This piece had so much potential.
In 2006, everything is going to change, for better or worse. By now, you will fully understand that to survive in an NFL game, you have to work yourself up into a kind of insanity. This is what it takes. Before games, your coaches will essentially pimp you out. They’re going to use humiliation and fear as a means to make you play as hard as humanly possible. One of them will literally show you a scene from the movie Deliverance during a mid-week meeting in order to demonstrate just how badly the opponent is going to own you. You will love this, in a way. It will make you go absolutely nuts. The NFL culture will brainwash you into a certain mentality: “My opponent is trying to take food out on my mouth, and I want to embarrass him in front of his family. It disgusts me to be on the same field as him.”
You will approach games as war. I don’t mean that as a cliche. There will be many times where you feel like your opponent is trying to steal your entire life. In October 2006, you’ll be playing against the Dallas Cowboys, rushing against the guard like you have thousands of times before, when you get your knee clipped from behind. You’ll get up, furious, and see that it’s the center, Andre Gurode, who hit you. This is an unspoken rule among lineman. You don’t do it. But maybe it was an accident. You say, “What the hell was that? You ain’t man enough to block me straight up?”
“Nah,” he’ll say, “I’m trying to put your ass out.”
This will be one of the most significant moments of your life. You will go the sideline, and your vision will be red. You will be madder than you’ve ever been in your entire life. A switch will get flipped. You will not be able to control the monster, and you’ll step way over the line for the first time. I know this will seem impossible to you — but you will stomp on Andre’s head, cutting him above his eye and causing him to get 30 stitches.
After that moment, you will never be looked at the same way again. And the complicated thing is, this is going to help you on the football field. Even as the media and the league is vilifying you, the irony is that this mistake will put you on the radar of everybody in the NFL. Guys will think you’re crazy. When you return from suspension and you play against the Eagles, an offensive lineman’s helmet will come off at the end of a play, and he will look at you scared shitless, like, “Hey Albert, you OK? Just relax.”
Guys will be terrified of you. They’ll shy away from your side of the field. And that’s where things are going to get really murky. On one hand, people expect you to flip a switch and be a killer when you’re on the field, and on the other hand, they expect you to be able to instantly switch it off when it’s over. Should you embrace the bad guy? Is that who you want to be, even if it means success in the short-term?
This is a really great start. It does exactly what you want it to, it recalls the time and moment vividly and then adds the personal perspective enough to get us involved. It even gives the reader just a bit of a pause to potentialy re-consider that moment and assess how and why that event occured.
Ok, so the hook worked and I (as the reader) am involved in the story Haynesworth is telling. It sounds like he is now at a point in his life where he really understands the magnitude of what he did. So I'm very interested on reading about the lesson learned here...
*I still don’t know if I have the answer for you, Albert. *
WTF?!? and then ...
If nothing else, listen to me on this, Albert: Do not leave the Tennessee Titans. Your defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz is a mastermind.
Goddammit.
Dear Older Haynesworth,
You ruined a great written piece by once again not giving 100% of yourself to the task in front of you. The opening of this article is like 2006--you got me hooked--and then end is like 2008 where just gave up and bailed on it.