Book review: Slow Getting Up, by Nate Jackson
This book is everything you want football memoirs to be but never are: hilarious, dirty, warm, human, honest, weird.
by Nate Jackson
HarperCollins
4 stars
Dwight Garner
This book is everything you want football memoirs to be but never are: hilarious, dirty, warm, human, honest, weird.
Nate Jackson played six seasons, from 2002 to 2008, with the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos, mostly at tight end. He managed to escape with some brain cells intact.
A lot of the tragicomedy in Slow Getting Up springs from sex, a pastime National Football League (NFL) players are able to pursue avidly. On a typical night in a club, Jackson and his Bronco teammates turn around to find "women … pulled towards us by our oversized pituitaries and our cave man libidos". He writes: "Now everything is open wide: arms, doors, and legs. We are young, physically powerful men with money."
Jackson is observant about almost everything - injuries, coaches, drug tests, agents, reporters, violence, pranks, self-loathing. He is epigrammatical. "Show me a painful ritual," he says about practices, "and I'll show you a way to cheat it."
He was always an NFL long shot. Once called up to the pros, however, he steadies himself by realising that he may be competing against "a herd of meat sacks" but they're basically like him. "They're just dudes: dudes with strengths and dudes with weaknesses. Dudes with doubts and fears and pain."