Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior

by Michael Strahan

  And that’s how we get to the coin toss, where I last left off, right before the opening kick. Another sniff of ammonia and, brother, we’re ready to get this party started. Isn’t it amazing we don’t gas ourselves out before every game? Between the Red Bull, the fans, the intensity, the insane pregame emotions and the anthem, it’s amazing we don’t need an IV before the ball is kicked.

  As our young guns run onto the field for that opening kick, I come back over to our sideline and do something referred to as Roll Call. I’ll call out a name, come over and head butt the teammate. Defense, let’s start bashing heads!

  Then I catch another glimpse of Peyton. I stare at him with respect, respect because he has the power to make me and all my teammates look bad. But he better respect me because I am here to make him look bad, too. Then I’ll get pissed, frustrated really, because I know playing against him on national TV, I may not get many chances to hit the guy.

  Peyton Manning’s arm is in a whole different league, but it’s the little things he does that people don’t talk about as much that make him different from his brother, or everyone else for that matter. When I go against Peyton, the man stands there as I zero in like I’m about to kill him. At the very last second he’ll either get rid of the ball or make a tiny little movement to get his butt out of my line of fire. It’s not drastic, just a subtle shift here or step there. Tom Brady does the same thing. They can sit in there while I’m thinking…pay dirt, here I come…BALL’S GONE! Damn!

  Peyton has a clock in his head that allows him to hold the ball for a specific amount of time. His consistency is amazing. It’s almost like he’ll always get it off by the same time each snap. In fact, our game plan is to try not to let him feel comfortable in the pocket. We have a bunch of blitzes planned to force him to get rid of the ball quicker. The faster you come against him, the faster he’ll get rid of the ball. It’s all about disrupting his rhythm.

  The moment before that ball is kicked, I’m thinking, we’ve got to win this game. Man, there is no way we’ll lose. I couldn’t take losing. I couldn’t take hating life this early in my season. Yes, losing actually makes me hate life for the night, for the week, sometimes a little longer.

  Once the opening ball is kicked off, you look at the poor souls giving up their bodies for this job, but I don’t care, I just want to win. I tell myself, sacrifice whatever you need in order to prevent yourself from hating life for the next week. Put it all out there tonight, because you have plenty of time to rest after the game.

  I read somewhere recently that some people simply don’t have the fear gene built into them. Players are routinely asked to run downfield as fast as humanly possible after kickoffs and launch themselves into a thousand pounds of meat and muscle, with no regard for the fear gene.

  Me? I’m still staring at Peyton. The whole time, I’m staring at the face of the NFL, the man who could ruin this night. Tonight, Peyton is playing for Caesar. I’ve faced Caesar’s guys too many times and lost. I’ve only got one or two of these seasons left in me. I’m willing to leave whatever it takes on that field to walk off victorious.

  My night will eventually be ruined by Caesar’s quarterback, 26–21, but not because of his play. We’ll actually keep him in check, as well as anyone could. He doesn’t pick us apart. Even with our best effort against him and a solid showing by his brother Eli, I’ll go home hating my life. Instead of celebrating what could be my last year, I’ll be forced to sulk in anticipation of a week of righting this wrong. I’ll trudge through another weekly regimen an angry, pissed-off-at-the-world man. But I’ll also experience some of the day-to-day ways we players relieve the pressure through humor and outrageous behavior.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Practical Jokes: The Brilliance of Our Immaturity

  Inside the NFL locker room, what’s viewed by the outside world as stupid is often viewed on the inside as an opportunity to create wonderful locker room magic! How incredibly vile, juvenile and offensive we are behind closed doors. Welcome to the world of millionaire fifth graders.

  The real world sees the violence and intensity of the NFL. But to stifle that intensity, we often look for anything remotely capable of dropping us down to grade-school level. Where else can you find a room full of people with a net worth of somewhere between $100 and $200 million and have guys actually pee on each other in the shower?

