by Terry Crews
“Yeah, but did you pay your rent?” Rebecca asked me.
“Oh, no, that’s going to be taken care of,” I said.
That didn’t exactly sound like a good plan to her, but she let it be. I don’t know who I thought was going to be taking care of my rent, because I certainly wasn’t paying it. My best friend, Darwin, had transferred to Western Michigan University and taken over Mike’s room in our apartment. I ended up being short on the rent several months in a row, and we had to sneak out in the middle of the night. I still feel horrible about that to this day. Back then I didn’t take responsibility for myself or my actions. I thought ignoring a situation was the same as fixing it. Once again, I had such a sense of entitlement that I thought what was good for me was also good for everyone else.
That fall I returned to school as a junior and threw myself into my first season of playing football since I’d earned my scholarship. Coming out of football camp the previous spring, what had once been the greatest thing ever had become something I hated. Now that I knew my scholarship was revocable if I didn’t do everything my coaches said, the pressure to conform felt like a heavy burden. It was wild to have gotten what I wanted, and then to despise it so quickly. My mind-set was much like it had been when I lost my virginity. I’d looked at my classmate like she’d used me because I couldn’t handle taking responsibility for my own actions. Now I did the same thing with my college coaches, projecting my guilt onto them about the fact that I wasn’t handling myself well at all, and becoming angry toward them for what I saw as their controlling and condescending attitude toward me.
This happened around the time I was dating Rebecca, so they understandably began to feel that our relationship was taking me off track. My grades were poor, but I knew that had nothing to do with Rebecca. I’d decided my major would be football and forget the rest. Finally, the coaches called me into their office. “We think you’re changing your attitude with that girlfriend of yours,” Coach said.
“That is way out of bounds for you to say to any grown man,” I said.
“Well, you’re having these problems, and we think it’s that girlfriend.”
“Dude, I don’t talk about your wife,” I said. “Don’t bring my girlfriend’s name up in your mouth one more time.”
The coaches and I clashed hard from that moment on, and for the rest of my time on the team, it was a nasty conflict. They considered me a rebel and an ingrate, which was the stone-cold truth. I threw all of my resentment and anger into working out and playing harder than ever, and there was no stopping me. I’ve always said it takes a lot of pain to be a great football player, because your anger can take you a long way on the football field. A guy with two great parents is not very common in the NCAA or NFL. Thousands of young men fuel their athletic careers with the pain of childhood trauma or other rejections, when it should be fueled by inspiration and love of the game. And the problem is, when you’re off the field, you’re still angry.
I started making a name for myself at our school and beyond, and it became known that the NFL scouts had taken notice. Our team went all the way that season and ended up winning the Mid-American Conference (MAC) championship for 1988. It was our school’s first championship in nearly thirty years. I was really starting to feel like my entrance to the NFL was on the verge of happening, and so I did my best to stay positive.
My future looked bright, but my present circumstances were not. Without a place of my own, I moved in with Rebecca. She had a government-subsidized apartment because she was a single mom, and I wasn’t really supposed to be there, so I snuck in and out. Naomi was getting bigger, but that part of it was still hard for me. Rebecca and I never had our time. Naomi was always there, and she was right in the middle of her terrible twos, which could be difficult. When I tried to study, she always seemed to be crying, and she wouldn’t stop. Honestly, it was really frustrating for me. I was twenty years old, and suddenly a stepfather, and I didn’t have the slightest clue about babies, or about patience. So I sometimes went and stayed with Darwin at his new apartment.
I was so close to finishing school and making good on my NFL dreams, and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that. Rebecca and I figured it would be best if I got back into the dorms, so I could do what it took to finish strong and take the next step, not just for myself, but also for our family. And then, that summer, we’d move in together, and get married, and we’d always be together after that.
Around that time, we also had some trouble with Naomi’s father, and I finally had to set him straight and tell him if he didn’t start respecting Rebecca, and me, we’d have real problems. It all started to feel like a lot, maybe too much. I found myself worrying I might not be ready, and I couldn’t hide my fears from Rebecca.
“Babe, I don’t know, am I ready?” I asked.
“Really?” Rebecca said.
I felt awful, and I didn’t say anything that would make it worse.
“Don’t even play with me like that,” she said. “If you say you don’t want to do it, then don’t. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. I’ve got too much at stake here.”
Immediately, I knew she was right. This wasn’t just about Rebecca and me. This was about Naomi, too, and the family we were all forming together.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We took the night to cool off, and the next day, I came right back.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said. “I’m in. I’m in. I’m in.”
All of the football players were given manual labor jobs. The team had hooked up with a local business, and we were supposed to do some work on campus for them. So that summer my job was to basically pound stop signs into the ground. I was working as much as I could, now that I was about to be married with a kid, trying to earn enough to get by. I was a senior, and the seniors often had dibs on the better jobs, and I was finally getting paid a nice amount of money.
For our next job, about seven of us—four black guys and three white guys—did some demolition on a dormitory. After two weeks, our boss let the four black guys go, and the three white guys stayed on all summer. It was obvious that racial discrimination was at play, and so I went to the coaches and complained.
