Hey Mike don't read my review as you are reading this one. Right off the top I have to tell you You're Okay, It's Just A Bruise was written in 1995 and that does not bother me one bit. In fact it makes it even better! Raiders were not my team. In fact I hated them but if you remember Howie Long, Marcus Allen, Lyle Alzado, Matt Millen (A$$ ho1# but I am a Detroit Lion fan) and Lester Hays you should read the book. Lots of stories. The author Doctor Huizenga is a U of Michigan grad, all American wrestler that received his MD from Harvard. Enough said. He became the Raiders team internist.
Some of the interesting things a gleamed from the book:
Many guys had shoe contracts with company X but wore shoes from company Y then had their ankles taped to cover the logo and then coloured a fake logo on the tape. College players would get tickets that they would turn around and scalp. One dude said he made $50K his senior year doing that. One unnamed vet on the Raiders counseled the married guys to never try a new sexual position with your spouse when you come back from a road trip. I forget this but there was mention of The Donald and his New Jersey Generals in the USFL.
There was much talk early in the book about Lyle Alzado and steroids. Howie Long is definitely not a math guy. Before the Super Bowl he is quoted as saying "Intimidation is 80% of the game...half the game is mental and half is conditioning.
There was so much steroids that the author said when a player went down on the field and he was running out he wondered if it was a muscle pull or a heart attack. He said that in '85 there were two groups of NFLers, players on the juice and players that were thinking about it.
Speaking of steroids, he mentions Mark Gastineau of the NYG. He was a big time roid monkey who's girlfriend was the actress Brigitte Nielsen. He had her name tattooed on his right buttock. To bust his chops the dudes on the team had fake tats with her name put on there a$$es so he could see that in the shower and drive him crazy.
There was a story about Dave Casper self medicating in a different way. He was in pain before an important practice. No doctor was on hand so he drew up a syringe of Xylocaine and Corisone and gave it to himself. When the author heard about this he asked him what he was thinking and the response was lovely, "Doc, normal people do normal things."
There was a chapter dedicated to the scare of AIDS in the NFL as it was and still is a blood sport. You have to remember that very little was known about AIDS in the early '80s. He also spends a chapter talking about the strike year and the scabs that played and the guys like Howie Long that crossed the picket line and how that changed the team chemistry even though they had just picked up Bo Jackson. You might remember some of these great Nike commercials.
A few of the other chapters were dealing with: concussions in the NFL, what lead the author to leave the Raiders, Mike Wise's suicide and Alzado's end of life cancer.
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