A freakin warrior: At 30, Kyle Long carries the scars of his Bears career

In a soccer stadium on foreign soil, Kyle Long prepares to play the Raiders. He watches old highlights on the video board of his father Howie driving quarterbacks into the mud and grass. His mother Diane is in the stands.

It is his first game across the pond and Kyle is fired up, but he is not right. He is limping. He can’t drive off the ball. He can’t move laterally or sit on power rushes or extend his injured hip.

His play deteriorates quickly, and by halftime, he is embarrassed. Long has thoughts about walking out of the locker room and downing a pint or two. He goes somewhere else mentally. He doesn’t remember the second half. It is the worst game of his life.

All that is left of his Bears career is the plane ride home from London to Chicago, sitting in the first row of first class in a sleeper seat across the aisle from head coach Matt Nagy in silence; a silence that said more than any Dear John letter ever could.

Long’s agent calls him later that week, telling him the Bears are done with him. They suggest a trade, but Long doesn’t want to be traded. His adductor is torn. He is done and he is free.

Just a few months earlier, Long might have had the best training camp of his career.

Why quit at 30, after just seven NFL seasons?

A lot can be explained in 16 surgery scars.

A football journey begins on a field in Charlottesville, Va., with a 10-year old wearing a helmet with a black stripe down the middle.

Kyle Long, the biggest and fastest kid on the field, lines up at nose tackle for the first play of his life. His father’s advice echoes in that helmet. “Just come off the ball quickly.” He gets off the ball so fast he intercepts the snap. He sprints the length of the field, scores a touchdown, and celebrates by taking a knee and blowing a kiss, just like he saw somebody do on TV. But the touchdown is called back because of that black stripe down the middle of the helmet. Stripers aren’t allowed to advance the ball.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, he thinks. He walks away from the game and doesn’t play again for five years. Eventually, he becomes one of the best high school defensive ends in the country. Then he takes a baseball detour, firing 96-mph fastballs, hitting home runs off water towers, and stealing 22 bases in a season while weighing 290 pounds. He returns to football as an offensive lineman.

Long arrives at Halas Hall in April 2013, the 20th pick of the draft. He is where he belongs. A Bear? Of course. At nearly 6-foot-7, 320 pounds, he looks like one, a grizzly standing on its hind legs. Even in a world of physically freakish human beings, Long is different.

He had been told by his father that he was special from the time he could walk, and his father knows special when he sees it. Howie, a football Hall of Famer, and Kyle’s brother Chris, the second overall pick of the 2008 draft, say Kyle is the best athlete in the family.

Kyle dreams of playing in maybe seven straight Pro Bowls, retiring and seeing his bronze bust in the same sacred room as his father’s, the nameplate below reading “Kyle Howard Long.”

Howie, Chris and Kyle Long at the Eagles’ 2017 NFC Championship win. (Andy Lewis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

As a rookie, he is unusually fresh, having played only six seasons of organized football. He is ready, he says, “to take on a beating, and more importantly, to give a beating.” His only significant injury up to this point has been a torn meniscus in his knee, which happened in junior college when he tried to ollie up a curb on his Sector9, and his back leg got caught.

The night before his second preseason game, he begins to doze. Then he springs up in bed, awakened by a bad dream. He is in his stance, frozen in his stance, and a defensive lineman just shoots past him.

He will have night terrors for most of his career.

He is late for a game and locked out of the stadium.

He is about to take the field but has no cleats.

Jay Cutler gets flattened, and it is Long’s fault.

He plays all 16 games in 2013. He is raw, and his bear hug technique makes coaches cringe, but he keeps making defenders look soft, slow and spineless.

In November, he comes down with the flu. Chills, sweats, fever, stomach issues. On the team bus to Green Bay, he vomits for nearly three hours. But the next day, he walks out for warmups playing a new song by Sia over and over in his headphones.

I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier

I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist

Like it doesn’t exist

He plays like he is swinging from the chandelier, flu and all. There is no stopping him, and he has the complete respect of every man who lines up with him and against him.

He is indestructible. Or so he feels.