“They can choose whoever they want,” the coaches said.
Again, I was so disappointed in the fact that the school didn’t take care of me that I whined about it for the rest of the summer. I was comparing my circumstances to rumors I’d heard about star players getting preferential treatment at other, bigger schools. The problem with my complaining was that I confused it with action. I should have hunted far and wide for another job, but instead, I just made excuses. I didn’t work again for the rest of the summer. And we were broke. I mean broke.
We couldn’t afford a big party, but I wanted to get married before football camp started up again, so Rebecca and I set our date for July 29, 1989, the day before my twenty-first birthday. We didn’t have anything, so everybody we knew chipped in as much as they could, and our wedding was basically a big potluck dinner. It felt so cool to have everyone give back to us. Because I’d started to make a name for myself on the football team, we knew a lot of people on campus and in the community, and it was really special to be supported by them like that.
Rebecca was very active in our church and played music at services, but I’d kept some distance from organized religion after coming out of Maranatha. Still, it meant a great deal to us to be married by our pastor, since we’d first met at his church. Rebecca planned everything. I basically just rented a crisp white tux and showed up. I wore my practice shorts underneath my suit, and the words “Western Michigan #94” were visible through my white pants to anyone who looked long enough. I’d also experimented with my high-top fade and had a barber cut a part on a diagonal all the way through, from the front to the back. Everything left of the part was short, and everything to the right was long. It was a geometric wonder.
The ceremony was as good as I could have expected. As we
exchanged our vows, two-year-old Naomi jumped up and grabbed onto my leg in the middle of everything. I held her for as long as I could to keep her calm, but when I had to put her down after we lit our unity candle, it was pure bedlam. She screamed as loud as she could for what seemed like an eternity. My brother, Marcelle, was my best man, and I had Darwin, JoNathan, Michael Lewis, and my childhood buddy Robert Blond as groomsmen. It was a full-on family affair. But when the ceremony was over, all I could think about was the bed-and-breakfast we had on reserve for the night in lieu of a real honeymoon. It was not easy getting Rebecca into my Chevy Nova because she was having such a wonderful time socializing with everyone. But she looked absolutely gorgeous, and I wanted to socialize with only her. Finally, I actually picked her up and put her in the car. All in all, it was a beautiful day.
I couldn’t have been happier with Rebecca, and I loved Naomi and our little family, but as my senior year got under way, it was a very stressful time. I was so busy with the team that Rebecca and I would sometimes look at each other and wonder how we were going to do this, and if I could really graduate. Was it even possible? I started to see why athletes paid other people to do their papers for them. I never did, so I just submitted whatever I could, and then, whatever my grade was, that’s what it was. I also had a bit of a hustle worked out. If I got a D in one class, I knew the A from my independent study in painting would keep my grade point average up enough to let me playing football. So I painted two or three really great paintings, and I held on to them. Then I purposefully made the rest of my paintings subpar. Because art is so subjective, my professors never actually told me they were bad. They just encouraged me to keep trying. I brought in one of my really terrible paintings and asked my professor how I could improve it, knowing all the while how and why it sucked. Then I made sure everything I showed them became progressively better. Toward the end of the semester, I handed in the three beautiful paintings and complimented the professor on how much his advice had helped me and made me a better artist. Totally flattered, and impressed with my improved artwork, my professors gave me an A both semesters.
As busy as I was, I certainly wasn’t working. We had so little money that even though Rebecca and I lived together off campus, I didn’t eat at home because I was scared to eat up all of Rebecca and Naomi’s food. I often snuck back into my old dormitory to eat, sometimes twice a day. This really nice older white guy headed up the kitchen, and he knew how much I was struggling.
“Terry, come on in,” he said, smiling. “I know you want to eat.”
“Thanks, man,” I said, clapping his palm in a hearty handshake.
I was so appreciative whenever he waved me through. But it didn’t always happen that way. One day, I was starving and late for practice when he stopped me.
“I can’t do it today,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He had snuck me in so many times that he was on the verge of getting in trouble. But even if he had to pull back on his kindness sometimes, he always found a way to let me back in again, and at the time, I was incredibly grateful. I knew I was breaking the rules, but at the same time, my sense of entitlement had turned me into a bit of a hustler, and the sad part is, I felt justified in getting over on others.
I was young and extremely immature. I’d had this vision that when I got married, things would just take care of themselves, but it wasn’t happening. I had this great idea that I was going to make T-shirts and sell them. So I used the little bit of money I had to buy an airbrush.
“Why are you buying this thing?” Rebecca said. “You know, you’d better use it. Are you using it? Are you doing it?”
Of course I didn’t follow through. I was always starting things like that, saying I was going to do them to get some money, and then I never did anything with them. I put Rebecca through a lot of stress.
