The 5 O’Clock Club: Playing in the NFL despite pain

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I just watched the 8 episodes of the RECEIVER series on Netflix (the sequel to last year’s “Quarterback”) I enjoyed the current series, especially from episode 3 onwards.

One thing that struck me was the Recipient Series was the number and severity of injuries that the players apparently suffered on a regular basis.

In the very first episode, we saw Amon Ra St. Brown suffer a toe injury against Seattle that forced him to play with steel plates in his cleats. The following week, he suffered a torn oblique, which forced him to play the next two games in tremendous pain despite his oblique being torn from the bone.

While injuries are no laughing matter, St. Brown left us with a remarkable quote that underscores his devotion to the game and, more importantly, his hatred for a rival NFC North team. With a grin on his face, he described how he deals with the pain: “Painkillers are something I really don’t like to take, except… unless it’s the Packers.”

But as the Netflix series shows, the receivers were actually heavily dependent on painkillers during the 1923 season.

One particularly poignant behind-the-scenes shot shows Raiders receiver Davante Adams suffering from a shoulder injury, slumped against a wall in the stadium hallway before opting for a lidocaine injection to get back into the game. At one point in the broadcast, Adams explains the extent of the injury to his teammates. Offensive lineman Greg Van Roten tells Adams that he had a similar injury a few seasons earlier and was still dealing with the pain. “Well, that’s comforting,” Adams quips.

The scenes where Adams can barely move before going into the locker room, followed by number 17 putting on his helmet as he leaves the locker room and sprints back onto the field after the shot, reminded me eerily of the scenes in North Dallas Forty — a 1979 film about the “industry” of NFL football — in which running back Delma Huddle (played by Tidewater’s own Tommy Reamon) violates his principles and gets an injection in his knee in order to get on the field – with devastating personal consequences.

In the final episode of the Netflix series, we see a near repeat of the injury and return sequence, when tight end George Kittle tells Kyle Shanahan to take him out of the championship game against the Chiefs because he can’t lift his arm. The trainers take Kittle to the locker room, give him a shot, and he emerges moments later from a phone booth like Superman, puts on his helmet, and sprints back to the sideline, where he tells Shanahan he’s ready to play again.

The show also reveals that Deebo Samuel suffered a hamstring injury early in the third quarter of the Super Bowl, but given the importance of the game, he stayed in the game and apparently forwent the magic of painkillers.

In some cases we saw in the Recipient series, nothing could be done to get the player back on the field. Justin Jefferson, for example, struggled with injuries in 1923, and we get an up close and personal look at those issues. Netflix shows us what he went through after suffering a hamstring injury in Week 4 against the Kansas City Chiefs. Early in the fourth quarter, he slips while running a route, grabs his leg, and immediately knows something is wrong. He limps off the field, talks to the trainers, and heads to the injury tent. He tells the training staff he heard a pop. Jefferson would eventually be placed on the injured list for the first serious injury of his professional career.

When Jefferson returns from the injured list, he almost immediately suffers a nasty chest injury in Las Vegas that leaves him coughing up blood on the sidelines. I remember watching the game live during the season and seeing video reports (on the broadcast or on Twitter, I’m not sure which) of the ambulance taking Jefferson to the hospital before the game was over. There was no silver bullet to get JJ back on the field immediately with these injuries.

A constant theme for Davante Adams in the first few episodes (until head coach Josh McDaniel is fired and Antonio Pierce is promoted to interim coach) is the risk of injury he faces as Jimmy Garappolo subjects Adams to repeated hard hits. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here before I lose my damn life,” Adams says on the sidelines during a Week 6 game against the New England Patriots. “I’ve never been hit so damn much in my entire career. Every game is a bust.”