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http://mmqb.si.com/2015/01/27/seattle-seahawks-legion-of-boom-richard-sherman-earl-thomas/
A Conversation with the Legion of Boom
After an almost unfathomable comeback win in the NFC championship, we joined up with Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Byron Maxwell, Jeremy Lane and, of course, Richard Sherman as they prepared for a Sports Illustrated cover shoot, and for the Patriots. Here’s what they had to say about teamwork, where they stand in history and, oh yeah, Tom Brady
By Robert Klemko
MAPLE VALLEY, Wash. — While they wait for Earl Thomas to arrive for the photo shoot, the conversation darts from Super Bowl tickets for family to overrated wide receivers to the finer points of the referee-defensive back relationship. They lounge on couches in Richard Sherman’s foyer as the host and unofficial voice of the Legion of Boom holds court, rattling off reasons for learning names of game officials and greeting them cordially before and during games. “They’re just like anybody,” Sherman says. “They’re human.”
About three hours after the suggested meeting time, Thomas pulls up in a black Rolls-Royce, and out pours a family—mom, girlfriend and two-year-old daughter. Thomas gets a pass: He was undergoing treatment for his injured shoulder, dislocated during an NFC title game for the ages. Thomas played through the pain, as did Sherman with a hyperextended elbow, as Seattle came back from a 16-0 halftime deficit to beat Green Bay 28-22, earning a second consecutive Super Bowl trip.
This was supposed to be Sherman’s Sports Illustrated cover, but the All-Pro turned down a solo pictorial in deference to his teammates. He wanted every defensive back on the front of the magazine, but settles for five on the cover and the rest on the inside. The Seahawks provided five sets of gray warmup sweats—one each for Sherman, Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Byron Maxwell and Jeremy Lane—but the group turns them down. “The guys want to express their individual style,” Sherman says. “It fits with our story.”
Indeed, the Legion hails from football factories (Sherman played at Stanford; Thomas, Texas; Chancellor, Virginia Tech; Maxwell, Clemson) and FCS outposts (Lane’s alma mater is Northwestern State). Its members come big (Chancellor, 6-3, 230) and relatively small (Thomas, 5-10, 200). They come from Compton and Tidewater and, in Thomas’s case, right smack in the path of Hurricane Rita in Orange, Texas. Debbie Thomas lost her home in 2005 when Earl was a teenager, and has remained by his side since.
She watches from Sherman’s driveway as a pizza deliveryman arrives mid-shoot and nearly drops his cargo when he realizes he’s delivering pepperoni pies to the Legion. Photographer Robert Beck tells him to jump in for a photobomb, and the athletes play along. When it’s all over, Debbie Thomas pats her son and Sherman on the shoulder with an ear-to-ear grin. “You made his year,” she says, “That’s what you’re supposed to do, no matter how big you get.”
A discussion with the Legion of Boom:
KLEMKO: What will it be like to go against Brandon Browner for a ring?
MAXWELL: It’s gonna be fun. We’re going to compete. Like going against your brother. What you expect from him is toughness, and if he ever gets a chance to go after you he will. It’s cool.
THOMAS: It’s going to be normal. He’s obviously a close friend, but when it comes to stuff like this, it’s not in my head.
LANE: It’s been a while since I’ve seen him play. I’m just excited for him, to have left us and still made it back.
SHERMAN: Anytime you play against your family you want to put your best foot forward. We’re gonna have a blast. He’s gonna be way too serious in the game, and we’ll mess with him. You can’t be serious with us. We know you. I’m looking forward to seeing him take on Marshawn…
KLEMKO: How easy has non-verbal communication gotten now that you’ve kept this group together for a few years?
SHERMAN: It’s a lot different than how we began. Nowadays I can look across the field and communicate something with Byron silently. We have hand signals for everything.
CHANCELLOR: If you don’t know the call, sometimes you can look around and see what the call is, just by how somebody is lined up. We all have little tendencies in different coverages; standing in a certain spot or even the way we’re standing. If you work with these guys every day, you start to pick up on it.
