Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (17 page)

That didn’t last, though. There were drugs in the locker room. And I was thinking,
No, that’s not good. That’s not what I want to see
. And then I got invited to a night out with some of my teammates, and one of them pulled me aside. “Man, you know, it’s men only, no wives,” he said. “No wives allowed. It’s a guy thing.”

Without even thinking about it, I went home and told Rebecca that I was going out with just the guys. She knew she could trust me, and that I wanted to become friends with my new teammates, so she didn’t make a fuss about it. I showed up to meet the guys, and it was a big free-for-all with these other girls.
They said no wives
, I thought.
But I guess they didn’t mean no
girls
. And, again, I thought:
Nah, nah, that’s not what I want to see. That’s not what I’m talking about
.

I was scared to say anything to the guys about what they were doing because, you know, I’m human, and I wanted them to like me. I was scared to tell my wife what they were up to when they weren’t around their wives, and for a long time I didn’t, because I knew she’d never let me out again.

It was always something. One night, we were in Atlanta, and I didn’t want to sit alone in my hotel room, so I went out with a bunch of the other players before a game. I got into the back of someone’s car, and I couldn’t believe what I saw.

“What is this, man?” I said. “There’s a gun in here.”

They acted like it was nothing. So, again, I didn’t say anything. Of course, we got pulled over. One of the guys in the front seat reached back and handed me the gun.

“Here, put this in the back!” he said. “Put this in the back!”

I wasn’t into this at all. This was the kind of craziness that had made me fight so hard to get out of Flint. But I didn’t exactly have a choice at that point, so I took the gun, and I put it under the seat.
I’m going to jail
, I thought.
I’m going to jail. Just because I wanted to not sit in my hotel room
.

It got worse. As the cop approached the open window, I couldn’t believe what came out of the driver’s mouth.

“Man, why are you pulling me over?” he said.

“Would you shut your mouth?” I whispered from the backseat.

When the cop went to write us a ticket, I let the driver have it.

“If you give him one more word, I’m gonna hit you in the back of the head,” I said. “Brother, you are not taking me to jail with your attitude. I’m not doing it.”

And that was one of the tame stories. It got to where I
dreaded having one of the other guys say, “Come hang out with me, man.”

The first time we traveled to New York City, I couldn’t believe I’d made it to the big city, the center of so much art and culture I’d always admired. The coaches told another player and me that we weren’t playing the next day, so we were free to relax. I was disappointed not to play, but I was excited to see New York City.

“Come hang out with me, man,” the other guy said.

I should have known better, but the NFL world was still so new and exhilarating for me.
Wow, I get to hang out with a football player in New York
, I thought.
This is going to be amazing
. Actually, it was awful. This guy grabbed a bunch of drugs and a couple of hookers, hailed a cab, and had the driver take him around in circles while he was doing his business. My job was to make sure he made it back to our hotel. Meanwhile, I stood on the corner, miserable.
Dude, I just want to go home
, I thought. But I didn’t know where we were, or how to get back to our hotel.

Plus, I knew if I left him on his own, I would never hear the end of it from the other guys on our team. It’s a shame dynamic with guys. That’s why I’ve always said, if there’s a pack of four guys, even four really good guys, something stupid is about to happen. Because no one wants to seem weak in front of the other guys, and so they will do anything, anything, just to prove they’ll do it. That’s why we need that female energy around to get us to stop and think about what we’re doing. Otherwise, we will go right off the ledge, and everybody’s too scared to stop it.

Whenever we arrived in a new city for a game, the first stop was always a strip club. Even though I had my pornography issue, I couldn’t handle seeing women in that way live. Even back then, I understood that the dynamic of pornography was to
get men to see women as objects, which distanced me from the women enough to allow me to deny their humanity, and somehow made it manageable for me, even though I knew it wasn’t good. If we were together in the same room, I saw them as people, and I couldn’t enjoy it. When I walked into a strip club, I knew I was seeing somebody’s sister, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter. After our first strip club outing, I realized:
Man, I can’t do this. This is not me. I don’t want to do this
. And so I sat outside many a strip club while my teammates were inside. It was hard because I didn’t want to be there, but just like in college, I didn’t want to be alone, either. I needed community, and I wanted to be with my crew. I could see how a person’s core values would get chipped away under such circumstances, and I tried to hold on to mine.

My disillusionment with my teammates was one thing. I liked them as people. I just didn’t want to behave that way myself. The reality check I received from the NFL was another thing, and just like with college football, I was soon disappointed. I saw so much dirty stuff. My friend Anthony’s coaches told him they really wanted him to play in the next day’s game. He resisted because his knee was bothering him, but they persisted, saying he was the future of the franchise. Well, they didn’t play him once, not until the last two minutes, when they put him in for one play. When they cut him from the team the next day, he protested because he was hurt. They told him they had footage of him playing the day before, so he couldn’t be injured. They took his money and sent him away. It was the most brutal thing imaginable.

Not to mention another fact I soon realized: The individual teams didn’t really matter because all of the money went to the league anyhow. Let’s just say that my whole opinion of everything changed very quickly.

But there I was, among the most elite athletes in the world, and, of course, I wanted to do everything I could to prove I belonged. And I wanted to take my career in the NFL as far as I possibly could. I certainly wasn’t going back to Flint. This was just the beginning for me. And, besides, I had to keep playing because our money problems were only getting worse. I didn’t end up playing in a game until my second year on the Rams, which meant we had to live on $75,000 for that whole time. That would have been totally fine, except for all of the debt I’d accumulated, and the fact that I insisted on living like I was earning a lot more than I was. On top of that, we had a dismal year, ending up with a 3-win, 13-loss record. Not good, to say the least.

