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

by Michael Strahan

  The guys who are overly demented are the ones who can push a player to the brink of snapping, and O’Hara nearly got Amani Toomer to swing away this past year. The new Field-Turf surface that now lines many NFL playing fields is made up of millions of tiny little rubber pellets meshed in, millimeter by millimeter, with a grassy surface. They feel and look like pieces of ground-up tire.

  Shaun gathered up a whole handful of the stuff one day, hid it in his hand behind his back and approached Toomer. Shaun proceeded to tell Amani he just had his tonsils taken out, then asked Amani if he’d ever had his tonsils taken out and asked to see. When Amani opened his mouth, O’Hara threw the whole handful of pellets down his throat.

  We usually do this kind of stuff to a rookie, but Amani can get nosey and paid for his curiosity. He completely flipped out and started yelling, “I’m no rookie! Fuck that!” He was furious and wouldn’t talk to Shaun for a month. Every time O’Hara tried making peace, Toomer walked away from him.

  This was the only time I ever saw a practical joke lead to a fight. Amani totally flipped out. I have to be honest with you, if I was the recipient of that, I may have gotten physical, too. It was the single funniest thing I saw all year, but I don’t think I’d feel too happy about having another man throw rubber pellets down my throat.

  That’s not to say I haven’t fallen victim to our locker room’s mad scientist. I was on the verge of being late for a meeting one day this past season and the last thing I felt like getting was a lecture and a fine from Coach Coughlin to put a damper on my morning. But I knew I was going to be cutting it close, so I threw my cell phone on the stool closest to the meeting room and ran into the meeting. Big mistake, Mike. Big, big mistake.

  The reason I didn’t take my phone into the meeting was because as ornery as Tom can get with our meeting times, his face turns the strangest shade of reddish purple when somebody makes the mistake of having their cell phone ring during his meetings. That’s a capital crime and $5,000 inside our building. We aren’t always using both sides of our brain. Why I’d leave my cell phone out in full view is beyond me. But I never gave it any thought because I calmly took my seat, just happy not to get another fine.

  When the meeting broke I walked back over to my phone and flipped it open and I was immediately smacked with the most horrifying picture I could have been greeted by. I would rather have taken the fine.

  O’Hara had seen the phone sitting there, picked it up and decided to take a picture of his, um, how can I say this politically correctly? I got it, his frank and beans. Not only was that incredibly small piece of manhood on my phone, he had the sucker set as my screen saver! The sicker part is: O’Hara had no idea whose phone it was when he did it. He saw the phone, took it, whipped out his junk, aimed and snapped. Hell, it could have been Coach Coughlin’s for all he knew.

  The worse a guy messes up off the field, the more we’ll mess with him. If a guy gets busted for drugs, we’ll throw a bag of salt or a bag of brown grass under his chair during meetings and pretend it fell out of his pocket. I did this to a lineman in a meeting one day and a coach damn near had a heart attack. That’s the only joke I’ve felt bad about and regret.

  If a guy has something embarrassing happen that ends up being written about, we’ll post it all over the locker room. It doesn’t matter how bad it is. The jokes are still getting thrown my way after my ex-wife, Jean, insinuated to the New York Post and New York Daily News that I’m gay. Players from around the league killed me about that for months. Actually, they’re still killing me about that.

  The weekend the story “broke” that I supposedly liked dudes, I was playing golf with Bucs All-Pro cornerback Ronde Barber. Ronde stepped behind a tree when I wasn’t looking, snapped a picture of his manhood with his phone and sent it to me via text message with the note, “I don’t believe your denials. Meet me behind the 12th tee box. Love, Ronde.”

  The more embarrassing the situation, the more the boys inside the locker room and throughout the NFL will circle like vultures to rub it in.

  As I’ve already said, the practical joke has a handful of purposes. Revenge, boredom, justice…the joke takes on several faces. While on the surface our plots and unsuspected targeting may seem cruel, these jokes serve as our greatest weapon in fighting the monotony. Every single day we hear the same garbage from the same people and look at the same faces over and over and over. We see each other more than we see our own families.