THOMAS: I think it comes from the way we talk to each other in meetings. We have a great DB coach in coach [Kris] Richard. Understanding situational football and our scheme allows us to play with total confidence. Last week on the goal line we had an all-out blitz on third down. Sherm came over and he gave me freedom to the inside and he had my help on the outside. And we didn’t communicate that in any way. I just knew.
LANE: I remember against Green Bay—I haven’t told ya’ll this yet—I think it was Will Dog, and I didn’t know if it was man or not but I saw Sherm to my left and I saw Kam bending down and I was like, Ok, we’re in Cover 3.
SHERMAN: I love that.
KLEMKO: Are there players, dead or alive, who you’ve seen play and thought, that guy belongs on the LOB?
CHANCELLOR: Alive? Nobody. Just because every man in the group goes through the gauntlet. We’ve been battle-tested, we work hard, we grind, and we have a different understanding of the game and the meaning of playing with each other. I just don’t see that across the league. Now, Sean Taylor could have been a part of it. He would’ve been an enforcer.
SHERMAN: Brandon Browner—
CHANCELLOR: Well, he still is a part of it.
SHERMAN: Right, the guys who have been through it with us know what it takes. Chris Maragos, Walter Thurmond. Those are the only ones I could truly say could be a part of this.
LANE: It’s about having respect for the game. We all have the same level of respect for the game.
CHANCELLOR: I think it shows when you watch them on film after guys leave here. They’re still doing the same things.
SHERMAN: You hear stories of them practicing super hard and looking like they’re always focused. Practice isn’t about getting rest here. It’s about getting better and having fun.
KLEMKO: What if you could play with 1985 rules, like the Bears defense you’re always compared to?
THOMAS: We would dominate. We would dominate. That’s why I have a hard time with the grades people give individuals and teams. The game is so different. All those greats would not be the same people in this era. They make it hard on DBs now and defenses, period, but it’s fun to be a part of something that people want to watch even more than our offense.
SHERMAN: It’s so much different. You could take quarterbacks down by their head, hit receivers all day. Who knows? We might have dominated and knocked everybody out, or we could’ve knocked ourselves out in the process. It’s impossible to compare.
KLEMKO: You’re down 16-0 to Green Bay, but everyone said the locker room was calm. How?
MAXWELL: You’re battle-tested, so you understand pressure situations once you’ve been in them. You say, Okay, lets just keep calm, stay the course and everything will be alright.
LANE: I think we just believe in ourselves so much that it’s never over till it’s over. I learned that as a kid playing Pop Warner.
SHERMAN: And you have so many examples of comebacks to draw from: Bears, Atlanta, Houston.
CHANCELLOR: Countless times. We just never quit. We believe in our preparation so much that it won’t allow us to quit. We know we’re going to win before the game starts. We just don’t know how yet.
KLEMKO: When you think about that 2012 game, the last time you played New England, what’s changed?
CHANCELLOR: I feel like we’re a lot more experienced. We know how teams want to attack us now.
SHERMAN: They had Wes Welker, Brandon Lloyd, who almost took Browner to the crib that game. It was a very different team. Defensively they weren’t as strong as they are now.
THOMAS: The biggest difference is the way we think now. With them it’s still the same quarterback, still the same coach, still the same scheming ways in all aspects.
KLEMKO: Tom Brady in one word…
CHANCELLOR: Competitor.
THOMAS: Competitor.
LANE: Smart.
SHERMAN: Fiery.
MAXWELL: Legend.