  Wall Street? Nah. Microsoft world headquarters? Just can’t see Paul Allen and Bill Gates’s disciples whizzing on each other. NFL locker room? Definitely! I could fill up this entire book (maybe the next one) with the childish, mindless and sometimes brilliant practical jokes we play on each other.

  We need practical jokes. It’s the only way to get through a week after a loss like the one we had to Manning and the Colts that opening week. It’s how we get through the pain of losing, soreness and repetition that mars our days.

  We truly live to mess with each other, and in an NFL locker room, nothing is off-limits. White guys, black guys, big guys, small guys, thugs, nerds, rich dudes, vets, rookies, coaches and even owners are far from exempt from our juvenile hysteria. More often than not, we’re just plain mean about it. The meaner we get, the funnier it usually seems. A quick example. The Giants strength and conditioning coach is a man named Jerry Palmieri. He was with Coach Coughlin down in Jacksonville. Jerry limped up to New York with Tom. Did I say limped? Jerry really needs a hip replacement. Poor guy is always dragging his leg around.

  In training camp he’s the guy who conducts bed check to see if we are in our rooms by curfew. So he drags that leg behind him from room to room to make sure we’re all tucked in nice and cozy at night. To check each individual room, he has to pass through a suite that acts as the common living area—three bedrooms per suite.

  The players have done two things to mess with Coach Palmieri. My personal favorite is when the guys took out all the lightbulbs in the suite and then rearranged the furniture. Jerry opened the door, flicked the switch on and off and when he decided the bulb had simply blown, he ventured into the pitch-black suite. All of a sudden we heard BOOM! CRASH! We all sat in our rooms and peed our pants. Can you imagine a group of fully grown men with their ears pressed tightly against a dorm-room door, trying not to laugh at a limping coach crashing into furniture? Since then Jerry always carries a flashlight.

  The other cruel trap we set is when guys hide and wait with water guns. When Jerry walks toward the dorms, they all jump out and squirt him and watch the poor bastard try to run away on that bad hip. It’s cruel, yes. But so funny.

  Our humor sinks much, much lower than that. The worst, most disgusting, grossest joke we’ve got in camp is the ol’ take-a-dump-in-the-wrong-part-of-the-toilet joke. This joke is reserved for ultimate revenge on offensive linemen.

  The aggressor in this case will venture into his victim’s bathroom, take the top off the toilet tank and take a crap in it. It sits there in hiding and stinks up the room. Then, when the poor victim flushes his toilet, the poop flushes in with the clean water and stinks it up even worse. Think how hard it is to try to clean that out of there. Now, that’s toilet humor.

  Shaun O’Hara, our center, is part of a whole different subculture known as the Missing Link. Offensive linemen as a whole are conservative at home and off the field, but they’re the sickest ones in the locker room and live to get each other with practical jokes. Their humor sometimes translates only to other offensive linemen and no one else on the team.

  For instance, they could be talking to each other in the shower and all the while one guy, while talking and trying to distract his prey, is taking a leak on the other guy’s leg. The victim can’t feel it because the pee is the same temperature as the shower. The rest of the linemen crack up in hysterical laughter while we teammates shake our heads and run the other way. If you did that to me I would whip your ass.

  You can tell a lot about a guy’s normal behavior by how he reacts when he falls victim to our jokes. Inside our world, if a guy can’t take a j
oke, we don’t want him. We’re all brothers, and if you can’t let your brother wrap your entire car from front to back in plastic wrap, then what good are you to our little society?

  Here are a few of my favorite practical jokes that I’ve either seen or heard about:

  THE BLUE DOT MAN. The infamous Blue Dot Man has been sadistically rearing his ugly head inside the Giants locker room since before I came into the league in 1993. It remains a staple inside today’s joke arsenal.

  Here’s how it works. Somehow we get our hands on a powder that the FBI uses to mark stolen items. They’ll put this powder on money and when the perp sweats, the part of the body (usually the hands) that touches the powder turns blue. Believe me, this stuff is impossible to remove quickly and usually stays on for about three days. We don’t put it just where someone can get his hands on it. We’ll line a young guy’s helmet with it so when he takes it off, he has a blue stain across his forehead that he simply can’t wash off.