  So if we take some rookie’s pants, tie them in knots and throw them in the ice tub, it breaks up the day. So what if we sneak into some guy’s room in the middle of the night and throw water all over him in his sleep? It means, “Hello, my friend, you’re special today.” What better way to break up the monotony of training camp meetings than sticking a fire extinguisher nozzle under a teammate’s dorm-room door and releasing the entire contents of fire retardation foam into his room?

  There is but ONE person who has protection from our childish pranks. Just one. The head coach. You don’t want to risk his having a bad sense of humor. Practical jokes are used in our personal world for justice. You don’t always need to use violence to get a guy back. Just hit him with a horrible joke. Instead of two guys fighting over something, we can get our point across without totally insulting anyone. If you humiliate in good fun, we’re apt to forgive and forget. If you humiliate with bad intentions, guys will hold on to that grudge forever.

  No matter how much we joke and fool around on the field and off, sometimes it takes sheer physical force to get through yet another week. Oftentimes that involves violence and rage against our own fellow teammates and NFL brothers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Footbrawling

  October 18, 2006, flipping through my radio dials

  I sped along Route 3 on my way to work, flipping through the radio dials searching for the perfect song to fuel the lousy mood I was in this morning. I was looking for something to push me into the mood to practice. To help me drag my bones through yet another day of film and meetings and whatever monotonous routine I was in no mood to participate in. I wanted to be pissed off today. Different moods help you trudge through the monotony and, at times, pain. Today I wanted anger. I needed a little pep in my step.

  As I flipped the remote dial on my car stereo, something changed my mood in a heartbeat. Something immediately smacked me across the face. Today Tiki Barber would provide all the soap opera I needed to change things around here. During my short jaunt into work that morning, I heard radio reports that Tiki had finally revealed what many of his close friends and teammates had long known—Tiki was retiring at season’s end. I had known for quite some time that Barber was heading into his final season. Actually, it was no secret inside our locker room, either. He wasn’t very discreet about it among his friends. Barber had grown sick of the business side of football.

  Hearing the news took me down memory lane, and not among the best of memories, either. It got me thinking about the only time I ever threatened to whip a teammate’s ass off the field, about wanting to beat the shit out of lovable little Tiki.

  Tiki was the only player I ever threatened to hurt off the field, outside our locker room, outside of football. And he was the only person who sent me over the edge of what is and what isn’t acceptable.

  It happened in late March 2002 after I came out and stated that due to my contract, I believed my tenure in the Big Apple was over. I was convinced that I was a goner, that the team that had always taken care of me financially didn’t want my services anymore. I blasted them, trying to make a strong case for why I should get paid more. I expected backlash from the organization, but I never expected it from one of my closest teammates.

  I turned to the dreaded back page of the New York Post only to see the headline “Greediest Giant,” quoting Tiki, who had blasted me for being greedy.

  Fights are rarely, very rarely, personal in the NFL. But Tiki had made this one personal, as if he had been brainwashed by management. We’re great fri
ends now and he’s the best running back I’ve ever been around. But my reaction? Thank the Lord that Tiki was not in the same room when the shock of that newspaper story sank in. I could have claimed temporary insanity and gotten my gap-toothed ass locked up for assault and battery for whipping the hell out of our best offensive weapon. The morning his quotes hit the back page of the Post, I called our star running back on the phone and left a very calm message, so he would call me back.

  When he called back, the first words out of my mouth were, “What the fuck were you thinking?!”

  He responded as if management had a hand in his back, sitting him on their knee and throwing their collective voices, “Well, Michael, I just think it’s a lot of money and you should think about the team.”

