Arena football gives Gordon direction in life
Three teams in three years worth it if NFL dream is realized
Eight weeks into the Washington Valor football season, and Jimmy Gordon still hasn't unpacked the extra clothing from his plastic storage bins.
Gordon knows the hazards of getting too comfortable in the Arena Football League. One day, he could get a call – The Call – and have to leave. When you're chasing NFL dreams, you can't make yourself at home.
That's why the furnished two-bedroom, twobathroom apartment in Odenton, Maryland, that Gordon shares with Valor teammate Anthony Parker looks like a model unit the leasing office might show to transient bachelors. Nothing adorns the white walls, the formal dining table setting remains untouched, the oven mitts look brand new. Gordon got the master suite by winning rock, paper, scissors, but the extra square footage is only good for stowing those plastic bins.
“The nature of the business,” Gordon explained, “you never know what's next.”
When he leaves his apartment to check for mail, neighbors notice him. It's hard not to. Gordon has muscles bulging at every inch of his 6-foot-2 body. So, they stare with eyes that wonder, “who is this guy?”
Gordon is a starting linebacker and the unidentified player featured in the Valor's advertisements adorning the elevators inside Verizon Center, where the team plays.
He's the one gripping a football and wearing a blue and white accented Under Armour jersey. His face is hidden by a dark eye shield that covers everything except his day's old stubble and thin lips. On game days, even the part-time arena workers don't realize it's him when Gordon steps into the elevator and stands in front of himself on the sign.
“He does look anonymous,” Parker said. “We [teammates] all know it's him, but nobody else does.”
This is Gordon's third AFL team in three years. He began his professional career with the Jacksonville Sharks, as a newlywed. By the next season, he was single and with the Tampa Bay Storm. Last summer while playing with them, Gordon was at a Qdoba when the 716 area code popped up on his phone. The Buffalo Bills wanted him for a workout. He left his halfeaten burrito and arrived at the airport less than two hours later. The workout didn't lead to a job offer. False alarm, but he hasn't stopped dreaming.
In January, the Valor traded for Gordon. One of the first players in town, he said yes to every promotional event - which included modeling as the hardcore poster boy in the No. 17 jersey.
During a recent game, Gordon fractured his right thumb, but he still does 10 push-ups on his knuckles as punishment every time he jumps offsides in practice. He knows if he's not sharp - or worse, remains on injured reserve - someone's waiting to take his job.
He is 25 years old and making $16,000 for four months of football. Almost daily he grapples with thoughts of life after. He is not ready for this to end. “A lot of reasons why people keep playing,” Gordon said, speaking in general terms but really referring to himself, “They don't know 'what else I would do? What else would I do after football? Who am I? Am I nobody now?'” “I play,” he said, “because it's my life.” On those Football Lives Here posters, the only thing that would give Gordon away is the partially covered tattoo peeking from under his left sleeve: the eastern border of Suffolk County, New York.
Gordon grew up there, but as a Long Island kid devoted to hockey. An uncle convinced him that his body would be better suited as a tight end, so Gordon tried out for the PatchogueMedford High School freshman team. He didn't know how to place the pads in his pants, but the football field - its spotlight, applause and adrenaline - gave him goose bumps the ice never could.
“It's almost impossible to describe,” Gordon said. “It's a feeling I have never felt . . . anywhere.”
Richie Smith was addicted, too. Smith and Gordon met while playing Division I football at the University of Buffalo. They became roommates and got matching B.A.W.B. tattoos. Bad Ass White Boy. In the moments before a 2011 game at Tennessee, where a sea of orange engulfed Buffalo players, Gordon lined up for kickoff and brazenly tugged an imaginary train whistle.
“This is the biggest crowd I ever played in front of,” Smith recalled. “Just screaming and chanting. You actually feel the grass pounding, and the grass vibrating. You look out, and me and Jimmy make eye contact, and he's doing his little choo-choo thing in front of 107,000 people.”
After Smith's senior season, he was cut after a tryout with the New York Jets. Suddenly, football was over, and the B.A.W.B. turned into some guy working with mortgages at a local bank.
“The transition of me not playing anymore and me having to - pardon my French - bust my balls every day,” said Smith, who has now found purpose coaching high school football and wrestling in Pennsylvania, “was hard.” Smith's early retirement shook Gordon. “This can't happen to me,” Gordon would say to himself throughout a senior season in which he caught nine passes for 108 yards and a touchdown.
A year later, Gordon prepared intensely for his pro day, but he believes he hurt his chances by not having solid representation. He says a big-time agent backed out on him at the last minute. This still bugs him.
“I know if I had an agent and did it the right way, I'd be in a whole different world right now,” he said. “I felt like I got screwed.”
Gordon went undrafted. Two NFL teams called, but only for one-day workouts. He said yes to both but didn't stick. So Gordon returned home, back to the borough pricked into his skin, as yet another B.A.W.B. abandoned by the game.
It's the first practice after a bye week, and on this Monday morning, a band of football vagabonds gathers under a tented dome.
The Ivy League graduate tosses passes. The 40-year-old wide receiver, the league's oldest player, stretches. The former Virginia Tech guard, the first person ever drafted in the China Arena Football League, laughs with his fellow linemen. Spread across these 64 yards of artifi- cial grass, every man has a story and every man is chasing something.