  A sock is another favorite spot to hit with the blue dye. Kid gets out of practice, takes off his sock and sees his entire foot has turned blue. He panics, thinking he’s got some actual medical problem, like a strange version of frostbite.

  The Blue Dot Man usually strikes a stubborn or cocky rookie so, young boys, watch your attitudes. The Blue Dot Man never sleeps.

  ICY HOT. Icy Hot is an analgesic gel that burns the living daylights out of you if it’s put in the wrong place. We always find the wrong places.

  One of the best jokes I heard was the use of Icy Hot by Colts star quarterback Peyton Manning. Believe it or not, Manning is one of the biggest practical jokers of anyone in the league. He’s always looking to get either one of his linemen or someone at the Pro Bowl. One day he stole a stick of deodorant from one of his linemen’s lockers, took off the cap and put a very thin strip of Icy Hot on the deodorant, then replaced the cap and put it back in the locker. That dude must have hit the ceiling in fiery pain when he stepped out of the shower and rolled the stick across his armpits.

  Manning’s joke, however, pales in comparison with the one that former cornerback Mark Collins pulled on the one and only Lawrence Taylor. Collins took the muscle-penetrating gel and put it into LT’s jockstrap. When that stuff kicked in, LT screamed and yelled all sorts of words I didn’t hear until I was about ten years old. Wow, was that man in pain! He never even asked if he could leave practice. He just walked off the practice field to wash the stuff off. Believe me, Icy Hot does not come off easily. Legend has it that when LT got out of the shower, he found that Collins had the stuff inside LT’s underwear, too. To this day I’m surprised he didn’t kill him.

  CHICKEN AND THE IDIOT. One of the best revenge jokes I’ve heard was directed at an equipment manager. From what I heard, the guy was a real ass. He’d do stupid things like charge players for extra socks and equipment, trying to make a buck off of them.

  The players had finally had it, so they somehow got their hands on a live chicken and let the thing completely gorge. They let this thing eat all morning long. This chicken filled its belly. Then it ate some more. Then more. After that, they let him feast some more.

  When the chicken had about all it could eat, they snuck over to the equipment guy’s dorm room—this was during training camp—and threw the chicken into the room, shut the door and let it have its run of the room all day long. When the equipment manager came back from an eighteen-hour day, the chicken had pretty much crapped on every square inch of his living quarters—on the floor, on the bed, on his clothes, in his clothes, on his papers.

  That, my friends, is the way to sweet revenge. Forget suing a guy. Forget kicking a guy’s butt. Just fill up a chicken and let him rage.

  LAW OFFICES OF NOODLEMAN, LIPSHITZ & SCHWARTZ. The best joke I ever pulled I conducted with the help of Jay Glazer. He has a very demented mind when it comes to getting his friends who are players and coaches.

  In my second year I told him a story about how earlier in the day, during practice, Jessie Armstead, fellow linebacker Marcus Buckley and a couple of other guys were joking about some bogus law that says if you’re with a girl for more than twelve hours, she can take away half your wealth.

  Quietly, guys started gesturing and nodding for me to turn around and look at this young cat we had on our team. Sure enough, this guy was counting on his fingers how many hours he was with this girl the night before. Out of respect, I won’t reveal the name of the player.

  When I recounted the tale to Glazer, he came up with the idea to “sue” the guy on behalf of some girl who’d claimed they spent the night together. So he cracks out his computer and generates a subpoena from the Law Offices of Noodleman, Lipshitz & Schwartz. Where he came up with that name, I don’t know, but what a great one!

  The subpoena included a claim from some girl that she had been with the aforementioned player for sixteen hours on a certain day and as a result, she was suing him for half of his net worth. The letter stated he was required to appear in Hackensack family court on such-and-such day at such-and-such time in such-and-such courtroom with his own independent defense counsel and a list of all of his assets. It looked so real, it would have scared the hell out of me if I had gotten it. Letterhead. A seal. Unbelievably authentic-looking.