At the time, credit card companies were handing out accounts like candy, and my whole mentality of entitlement meant that I’d charged up all of my cards. I had them all: American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and even a Sears card. They’d all since been halted, and I had no way to make even the minimum payments on them, so we had creditors calling the house constantly. On several occasions, there was a knock on the door of our apartment. When I answered, our upstairs neighbor was standing there looking sheepish.
“Hey, uh, Visa is on the line at my house, asking to talk to you,” he said.
“Whoa, I’m sorry, man,” I said. “We’ll handle it.”
But the real truth was, I didn’t have any money coming in, and I wouldn’t until I went pro. Looking back, I can see I was really very ignorant about the ways of the world, but at the time, I was young, and I was bound for glory, and I thought I knew everything. I think my attitude had a lot to do with growing up in a city like Flint, where everyone worked for General Motors, and the mentality was that GM was going to take care of us. GM was like our dad. We worked for the shop, and in return, they gave us a house, a car, whatever we needed. I had rejected that lifestyle because I didn’t want to work for the shop, but I still had the mentality that someone owed me. That was part of how I’d grown up feeling so entitled, expecting my parents to give things to us, without ever really taking responsibility for them.
Usually, I dodged the calls, but one day I was around the house trying to study. I ended up on the phone with collections, and finally, I snapped.
“You don’t pay your bills,” he said.
“You know what, man,” I said. “In a minute I’m going to be in the NFL, and you are still going to be calling people, begging for your little money. You probably don’t make, what, eight dollars an hour, maybe, if that?”
Not that I was even making eight dollars an hour at the time, but you know.
“I’m going to be rich,” I said. “And you’re still going to be working there, and you’re still going to be bothering people for their money.”
Finally, Rebecca grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung it up.
A minute later, the phone rang again. Instead of being nervous about what this guy might say or do, I was so mad that I was ready to get back into it.
“Sir, you know what, I apologize,” he said.
Well, now, this was the first time I’d ever had a bill collector call me back to say he was sorry, so maybe my rant had worked.
“Pay us when you can,” he added before hanging up.
Even I was surprised to receive such kindness, but the stress I was under at the time was incredible, and I guess he could tell I was not in good shape.
Some days the phone rang and rang, and Naomi cried, and Rebecca looked at me like she was wondering what she had gotten herself into this time.
“We’re gonna go pro, baby,” I said. “And as soon as I go pro, all of these bills are going to be paid. So don’t even worry.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
I was good at saying the right thing to keep Rebecca’s anxiety at bay, but I wasn’t always so good at convincing myself. After we’d been married for a few months, Rebecca got pregnant. I was excited to have a baby, but the thought of the cost and responsibility terrified me. There were times when Rebecca went off to work, and I watched Naomi, and I just sat there in a fog. On other days, when Naomi was with her babysitter, I started acting out in secret with pornography again. Every time, I felt guilty afterward, and I swore I’d never do it again, but somehow, I always did. I grew depressed, which made me even less able to get on top of our money problems and made things seem that much more overwhelming.
It didn’t help that tensions were worse than ever between my football coaches and me, and I knew if I didn’t hang on and make it through college, I’d jeopardize everything I’d worked so hard for since the seventh grade. It was a difficult season. And then, during a game, I got called to the sideline by one of my coaches. “Your wife’s in the hospital,” he said.
She’d had a miscarriage. I walked off the field and arrived at the hospital, sweaty and cry
ing. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about?” she said. “It’s okay. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
But in my heart, I knew I was being punished for my dark secret. Rebecca soon became pregnant again, and I was filled with fear. I tried my best to be good.
THE PREVIOUS YEAR, EVEN WHEN I’D SOMETIMES felt discouraged by my football experience, we were playing so well that I got swept up in the excitement of winning. But this year, we had a terrible season, largely because we had a brilliant backup quarterback, who happened to be black. This was in the days when there hadn’t been many black quarterbacks yet, so they benched him and played this little white freshman from Canada instead. It was not good. Our quarterback went in, led the nation in interceptions, and had a horrible time, but they stuck with him.
I’d always suspected there was racism at play on our team. From the beginning, my linebacker coach had told me that I wasn’t smart enough to play linebacker (even though the NFL eventually thought I was intelligent enough to keep me there for six seasons). I noticed that he played all of the white guys in what they called the thinking man’s spots, whereas I was forced to play a position that was about being a physical body. I knew I should have had a different position, because of my athleticism, but I also knew my ability to take a tremendous amount of physical pain was my ticket out, so I went with what I’d been given.
Most of the black players on the team were angry, but we didn’t feel there was anything we could do. I later found out that the racial tension finally boiled over a few years after I left, and the black players actually had a sit-down strike, where they refused to even go out on the field because of the discrimination they felt.
What was happening on the football field at school primed me for a 1989 movie that shook me to the core: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. I probably saw that movie twenty times in the theater. I couldn’t get enough. When School Daze had been released the year before, we’d had a midnight screening at school, and it was an event for all of the black students. This was even better. I’d never seen images so raw, so compelling, or so truthful. As Star Wars had done years earlier, it cemented my conviction that I was meant to be in film someday.
