Players plan for life after NFL

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. – How do you make a 300-pound NFL lineman nervous? Ask him to trade his shoulder pads for a tie, put him behind an anchor’s desk and tell him he’s on the air.

Welcome to a different kind of NFL training camp: Boot camp for players who want to become broadcasters after their playing days.

For men whose lives have revolved around physical gifts and skills they have honed since boyhood – in some cases, they’ve never had to apply for a job – the camp represents a taste of the real world and a hint of things to come.

“As a football player, you believe in yourself,” said Tim Hasselbeck, a backup quarterback for the New York Giants. “You think you’re qualified to be doing what you’re doing.”

Like the other players, Hasselbeck is fluent in football speak, like “cover-2 defense” and “seam route.” But broadcast terms like “b-roll” and “roll cue” aren’t often uttered in the huddle.

“I’m back in Pop Warner now,” Hasselbeck said. One of the smoother wannabe broadcasters, his wife, Elisabeth, works in television as a host on “The View.”

The four-day camp this week at the NFL Films headquarters in Mount Laurel was a new effort by the NFL and the NFL Players Association to prepare players for the inevitable: life after football.

The average NFL career lasts only about four years. And even the superstars who stay in the league for a decade and rake in millions of dollars are usually done by sometime in their 30s.

“No matter how much money you make, you still have 50-plus years (after football),” said Michael Haynes, a Hall of Fame player who is now the league’s vice president of player development.

The broadcasting seminar is the latest of several league initiatives for helping players get ready for those years. The league also pays for college courses, offers seminars at top business schools and gets recent retirees coaching opportunities in NFL Europa. It also arranges off-season internships for players in other businesses.

In many ways, broadcasting is a natural step for ex-athletes and it gives them a chance to stay around the sport they love.

That’s why Ike Reese, who says his playing career is probably finished after nine years with the Philadelphia Eagles and Atlanta Falcons, wants to get into broadcasting.

Like the other players at the camp, Reese studied film of a key play from a playoff game last year, making note of why an Indianapolis Colts receiver was wide open. That was the easy part.

Then, the players had to sit under the harsh TV lights and explain it to CBS studio anchor James Brown – one of the big-name broadcasters teaching at the camp. They had about a minute to make the key points and stay in sync with the videos they were talking about while remembering to look at the camera at the right time, have scripted remarks but not sound like they were reading them.

At broadcast boot camp, there’s one lesson Reese learned first: “It’s a lot harder than it looks.”