Off the depth chart
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LATELY IT SEEMS everything in John Moffitt's life has acquired a veneer of existential drama. There is nothing easy, nothing unexamined, nothing remotely as basic as putting his hand in the dirt and driving his head and body into another human being. Case in point: the simple question of whether to have a beer while watching his former team, the Broncos, play the Chiefs on Sunday night of Week 11.
The setting is important for context. Moffitt sits in the upstairs TV room of his rented house in the Seattle suburb of Renton, a sliver of Lake Washington visible through the front window. Two cameramen and a photographer crowd the room, ready to watch him watch the game. He can tell the action is about to begin because the muted television keeps alternating between Peyton Manning's stoic face and a line of soldiers on hand to celebrate the NFL's ongoing merger with the United States military. On a counter downstairs, a medium-size farm's worth of grilled meat covers the kitchen island, a case of beer tantalizingly close.
Moffitt is an oversize Jack Black, 312 pounds of childlike ebullience, easy distractibility and, at this moment, indecision. The room is silent as he grapples with the beer-or-no-beer decision. He plays with his long, dark hair, which will spend the evening in and out of a tight bun. With an air of finality, he tells his manager, Wael Abou-Zaki, "I'm not going to have a beer. I really can't."
There is no response. Moffitt looks around the room and says, as if answering a question nobody asked, "Okay, I'll have one." He prods Abou-Zaki, "Are you going to have one, L? I just don't want to be the only one drinking, you know? There are cameras here, and if it's just me sitting on the couch drinking beer ... You know what I'm saying?"
To illustrate, Moffitt throws his enormous and relatively formless body into the back corner of the brown sectional and adopts a voice filled with mock concern, like a bad impression of a news anchor reporting a tragedy. "Yeah, John looks good," he says. "John looks like he's doing well. Great. Great. Really good to see."
Two weeks removed from walking away from a lucrative career as a third-year guard with the Broncos, he reports that sitting in front of the television (without a beer, ultimately) "feels super normal. There is no part of me that wants to go out there and do that." He would not be watching this game if it weren't for the cameras on hand to watch him watch it. In fact, nobody here could watch this game at all if Moffitt hadn't discovered that morning that his cable had been turned off. His mother ("My accountant," he says) forgot to make a payment. "I turned it on. No channels," he says. "Oh, that's just perfect." He spent a good part of his day on the phone in a panic to reach a human who could reconnect him by kickoff.
"I should've left it off," he says. "Made it part of the story, you know? I'm done with the NFL and don't have money for cable. I'm a minimalist. We only read books in this house now."
We are here because Moffitt -- financially stable for now -- made a decision so outlandish, so heretical, so anti-American that it simply can't escape further scrutiny. It bears repeating: John Moffitt, 27 years old, with a contract that would have paid him $312,500 for the rest of this season and $752,500 the next, quit the Super Bowl favorite in midseason. To boil it down to the essence of Moffitt -- a Moffitt reduction sauce, as it were -- he just wasn't feeling it anymore. Instead, he felt objectified, a pawn in a soulless enterprise. Practice had become drudgery. "It got to the point where I didn't want to step out onto the practice field another day," he says. "When you're stretching and you're like, 'This is the worst,' I think it's time to change something."
Within a week of his leaving, the game started to look different from the outside too. Moffitt's coach, John Fox, required heart surgery for a pre-existing condition. Texans coach Gary Kubiak suffered a ministroke on the field. In Dallas, Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett announced that doctors told him he was showing signs of CTE. In Miami, a bullied Jonathan Martin left the Dolphins, and his teammate, a hypertrophic thug named Richie Incognito, was the new national warden of football culture.
Moffitt had worked most of his life to reach the league, and now he was walking away? How many fans would give limbs to trade places? How many would love to just once run out onto the field to the seductive wash of all those cheers? "How dare you -- right?" Moffitt asks, palms upraised. The decision was so outside the paradigm that friends and family asked just one question: Are you okay? "I was really okay," he says. "I was great. I was walking away from their dream, not mine."
On the television, Moffitt watches huge armored men protect Manning at the expense of their own bodies. Two weeks ago, they were teammates, buddies, yet nothing on-screen causes him to change his expression, nothing causes him to so much as lean forward with expectancy. He is right. He is done. His body bears the toll: a shredded knee, elbow surgery, countless blows to the head. Though he has no history of concussions, he is disturbed by studies linking cognitive difficulties to repeated small collisions, the raison d'être of the offensive lineman. He says he looked at the pageantry -- the military flyovers, the crazed passion of fans and what he views as the sacrifice of humanity for a television show -- and felt a growing unease. His faith was shaken. He turned to books by Noam Chomsky, the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra, which led him to question the intellectual capital being expended on sports.
"I offered a service, and I no longer wanted to offer the service and I no longer request money for it," he says. "You can change a passion. You can change a dream. I had the NFL dream, and it was no longer what I envisioned. I don't expect people to understand."
The details are strikingly mundane. He returned to Renton during the Broncos' bye week to be with his longtime girlfriend, Dani Bunker, and her 5-year-old daughter. On Sunday, Nov. 3, he called his agent, Michael George, and told him he was finished with football; George told Moffitt to sleep on it. The next day, Moffitt called Broncos VP of football operations John Elway and said: "I don't have a passion for football anymore, and I don't want to play. I'm not happy." Elway was supportive.
"I was very insistent on telling John I didn't want to waste his time," Moffitt says. "I told him, 'I'm good.'"
And then, in typical Moffitt fashion, he tweeted, "Football was fun but my head hurts-haha kidding roger goodell. I'm on to new things, thanks to everyone along the way!!!" He swears he thought that would be the end of it, that nobody would care about a story he dismissively calls "Backup Retires." But then interview requests rolled in and Moffitt started talking about the sports-industrial complex and the controversial writings of libertarian socialist Chomsky and brain trauma and universal harmony. Pretty soon, "Backup Retires" had developed layers, existential and otherwise. Doors opened. His phone rang.