***********************************
http://mmqb.si.com/2015/01/27/richard-sherman-seahawks-super-bowl-49-sports-illustrated-magazine/
Jonathan Ferrey for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB
It’s About More than Me
Feels great to be back on the biggest stage—more established, a little more grown up—with my Legion of Boom brothers. Above all, these past 12 months have shown me that we have the power, and the duty, to shape our own destinies
By Richard Sherman
This story appears in the February 2 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Last season, while I was posing for magazine covers and calling out wide receivers in unconventional ways, I was also negotiating for an extension on my rookie contract. Seahawks general manager John Schneider asked me an important question: “Who are you going to be when you get paid?” As a fan, you’ve seen the scenario play out dozens of times—Player X gets a megadeal and never lives up to the paycheck; he stops playing hard and starts making business decisions with his body. I told John that I’m not playing football for the money, that I want to be the best to ever play. I said, “I’ll be the guy who has $50 million in the bank and plays like he has $5.”
My coach, Pete Carroll, says I’ve grown up since that breakout year, and to an extent, I agree. You see the world a little bit differently at 26 versus 25. Little slights don’t affect me as much as they did a year ago, and I don’t get overjoyed like I used to. It takes a little bit more to move the needle—winning a Super Bowl will do that. When you join a group of men and accomplish something so difficult and so rare, you no longer feel as though you have to prove things to people who haven’t proven anything to you. In most cases I have a better résumé than my detractors.
Before I had that, I was lucky to be drafted by Pete and John, who assembled around me one of the most talented and diverse defensive backfields in football. More than I want individual success, I want to be remembered as part of the Legion of Boom, which is why all of us are on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine this week. In football, unlike various other sports, it takes a total team effort to be successful.
I can’t perform at this level without Kam Chancellor, the lion of the Legion, the guy who once picked off Peyton Manning by ducking to make it appear as though he couldn’t leap for the ball. He’s also the guy we go to with our problems, who doles out advice about a lot of issues that arise outside of football.
I can’t perform at this level without Earl Thomas—The Example—who can show you how to do the right thing better than he can explain it. When everybody else is joking, he’s locked in, a reminder of what we’re here for.
I can’t perform at this level without Byron Maxwell, our chill guy, oblivious to the pressure. I remember him joking around with Carroll in our rookie camp, saying that if he was allowed to play nickel he’d choke out the slot receiver. Carroll relented and Maxwell delivered, only to get injured in camp. Now he’s the corner on the other side, and his consistently high level of play makes QBs’ decisions very difficult.
I can’t perform at this level without Jeremy Lane, the scrappy guy from Tyler, Texas. Competition brings out the dog in him; just look at what he’s done to the Packers’ Randall Cobb.
Carroll requires certain things of all of us—we have to tackle with the best—but he’s allowed each of us to be ourselves. This organization let me develop a public persona through trial and error, and it let me be nonchalant in my technique, something I wasn’t allowed to do at Stanford. I don’t imagine that’s an option in New England.
When you grow up in this defense, it becomes difficult to judge receivers across the league by watching them on tape. Most cornerbacks don’t push receivers to their limits with effective press technique; only a handful of cornerbacks outside Seattle are capable of it—guys like the Patriots’ Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner. Those are the players who give us the best indication of which receivers will be a challenge for our team.
With us, what you see is what you get: Press man and Cover Three—though the league continues to undermine our style of play, making things easier for the offense. Pass interference is a spot foul when called on the defense, but it’s a 10-yard penalty when called on the offense? We had the Packers facing third-and-13 in the NFC championship game, and the referees called hands to the face on one of our D-linemen who had no impact on the play.
Five-yard penalty, first down. Those are the moments when you wonder, How can we win as a defense? People ask me how I’d compare this defense with the 1985 Bears, and I never have the answer they’re looking for. But I know this: In this era, with the rules we play by, we’re as dominant as any team can be.
But those are small issues. On a bigger level, I look at the NFL today and I’m as disappointed as ever in its management. Commissioner Roger Goodell operates at a high level, but he’s doing what 32 owners tell him to do. I once believed that having more retired players in the league office could remedy this, but the former player in the highest position, executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent, continues to disappoint. When he told Adrian Peterson he’d receive a two-game suspension and the league failed to deliver, he became just another suit.