Jason Hatcher of the Cowboys is one of the best defensive tackles in the league. Long has watched him on tape, manhandling guards and taking away their courage. But Hatcher injured his neck. When Long faces him in a Monday night game later that season and sees him wearing a neck roll, lining up about four yards deeper than usual, with a look on his face that says he wants to be somewhere else, Long has an epiphany.

“That’s when I realized health is wealth in this game,” he says.

Changes come quickly after Long’s second season. John Fox replaces Marc Trestman as head coach, bringing a new offensive line coach, Dave Magazu. The Bears sign defensive lineman Akiem Hicks in free agency. Long gets along well with Magazu and Hicks, but both become sources of stress for him, as does a position switch.

Hicks is unlike any player Long ever lined up against, with power that can shock Long from his toes to his teeth and quickness to leave Long lunging at the breeze. During one-on-ones, Bears position coaches assign their drills to their assistants so they can watch Long and Hicks go at it.

“It was,” Long says, “a battle every day.”

“Intense” is how Hick describes those battles.

“There aren’t many players that can play offensive line with that type of raw aggression that he does,” Hicks says. “I felt like I was playing a defensive lineman.”

Magazu coaches hard, and Long, a two-time Pro Bowler at the time, doesn’t think he needs it. Long struggles in Magazu’s meetings. He sees a doctor who prescribes ADHD medicine.

The result is “razor focus,” unlike anything he ever has experienced. But the meds dull his personality and suppress his appetite. He loses 15 pounds. At 305, he’s too light. After about a year, he concludes he is better off with less focus and more mass, and he stops taking the pills.

Long also is learning to play left tackle after two years of playing right guard. His first assignment is to block Green Bay Packers defensive end Julius Peppers, who now has the fourth-most sacks in NFL history. On a third-and-long play in the first quarter, Peppers maneuvers around Long and puts his hands on Cutler. Long lunges with his fingers extended. When he hits the steely Peppers, three fingers dislocate and his knuckle fractures.

It turns out to be the best injury of Long’s life. Long has to wear a cast in games. The cast becomes a weapon. Before each game, he closes his hand on a tennis ball and trainers tape and cast his hand. But they make it appear as if his fingers are extended. In fact, the cast extends about two inches beyond Long’s regular hand length.

“I could use my right hand as a jab and my left hand to grab,” Long says. “I could throw my right hand recklessly at their heads, chests, throats. They hated it. It was hard, and I couldn’t feel anything because I was grabbing the tennis ball.”

Long plays well enough with the cast to be invited to his third Pro Bowl. But in that game, his left hand gets caught between Calais Campbell’s shoulder pads and Travis Frederick’s helmet. He dislocates his index, middle and ring fingers.

“The fingers were lying on my wrist, pulled back all the way,” he says.

Kyle Long toughed out his various injuries for most of his Bears career. (Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)

While Long is having X-rays taken in the locker room, his quarterback Tony Romo warns him about pain pills. He tells Long that pain pills can become a bad habit. Long knows about such habits, having gone to rehab as a teen.

Besides, Romo had been planning on knocking back a few with Long after the game. Long waves off the medication. Romo reaches into a cooler and throws him a tallboy.

Getting hurt, he thinks, isn’t so bad.

Things unravel so quickly in the NFL. A solid pass protection set becomes a sack so rapidly that it takes slow motion to figure out what happened. A 10-point lead turns into a four-point deficit in a beer run. Bulletproof becomes bullet-riddled in the time it takes to pull a trigger.

In the summer of 2016, the Bears practice with the Patriots in Foxboro, Mass. Long is in a contract negotiation and intends to leave an impression. During a practice, he pulls to his left on a power run, and squarely meets Patriots linebacker Dont’a Hightower in the hole. It is the kind of collision that makes people stop talking and turn their heads. Long jars his left shoulder.

A few days later, in a preseason game against the Patriots, Long latches his left hand onto a defensive lineman, and the defender moves to Long’s right. Long’s left arm is yanked across his body. He hears what sounds like a naval rope snapping. Long adjusts his left arm and keeps playing.

After the game, Long boards the team charter behind defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. When Long sees Fangio struggling to put a duffel bag in the overhead bin, he takes the bag and reaches for the bin. Then his left arm falls to his side, unable to support the weight of a duffel bag.

