who limped off during a playoff game in 1979 with a fractured fibula.

"He had a Rams trainer duct-tape a magazine or something around his broken leg and then he went back in," Turley remembers. "You believe that? The lesson is, 'You do whatever it takes to play . . . You get hurt, you find a way.' There's no time for whirlpools or for healing up just right. You just suck it up and push through, and if you can't, you're out. There's a saying around locker rooms: 'No one has ever made the club from the tub.'"

Since his youth, Turley has embraced the physical risks of his sport. "If you've made it to the NFL, you've seen talented teammates fall by the wayside in high school and college from injuries," he says. "It's sad. But that's kind of the beauty of the game. It's primitive -- there's no other sport like it. You're the gladiators. And when you're kind of an elite gladiator, the injuries you suffer are badges of honor -- until they really hurt you."

Turley, who decided to retire in December, has suffered numerous concussions and already worries about his sudden bouts of forgetfulness. "I'm a little concerned about what's down the road for me," he says. His 32-year-old body is hurting more than ever. When looking at NFL retirees such as Pear, he thinks he might be glimpsing the ghost of his own future. "What has happened to Dave and other players is going to happen to a lot of players in my era," he says. "So we better start paying attention."

It disturbs Turley that the NFL usually pays for health insurance for only five years after a player leaves the game. To show his commitment to the aggrieved retirees, he has donated $25,000 to Gridiron Greats and done a TV interview with Pear, whom he thanked on-air for his part in building the game for younger players. "I heard frustration in Dave's voice," he says. "Must be so hard on him, on all those guys . . . But to a man, if you asked those guys whether they'd play again, they'd say yes. It's what they dreamed about doing."

At the peak of John Mackey's football career, his uniform number, 88, became famous in Baltimore. To his fans, perhaps his most memorable play came in 1971, when 88 caught a tipped pass from Johnny Unitas in Super Bowl V and streaked for a long touchdown, helping the Colts defeat the Dallas Cowboys.

On a Sunday last November, the former All-Pro tight end walked haltingly down a short hallway and into the living room of his Baltimore condominium. Eighty-eight wore his Hall of Fame ring on his right hand and his Super Bowl ring on his left. He looked at his wife, Sylvia, and their two adult daughters, Laura and Lisa. The three women glanced up from a football game and smiled at him.

Mackey sat beside them, then looked at a wall near the television and began talking. "One line on the right, one line on the left. Two lines on the right, two lines on the left."

"He does that sometimes," Laura said. "Sometimes he counts squares in the bathroom."

Mackey peered quizzically at the television screen. "Football," he said. A year ago, as his daughters remember, he glanced at the television to see a player in a Colts jersey with 88 on his back. He exclaimed, "Look at me." A few second later, he muttered, "That's not me. Who is that?"

Mackey was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia in 2001, at age 60. He and Sylvia were living in Los Angeles at the time, but Sylvia immediately decided to move him back to Baltimore. "I wanted him in a city where he was known, so that people could help him if he ever got lost during a wandering stage," she says. Her worst fear became a sudden reality. He strolled off at a Baltimore Ravens game. Panicked, Sylvia and her daughters searched the stadium without success before it occurred to Sylvia that in this hometown crowd he would probably receive help. Before leaving the stadium, she called their condo in the hope that he was there. John answered. Since John couldn't explain, Sylvia can only imagine that a longtime fan of his recognized him and drove him home.

By then, Sylvia was working as a flight attendant for United Airlines, both for the salary and to secure a health insurance plan for the Mackeys. But no insurance plan available to her could pay for the round-the-clock home nursing care that her husband soon needed, and her husband's $2,450-per-month pension wouldn't offset such expenses, either.

In 2006, Sylvia wrote a letter to then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, asking for help, explaining the toll of her husband's dementia on their family and emphasizing that she knew of other retired players in similar straits. Last year, her letter triggered the creation of the 88 Plan, funded by the union and the league, and named in honor of Mackey and his uniform number. As of late December, according to the players union, the applications of 80 retirees had been approved for benefits under the 88 Plan. For John's care at home, the Mackeys receive a $50,000 benefit annually, which is used to hire a 40-hour-per-week daytime nurse. Families with dementia victims who require care in a facility will receive $88,000 annually.

But the 88 Plan does not provide benefits to retirees with less serious cognitive problems, such as Pear's. The six-man retirement board that has been the bane of Pear and other angry retirees will decide who receives the 88 Plan benefits.

Former Colts safety Bruce Laird, a leader of the retiree group Fourth and Goal, sees the 88 Plan as only a first step toward addressing the needs of players with profound cognitive problems that fall short of dementia. At 57, he has his own health worries, after a 14-year professional career that ended in 1986. "I had dozens of concussions when I played -- four in one year alone -- and I kept going back in games," he says.

He has been convinced by his own forgetfulness and by a pack of studies that -- though not unanimous in their conclusions -- suggest a link between long-term participation in football and an enhanced risk of dementia. A University of North Carolina study that assessed 2,552 retired players determined that the players who had incurred at least three concussions were more than three times as likely to suffer from significant memory problem than those with no history of concussions.

"A lot of the retired players just keep suffering in silence," Laird says. "Some are too screwed up even to get out of bed. Sylvia fought and won. But it was Sylvia. Not the union."

Sylvia Mackey doesn't particularly care about who gets the credit, just as long as the league and the union face up to what she sees as an inevitability. "People get hurt in this game," she says. "That's football."