Under Goodell the league continues to put players like Marshawn Lynch in a position to be mocked by the media, which seems to get a kick out of seeing people struggle on camera. As teammates we’re angry because we know what certain people do well and we know what they struggle with. Marshawn’s talking to the press is the equivalent of putting a reporter on a football field and telling him to tackle Adrian Peterson.
Seahawks united. (Scott Eklund/AP)
Some of the same people slamming Marshawn for not talking are just as likely to condemn the Browns’ Andrew Hawkins and Johnson Bademosi for protesting police brutality with T-shirts. They want to hear us speak, but only if we’re saying something they want to hear. As athletes who spend most of our waking hours at the team facility, we learned about the events in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner through a kind of osmosis—you see a video clip or read a story, but you never get the full picture.
We understand, though, what it is to grow up as a black man in America. As a community, the best way for us to avoid becoming victims is for people to understand that we can avoid a great majority of these situations. Too often we look at a Ferguson and we say,That’s what’s wrong with my life, that’s why I’m in the situation I’m in.
I thought long and hard about joining in with players across the league and making a visual statement—a T-shirt or a hands-up gesture—but ultimately I decided against it. I asked myself, What message am I sending out? Am I going to end police violence? Racism? No, of course not. So how can I evoke change?
I got some news nine months ago that helped me reach a conclusion. My girlfriend, Ashley, and I are expecting our first child, a boy, any day now. I’ve realized in the last year that I can evoke change by being a great role model: a man who respects women and police officers, who graduated from college and does everything in his power to be successful within the rules.
Circumstances dictate where you start—a single mother raised Kam Chancellor to become the man he is today—but each individual determines his course. Where I came from, in Compton, kids were brainwashed into thinking that if they weren’t athletes or rappers or drug dealers they were nothing. My son will understand that he’s in control of his own destiny and that education, work ethic and discipline will guide him to an even better life than I’ve enjoyed. He’ll be the man who makes this world a better place through positive actions and influence.
A Conversation with the Legion of Boom
After an almost unfathomable comeback win in the NFC championship, we joined up with Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Byron Maxwell, Jeremy Lane and, of course, Richard Sherman as they prepared for a Sports Illustrated cover shoot, and for the Patriots. Here’s what they had to say about teamwork, where they stand in history and, oh yeah, Tom Brady
By Robert Klemko
MAPLE VALLEY, Wash. — While they wait for Earl Thomas to arrive for the photo shoot, the conversation darts from Super Bowl tickets for family to overrated wide receivers to the finer points of the referee-defensive back relationship. They lounge on couches in Richard Sherman’s foyer as the host and unofficial voice of the Legion of Boom holds court, rattling off reasons for learning names of game officials and greeting them cordially before and during games. “They’re just like anybody,” Sherman says. “They’re human.”
About three hours after the suggested meeting time, Thomas pulls up in a black Rolls-Royce, and out pours a family—mom, girlfriend and two-year-old daughter. Thomas gets a pass: He was undergoing treatment for his injured shoulder, dislocated during an NFC title game for the ages. Thomas played through the pain, as did Sherman with a hyperextended elbow, as Seattle came back from a 16-0 halftime deficit to beat Green Bay 28-22, earning a second consecutive Super Bowl trip.
This was supposed to be Sherman’s Sports Illustrated cover, but the All-Pro turned down a solo pictorial in deference to his teammates. He wanted every defensive back on the front of the magazine, but settles for five on the cover and the rest on the inside. The Seahawks provided five sets of gray warmup sweats—one each for Sherman, Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Byron Maxwell and Jeremy Lane—but the group turns them down. “The guys want to express their individual style,” Sherman says. “It fits with our story.”
