This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Not long after Jack Crawford retired from the NFL, he walked into a comedy club in Brooklyn. He had thought about this moment many times, but now that it was here, he tried to come up with any excuse to get out of it.
I’m not ready. I’m not prepared. I need more time.
His 6-foot-5 body almost shook with nerves. The open mic was in a tiny room on the second floor of a Bushwick comedy club. Crawford thought it looked like a classroom or an office space — anything but a comedy club. He added his name to the bottom of the list, then took a seat. There were maybe 12 other people in the room.
“It was so underwhelming and dead,” he said.
In college, Crawford played defensive end in some of the biggest stadiums in the world: Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State, his alma mater. Over 10 NFL seasons, he sacked Drew Brees, Tom Brady and Eli Manning while millions watched at home. He used to get nervous the night before every game. However, on that April day in 2023, more than two years after his final NFL game, Crawford felt nerves unlike any he had experienced previously.
He had wanted to try standup for a long time, ever since he started going with his wife to a comedy club in Atlanta near the end of his NFL career. The more they went, the more Crawford saw parallels between standup and football.
Both are rooted heavily in results: You prepare, you practice, but in the end, you are judged by how you perform in front of an audience. Both force the performer to focus on a singular moment, to be fully present. And both offer instant, visceral feedback.
Over time, Crawford’s seed of interest in standup grew into a desire. He had to try it at least once. He watched YouTube videos and worked on material, but for a long time, fear kept him from actually attempting a routine. His mind dreamed up improbable scenarios: Someone who saw him perform would then bump into him on the streets of New York City and harshly judge him.
The only reason he went to the club that day was a friend who had ambushed him after lunch: There’s an open mic starting soon down the street. Let’s go.
When his name was finally called, Crawford walked to the front of the room — there was no real stage — and grabbed the microphone from the stand. To set expectations low, he announced in his British accent (he grew up in northwest London) that this was his first time performing. That drew polite applause from the handful of people there.
And then, for the next five minutes, he bombed.
Crawford doesn’t remember any of his jokes, although he is certain that none of them were actually jokes. At one point, something he said earned a half smile from someone in the crowd, but the rest of the time … crickets.
When he finished, he put the mic back in the stand and walked outside. “It’s like you come out the other end of some kind of storm that you just couldn’t see out of,” he said. “I just felt this huge relief.”
At first, it was because he had conquered his fear, and after a while, he found the courage to perform again at another open mic. “Because I knew I could get through it,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be that bad.”
Eventually, he realized that what he experienced was more profound and meaningful than simple relief. Let’s call it the open mic effect.
“If you expose yourself to something that feels so scary,” he said, “it just has an effect on you. It just reminds you that nothing really matters that much. Nobody’s thinking about you that much. No one cares about you that much. So don’t take yourself too seriously.”
The fear he felt before his first open mic, the worries about feeling judged and embarrassed? In the end, none of them were nearly as meaningful as he had made them out to be.
The feeling of relief he initially experienced turned into a core belief, one he thinks can help anyone better deal with fears of failure, embarrassment and judgment: Everyone should do an open mic.
Crawford chases Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers during a game in 2020. (Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images)
When Crawford played football, he saw it time and again: Players with all the physical tools and ability who were held back by fear of failure.
He considered himself among them.
“In practice I was like the All-American,” Crawford said. “But in games, I would freeze.”
At 6-foot-5 and 288 pounds, Crawford was massive even by the massive standards of NFL defensive ends. He was quick, athletic and smart. He worked hard and knew the playbook. In practice, he could watch coaches teach drills and give instruction and implement it just as they had demonstrated.
Game action, however, is a maze of dozens of possibilities, all happening in a matter of seconds. There is very little time for a defender to process and think once the ball is snapped; all that practice and training has to turn into instinct — and the ability to trust your instincts.
That was the part Crawford struggled with.
“I couldn’t take the first step with the same speed and assurance in games that I did in practice because I was fearful of taking the step into the unknown,” he said. “In games, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. I couldn’t let go of the fear, which led to my overthinking.”
Most defensive ends make their money on their first step. If they are quick off the line of scrimmage, if they gain a half-second advantage, they increase their chances of making a play: a sack, a tackle for a loss, the kind of game-altering disruptions that earn defensive ends some of the biggest contracts in the NFL. If defensive ends are purely reactive — if the decision about that first step comes in response to what has happened — it’s already too late.
Crawford would know right away if he messed with his first step, and his first thought would be: This is not going to look good on tape tomorrow.
His thinking shifted in 2014, his third NFL season, when he joined the Dallas Cowboys. Rod Marinelli, the team’s veteran defensive line coach, told Crawford to stop thinking so much.
“Make your mistakes,” Marinelli said, according to Crawford. “I just want you to go from here to here, from A to B, as fast and as hard and as low as you possibly can. If you’re out of position, if you mess up, it’s on me.”
Crawford made zero starts and had zero sacks during his first two NFL seasons in Oakland. In his three seasons with the Cowboys, he started 11 games and had 9.5 sacks for a team that made the playoffs twice.