Nine Valor players have set foot inside an NFL locker room, including former Maryland Terrapin Josh Portis, the backup quarterback who was released from the Seattle Seahawks after a Cinco de Mayo arrest on suspicion of DUI in 2013.
Through various circumstances, the players have landed in the AFL, the minor league that's not affiliated with the NFL. The league has faced financial problems and lost several teams. However this season, Ted Leonsis brought the Valor to Washington to play in the five-team league - Leonsis also owns the Baltimore Brigade.
Though smaller, the AFL still offers a chance to keep playing.
Once the season is over, Parker, the 340pound offensive lineman rooming with Gordon, will go back to working in the mental health field. The day job pays the bills, but football owns his heart.
“I'll chase it as long as I can. I don't see myself without it yet,” the 28-year-old Parker said. “If I wake up one morning and I see myself without it or see somebody else play and not me . . . “Parker pauses. “Until then I'm gone with the wind.” Finally, Gordon swaggers to the turf. He's back from seeing a specialist about his busted thumb and will practice in a protective cast. Any pain he might feel beats working security at night club or answering phones at an athletic facility, jobs he held in 2014, when his life was aimless, miserable and appallingly normal.
“You play a sport, it's become your life now. Then all of a sudden, it's taken away from you,” Gordon said. “Yeah, I went through a massive depression, I would call it. I know for a fact, many hundreds of football players go through it.”
For the first time in years, Gordon had August off. He stopped working out, convinced the NFL would never call again. The sofa became his arena. He drank some. Got angry a lot. Watched a little football whenever he could stand it.
On Sundays, he watched former rivals on television and fumed over how he used to give those chumps the business back in college. Gordon knows how crazy this sounds, and has a hard time letting his words run free, but for a while he was so bitter that he rooted against his alma mater.
“I was hoping my college team would lose,” Gordon admitted, regret tinting the volume of his low voice. “Not being supportive of the younger guys behind me. Hoping receivers would drop balls. I was really messed up. Just a very negative person.”
Smith, the former college roommate, knew exactly what Gordon was going through. However, he gave Gordon space.
“You feel like you've let a lot of people down,” Smith said.
Gordon had someone back then. She was his high school sweetheart and when Gordon earned a Division I football scholarship, she moved to Buffalo, too. After college, the announcement of their wedding bann appeared in the church's Sunday program. They lived together in an English basement on a quiet tree-lined street in Patchogue, New York.
She echoed the gentle whispers of other family members, encouraging Gordon to move on and get a job. But Gordon was drifting and she couldn't save him.
“Especially her, [she] went through it the worst with me,” Gordon said. “It was definitely hard for her.
“I was young and just hated everyone and felt like everyone was after me. Just angry with anything. Anything that didn't go my way, I felt like you were coming at me,” he continued. “I was just young and stupid and I didn't have answers.”
About a year after Gordon's college pro day, he was still searching, so his fiancee's father brought him to a training facility in Long Island.
“It was more of an escape,” said Jim Scheller, the director of strength at Revolution Athletics.
At first, Gordon sneered at the modest place, believing he didn't belong in the same classes with high school lacrosse players or volleyball setters. But the training snapped Gordon out of his malaise. He remembered watching the New York Dragons as a kid, so he searched online for AFL open workouts.
Over a two-week stretch, he attended workouts in Orlando, Tampa Bay and Cleveland. By April 2015, the call came from Jacksonville.
“That's when the AFL kind of came into my life,” Gordon said. “Obviously, it was a good thing.”
On July 1, Gordon returned to action after spending one week on injured reserve. He'll see another hand specialist soon, and surgery could be an option. Still, he expects to play, and he'll be choo-chooing like a wild man on July 22, when the Valor play their first home game in more than a month. “No injury can stop me,” Gordon boasted. The dark days have passed, and although he doesn't want to dwell on a future without football, Gordon can at least envision it. He thinks he'll move back to Tampa Bay and continue his love of strength and conditioning, training the next generation of football players.
The day will come when Gordon stops chasing his dream. He says he'll be ready. But not right now.
“This is what I want to keep doing,” Gordon said. “We only have a small window. I mean, I don't know if I'm playing tomorrow. I don't know if I'm playing five years from now but right now I know I can play. Until someone says I'm not allowed to play anymore, eventually my body gives out and says 'you're done,' I'm going to keep playing.”
Gordon hasn't fully unpacked and remains a stranger on the elevator, the faceless face of a franchise in its inaugural season in the AFL, fighting his own football mortality. But for many, he leads an enviable life.
“I hope he can chase the dream as long as he can,” Smith said. “I kind of live vicariously through him because he's making this happen . . . if he keeps succeeding, the sky's the limit for him.”
Before the Valor lost, 55-51, to Tampa Bay on July 1 and dropped to 1-9, the team's commercial flight was delayed several hours. The players, large men in dress shirts and khakis, waited inside a terminal at BaltimoreWashington International Airport. People noticed. As he looked through his phone, Gordon felt their stares.
Gordon has a quote saved in that phone, about how an athlete dies twice.