Indeed, the Legion hails from football factories (Sherman played at Stanford; Thomas, Texas; Chancellor, Virginia Tech; Maxwell, Clemson) and FCS outposts (Lane’s alma mater is Northwestern State). Its members come big (Chancellor, 6-3, 230) and relatively small (Thomas, 5-10, 200). They come from Compton and Tidewater and, in Thomas’s case, right smack in the path of Hurricane Rita in Orange, Texas. Debbie Thomas lost her home in 2005 when Earl was a teenager, and has remained by his side since.
She watches from Sherman’s driveway as a pizza deliveryman arrives mid-shoot and nearly drops his cargo when he realizes he’s delivering pepperoni pies to the Legion. Photographer Robert Beck tells him to jump in for a photobomb, and the athletes play along. When it’s all over, Debbie Thomas pats her son and Sherman on the shoulder with an ear-to-ear grin. “You made his year,” she says, “That’s what you’re supposed to do, no matter how big you get.”
A discussion with the Legion of Boom:
KLEMKO: What will it be like to go against Brandon Browner for a ring?
MAXWELL: It’s gonna be fun. We’re going to compete. Like going against your brother. What you expect from him is toughness, and if he ever gets a chance to go after you he will. It’s cool.
THOMAS: It’s going to be normal. He’s obviously a close friend, but when it comes to stuff like this, it’s not in my head.
LANE: It’s been a while since I’ve seen him play. I’m just excited for him, to have left us and still made it back.
SHERMAN: Anytime you play against your family you want to put your best foot forward. We’re gonna have a blast. He’s gonna be way too serious in the game, and we’ll mess with him. You can’t be serious with us. We know you. I’m looking forward to seeing him take on Marshawn…
KLEMKO: How easy has non-verbal communication gotten now that you’ve kept this group together for a few years?
SHERMAN: It’s a lot different than how we began. Nowadays I can look across the field and communicate something with Byron silently. We have hand signals for everything.
CHANCELLOR: If you don’t know the call, sometimes you can look around and see what the call is, just by how somebody is lined up. We all have little tendencies in different coverages; standing in a certain spot or even the way we’re standing. If you work with these guys every day, you start to pick up on it.
THOMAS: I think it comes from the way we talk to each other in meetings. We have a great DB coach in coach [Kris] Richard. Understanding situational football and our scheme allows us to play with total confidence. Last week on the goal line we had an all-out blitz on third down. Sherm came over and he gave me freedom to the inside and he had my help on the outside. And we didn’t communicate that in any way. I just knew.
LANE: I remember against Green Bay—I haven’t told ya’ll this yet—I think it was Will Dog, and I didn’t know if it was man or not but I saw Sherm to my left and I saw Kam bending down and I was like, Ok, we’re in Cover 3.
SHERMAN: I love that.
KLEMKO: Are there players, dead or alive, who you’ve seen play and thought, that guy belongs on the LOB?
CHANCELLOR: Alive? Nobody. Just because every man in the group goes through the gauntlet. We’ve been battle-tested, we work hard, we grind, and we have a different understanding of the game and the meaning of playing with each other. I just don’t see that across the league. Now, Sean Taylor could have been a part of it. He would’ve been an enforcer.
SHERMAN: Brandon Browner—
CHANCELLOR: Well, he still is a part of it.
SHERMAN: Right, the guys who have been through it with us know what it takes. Chris Maragos, Walter Thurmond. Those are the only ones I could truly say could be a part of this.
LANE: It’s about having respect for the game. We all have the same level of respect for the game.
CHANCELLOR: I think it shows when you watch them on film after guys leave here. They’re still doing the same things.
SHERMAN: You hear stories of them practicing super hard and looking like they’re always focused. Practice isn’t about getting rest here. It’s about getting better and having fun.
KLEMKO: What if you could play with 1985 rules, like the Bears defense you’re always compared to?
THOMAS: We would dominate. We would dominate. That’s why I have a hard time with the grades people give individuals and teams. The game is so different. All those greats would not be the same people in this era. They make it hard on DBs now and defenses, period, but it’s fun to be a part of something that people want to watch even more than our offense.