The next day he shows up in the training room, a new world. Long reclines on a wood table with blue cushions up against the wall. Using an empty Starbucks cup for a spitter, he looks around at all the rolls of tape meticulously stacked. He thinks of stories he has heard about Olin Kreutz throwing tape around to screw with the training staff.

Bears doctor Mark Bowen tells him he probably has a torn labrum, based on the MRI.

“It was,” he says, “the first time I felt vulnerable.”

Tears well in Long’s eyes and offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains approaches. “You’re a warrior,” he tells him. “A freakin’ warrior. Whatever you decide is OK.”

Some in Long’s corner advise him to have surgery and sit out the year. Others, including his father, see it differently.

His father’s golden rule always has been, “If you can’t run, you can’t play.” What the rule really says is, “If you can run, you can play.” Howie learned it from his position coach on the Raiders, Earl Leggett, a hard-bitten old Bear who played on the 1963 championship team.

Kyle can run. He can play. And he plays without a shoulder brace, so nobody knows he is hurting.

Bears general manager Ryan Pace makes Long feel comfortable with his decision. Says Long, “He looked at me and said, ‘Kyle, I want you to know we’re not going to forget this. We’re going to take care of you. Do what you can do, that’s enough. We’ve got your back.’”

Before the start of the regular season, the Bears sign him to a four-year contract extension worth $40 million.

Despite the shoulder injury, Long plays well for the first six games of the season. Then he takes the field for pregame warmups at Lambeau Field. By this time, the left side of his upper body is a mess, with some muscles atrophying and others overcompensating. He comes off a snap and locks out against fellow offensive lineman Eric Kush, and his triceps pops and rolls up in his arm.

He can run though, so he can play.

Two games later against Tampa, Cutler calls, “Fake Toss Right Shovel Right.” Long and right tackle Bobby Massie double-team a Bucs lineman, and Cutler pitches a shovel pass to fullback Paul Lasike, who fumbles. While most of the other men on the field dive for the ball, Long, unaware of what’s happening behind him, keeps blocking. And then the entire pile of humanity lands on the back of Long’s extended right leg.

“I had never felt anything as horrible or as painful in my life,” he says. “I remember thinking, is my foot hanging off? I didn’t know if it was backward or forward. I was in extreme pain. I wasn’t crying, I was screaming. Screaming.”

Long is carted off the field and to the locker room. But he isn’t going to sit there. Against doctor’s orders, he takes a pair of crutches and returns to the field. As he makes his way to the Bears sideline, one of the crutches collapses, and he falls. Fans yell for Bears trainers to help him. They get him to the sideline, where he watches the rest of the game.

“It’s important to remain with your team even when you can’t fight,” Long says.

Kyle Long yells to his team as he gets carted off the field against the Buccaneers in November 2016. (Kim Klement /USA Today)

His ankle is shredded, everything torn on both sides except the Achilles. His season is over after eight games.

Making matters worse is a condition called tarsal coalition. Long was born with two bones in his ankle fused together, which made him pigeon-toed as a child.

“The surgeon was shocked that Kyle came back and played at all,” his father says.

Long and Bears tight end Zach Miller have surgery the same day and share a hospital room in Charlotte, N.C.

“We thought we were going to be like Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump, eating ice cream and comforting one another,” Long says.

Instead, Long throws up about 25 times as the anesthesia wears off.

There are bumps in the rehab process, so other surgeries are postponed until the following offseason. Long is not well prepared physically for the 2017 season, having lost power in both his lower and upper body. He sits out the preseason and the first two games of the regular season.

In Long’s second game back against the Packers, linebacker Blake Martinez uses Long’s height against him, exploding up into him.

“I remember feeling a click,” Long says. “It was a feeling, not a sound, a weird feeling.”

He keeps playing. As the weeks pass, he finds himself rolling his head around frequently. During this period, Long’s teammates vote him the recipient of the Ed Block Courage Award.

Long starts wearing a neck roll. His trap muscles are shrinking, as well as other upper body muscles. After about eight weeks, he notices he doesn’t have much feeling in his right hand. Doctors discover a fractured vertebra and pinched nerve.

But he can run, so he can play.

