d to a gurney, to polite applause. Usually, the player raises a hand, maybe gives a thumbs-up, and the cheers rise with a mixture of happiness and r

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It happened with the offense heading north, 22 men on the field, no contact allowed.They wont talk about what the injury looked like, out of respect. These are men who long ago came to terms with the inhumanity of their game. They laugh about concussions and broken bones as a defense mechanism, the way an electrician might laugh with his buddies about getting a jolt from a faulty circuit. Occupational hazard.But this is different. They close their eyes and wince, the image flashing in their minds. They shake their heads reflexively, as if they can dislodge the memory and evict it from their brains. They watched Teddy Bridgewater go down on that field on Aug.?30, his left leg separating at the knee, during the first minutes of a Vikings preseason practice. Every time they think about it, every time they stand near this field and close their eyes, they see it again.INJURIES IN THE NFL are commodified, sloganized, reduced to transactions. Theyre interchangeable, disposable, devoid of pain. Theyre dehumanized, disembodied, such an expected part of the game that theyve got their own capitalized catchphrase: Next Man Up.Check the injury report, adjust your fantasy team. See how easy this is? How painless? One goes down, another pops up.I hate that exact saying -- Next man up, Vikings guard Alex Boone says. Thats f---ed up because it makes it sound like were barbarians. Like we dont care: F--- it, hes hurt, move on. Its terrible to say that. A guy gets hurt and all of a sudden everyone is like, Oh, who was that guy? In a sense, Next Man Up is an essential and ordinary part of the lexicon. In a sport with so many injuries, a coach has no choice but to rely on a cut-rate, impersonal slogan to motivate and distract. While hes telling his players to step up, team personnel are scanning the waiver wire, pulling up reports on practice-squad players and making calls on trades. Its impossible to ignore statistics like this one: In 2015, NFL players missed 1,639 games -- almost 100 per week -- because of injury. Those three words -- Next Man Up -- have become such a vital part of the culture that many players hear it with the same anesthetized indifference.Even when we watch other games, it gets lost, Vikings safety Harrison Smith says. We react the same way. Theres a human part of it that gets lost.But sometimes an event changes all that. Whether through proximity or sheer gruesomeness, the collective pain of a group of men rises up to relegate Next Man Up to a heartless cliché.It was very surreal, Boone says of Bridgewaters injury. Sometimes you forget how brutal this game can be.Minnesotas coach, Mike Zimmer, canceled practice. NFL teams never cancel practice. The game never stops. In a way, its a repudiation of Next Man Up to send everyone home -- an acknowledgment that some injuries transcend the transactional. Sometimes, even in such a brutal world, circumstances dictate that the next man cant reasonably be expected to step up, at least not right away.It happened at the beginning of practice, and obviously Coach made the right call to cancel, Vikings quarterbacks coach Scott Turner says. We werent going to get anything done that day.At his first news conference after the injury, a still-shaken Zimmer said his team would mourn for a day and move on. If anything, this meant his players needed to recommit to the mission. No one is going to feel sorry for us, or cry, he said. Im not going to feel sorry for us either. He said hed spoken with his mentor, Bill Parcells, for advice on how to deal with the trauma his team experienced. He said he spoke with his deceased father in spirit. As he continued, the coach in him drained from his eyes. He transformed from functionary to human being, and when he was asked a question about grieving -- a question that somehow seemed utterly appropriate -- Zimmer paused and looked down. After a deep breath, he looked to the sky as his lower lip quivered. My wife passed away seven years ago, he said. It was a tough day. The sun came up the next day, the world kept spinning, people kept going to work. Thats what were going to do.HARRISON SMITH WAS running downfield with his back to the play, making sure he didnt get beaten on a deep route. Even in a practice, and a noncontact drill, thats important. Its six weeks later, and hes standing next to that field running the calculus through his head. He concludes that he must have been the person farthest from the injury. He pauses a moment to give thanks. When it happened, he heard a scream from a receiver who had turned back toward the play. It was an expletive that carried an unmistakable pitch: pain.You play this game long enough, you learn to recognize it.He must have pulled a hammy, Smith