SHERMAN: It’s so much different. You could take quarterbacks down by their head, hit receivers all day. Who knows? We might have dominated and knocked everybody out, or we could’ve knocked ourselves out in the process. It’s impossible to compare.
KLEMKO: You’re down 16-0 to Green Bay, but everyone said the locker room was calm. How?
MAXWELL: You’re battle-tested, so you understand pressure situations once you’ve been in them. You say, Okay, lets just keep calm, stay the course and everything will be alright.
LANE: I think we just believe in ourselves so much that it’s never over till it’s over. I learned that as a kid playing Pop Warner.
SHERMAN: And you have so many examples of comebacks to draw from: Bears, Atlanta, Houston.
CHANCELLOR: Countless times. We just never quit. We believe in our preparation so much that it won’t allow us to quit. We know we’re going to win before the game starts. We just don’t know how yet.
KLEMKO: When you think about that 2012 game, the last time you played New England, what’s changed?
CHANCELLOR: I feel like we’re a lot more experienced. We know how teams want to attack us now.
SHERMAN: They had Wes Welker, Brandon Lloyd, who almost took Browner to the crib that game. It was a very different team. Defensively they weren’t as strong as they are now.
THOMAS: The biggest difference is the way we think now. With them it’s still the same quarterback, still the same coach, still the same scheming ways in all aspects.
KLEMKO: Tom Brady in one word…
CHANCELLOR: Competitor.
THOMAS: Competitor.
LANE: Smart.
SHERMAN: Fiery.
MAXWELL: Legend.
***********************************
http://mmqb.si.com/2015/01/27/richard-sherman-seahawks-super-bowl-49-sports-illustrated-magazine/
Jonathan Ferrey for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB
It’s About More than Me
Feels great to be back on the biggest stage—more established, a little more grown up—with my Legion of Boom brothers. Above all, these past 12 months have shown me that we have the power, and the duty, to shape our own destinies
By Richard Sherman
This story appears in the February 2 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Last season, while I was posing for magazine covers and calling out wide receivers in unconventional ways, I was also negotiating for an extension on my rookie contract. Seahawks general manager John Schneider asked me an important question: “Who are you going to be when you get paid?” As a fan, you’ve seen the scenario play out dozens of times—Player X gets a megadeal and never lives up to the paycheck; he stops playing hard and starts making business decisions with his body. I told John that I’m not playing football for the money, that I want to be the best to ever play. I said, “I’ll be the guy who has $50 million in the bank and plays like he has $5.”
My coach, Pete Carroll, says I’ve grown up since that breakout year, and to an extent, I agree. You see the world a little bit differently at 26 versus 25. Little slights don’t affect me as much as they did a year ago, and I don’t get overjoyed like I used to. It takes a little bit more to move the needle—winning a Super Bowl will do that. When you join a group of men and accomplish something so difficult and so rare, you no longer feel as though you have to prove things to people who haven’t proven anything to you. In most cases I have a better résumé than my detractors.
Before I had that, I was lucky to be drafted by Pete and John, who assembled around me one of the most talented and diverse defensive backfields in football. More than I want individual success, I want to be remembered as part of the Legion of Boom, which is why all of us are on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine this week. In football, unlike various other sports, it takes a total team effort to be successful.
I can’t perform at this level without Kam Chancellor, the lion of the Legion, the guy who once picked off Peyton Manning by ducking to make it appear as though he couldn’t leap for the ball. He’s also the guy we go to with our problems, who doles out advice about a lot of issues that arise outside of football.
I can’t perform at this level without Earl Thomas—The Example—who can show you how to do the right thing better than he can explain it. When everybody else is joking, he’s locked in, a reminder of what we’re here for.