My second year on the team, John Robinson and the coaching staff who’d drafted me were fired. Suddenly, I had to prove myself to our new coach, Chuck Knox, and his team of assistants. I was low on the totem pole to begin with, and the new coaches came in planning to make a ton of changes, which did not bode well for me. And then I came head-to-head with one of the coaches. He berated me. He dogged me out. He belittled me in every way imaginable. One time, he got a colonoscopy, and he privately showed me the pictures.

“Look at that, you ever see a pucker like that?” he said.

“Why are you showing me that?” I said, trying to look away.

He kept trying to get my attention. “Hey, Tyrone,” he said. “Hey.”

“No, my name is Terry.”

“I like Tyrone. I’m going to call you Tyrone.”

I was seething, but I let it go.
He’s not going to break me
, I thought. I wondered if maybe it was like that movie
An Officer and a Gentleman
, where they tried to break Richard Gere’s character until he found the magic way to get out from under them.
Only I couldn’t see an end in sight, and nothing I did helped, not even when I played hard and made things happen on the field.

One day we were in practice, looking over footage from the last game, and he zipped right through the film of me. That time, the other players noticed.

“Hey, hey, hey, Terry just got an interception,” said Kevin Greene, the star linebacker at the time.

“Ah, it doesn’t matter,” the coach said. “He’s not going to be here.”

I couldn’t hide how mad I was. “What is that?” I said.

“You know what?” the coach said to me. “You sucker, you’re going to end up with an apple and a bus ticket. That’s it. You can’t play. The only reason you’re here is because somebody up there likes you. But I don’t care about you.”

He made me feel so small, but I was such a pleaser that I wanted him to like me, even though anyone could have told me there was nothing I could do to make things right with him. I took his abuse because I was so scared of losing my place on the team. And then he cut me at the end of the season anyhow. At first, I actually thought that maybe this was just another one of his tricks. But it wasn’t.

It started to eat at me that I’d never stood up for myself and told him that the way he was talking to me was unacceptable. He had gotten inside my head in the worst possible way and made me feel so low. Now I didn’t have a place on the team, and I didn’t even have my self-respect. Honestly, that was the closest I’ve ever come to killing someone. I plotted the whole thing out, fantasizing about how I would wait for him to come outside after practice. Obviously, I never would have taken it that far, but it got so dark for a time that I felt like I could have done it.

MY AGENT WAS UPBEAT, SAYING HE WAS GOING
to try to get me on another team. There was nothing to do but wait. We’d spent the little bit of money I’d been given, so we were broke, and I kept thinking about all of the things I should have done differently, but it was too late for any of that now. We sat in our tiny apartment, and every little thing set me off. I yelled at Rebecca. I yelled at the kids. I said things to Rebecca she didn’t deserve. I definitely was not nice.

I felt such immense pain and pressure pushing down on me, and I wanted to give up. I wanted everyone to leave me alone. Not that it helped when people did leave us alone. I might not have wanted to run wild through the streets with my teammates, but I’d loved that feeling of being a part of a team, and I still wanted to hang out with the other players. Well, when we were cut, we called people who had been our friends the week
before, and they didn’t call us back. I got it. We weren’t on the team anymore, and they were, and they felt uncomfortable. But it was rough. We still went to the same restaurants and grocery stores, and our kids still went to the same schools, but we were out, and they were in, simple as that.

Finally, we returned to Flint and moved back in with my parents. The dynamic was problematic from the start. My sister, Micki, was in high school now, and she was always telling me how things should be. We got into a lot of fights. “You know, I’m a grown man with a family,” I said, not getting that the funny thing is, grown men with families shouldn’t move back in with their mothers, except under the most dire circumstances. Here I was, acting like the whole world was my hotel.

Trish came in and inevitably took sides.

“Well, your sister’s right,” Trish said.

I was angry all of the time and scared about what might come next.

Hard to believe I could be dumber than I already was, but things got worse. Right before the Rams cut me, they gave me a $40,000 signing bonus to come back to the team for a second season, and I went and bought a Nissan Pathfinder, which was the hottest car back then. Never mind that we didn’t have a place to live, and we were staying with my parents, so long as I had a nice car. Rebecca had been very supportive, but she couldn’t keep quiet this time.

“Couldn’t we use that money to buy a small house, and maybe live there, and we’ll just keep the car that we have?” she said. “Or shouldn’t we get an apartment?”

“Oh, no, no, I can’t do that,” I said.

I cringe thinking about it now. I was literally outside of my parents’ house, washing my new car, while my wife and two
kids were inside. But at the time, I just wanted what I wanted, and I didn’t think about how it was for anyone else.

Now that I’d been cut, all I had was that car. And the car payments.

Oh, snap, how are we going to do this?
I thought.

Finally, in 1993, the Green Bay Packers signed me. I went up there to join the team. But this wasn’t quite the solution I’d hoped it would be. The season started up, and I didn’t play. This meant I wasn’t getting paid. They gave me $200 a week to work out, and that was it. I had spent all of the money I had on the car, and clothes, and going out to eat, so I had no money, and the bills were piling up, and the credit cards were not getting paid, and creditors were once again calling all of the time. I couldn’t afford to make payments on the Pathfinder anymore, and soon there were repo men looking for me to take the car back. At least we were lucky enough that my parents let Rebecca and the kids stay on at their house in Flint.