thought.Smith swung around to the receiver and saw that he was looking toward the backfield. He was reacting to someone elses pain. Smith followed his eyes to see helmets flying and teammates jumping away like the grass was on fire. He heard them screaming, and Bridgewater screaming, and he saw powerful men rendered powerless.EARLIER IN THE summer, a barbecue at Boones house. Bridgewater arrived two hours late, and Boone confronted him.Im so sorry, Boone said. The foods overcooked.Bridgewater laughed. Dude, dont worry about it. Im two hours late.No, its my fault, Boone said.Boone mocks himself now, apologizing for something that wasnt his fault. I remember thinking, Yeah, you were late. Why am I apologizing?Bridgewaters coaches, from Charlie Strong at Louisville to Zimmer in Minnesota, consider the quarterback an honorary son. The worst thing his teammates can say about him is that hes the closest thing the locker room has to a teachers pet. They laugh at the way he tends to parrot Zimmers philosophy.I swear hes the nicest guy Ive ever met in my life, Boone says. Hes a sweet guy -- and thats not a word you usually associate with football players, but he really is. His genuine sincerity toward everything is just ... youre like, Wow, hes really a good person. He never says a bad word, hes never mad.Wide receiver Adam Thielen says, Across this league, everyone has respect for Teddy, and he cites Sam Bradford as proof. Bradford texted get-well wishes to Bridgewater the day after the injury -- about the same time the Vikings front office started asking tight ends coach Pat Shurmur, once Bradfords offensive coordinator in St. Louis and Philadelphia, for a detailed scouting report on his former quarterback. Three days after that, Minnesota traded a first-round and a conditional fourth-round pick to the Eagles to turn Bradford into its Next Man Up.Nobody knows when Bridgewater will play again. The team says hell be back next year, but theres no guarantee. His knee dislocated, and the impact tore multiple ligaments connecting the patella to the tibia and fibula. When the Vikings traded for Bradford, back when nobody expected Minnesota to start the season 5-1, it was noted that Bridgewater is under team control through 2017.Everyone still loves Teddy, Bradford says. Teddys the guy. Theres no moving past Teddy. Thats just how it is, and how it should be.MATT ASIATA WAS maybe 10 yards away from the 30-yard line, right hash, when he heard a burst of noise he couldntt identify.dddddddddddd He looked back and saw Bridgewater on the ground, and saw the bodies scatter, and saw the helmets popping off his teammates heads like so many bottle caps. They all remember the scattering bodies and the flying helmets, no matter where they were. The next thing Asiata heard was the voices, all the voices, people going crazy, with Bridgewaters a few registers above the rest.Asiata couldnt quite comprehend it. He had just seen him in the huddle, had lined up behind him at running back for a play in a noncontact drill. Nobody ever gets badly hurt in a noncontact drill. Asiata listened to the screams and thought: He must be faking it. Its a prank, something Teddy thought up with the linemen. This cant be real.But the noise kept coming, and the trainers filled the void left by the scattered bodies. Asiata ran back toward Bridgewater and then veered off. He and a couple of teammates took a knee and said a prayer. They closed their eyes to pray for their teammate. They closed their eyes so they wouldnt have to see.Everything happens for a reason, Asiata says, without much conviction.YOURE PHOTOGRAPHED WALKING into a store and driving through an intersection and standing in an elevator. Theres video of you paying for gas and boarding a plane and ordering a burrito. Someone goes missing, theres always a photo from a last known location. Have you seen this person? Someone commits a crime. Help find this man.There are no available images of Bridgewaters injury. They exist, no doubt -- every NFL team records every second of practice, from the moment players begin stretching until they leave the field. And yet it seems nobody outside the organization has seen the moment Bridgewater went back to pass in a noncontact 11-on-11 drill, tripped in some fashion and landed in a way that caused his left leg to dangle in an anatomically impossible way nobody wants to talk about.What remains is an incomplete, and reluctant, oral history.It was kind of a freak deal, Thielen says. He was dropping back and got tripped up and just awkwardly stepped on his knee. Its hard to talk about. It was bad.Running back Jerick McKinnon shakes his head slowly when asked to describe what he saw that morning. He looks toward the practice field, to the 30, right hash.I saw it all, he says. I aint going to go into it. I dont have any words to describe it.Three weeks after Bridgewaters injury, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson tore a meniscus in his knee during the teams Week 2 game against Green Bay, possibly ending his season. Peterson left the field with the help of trainers, partially under his own power, and the route to the locker room took him past a field-level restaurant at the Vikings slick new U.S. Bank Stadium.Those in the Delta Sky360 Club (which, in 16,455 square feet, elevates the sports bar concept to a magnificent VIP experience) were forced to witness a mans private agony. It disturbed the reverie, intruded on the fantasy that we are somehow not complicit in the games brutality. A player goes down while youre watching on TV and they cut to a commercial. When they come back, he is miraculously gone, and the attention moves to the inadequacies of his replacement.Or, in more serious cases, a player gets wheeled off, strapped to a gurney, to polite applause. Usually, the player raises a hand, maybe gives a thumbs-up, and the cheers rise with a mixture of happiness and relief. He can move, the applause says, therefore our guilt is assuaged. We understand the bargain, but wed feel really bad if someone died for our amusement.Injury reports are transmitted to fans at U.S. Bank Stadium through two huge video screens that hover above each end zone. A generic model of the human anatomy appears below a players name and number. The body rotates to create the illusion of three-dimensionality while a target circle wanders the body to create suspense -- where will it land? -- until it rests on the spot of the injury. The injured player is off somewhere, safely out of sight. Words appear:Brandon Fusco, Concussion, Will Not Return.Its the great injury game show, sponsored by Twin Cities Orthopedics.HE JUMPED AWAY, scattering with the rest of them. He thinks he threw his helmet, but his memory isnt trustworthy on this subject. Alex Boones first thought was, Holy f---, did that really happen? It felt like an electrical surge traveled up his spine, the way you feel when helplessness collides with empathy. He yelled. Everyone who was in Bridgewaters immediate vicinity yelled, and the yells emanated outward, to the linebackers and receivers and defensive backs, like echoes. The ones closest looked down and saw Bridgewaters left leg bent at an unnatural angle and let their screams mingle in the summer air, right along with his.Boones second thought was, Theres my friend. My friend is in pain. He considers this now, how the people close to the sounds and the pain didnt see it as a transaction or a line on an injury report. I didnt think, Our quarterbacks injured, he says. It was, My friend is injured. A thousand thoughts swirled through his mind. He thought about the barbecue, and how protective hed become of Teddy, on and off the field. He thought about Bridgewaters mom. It sounds crazy, but he did. His mom. Boone looked at the helmets popping off heads and spinning into the air, and he heard someone yelling to call 911, and he thought about how nobody ever calls 911 for an injury at an NFL practice, and then he looked down at Bridgewaters left leg and thought, Whos going to tell his mom?Boone saw that the human scattering served a practical purpose: It cleared a path for the trainers and first responders, the people who could do more than scream and swear and think about Bridgewaters mom. They went to work the way theyre supposed to: quickly and with expertise. The buzz up the spine, the helplessness, dissipated some. When a knee dislocates and the ligaments tear free of the bones, leaving the fibula and tibia to their own devices, the next concern is nerve damage that might lead to amputation. In the coming days, after Bridgewater undergoes extensive surgery, the Vikings trainers and the local first responders will be credited for saving his leg.The Vikings walked quietly to the locker room and gathered as a team to say a prayer.THE INJURED MAN recedes, quietly and respectfully. One minute youre the man, rounding into your prime, bonding with your receivers and fighting through overcooked meat at a linemans barbecue, and the next its Sam Bradfords time.The screams wax and wane. The injured man Dopplers in and Dopplers out.Bridgewater is around the facility, they all say. He helps Bradford understand the offense. He is upbeat, working out, still a part of the team. Perhaps his car is parked in one of the reserved for injured player spots in the team lot, not more than 50 yards from the grass practice field where everything in his life suddenly changed. His presence is mostly spectral. He is not visible when the media are allowed in the locker room, and he does not watch the games from the sideline. He has not spoken publicly. To the outside world, he is invisible.Its what passes for decorum inside a merciless culture, a way of ensuring a peaceful transition of power. It seems theres a corollary to Next Man Up: the necessary disappearance of the Last Man Down. ' ' '