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NFL Veteran Recounts The Bruises And Breaks Of Life In The League.
2013-09-24

Being a professional football player can be a brutal life. Nate Jackson spent six years in the NFL, mostly as a receiver with the Denver Broncos, and while he wasn't a star or even a starter he did carve out life in the rarefied air of professional sports, and he got just as banged up as any big-name player. But he learned to play through the pain.

Jackson recounts his playing days from the glory of a touchdown pass to the meat grinder existence of life on the scrimmage line in a new memoir, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile. "The human mind is really good at pushing pain down and away when you feel that there is a moment of glory up ahead waiting for you," he tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin. "In football we are always pulled along by that next game, that next play, and so I learned how to get through the next play. No matter how much pain I was in I was able to turn it off ... there's a switch that I can locate and flip that switch and I don't feel any pain."

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