Tamba Hali

by David Seigerman

  Instead, he played the game without fear. He played with humility. He wasn’t concerned with the reporters or the rankings or the college recruiting rumors. The attention he was starting to get meant nothing to him.

  “I was getting attention for football, but it didn’t go to my head. I didn’t understand what was so good about playing sports,” he said. “I was just excited to play in the games and to be around the guys.”

  Despite all the individual accolades piling up around him, Tamba remained the quintessential team player—any coach’s dream. He happily lined up wherever Coach Heck put him, whether it was defensive end, defensive tackle, nose guard, or even linebacker. The Teaneck coaches loved to move him around and make the other team have to find number 72 at the start of every play.

  Heck once attended a clinic featuring Rex Ryan (future head coach of the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills) and his father, Buddy Ryan, the legendary defensive coordinator for the 1985 Chicago Bears, often considered the best defense in NFL history. At that clinic, the Ryans taught the concepts of the 46 Defense (Buddy’s signature system). Heck came away with the understanding that a coach might want to line up his most disruptive player head-on against the center. You needed to put someone there who would be impossible to block, they said, someone who could penetrate the heart of an offensive line and blow up the quarterback’s plan right along with his pocket of protection.

  Heck had a guy who could do just that.

  “We would line up Tamba over center and he would just give that guy fits. They just couldn’t handle him,” Coach Heck said. “It had nothing to do with his body. It was all about his heart. Some people have that drive, that heart, that motor, and they’re never going to quit. When you have to play against that every play, it’s exhausting.”

  Tamba’s junior season played out like one continuous highlight reel. When it was over, he was first-team all-state, being recruited by major college football programs from across the country. Three years earlier, Tamba Hali thought getting a quarter back meant receiving change from a cashier. Now, he was a quarterback hunter, one of the most sought-after defensive prospects in America.

  Even Henry Hali was becoming a football fan.

  Tamba’s senior season was more of the same: dominant performances on the field, mounting interest off it. Coach Heck remembers one sequence of three plays that pretty much summed up the kind of player Tamba had become.

  It was Thanksgiving, which around Teaneck meant more than turkey and stuffing. The holiday was home to the annual rivalry game between Teaneck and Hackensack, a tradition dating back to 1931. It was always the regular-season finale, and Teaneck had lost the previous three meetings.

  The Highwaymen led by a touchdown, 14–7, late in the game. The Comets were moving the ball, and tension in the stands was rising like the mercury in the meat thermometers jabbed into turkeys all over Bergen County. Tamba stopped three plays in a row, making tackles on two running plays and getting a sack on Hackensack’s last play.

  Tamba Hali stamped his signature on the last three plays of his high-school career. The kid who had to be introduced to football when he first arrived at Teaneck now walked off the field as perhaps the best player in Highwaymen history. He certainly was one of the most decorated.

  He was honored as an all-state and All-America selection and nominated as the Gatorade Player of the Year in the state of New Jersey. SuperPrep, a well-established recruiting service, considered him the best prospect in New Jersey—at any position—and the third-best defensive-line prospect in the country.

  Forget Michael Jordan. Tamba Hali was making a name for himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I WANT TO WEAR THAT UNIFORM”

  “I am a Texas player, and Texas is my home state.”

  That’s how Vince Young, as reported by Sports Illustrated, once described his decision to sign with the University of Texas. Young, a quarterback who could run as well as he could throw, made his mark at Madison High School in Houston. He was the national high-school Player of the Year in the eyes of the people who rank such things and universally considered the prize catch in the 2002 recruiting class.

  He was the best that Texas high-school football had to offer that year, and Texas was the natural choice. The only choice. When you grow up immersed in the Texas football culture and the Longhorns come calling, your decision about where to go to college and play your college football is essentially a no-brainer. Some even call it a dream come true.

  Tamba Hali had no such dreams growing up.

  “When I was five or six, maybe the dream was to become a soldier,” Tamba said. “We were worried about getting our next meal; we really couldn’t dream at that time. Reality was too real for us to think beyond what was happening. I really couldn’t imagine anything.”

  So when Boston College offered Tamba a scholarship after his sophomore season at  Teaneck High School, he really didn’t know what to think or how to react. He had to ask his coach, Dennis Heck, “What do I say to the man?” This was not something he had always dreamed might happen to him. He wasn’t even aware that it possibly could.

  He started to appreciate his new reality when offers started pouring in during his breakout junior season. Two dozen or so schools had expressed interest in having Tamba come learn on their campus and play football for their team.

  By the end of his senior season, Hali was one of the most enthusiastically pursued prospects in the country. Maybe not quite at Young’s level (quarterbacks have always existed on a different plane), but enough to make him a familiar name on the wish lists of college fans from gray upstate New York to golden Southern California. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, 853,537 kids had played 11-v-11 high-school football in 2001. Tamba Hali was considered among the top fifty to sixty seniors in the land.

  Sixty-four scholarship offers were extended to Tamba. And everyone waited to see which one he would accept.