  That got me even more furious, so I took it to a level that is considered completely unacceptable off the field. “Mind your damn business!” I screamed. “And let me tell you something. If I ever see you outside or if I get you alone, I’m going to beat the shit out of you! You better never let me get you alone! I AM GOING TO BEAT YOUR ASS!”

  Could I have been any clearer? We had two taboos working here. Number one, you never, ever fight off the field. Number two, you never, ever talk about another man’s business situation, especially to the press.

  Ironically, Tiki’s retirement had as much to do with the business side of football as anything. He’d soured on the business end of our profession. Later he said it had to do with Coach Coughlin and the daily grind on his body. I’m sure that played a part, but I’m also sure that the business part of the NFL, as in salary negotiations, is what made the physical grind unbearable. When you’re as great a player as Tiki is, you want to be rewarded for it, not put through the ringer by the team every time you bring up your market value.

  Yet it happens. Tiki had gone to Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi for years for a new deal—a deal that would have paid him like a perennial Pro Bowler. Every year Barber asked and every year the Giants would draft someone to replace him in the backfield, barely budging on his requests.

  I believe what pushed him over the edge was when Accorsi told Tiki he’d give him a small bump in pay, but he’d have to return it if he didn’t produce like an absolute stud. Ernie got him on this not once but for two years and, in my opinion, Barber got fed up with putting his body through the pain and battering and not getting enough financial appreciation in return.

  I knew he had told some people he seriously considered pulling a Barry Sanders and retiring the night before camp. But ultimately he felt we were too close to winning the Super Bowl. If we had sucked on paper going into the season, I believe he would have retired.

  I find it interesting that Tiki retired over the same problem I had five years prior. My contract problem was so ugly, the Giants actually shopped me around. They called Dan Reeves in Atlanta and John Fox in North Carolina, the Vikings and a handful of other teams, while vehemently denying making such overtures. Business is business, though, so I never made it a personal issue.

  Tiki was another story. He made it personal for what he thought was the good of the team. Here’s what it got him. Sour, that they never treated him fairly, and bitter, that they never did him right by paying him comparably to the rest of the league. I wonder, would he have tried to kick my ass if I had ripped his deal? Nah, I don’t believe he would have stooped that low.

  After I called Tiki out, we didn’t talk or look at each other for months. Football is a funny world. No matter how much you may despise another man or resent somebody taking your job, you learn to put it aside for the common cause of a victorious Sunday. Any harm you wish on a teammate ends up hurting you as well. I also realized that no matter what Tiki said, I was going to get paid according to how well I played and not his opinion.

  Tiki and I ended up making up during a preseason game for WCBS-TV. Actually, it was orchestrated by Jay Glazer. He was the sideline reporter for the game and told the two of us to bury the hatchet. So if we were doing that, we might as well do it live on TV. To Tiki’s credit, he came clean, apologized and admitted he had stepped on a subject that was none of his business.

  As we approached each other for the interview, the entire stands in the section near where we were doing the interview stood up as if they were watching a prelude to a fight. We hadn’t been seen together up to that point. I think they believed I was going to kill him. Had they caught us together three months earlier, they might have been right.

  And that was the closest I ever came to honestly seeking out someone off the football field and beating him down. On the field? It’s a completely different story.

  Fights are a part of our landscape. We live, we breathe, we practice, we play and we fight. Everything in our professional lives is predicated on violence and aggression, so of course when pushed, we’ll snap in the heat of battle. But the other aspect you have at work here is a brotherhood. All these guys locked together like we’re on some sequestered reality show. We bond like brothers. So what do brothers do? They fight! Some worse than others.

  Unfortunately, I was involved in the worst football fight I’ve ever seen. It was during a mini-camp practice in the mid-1990s under Dan Reeves. I remember it like it was yesterday.

  Our right tackle Scott Gragg, fresh off another altercation two plays earlier, took his bearlike mitts connected to his humungous 6 foot 8, 340-pound frame and tried to take his frustration out on me. He was going after my ribs, face, stomach, whatever would cause me to crumble. This man was much bigger than me. Actually, that’s an understatement. Scott Gragg was the biggest man on our team, towering over me by four inches and taking a seventy-pound weight differential into our impromptu battle.