In an October game against the Saints, Long’s left hand is bent when it catches between defensive lineman Sheldon Williams’ arm and teammate Cody Whitehair’s helmet. His pinky is sticking out of the side of his hand, and his ring finger is coming out of the top of his hand.

Three games later, Long and Eagles defensive tackle Fletcher Cox exchange clubs on a draw play.

“It was like Godzilla versus Mothra,” Long says. “Unfortunately he was Godzilla. My elbow snapped like a dried-out rubber band.”

His UCL ligament is torn, and the decision is made to shut him down for the season with four games remaining.

By now, the training room is a second home. He shows up there to shoot the bull even if he doesn’t need treatment. Fox stops there every morning before meetings, cup of Joe in hand. Long enjoys the hell out of Fox, who notes Long always has medical opinions. It’s about that time when Fox starts calling him “Dr. Long.”

In the span of a month in the winter of 2017-18, Long has surgeries on his neck, shoulder, elbow and chest.

During the neck procedure, doctors discover the cadaver vertebrae they have is too small for his neck, which is about the size of some waists. When Long awakens from anesthesia after four and a half hours, the first pain he feels is in his hip. He looks down and sees a large scar. Surprise. Bone was taken from his hip to use in his neck.

“I didn’t know how bad the neck injury was,” his father says. “I felt bad for asking him if he could keep playing. It impacted him very significantly, and it hit home for me.”

(Courtesy Kyle Long)

Then comes a triple surgery in Los Angeles on his shoulder, elbow and chest. Afterward, another violent bout of vomiting along with full-body cramps. His father follows him around a hotel room with a bucket.

Long bounces back quickly, as always. He doesn’t fill his prescription for pain medication, and a day after surgery, he is “crushing some beers” at Shellback Tavern on Manhattan Beach, wearing an Ace bandage on his shoulder and arm. Long continues to follow Romo’s advice on painkillers, in part because he wants to be aware of his pain. He does, however, find comfort in the occasional beer.

The surgeries are a relief.

“I felt like they pulled the evil out of me,” Long says. “I remember I could hold an Xbox controller the second day, and that was huge. We’re back, boys. I was feeling good for the first time in a year and a half.”

The 2018 season starts well enough, with Long playing effectively on the best team he ever played on. In the seventh game, the Bears are protecting a 24-10 lead against the Jets in the waning minutes. Jordan Howard is running behind Long repeatedly, and Long is putting defenders on their backs. Finally, Jets linemen try a technique in which they fold up on the line of scrimmage to create a pileup. Long tries to get low and drive his man forward, and he extends his back foot. Tight end Dion Sims is knocked over a pile and falls backward on Long’s extended leg — the same leg that was operated on, the same leg that never was quite right. Long hears a pop.

The fifth metatarsal in his foot is fractured. Long hops off the field.

After two months on injured reserve, Long returns in the regular-season finale against the Vikings. But with all the time off his feet, he weighs 345 pounds. He plays so well against the Vikings he decides to put on more weight for his first playoff game against the Eagles and gains another 10 pounds in one week.

At 355 pounds, Long doesn’t have his best game against Cox, and the Bears lose after kicker Cody Parkey’s double doink.

“I was very large,” Long says. “When you put your helmet on, pads, tape, and then you’re sweating, it’s like 355 becomes 380 pounds on the field. It didn’t really work for me.”

In 2019, he drops back down to 320, and he is healthy. More than healthy, he is happy.

“I think the good Lord put some feel-good in my soul,” he says.

Then in the second game, Long charges upfield to take out a linebacker. Running back David Montgomery, “running hard as hell,” plows into Long’s back when Long is positioned awkwardly. Long tells himself the feeling in his hip is just a tweak and keeps going.

He can run, so he can play.

It gets worse the next week in a game against the Redskins. By this time, Hicks can see Long isn’t right, and he backs off in practice. Long sits out a game, then comes back to play against the Raiders in London. The rest has not helped.

“I was trying to be a good teammate, and it backfired,” he says. “The coaching staff is looking at you as soft and insignificant. You hope they are done with you because there is nothing you can do.”

When the Bears say goodbye, he understands. This is the life he was born into, and also the life he chose.