Crawford calls that moment with Marinelli the turning point of his career.
The Second City comedy club in Chicago is famous for its alumni: It is where Chris Farley debuted his unhinged motivational speaker character, Matt Foley. John Candy and Bill Murray started on the same day.
Second City also hosts beginner improv classes, and about a decade ago, a group of those beginners took part in a game called “Give Focus.”
“Give Focus” is an exercise that allows participants to share attention and take risks in front of others. The idea is that one person in the class is in “focus,” meaning they move around the room and do whatever they want while everyone else remains frozen. At some point, the person in “focus” passes the role to another classmate.
In one clip from the class a decade ago, a woman in a cardigan skips across the room with her hands behind her back. A few people giggle. Then another woman in a long-sleeve plaid shirt moves across the room while making loud pterodactyl noises, her arms spread like wings. When she stops in front of a man in black, she makes a hissing sound near his face. This draws even more laughs.
Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavior science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Kaitlin Woolley, a professor of marketing at Cornell, watched this exercise with a special focus because they believed it could offer insight into a broader question: Would people be more motivated if they viewed feelings of embarrassment and discomfort as a positive sign of growth and progress?
They teamed up with Second City to find out. Across multiple eight-week beginner-level classes, Fishbach and Woolley gave two sets of directions for Second City instructors to pass along to students.
One group received instructions to lean into their discomfort: “Your goal for the next exercise is to feel awkward and uncomfortable. Feeling uncomfortable is a sign that the exercise is working. In the next game, your goal is to push past your comfort zone and put yourself in situations that make you feel awkward and uncomfortable.”
By contrast, the instructions for other groups made no mention of discomfort: “Your goal for the next exercise is to feel yourself developing new skills. Developing new skills is a sign that the exercise is working. In the next game, your goal is to push yourself to develop new skills and feel yourself improving.”
In analyzing the classes, Fishbach and Woolley found that the participants whose goal was to feel awkward and uncomfortable remained “in focus” longer and took more creative risks, such as screeching like a pterodactyl.
“They reported they were more interested in doing improvisation,” Fishbach said. “It turns out that if you just think differently about the awkwardness, you can grow from it.”
Fishbach was surprised by the universality of the experience for participants. All it took was a couple of simple lines of instruction; usually, it’s never that easy.
“I don’t think that saying one sentence to someone will change their life,” she said. “This is not the argument: Say it, and you’re done forever. But that will change the way you approach the next task, and the next task after that.
“Just be willing to get to the level where you are between embarrassed and confident, between stupid and smart, between able and unable — that’s where we develop.”
Crawford has performed at comedy clubs around New York City since 2023. (Photo courtesy of Jack Crawford)
Crawford experienced that feeling of development after his very first open mic. It was subconscious at first — something he felt but couldn’t articulate.
Still, the more standup he did, the more he started to understand what was happening on a deeper level.
“Doing standup is probably the most visceral and raw experience of feeling embarrassment that exists,” he said. “That level of embarrassment, it’s like exposure therapy in a way.”
It’s not hard to relate: Large percentages of us hate public speaking, even in front of our own coworkers. And standup, Crawford believes, is the hardest form of public speaking. It is also the most personal. There is no support to hide behind, no presentation or role or inherent allegiance. A standup comedian is saying: My jokes are worth your attention and your time. I think I have something to say that will make you laugh.
It’s a promise that is extremely difficult to deliver on.
Crawford said that after his early open mics, he felt that nothing he did was as significant as it might seem in his own mind. That might sound dramatic, but “I’m a dramatic person,” he said, laughing.
The fears he had carried around about judgment and embarrassment seemed silly in retrospect. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been embarrassed while performing. It was just that the embarrassment wasn’t as bad as he had made it out to be.
“That level of embarrassment can translate to other areas of your life,” he said. “Once you’ve gone through something like that, it does take the pressure off. It does make you less afraid of suffering embarrassment in other forms.
“This translates to taking other risks and experiencing failures in other ways. Because I think it opens up a whole new level of potential within yourself that you never really thought you could endure and overcome.”
He wants to pursue comedy as a potential career, or at least see how far he can go with it. He knows the stakes for him are relatively low because of his financial stability from his NFL career. Still, he cares about it, and on the stage the stakes feel just as high to him.
Recently, Crawford performed a show at a place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He has worked hard to improve and has come a long way since that day in Brooklyn.
There were about 40 people in the room this time — a big crowd for him at this point in his career. Still, the younger crowd wasn’t exactly his target audience; they didn’t seem to get or care about his jokes, which dealt with race and sports.
In other words, he bombed.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Horrible.”
It stung — it always stings — but that was never the point. Of course it stings. He cares about comedy and the craft. He wants to be good. It should sting, but the sting doesn’t hurt as much as it once did, and it doesn’t last as long. Maybe more to the point, he doesn’t fear it anymore.
At the end of the night, he stepped outside, knowing there would be another show soon.