  I quickly surveyed the odds in my head, realized I didn’t like them and that’s when…some…thing…went…Cli-i-ick!

  Snap, my brain stopped working. My blood frantically raced through my body. So this is how Bill Bixby, the Hulk, must have felt before he turned green and popped out of his purple pants. (Why is he always wearing the same pants?) Anyway, back to my fight. My common sense jumped out of my skin and suddenly, I was left alone to do things I would never, ever think I was capable of.

  Like what? you might ask.

  I grabbed Gragg by the face mask and violently ripped his helmet off his head. Target revealed. Remember the part about all common sense fleeing my mind and body? The sensible thing in any fair fight would have been to punch this man in the face, hope to get a couple of shots in, maybe a cut, and have my street cred in the locker room step up a rung or two. But no, that would have been too sane.

  Why I made the decision to do what I did next, I still haven’t figured out, but I guess I had to do what I had to do. Otherwise I can’t bear thinking I’m actually capable of willingly trying to kill a man. Still, I took that helmet and swung it as hard as I could in a Tomahawk chop, right at my target, Gragg’s head.

  THWAAAAAP! I leveled the giant Giant, connecting good enough with my weapon to get him to fall on his back. Then the blood started trickling. I never once thought, “What have I done to this guy?” Instead of feeling bad, my next thought was, “Go over and kick this guy’s ass!” So I ran and jumped on top of him and proceeded to hit him in the face over and over. My horrified teammates thankfully stopped the carnage. Otherwise I’m not sure when I would have stopped.

  It never once dawned on me that I could have killed him, only that he could have whipped my ass, a fate worse than death inside the warped philosophy of an NFL locker room. It also never dawned on me that he was a teammate, a friend and someone we certainly needed on Sundays.

  Reeves immediately called an end to our off-season workout because the fight spread, causing Jessie Armstead to want a piece of somebody, so he jumped on Howard Cross. It had all the makings of one huge motorcycle gang–like rumble. Reeves later said it was the worst practice fight he’d ever seen.

  Should I be proud? Should I have been scared of myself? Should I be ashamed? To be honest, I think about that f
ight to this day. I transformed into something ugly. But the part that scares me now is that I didn’t scare myself at the time. The only thing I was ashamed of was that I used a weapon first, then my fists. That’s the way you think out there. I clock into work every day into a violent world. Sometimes in order to survive, you are forced to find the ugly side of your most inner self.

  Sam Madison, the longtime Pro Bowl corner for the Dolphins (and my teammate last year), has a saying for all the young guys, “Find that OTHER guy.” In other words, nearly every one of us has some sort of split personality living inside of us, the off-field sane version and the maniac, barbaric gladiator we MUST connect to for survival out there on the battlefield. Find that different guy on the field! Be that other guy who is simply a coldhearted SOB. Don’t feel sorry and don’t look back. If on the field you’re a cornered wild animal, remember, once you’re off the field, you’re no longer cornered.

  Finding that “other guy” is usually reserved for game day. But I found my other guy that day and I let it drift into the crevices of my conscience that I could have killed Gragg, that I actually relished my skin-splitting hit as my locker-room credibility skyrocketed and other guys realized that maybe I was not to be messed with.

  Yet more surprising than the brutality of the fight was the brevity of the aftermath. I went to Gragg in the locker room and apologized. He responded with a chuckle and, “You really got me with a good shot.” We never talked about it ever again. Like I said before, just two brothers acting like idiots and then, la di da di da, let’s go play some football, buddy.

  Imagine, I just hit this man in his skull with a deadly weapon, tried to hurt him, and thirty minutes later it was nothing more than another day at the office. Still, taking fights from the field off the field is taboo. It rarely happens, but if it does, something must be really, really off.