“It’s a bottom-line business,” Long says. “If No. 75 isn’t blocking the (man) in front of him, he has no place on our team. I respect that. When I spoke to Nagy, he essentially verbalized that, and I told him if I were him, I would have done this a long time ago because I hadn’t blocked (anybody) in weeks. The Bears took care of me for a long time when I was hurt. Guys don’t get two, three chances in the league. I did.”

What Long misses is the test of the will, the need to dig deeper, deeper, deeper than ever before. He misses mental challenges against former Packer Mike Daniels, and physical challenges against Cox. And he misses the brotherhood, combating Hicks in practice, trying to defeat one another with passion and respect.

What Long does not miss is the sense that his body is betraying him, and the fear of letting down those in the stands and locker room.

“If a kid was to come to watch No. 75 for the Bears because his dad said he’s a good player, and then he gets his shit kicked in, it’s a bad look for the dad,” Long says. “And it’s a bad look for old 75 out there. Towards the end, I really started to see my value in the locker room decrease as my physical status decreased. Folks that I thought were friends, people I thought were family, they disappear when you stop playing. You look around, guys won’t make eye contact with you.”

Kyle Long celebrates with Khalil Mack after the Bears’ win in Denver last season. (Isaiah J. Downing / USA Today)

He is not to blame for his four stints on injured reserve, no one is. But there always are things to look back on.

“The training staff did an incredible job, did everything in their power to make sure I was as healthy as possible,” he says. “The organization supported me fully. There were times I didn’t match that.”

Though Long was as strong as anybody, he wasn’t as strong as he could have been. Born with genes that would let him get away with it, Long acknowledges he rarely trained as hard as he could have.

“It was very unprofessional of me not to have a regimen to follow,” he says. “What did (former Seahawks running back) Marshawn Lynch say at the Super Bowl media sessions? I’m only here so I don’t get fined. I relied a lot on just showing up. At a certain point in time, you can’t do that.”

His right ankle doesn’t look much like an ankle, and his right lower leg remains considerably smaller than his left. Both shoulders have atrophied too. He has to sleep on his back instead of his side, which he prefers, so his shoulder doesn’t subluxate. His thumbs have too much flexibility, the result of ligament tears. There will be more surgeries.

“It was carnage for him,” his father says. “The sad part for me is, look at the way he started. Let’s dream a little. Let’s say he stayed healthy. Where would he be right now? He might have gone to seven straight Pro Bowls, and we’re having a totally different conversation. But the thing he can always hold his head high about is he went so far beyond where the normal guy would have gone to sacrifice to play. He can rest his head on the pillow at night.”

Kyle sleeps well. No more night terrors. He feels good physically. No, he feels great. He is without significant pain for the first time in five years. At 270 pounds, he is lighter than he has been since high school, light enough to play defensive end or tight end.

We can ponder whys and what-could-have-beens, but the enduring memory of Long will be swinging the sword until it was taken from his hands.

A great Bear he was.

Those 16 scars? The price of grandeur.

“One of the things that I always admired about Kyle was that he respected his family history all while cementing himself as one of the best linemen in the league,” Hicks says. “To emerge from his father’s shadow as his own man is something that should be revered. Not everyone is able to overcome their father’s legacy. I’ve seen it play out first-hand.

“As far as competition, his strength and athleticism were obvious on the field, but his passion to me is what made him. His fierceness and inability to quit are what make him one of those who could play in any era. … Ultimately, I believe Kyle to be one of the best offensive linemen I’ve ever competed against.”

This spring Long is enjoying not having to set a morning alarm and not having to please an assistant coach by putting 650 pounds on his back. He spends his days exploring media work, gaming and playing with his bow and arrow. There are dogleg holes to be conquered, new cuisines to try, culture to be soaked in.

As for filing retirement papers …

“They have those?” he says.

He has walked from football twice before and come back. Long reads something about getting back up on the horse in life. It gives him pause.

“Did I just get off the horse and walk away?” he asks. “Is that what my (yet-to-be-born) kids are going to hear? Part of me feels there’s a horse by my locker saying, ‘Where is that big dumb son of a bitch?’”

Questions for another day.

For now, Kyle Long needs to heal.

(Photo: Michael Hickey / Getty Images)

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