For the entire 21st century, the Buffalo Bills have been the football equivalent of Two and a Half Men — just the absolute worst shit that nonetheless hangs around to bring down your quality of life. Other, better teams have relocated to different cities for a change of pace, but the Bills remain in frigid Buffalo, where their fans have pivoted to bodily nihilism as a way to stave off the we-suck-forever blues.
Last season, the Bills somehow made a surprise appearance in the playoffs — their first since 1999. Did they use the momentum to build on their success, once the season was over? Of course not: They got worse, were picked by many football experts to get worse, and have been much, much worse in the new season. On Sunday, that violent bed-shitting was too much for cornerback Vontae Davis, who signed with the Bills in the most recent offseason. At halftime, with the Bills down 28-6 to the Los Angeles Chargers, Davis apparently just up-and-quit on the team, pulling himself out of the game and telling his teammates he was retiring.
Even a casual follower of sports becomes attuned to the reputations earned by each franchise over the years. The Boston Celtics and New England Patriots are winners because they win a lot; the New York Mets are losers because they lose a lot; and so on. Though the Bills used to be quite good, their streak of terribleness has rendered them a thoroughly pathetic franchise. And so the revelation that one of their players just decided “yeah, fuck this” in the middle of the game broke new ground at the bottom of the barrel. You expect that a loser team will always be a loser; you don’t expect them to innovate new ways of losing. Plenty of cool football stuff happened on Sunday, but Davis dominated headlines and Twitter trends.
During and after the game, Davis was criticized for his decisions by his teammates, and if you look around the internet and television, you can find similar commentary by the macho ghouls who insist you should always pull through, especially in football, which is frequently held up by doofuses as an analogy for the soul of the nation. Now, to let down the people you know in such an abrupt fashion is one thing; their disappointment is understandable, especially since they still had to play for the fucking Bills.
But after the game, Davis released a lengthy, thoughtful statement about his decision. “I meant no disrespect to my teammates and coaches,” he said. “But I hold myself to a standard. Mentally, I always expect myself to play at a high level. But physically, I know today that isn’t possible, and I had an honest moment with myself. While I was on the field, I just didn’t feel right, and I told the coaches, ‘I’m not feeling like myself.’ I also wondered: Do I want to keep sacrificing? And truthfully, I do not, because the season is long, and it’s more important for me and my family to walk away healthy than to wilfully embrace the warrior mentality and limp away too late.”
Official statement from CB @vontaedavis. pic.twitter.com/8WXszhnrUo
— NFL (@NFL) September 16, 2018
That last part is crucial. American culture writ large is still diseased with living up to an imagined masculine standard of grit and toughness, but this is doubly true in football, where players have literally died because they’ve pushed too far past their physical limitations. Football players are often judged on wholly subjective traits like “heart” and “will,” vague qualities that also function as coded phrases used to insinuate more sinister things that nobody will say out loud. Davis didn’t say what was wrong with his body, but it doesn’t really matter; by the rules of the game, he should’ve just kept going until his health was spent.
In recent years, the negative side effects of football have become more studied and publicized, with plenty of players suffering from horrifying health problems post-retirement, and others still choosing to retire early rather than wake up one day not knowing their wife’s name. Surely this was on Davis’ mind when he decided to yoke decades of conventional wisdom, and just give up. This is admirable in a football sense, because nobody should sacrifice their future health for the fucking Bills. (Davis, mind you, is not some broken-down old man; he’s just 30 years old.)
But in a broader life sense, it’s admirable too. In a capitalistic society, workers are encouraged to give all they have to the job, devoting their free time and will to creating some product that someone else will get richer from. The money and health benefits help with the sour taste of realizing your labor is sorely undercompensated, but that only goes so far. And if you’re in a financially stable position, as Davis should be after making $35 million over his career, the downsides of forfeiting the game become entirely existential. If you don’t need the money, then the only reason not to quit is pride, and these abstract values of “loyalty” and “toughness” forced upon us by the masters who’d prefer to keep us dumb and in-the-dark about the point of all this work. And if you have the presence of mind to realize you don’t care about those values, at least as they’re meted out by strangers, then you may as well just get the hell out to give yourself some piece of mind.
Davis was looking at the prospect of another year giving up his time and effort for something that wasn’t going to pay off — a toiling existence on another awful football team, to be remembered by nobody in the years since. Instead, he decided to make his own luck, despite the naysaying he almost certainly knew he’d encounter. To forgo the archaic values of a society you’ve spent nearly your entire life inside is braver than anything that could be accomplished on the football field, and it should inspire us all. When the going gets tough, the tough can always get going.
Update: A previous version of this article misidentified the home of the Chargers. It is Los Angeles, not San Diego.
