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

by Michael Strahan

  When we were done, I heard Hammer talking smack about someone. It sounded an awful lot like he was talking about, well, ignorant ol’ me. Gee, how dare I not do a freakin’ up-down right.

  Hmmm, my chance to earn respect was about to come a lot sooner than I thought. “This motherfucker just got here and now he’s got me doing extra up-downs!” Hammer proclaimed to the other linemen.

  I asked him who he was talking about.

  “I’m talking about you!”

  That’s all I needed.

  “If you’re gonna talk about me, do it to my face.” Man, was I quick and catchy with my verbal jabs back then or what?

  He charged at me and pushed me. I was holding my helmet in my hand and I took it and smacked him three times—once to the top of his head, then once on either side. A quick bam, bam, bam. Maybe it was this that spawned the Gragg helmet-bashing incident.

  The other players quickly broke it up, but I learned two great lessons from Earl Leggett that day. First, he pulled me aside and gave me this practical advice: “Don’t ever fight a man in this league using a helmet as a weapon. That only exposes your face in a fight. Guys in this league are crazy. Crazier than you, man!”

  His second quip was one of wisdom. “I’d love to fight for you, but I’m too old. So make sure if you’re fighting, you’re fighting to put food on your table.”

  Yeah, Earl, I was fighting for food money. With Hammer, I wasn’t sure how it would end. I didn’t know what was cool and what wasn’t. But it certainly didn’t help me when every time Hammer talked smack to LT, Taylor would say, “Shut up, Hammer, before I get Strahan over here.”

  Fights are just one of the many events that makes a rookie’s life rotten. You’ve got hazing, rookie talent shows and no rights. In terms of hazing, the life of a rookie is soooo much easier today than it was when I started in 1993. Back then, they hazed the crap out of you. Vets treated you like garbage. They demoralized you; they didn’t give a rat’s ass whether you were dead or alive. Actually, they probably wished I was dead.

  The year before I came in, the Giants’ first-round pick was Notre Dame tight end Derek Brown. At his first-ever training camp practice, he was coming across the middle on a pass route. LT took his forearm and WHAM! threw it in the window of Derek Brown’s face mask and actually broke his nose. Derek never recovered. He was no longer able to walk around after that like he was The Man, which he had been at one time at Notre Dame. Today we can’t afford to lose a Shockey or a Brandon Jacobs or an Eli Manning or any other young high draft pick, even though B-Short might not agree.

  Because of all the piss and vinegar they come in with, I look at rookies as hopeless and confused souls. But today we have to treat them differently. We can’t push them to break because if they actually do crack, we lose them. With the salary cap quickly forcing vets out and youngsters in, we rely on these young cats. But that doesn’t give them automatic status equal to the vets. And that included young Eli Manning.

  When the Giants chose Eli we had no problem with the selection. We were ecstatic that a kid with this many accolades was tabbed to eventually take over. The operative word here is eventually.

  When the Giants released Kerry Collins, we had a group of very unhappy veterans, and guys like me and Tiki Barber had no problem voicing our displeasure. The problem for a guy like Eli is that no veteran wants to rebuild, so when the front office puts our future in the hands of a kid who hasn’t done a damn thing in the league, we resent it. While we didn’t resent Eli, I’m sure we acted like we did. Some guys looked at him with resentment because Eli got a lot of glamour and love without ever throwing a pass, unlike guys who had played their asses off for years. (Some guys also get upset about the amount of money rookies make before they ever prove they can play.)

  A guy like Eli will always be judged harshly by his teammates and fans until he proves himself and steps up. I’m sure his brother went through the same thing those first couple of years. But when Peyton proved that as a number one overall pick he was worth it, every veteran in that locker room loved him like the best man at their wedding.

  When I came into the league, I wasn’t pegged to play right away, and I certainly wasn’t expected to reclaim the glory of a franchise. A number one overall pick in the draft can’t usually deal with that kind of pressure. Tim Couch of the Browns, David Carr, Ki-Jana Carter, Courtney Brown all had their problems and never made an imprint on the league. One of the reasons was way too much pressure on the first pick. They all have to be like Peyton Manning—All-World. That’s why I have so much respect for a guy like Peyton. Despite the fact that the entire world put insurmountable pressure on him, he surmounted anyway.

  Plus, you have to remember that when one of these rookies is chosen, they’re chosen to replace someone that may be a close friend of the other players. That’s tough on a new kid. I’m all for fair competition, but I’m not sure I’m in the majority here. A lot of guys will look at a rookie like he’s a jerk, even before they meet him. It’s natural. He’ll face a hostile environment until he proves he can play. Then we’ll welcome him with open arms. If he doesn’t, we won’t.

