Advertisement

Russell Wilson claiming special water healed concussion? Not surprising

Eric Edholm

If you read the extensive feature in Rolling Stone (yes, they write about sports now, too) on Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, your brain might have tripped up when you read this portion of the story.

Another venture is slightly less altruistic. Wilson is an investor in Reliant Recovery Water, a $3-per-bottle concoction with nanobubbles and electrolytes that purportedly helps people recover quickly from workouts and, according to Wilson, injury. He mentions a teammate whose knee healed miraculously, and then he shares his own testimonial.

'I banged my head during the Packers game in the playoffs, and the next day I was fine,' says Wilson. 'It was the water.'

[Wilson's agent, Mark] Rodgers offers a hasty interjection. 'Well, we're not saying we have real medical proof.'

But Wilson shakes his head, energized by the subject. He speaks with an evangelist's zeal.

'I know it works.' His eyes brighten. 'Soon you're going to be able to order it straight from Amazon.'

It's a bit weird, right? People just don't talk (or think?) like this, right? And, um, Wilson is not really that naive, is he?

Nanobubbles: They'll take your concussion away!

[Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football: Sign up and join a league today!]

Timeout on the field. Perspective needed.

Quickly zoom back up to the first line of the feature, and it's all laid out for us: Wilson is an unabashed shill. And a damned good one, maybe. Almost all quarterbacks who have a lick of success get offers for these sorts of things, and many choose to pitch them. Good for them. It's a way to supplement those $20M-per-year salaries.

For further proof that this was his aim, check out the tweet Wilson sent out as people outwardly questioned this holy-water element of the story.

No, Wilson isn't crazy. And no, he's not still concussed — meant with all respect amid the current landscape of this CTE-addled football world we live in — from that Clay Matthews hit, we don't believe. The "@" says it all: Wilson is looking to move units like he looks to move the offense up and down the field on Sundays. He's ahead of the chains, folks.

Want more? In the feature in which Wilson is referred to as a "benevolent dictator," his own agent had this to say about him:

"I've never seen anyone able to adapt to different situations and groups so quickly," Rodgers said. "He's like a great politician."

And if politicians aren't 99 percent cheap salesmen ...

Hey, if you're in the any-news-is-good-news camp, like perhaps the Recovery Water folks are at this moment, then Wilson has done his job. Ably so. He has gotten people to talk about this product, even if it is in a somewhat obscured light.

Why so, you ask? Well, the NFL can't claim — like Wilson can — that the water possesses magic healing powers and concussion-eliminating properties, and thank goodness for that. The league must adhere rigidly, we are led to believe, to post-concussion protocol that involves team medical staffs taking careful measures to clear a player before sending them back in the game. Elixirs and homeopathic curealls just aren't going to cut it.

But if you remember, this was a bit of a controversial play at the time because Fox sideline reporter Erin Andrews reported that the Seahawks' medical staff barely spent any time talking to Wilson after the illegal Matthews hit before Wilson was allowed to return to the field. Somehow this, which should have been far more controversial, has been forgotten by the NFL a lot faster than, say, what happened later that night in the AFC title game (DUH: deflate-gate!).

For the foreseeable future, the NFL will keep brushing that aside, continuing to claim it's doing everything it can to police head trauma, but it will turn a quarterback softening his balls into a league-wide crisis. And likewise, we don't expect anytime soon for quarterback pitchmen to be any less ridiculous in shoving the products they endorse into our faces in an stilted way.

It's the natural order of the NFL, and we've just learned to stop worrying and love the aplomb.

- - - - - - -

Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!