  Jay gave it to me and I put it into the player’s mailbox. Once he saw it, as good as it was, I couldn’t let the guy go through with it. He was pretty upset. I couldn’t let him go to the courthouse. Glazer has never forgiven me. He wanted the poor guy to show up in some judge’s courtroom and say, “Uh, yeah, Your Honor, I’m here to proclaim that I was only with that girl for eleven hours so she shouldn’t get any of my stuff.” But I just couldn’t let him do it.

  LUCKY POWERBALL WINNER. The level of thought that goes into some jokes can border on evil genius. The more sinister, the more hilarious. The more ingenious, the more embarrassing. The Kansas City Chiefs had one back in 1998. This story was told by Tony Gonzalez, the Chiefs All-Pro tight end, and Greg Manusky, their former linebacker, who is now the defensive coordinator of the 49ers.

  At the time there was a huge Powerball lottery, one of the early ones where the jackpot was so huge, even the richest people in the area were plunking down cash to take a shot. The Chiefs were slated to fly to Tokyo for the American Bowl, an annual overseas preseason game the NFL uses to promote the game internationally. The Powerball drawing was scheduled to take place while the Chiefs were in the air en route to Japan.

  Manusky got one of their quarterbacks at the time, either Rich Gannon or Elvis Grbac, to get the lottery numbers of their young quarterback, Pat Barnes. Somehow they commandeered his ticket long enough to jot down his numbers without his knowing it.

  Fast-forward to the flight. Manusky set his watch to go off at about the time of the drawing, then gave Barnes’s numbers to their public relations director, Bob Moore. Moore got on the flight attendants’ loudspeaker and, as if he’d been to a hundred acting classes, pulled off the second part of the prank with precision. Moore announced to the plane that the Powerball lottery balls had been drawn, and then he paused for everyone to get their tickets out before announcing the numbers.

  Not only did Barnes and a handful of players take out their tickets, so did the team’s owner, Lamar Hunt, their general manager, Carl Peterson, and most of the executives and coaches.

  Moore announced the fake numbers, Barnes’s numbers, as the winning ticket. And Barnes lost his mind.

  Gonzalez was sitting right next to him and recounts that Barnes said something along the lines of “Whew!” and proceeded to sprint—not walk but break into a full sprint—up the aisle to where the owners were sitting. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, believing he’d just hit the jackpot!

  Manusky, however, started crapping his pants because he was now afraid that Barnes would run to the front and curse out Hunt and Peterson and tell them to stick their job where the sun don’t shine. He also feared that Hunt and his group, upon hearing the numbers, would rip up their own ticket
s, assuming they lost. Manusky thought he’d just got himself cut.

  Neither happened. Barnes did go insane only to slowly calm down at the sound of laughter from those who knew what Manusky and the other quarterbacks had done. This kid went from being a backup third-string quarterback to the second wealthiest man on the plane to a third-string strap again, all within the span of thirty seconds. While the rest of the team got to laugh their asses off.

  THE HELMET JOKE. This year William Joseph, our former first-round defensive tackle from the University of Miami, came to me with a Giants helmet and asked me to sign it as a favor for a friend of his. I pulled out a Sharpie, ready to swing my handwriting elegantly around one side of the helmet, only to hear him cracking up.

  Willie Jo, as we call him, never plays a joke that’s funny! He’s corny as hell, but this cat got me to sign my own game helmet. If he hadn’t started laughing, I may have run out there like a complete moron with my signature emblazoned on the side of my helmet.

  THE BEST PRANKSTER I’VE EVER PLAYED WITH. The granddaddy of the ingenious joke in our 2006 locker room is, by far, Shaun O’Hara. He’s truly a sick, deranged, psychotic yet unbelievably clever human being.

  One day when Eli Manning was younger, he went to put his hands under the center and got the shock of his life. Manning squatted down, stuck his hands under O’Hara’s butt cheeks and shockingly felt the skin of O’Hara’s nuts. The guy actually cut a hole in his pants so his testicles hung out onto Eli’s hands. Now, that’s nasty!