  I always find it amazing how much you’re willing to overlook a guy’s personality flaws if he can play. He can be just short of a serial killer and you’ll let him live under your own roof, provided he can help you win that ring. At the same time, if he can’t start effectively for you, you’ll resent the guy from the time he gets here until the day he leaves. That’s what Eli faces. He will continue to face skeptisim until he becomes a star player. If he never reaches his potential, never grabs the reins of the team, he’ll eventually be replaced like David Carr and Tim Couch were. He’ll be ridiculed by the fans, the media and, most glaringly, by his locker room peers, past and present. Once Eli proves he can play, the jealousy and resentment will disappear. Until then, it hovers and hangs over his head as if he were a spoiled rich kid whose daddy gives him everything.

  During Eli’s first year as a starter, it was hard on him. He was completely shell-shocked to the point where the players actually started to feel bad for him. Eli was thrown into the fire and took a complete scorching. He was a huge topic of debate among teammates, other players in the league and the press. While we rooted for him, we weren’t sure how the weekly beatings would affect him. I was shocked last year when I saw him respond the way he did under the ridiculous pressure of the Manning Bowl.

  Eli never crawled into the NFL version of the fetal position like so many others would have. I give him credit for that. Yet he still needs to make the Giants perennial winners. In order to achieve total validation, he needs to make the rest of the league afraid to face him.

  The worst thing a team can do for a kid like Eli is to put a franchise in his hands, the hands of a “potential.” Don’t cripple us by hoping a kid will soon become a star. As if we already don’t hate rookies enough, putting our future into the hands of a shoulda, woulda, coulda is potentially damaging. One of the things guys were upset about during Eli’s rookie year was that management seemed to be sacrificing our playoff chances by benching Kurt Warner in favor of accelerating Eli’s development.

  Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t dislike Eli personally. You can still love a guy personally and have a different opinion of him professionally. He’s an extremely nice kid whom everyone does love personally. But we knew that as a rookie, until Eli stepped up he wasn’t ready to lead where we wanted to go.

  Twice in my career, the Giants have chosen my replacement in the first round. The first was in 1996. They took Cedric Jones as the fifth overall pick of the draft. Not only did he become the highest-profile guy on our line overnight, Dan Reeves and Mike Nolan, the defensive coordinator at the time, decided to move me from right defensive end to left.

  You don’t think I resented Cedric for that? Of course I did! I was upset. Who the hell is this kid? Football is a funny world, though. General managers have a saying: “Everything will work itself out.” When there’s a logja
m at a position, “everything will work itself out.” When a player or coach needs a new deal, “everything will work itself out.”

  Cedric ended up becoming one of the best friends I ever had in or out of this league. My moving from right defensive end to left became the greatest move of my career. I guess “everything worked itself out.”

  When they drafted Kiwanuka, I had absolutely no problem with him at all—at this point in my career, the team should prepare themselves for my retirement. But why they moved this kid to strong-side linebacker, I’ll never know. He’s turned out to be a pretty damn good pass rusher. I’ll always judge another pass rusher’s games compared to mine, but this kid has what it takes to become a stud. But even though I like his game, it was still his rite of passage for me to give him the basic rookie treatment.

  What most of these young guys (and the public) don’t know is that a player is considered a rookie until after the third game of his second year. Some of these guys think that once they make the team in Year Two, or after the last game of Year One, they’re in the clear. Nope! An unwritten rule, you don’t get your varsity jacket until Week Four of your second year in the NFL, so you better not act like you’re a vet.

  Until then, take a backseat to everything. If you’re waiting to get taped and a vet comes in, the vet takes immediate priority. If you’re waiting for some equipment adjustment and a vet walks in, the vet jumps to the front. You’re lower on the food chain in just about everything we do. Food line, doing our dirty work, whatever.

  It starts in camp when the vets make the rookies carry our helmets and shoulder pads from practice to the locker room. That’s a basic rookie responsibility. Sometimes you’ll see a rookie, absolutely exhausted from a 95-degree practice, struggling with three helmets and three sets of shoulder pads.

  It’s your basic hazing—a completely legitimate form of status recognition that happens inside the NFL. It eventually promotes bonding, but it also shows guys how to follow rules. You’ve got to remember, we all come from different backgrounds. We have to get on the same page, our page. Forget your boys, forget your family, forget your college teammates. It’s now about us, your new family. As bizarre as it sounds, hazing helps build a family identity. It also helps break the guys who think they are special.

