Eric Winston took a beating for five teams over the course of his 12-year N.F.L. career, and this little anecdote, honestly, could be about any of them. So set aside for a moment which team it was (it was the Arizona Cardinals, in 2013) and just close your eyes and picture Mr. Winston at his apex: 6-foot-7, 302 pounds, shoulders square and flat like a base camp at the foot of a sheer cliff to the top of his head, exhausted from smashing into things for hours, and lumbering into a training facility for his post-practice treatment.
Mr. Winston was lucky enough to be relatively healthy at the time. But it was the season he turned 30, on the down slope of his career as an offensive lineman, at a moment in National Football League history when the long-term cognitive damage that football can do was becoming more undeniable by the day. This was his job, and his body was his livelihood, and right now it really, really hurt.
Wanting only to let his muscles start their slow recovery for the next practice, Mr. Winston plunged into an ice bath. And then kept plunging. Even though he’s nearly seven feet tall on his tiptoes, he had to tread water because, for no discernible reason, the ice tubs were a baffling eight feet deep.
“You had to put a stool in it,” Mr. Winston said recently over lunch in Washington, D.C., near the headquarters of the N.F.L. Players Association, where he has a second job — a kind of pro bono side hustle — as union president. “Then you’d press it down because you were in the cold tub and you didn’t want to go all the way down. You had to submerge a stool to stand on.” Mr. Winston’s employer was a profit-sharing partner in a multibillion-dollar syndicate — one of the few truly risk-free ventures in American commerce. And it couldn’t be bothered to provide an ice tub that required no active effort to avoid drowning.