  The NCAA allows high-school seniors to make “official” visits to as many as five different campuses. Official visits mean the recruit is brought in as an official guest of the university, and his meal and travel expenses are paid for. Recruits are allowed to take as many unofficial visits—when they pay their own way—as they’d like. Tamba’s five visits were to USC, Syracuse, Miami, Maryland, and Penn State.

  But it was a visit from college football royalty that swayed Tamba’s decision. In late January 2002, Joe Paterno, head coach at Penn State University, came to Teaneck to see Tamba and pitch him in person.

  He had already handwritten a six-page letter to Tamba—which Coach Heck, now the principal at Teaneck High School, still keeps in a drawer in his desk. Tamba read as much of the letter as he could before the cursive letters became too tiring to decipher. Now, Coach Paterno was sitting in Coach Heck’s office, waiting to talk to Tamba.

  Tamba wanted to look good for the meeting, so he had one of his friends braid his long hair. The start of a new class period or something must have interrupted them because Tamba showed up for the meeting sporting only half a head of braided hair. Like everything else in Tamba’s life—football and academics—there was still work to be done.

  Coach Paterno was a seventy-five-year-old man at the time, with thirty-five seasons as Penn State’s head coach already under his belt. He didn’t know what to make of Tamba’s hairdo. But he was anxious to make an impression of his own.

  “Joe says to Tamba, ‘You know, I could pick up that phone, call anybody in the country, and they’ll return my call,’ ” Coach Heck said. “Tamba said, ‘Okay.’ Joe says, ‘I mean, I can call any coach in the NFL and they’ll return my call.’ Tamba said, ‘That’s great.’ ‘I could call the president of the United States and he’d return my call.’ He was trying to get across to Tamba that he had a great deal of influence.”

  Tamba’s reaction was similar to Paterno’s reaction to his hair. He wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “So Tamba says, ‘I really l
ike your uniforms.’ ” Heck said. “ ‘I want to wear that uniform.’ ”

  The decision really didn’t come down to the uniforms, although it would have made perfect sense. There really isn’t a more modest, less individual-focused fashion statement in all of sports than the one made by the Nittany Lions. For home games, they wear navy blue jerseys so dark that it looks like the players’ bodies are hiding in the shadows and white pants that could have been designed to show a maximum amount of grass stains, dirt, blood, and streaks of opponents’ helmet paint (so you can tell by a guy’s pants how hard he worked that day). For road games, it’s white tops and white bottoms, as if to suggest nothing special has come to town. They were almost invisible.

  The helmet, of course, is plain white, ordinary white, with a single blue streak bisecting what otherwise might look like an egg to be cracked. The helmet has no logo on it, just as the jersey has no name on it—no player’s name on the back, no school name on the front, no branding on the sleeves. Every time a player dresses for a game, he is reminded by one peek in the mirror that he is no different from everyone around him in the locker room, that he is no greater or lesser a piece to the Penn State puzzle than any of his teammates, no more special or unique than the players who wore this same jersey and helmet and pants before or those who will wear it after their time is done.

  And don’t forget the black shoes. Legend has it that Joe Paterno went for the black shoes because they make his players look slower. It’s subtle and strategic and might perhaps result in the slightest of advantages at some point during some game someday. What it’s not is flashy, which is why the Penn State look probably appealed to Tamba.

  But it’s not why he made his decision. Ultimately, he chose Penn State over his second choice, Syracuse, after much discussion and deliberation with Henry and with Coach Heck.

  “Tamba came to me when it was time to make his decision,” Heck said. “He says, ‘Coach, I don’t know where to go. Where would you send your son?’ ”

  Tamba had become like a son to Heck, whose own children had become close with his best player. He appreciated the physicality and relentlessness Tamba brought to the football field almost as much as the gentle respect with which he treated people off it.

  Together, son and coach and father arrived at the decision. On January 29, 2002, Tamba announced his verbal commitment. On February 6, he signed his letter of intent and submitted it by fax machine (again . . . ask your parents . . .). Eight years after learning to read and write, Tamba Hali was going to college. Four years after he first tucked his own shoulders into a pair of shoulder pads, he was going to play college football. At Pennsylvania State University.

  Ten years after he stepped silently past that dead body at the border, leaving behind a country being ripped apart, Tamba was going to a place known as Happy Valley.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE END GAME

  For a few final, violent months of 2003, war raged on in Liberia. This was not the Liberian civil war that Tamba Hali and his siblings had lived through and eventually fled. That war ended in 1997, when Charles Taylor, the leader of the rebellious National Patriotic Front of Liberia, was voted president in a general election overseen by observers from the United Nations. The rally cry for the hundreds of thousands of Liberians who supported the man who plunged their country into war before plundering its resources was unlike any candidate’s campaign slogan before or since: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him!”

  By 1999, war had erupted again. It was called the Second Liberian Civil War, but it was really a continuation of the one Taylor and his rebel forces had started on Christmas Day a decade earlier.