I can’t perform at this level without Byron Maxwell, our chill guy, oblivious to the pressure. I remember him joking around with Carroll in our rookie camp, saying that if he was allowed to play nickel he’d choke out the slot receiver. Carroll relented and Maxwell delivered, only to get injured in camp. Now he’s the corner on the other side, and his consistently high level of play makes QBs’ decisions very difficult.
I can’t perform at this level without Jeremy Lane, the scrappy guy from Tyler, Texas. Competition brings out the dog in him; just look at what he’s done to the Packers’ Randall Cobb.
Carroll requires certain things of all of us—we have to tackle with the best—but he’s allowed each of us to be ourselves. This organization let me develop a public persona through trial and error, and it let me be nonchalant in my technique, something I wasn’t allowed to do at Stanford. I don’t imagine that’s an option in New England.
When you grow up in this defense, it becomes difficult to judge receivers across the league by watching them on tape. Most cornerbacks don’t push receivers to their limits with effective press technique; only a handful of cornerbacks outside Seattle are capable of it—guys like the Patriots’ Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner. Those are the players who give us the best indication of which receivers will be a challenge for our team.
With us, what you see is what you get: Press man and Cover Three—though the league continues to undermine our style of play, making things easier for the offense. Pass interference is a spot foul when called on the defense, but it’s a 10-yard penalty when called on the offense? We had the Packers facing third-and-13 in the NFC championship game, and the referees called hands to the face on one of our D-linemen who had no impact on the play.
Five-yard penalty, first down. Those are the moments when you wonder, How can we win as a defense? People ask me how I’d compare this defense with the 1985 Bears, and I never have the answer they’re looking for. But I know this: In this era, with the rules we play by, we’re as dominant as any team can be.
But those are small issues. On a bigger level, I look at the NFL today and I’m as disappointed as ever in its management. Commissioner Roger Goodell operates at a high level, but he’s doing what 32 owners tell him to do. I once believed that having more retired players in the league office could remedy this, but the former player in the highest position, executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent, continues to disappoint. When he told Adrian Peterson he’d receive a two-game suspension and the league failed to deliver, he became just another suit.
Under Goodell the league continues to put players like Marshawn Lynch in a position to be mocked by the media, which seems to get a kick out of seeing people struggle on camera. As teammates we’re angry because we know what certain people do well and we know what they struggle with. Marshawn’s talking to the press is the equivalent of putting a reporter on a football field and telling him to tackle Adrian Peterson.
Seahawks united. (Scott Eklund/AP)
Some of the same people slamming Marshawn for not talking are just as likely to condemn the Browns’ Andrew Hawkins and Johnson Bademosi for protesting police brutality with T-shirts. They want to hear us speak, but only if we’re saying something they want to hear. As athletes who spend most of our waking hours at the team facility, we learned about the events in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner through a kind of osmosis—you see a video clip or read a story, but you never get the full picture.
We understand, though, what it is to grow up as a black man in America. As a community, the best way for us to avoid becoming victims is for people to understand that we can avoid a great majority of these situations. Too often we look at a Ferguson and we say,That’s what’s wrong with my life, that’s why I’m in the situation I’m in.
I thought long and hard about joining in with players across the league and making a visual statement—a T-shirt or a hands-up gesture—but ultimately I decided against it. I asked myself, What message am I sending out? Am I going to end police violence? Racism? No, of course not. So how can I evoke change?
I got some news nine months ago that helped me reach a conclusion. My girlfriend, Ashley, and I are expecting our first child, a boy, any day now. I’ve realized in the last year that I can evoke change by being a great role model: a man who respects women and police officers, who graduated from college and does everything in his power to be successful within the rules.
Circumstances dictate where you start—a single mother raised Kam Chancellor to become the man he is today—but each individual determines his course. Where I came from, in Compton, kids were brainwashed into thinking that if they weren’t athletes or rappers or drug dealers they were nothing. My son will understand that he’s in control of his own destiny and that education, work ethic and discipline will guide him to an even better life than I’ve enjoyed. He’ll be the man who makes this world a better place through positive actions and influence.
