The Draw Play

I am starting to become convinced that if you are a high level athlete who plays for a long time and makes a lot of money, you inevitably turn into a batman supervillian who starts getting into really weird health habits and pseudoscience. The absolute peak of this is that lunatic tech billionaire who is convinced he will live forever and uses his own son as a bloodbag. But it feels like athletes are getting into this shit too.

Tom Brady is the first that I was aware of falling into these patterns, though I doubt the actual first and I’m sure you can come up with older examples. Towards the end of his career he started marketing his TB12 Method with the help of his kook trainer. The TB12 Method is a lot of standard good health practices (eat unprocessed foods! Avoid bad foods! Stay hydrated! Work on your flexibility!) mixed in with some odd stuff that feels silly (drink OBSCENE amounts of water, if your pee is even the slightest bit yellow commit seppuku immediately) and some obvious hack diet bullshit (Tomatoes? BAD. All nightshade vegetables? Evil). I think Tom Brady’s longevity was absolutely aided by his strict diet and discipline in taking care of himself, but at that level? It’s just attributing things incorrectly. I do not think Tom Brady avoiding tomatoes made him the GOAT. I think his incredible work ethic, exceptional football IQ on how to avoid hits, and some fucking luck did most of the work.

Then you have Aaron Rodgers, who to be fair may have been born a kook. But we didn’t know how kooky till later on when the Vax stuff happened. He does weird soul-searching drugs in the woods and thinks chemtrails are poisoning us all. Hollistic medicines are not devoid of benefit. Herbs, scents, all that jazz does have effects on the body and were used in many ways before the development of modern medicines. However, many of those effects are the result of the placebo effect, and many of the weirder treatments are probably bogus nonsense.

During the first season of Quarterback (I didn’t watch the new season yet) Kirk Cousins revealed he does a mental exercise where he attaches electrodes to his forehead and opens up a game program that requires his focus to work. I have no idea how the tech works, and I definitely don’t know if it actually improves focus ability, but watching him do it certainly looked like bullshit. But hey, when you are a top level athlete in the top level of your sport, you seem bound to get attached to anything that seems like it gives any sort of small advantage. Maybe Kirk believes his little brain wave exercise is what gives him the edge to throw game-ending interceptions.

The latest kook we have to add to this list of old athletes doing weird pseudoscience shit to get the edge is Matthew Stafford. Stafford recently dealt with a disk issue in his back, and is in the process of healing it. This process apparently involves spending lots of time in what looks like a cancer coffin hyperbolic chamber doing…something? I have no idea what this Ammortal chamber is. Reading about it does not improve my opinion on it.

All of these kooks doing kooky things make me appreciate the Joe Flaccos of the world. Joe Flacco isn’t a kook. Joe Flacco is a normal ass dude. He probably does his own yardwork. I’m sure he lives in a mansion, but it’s probably a boring McMansion and not an actual mansion. He probably works out on outdated equipment he keeps in his garage. He feels like a guy who sits on the couch and watches dumb reality TV with his wife, who he loves, and will never cheat on or divorce. Joe Flacco has succeeded at the highest levels of the sport and if you saw him on the street you’d just see a dude who is taller than normal dudes, being a normal dude. I love Joe Flacco. We need more guys who look like they eat shitty hot dogs on the 4th of July and less guys who spend 13 hours a day in a freeze pod trying to touch god. Make athletes less healthy again.