  Rachel Keita, Tamba Hali’s mother, was still in danger. She had returned to Monrovia, where she worked as a minister, trying to help heal the people and the city, even as the fighting continued around her. In 2003, as she walked with three friends through the streets of Liberia’s murdered capital, bullets rang out without warning. Nonspecific news reports acknowledged that at least one of Rachel’s friends had been killed. Rachel had been shot in the knee but survived.

  For most of the first ten years of his life, Tamba lived without his father. For all of the second ten years, he lived without his mother. He had always hoped to find a way to bring her to America, just as his father had managed to do for him and his brothers and sister. Now that he was playing college football and developing into a potential professional prospect, a plan was starting to materialize.

  If he could make it to the NFL, Tamba figured, he could afford to rescue his mother from Liberia. And he had to get her out.

  Tamba had never had a plan for football before, no idea what he wanted to get out of it. He had to be talked into playing the game in the first place, but he’d never considered that it might carry him to college or beyond. Now, here he was at Penn State, playing for the legendary and influential Joe Paterno; perhaps it was time to consider what other miracles football could conjure up.

  Back in high school, Tamba never gave much thought to what outsiders were saying about his performance or his potential. As he said, “I didn’t do it for anyone else but me.” It started to occur to him that he really did have something else to play for, someone else to play for.

  His mother.

  College wasn’t always easy for Tamba. Not in the classroom, for starters. The support staff he had back in Teaneck, his father, Henry, in particular, was gone, and he was forced to make schoolwork a priority and tackle it on his own—a lesson familiar to pretty much all college freshmen. He dropped a class that would be taught largely online because that kind of structure didn’t feel comfortable to him. He switched majors a time or two (or three) and found tutors when he needed them. He still felt like he was behind in his schooling, but falling behind was not an option. Not in Joe Paterno’s world. Tamba persevered and soon he was making academic progress.

  The challenges of college extended to the field, too. Tamba learned pretty quickly that the Big Ten Conference wasn’t quite as easy to dominate as the high-school competition back in Jersey.

  “I started to realize there’s another level of playing that you have to get to,” he said. “Your natural ability is not going to let you take over games like you did in high school. You had to be able to do it where guys around you are as good as you or better.”

  Tamba spent his first two college seasons playing defensive tackle, which meant he was going up against a steady rotation of three-hundred-pound guards who would wind up in the NFL: Iowa’s Eric Steinbach (second round draft pick, 2003), Illinois’s David Diehl (fifth round, 2003), Ohio State’s Alex Stepanovich (fourth round, 2004), and Michigan’s David Baas (second round, 2005).

  Then, in 2004, Hali moved to defensive end. And everything changed. He earned second-team All–Big Ten honors and was maturing into a first-rate defender. Just as attention swarmed him back in high school like ants on a fallen sandwich at a picnic, the NFL Draft world began to speculate about his future.

  “I only had two sacks that year, but I played well enough according to my coaches that I could have been drafted in the third or fourth round,” Tamba said.

  In truth, he never dreamed of leaving college after that junior season. He easily could have, considering the difficult state of Penn State football. The Nittany Lions went 3–9 during his sophomore season, 4–7 during his junior season—the worst back-to-back stretch of seasons in school history—and even the true blue-and-white faithful were beginning to wonder whether Paterno had reached the end of his road.

  Tamba’s coaches told him that if he wanted to be recognized as one of the better players in the country, he would have to get sacks. They explained that people who can get to the quarterback—pass rushers—are held in unique esteem at the NFL level. They were nearly as valued as the quarterbacks they were sent to conquer.

  There was more work to be done before Tamba could move on. So he stayed, committed to learning the little things that Coach Paterno always
preached about to him.

  “Joe always said, ‘If you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.’ It’s the behind-the-scenes stuff that you do that makes them happen,” Tamba said. “The little things that people overlook may not seem like a big deal. But if you can create good habits instead of bad habits, they will create who you are. They will set you up for success.”

  His senior season was an absolute success, for Tamba as well as his team. His impressive statistics (65 tackles, 11 sacks, 17 tackles for loss) brought impressive awards (Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year, first-team All-America). Penn State returned to prominence in a big way, going 11–1, winning the Big Ten Conference and the Orange Bowl, and finishing number three in the final national rankings.

  Perhaps the most important play of the season had Tamba’s fingerprints all over it. The Lions had won their first five games of the season—already surpassing their win total from the year before. Ohio State came to State College, PA, ranked sixth in the country. Penn State led by a touchdown, 17–10, late in the fourth quarter, but the Buckeyes were driving. Just as he had done against Hackensack (and would do countless times in Kansas City), Tamba brought a heavy rush from the left side of the defensive line, picked up speed as he approached Troy Smith, and finally walloped the Buckeyes quarterback. He enveloped Smith—who would win the Heisman Trophy the following season—the way a bun envelops a hot dog. In doing so, he jarred loose the ball, which was recovered by another Penn State defender. The sack-and-forced-fumble combination was becoming the Tamba Hali Special.

  That play essentially finished off Penn State’s statement win. And when PSU and OSU were tied atop the Big Ten standings at the end of the regular season, that win broke the tie and gave the Nittany Lions the conference title, plus the corresponding berth to the Orange Bowl.