From his office on 20th Street NW, Gene Upshaw picked up a phone last year, looking for help. The volume of retired players' attacks against him had driven the football union chief to Washington power lawyer Lanny Davis, whose legal specialty is not labor relations or litigation but rather what Davis cheerfully terms "crisis management."

When the wolves are baying at the door, Davis is a man to call. His experience at guiding clients through controversy dates back to his days as a legal counsel in the Clinton White House, where, during the greatest crisis of that presidency, he dispensed advice to allies on how to deal with a media corps voracious for information about Bill Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Davis can envision a possible way out of the public relations mess for the players union and the NFL, a solution that might, among other things, enable retirees in Pear's position to receive disability benefits from the league. Noting that, since last September, the players union Web site has stated that any retiree receiving Social Security disability payments has effectively proved his medical eligibility for the league's total and permanent disability benefit, Davis says that Pear might deserve the league benefit, now worth more than $110,000 a year, despite being denied it in 1995.

"It'd need to be thoroughly considered," he says. "Perhaps it can be done, if there is no black-and-white rule . . . I'd be curious about Gene's view."

Upshaw's view is not Davis's view.

Upshaw indicates that, for the moment, he is not malleable on the subject of retirees in Pear's situation. "He took his pension," Upshaw says, sitting in his office recently. "Pear can't undo his decision, and I can't undo it. I cannot just go around fixing his mistakes and other players' mistakes just so that they can get a benefit."

Now and then, Upshaw walks into another room to fish out records with information about Pear, along with charts and statistics about the NFL's treatment of retired players. At 62, the robust union executive has a strong gait and is about 20 pounds leaner than during his 15-year playing career, when he played offensive guard at 255 pounds and was a nimble 6-foot-5 wrecking machine on his way to the Hall of Fame. He and Pear were Raiders teammates in 1979 and 1980.

In 2006, Upshaw earned $6.7 million, including bonuses, from the union, which easily makes him the highest paid union leader in professional sports. But he contends that, if anything, he is "underpaid," given his accomplishments and responsibilities. He points out that the average player's salary was a relatively paltry $85,000 when his union work began in 1983. It has increased more than twentyfold since.

He raps a conference table with his pen. "I am the only guy in the room saying to the [active] players that we need to think of people outside this room -- the retired players," he says. "The union doesn't have to do that, but it does it, and I do it. And [active] players pay for it . . . We can't do everything these [retired] guys want done for them. There are too many of them out there, and more guys would start coming to us. We'd go broke. Dave Pear, Dave Pear, Dave Pear. It isn't just Dave Pear. There are a lot of guys."

What should somebody like Pear do? I ask. Upshaw neatly arranges his sheets of paper. "Once he took that pension, that was it: He can't get a disability [benefit]. That's not only the rule of the retirement plan -- it's the law."

I ask if he's certain of that.

"Yes," he answers. "It's not just the NFL; it's the law."

But it's not the law, says the attorney Upshaw himself retained. Lanny Davis, in a separate interview, says the NFL could grant both a pension and a right to a disability payment. "It's discretionary," Davis says, "which is the way it is with most corporations. [That's] my understanding from talking to [union attorneys]. The point that I think is more important to Gene is that everyone in the league and [union] is open right now to thinking how to help these guys."

Davis seems to want to play peacemaker, but Upshaw remains furious over the retired players' criticism of him. He pulls out pages from union files that show the specifics of the charitable donations made on behalf of the Pear family by the Players Assistance Trust. "Dave Pear says we haven't helped him and other players," he says. "We're gonna be paying out another million or so in '07 to retirees. And take a look at this sheet."

The PAT made several mortgage payments in 2006 of roughly $2,000 a month for Pear and, at times, took care of his energy and water bills. In total, the PAT provided $20,046 in charitable support that year to Pear, before halting the payments in 2007; Upshaw explained that the union wished to alternate in helping players. "Does Pear or anybody else ever say thanks for the help?" he demands.

"I can't believe he expects me to be thankful," Pear says. "I wouldn't have needed a dime of that money if they'd just paid me what I deserve in the first place . . . I know I'm not the only one out there. I ache for all these families of players in my shoes. When somebody gets a little help, I cheer. It's just that it's coming so slowly. Most of us probably will be dead before it happens."

While Heidi prepares dinner, Dave Pear digs his cane into the floor and moves toward their bedroom. He has just thought of something he wants to give to their 24-year-old son, Adam, and their 20-year-old daughter, Alexandra. The items are a reminder of all that went wrong for him -- though, in their hands, who knows? Maybe they can hawk them and make a nice piece of change, he says. He pulls his secrets out of an envelope and hoists them the way a precious metals salesman would show off gold ingots.

"Two tickets to Super Bowl XV," he says. "We all got tickets. I completely forgot about selling these two." He grins. "I'll let the kids sell them or do whatever with them. Bet those memorabilia collectors would like them, huh? I got a lot of memorabilia that can go to the kids one day."

He reaches into his closet and pulls out a white Raiders road jersey with the black numeral 74 on it. It is his Super Bowl jersey. Never been laundered, he says proudly.

He rests the jersey on the bed. A surprise catches him then, a bolt of pain shooting up the back. He winces and takes another pill. He lies on his bed, closes his eyes and drapes the jersey over himself, a makeshift blanket. He just needs a couple of moments, he says.

"Hope the kids will like the tickets," he says. "It's the Super Bowl. Everybody likes the Super Bowl."

Michael Leahy is a Magazine staff writer. He can be reached at leahym@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.