  Hazing has been severely hampered in recent years. Back in my early days, the vets were brutal; nothing was out of the range of genius when it came to messing with the rooks. I was told that the year before I got here, Dave Brown, our former quarterback, was stripped naked, tied up with duct tape and thrown out on the lawn of Farleigh-Dickinson University (the Giants training camp in the early 1990s).

  Brown was also the target of one of the greatest all-time punishments in the history of rookiedom. It stemmed from his inability to bring in the proper doughnuts one morning. Proper doughnuts, you ask? Oh, hell, yeah! Vets are damn finicky about their Saturday morning doughnuts. Those doughnuts represent a tradition of hazing still staunchly upheld today.

  Here’s the deal: As a rookie, it’s your responsibility—scratch that, it is your DUTY—to bring in doughnuts, bagels and juice every week for the Saturday morning walkthrough. First-rounder for the doughnuts and bagels, second-rounder for the juice. Sounds nice and childish, doesn’t it?

  I was in the unfortunate position of being a second-round pick, but the first pick of my year’s draft, the aforementioned Dave Brown, was taken by the Giants in the supplemental draft the year before, so we lost our 1993 first-rounder. In essence Dave was our first-round pick but he was given the job the year before when he and Derek Brown split the duties. So while Dave paid for the doughnuts and bagels my year, I had to go and get it all.

  Not only do you have to buy, but the food and juice has to be exactly right. My first year, LT wanted to make it hard on me. So I had to buy him prune juice. Freakin’ prune juice! What human being less than eighty years old drinks prune juice on a regular basis? The answer: someone trying to bust my chops.

  Another thing: Our guys are very particular about where the doughnuts originate. The biggest faux pas a rookie can make is going to Dunkin’ Donuts. DO NOT under any circumstances, I repeat, DO NOT BRING IN DUNKIN’ DONUTS. We’re very picky about our free breakfasts and Dunkin’ Donuts will get a rookie killed.

  One year Thomas Lewis, our first-round wide receiver from Indiana in 1994, failed to grasp this and not only did he bring in Dunkin’ Donuts, he brought in two dozen. How do you bring in twenty-four doughnuts for fifty-three players, coaches, equipment guys and trainers? To say that didn’t go over well is like saying Charles Manson is just a “little” screwed up.

  Damn it, T-Lew, make us feel fancy! My teammates took the doughnuts he brought in and squeezed out all the jelly into every one of his shoes and pockets, and poured juice in his helmet and smeared it with jelly. It was evil. Hey, T-Lew knew the rules, but he tried to take the easy way out. Our head coach, Dan Reeves, had no problem with the retaliation. In fact, Reeves was as angry as we were at T-Lew’s poor job at the doughnut shop. Coaches gorge on the rookie’s bounty, too.

  There’s a proper protocol that must be followed. It wasn’t. We destroyed that poor man’s clothes and locker that day. But that is nothing compared to what happened to Dave Brown. One morning Brown failed to bring in suitable doughnuts, so LT (I already mentioned he’s very particular about his Saturday morning breakfasts) took the box and smashed it over Dave’s head. What ensued next was a food fight straight out of the cafeteria scene in Animal House.

  Here’s the great part. Dave and the official first-round pick that year, Derek Brown, had to clean it up. Why? If they hadn’t brought in the wrong doughnuts in the first place, the doughnuts-over-the-head smash and the ensuing food fight wouldn’t have taken place. As a result of that food fight, the vets actually hired a chef to come in and cater breakfast and charged Dave and Derek.

  Me, I had to get my doughnuts from Mazur’s Bakery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. I learned real fast that those freakin’ doughnuts were the most important thing I did on a Saturday morning. A few times I was actually late to meetings because I was fetching the men their goods. I’d walk in and they’d break meetings to gorge on the goodies. I would rather miss that entire day and get fined by the coach than face LT, Coach Reeves, Phil Simms, Jumbo, Bart Oates and Erik Howard without the right beverages and doughnuts.

  The worst guy about fulfilling his proper duties was Tyrone Wheatley, the former Heisman hopeful from Michigan. He wouldn’t come in with the doughnuts. He didn’t care what we thought. As a result, it took us a long time to view him as a full-fledged teammate. You’re not looked at as one of us if you don’t play by our rules. It’s also a good gauge for the coaches to see exactly what a guy’s makeup is. Wheat was a freak about it. He didn’t care what we felt about him, what the recourse was, nothing. Eventually we grew to love the guy, but it took years for that to happen.

  Hazing took a major step back last decade after some morons inside the Saints locker room decided it would be a good idea to make their rookies run through a gauntlet of players hitting them with socks filled with coins. That’s not a unity builder, that’s assault. It’s also the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. They injured their tight end Cam Cleeland, who was sidelined with an eye injury after getting hit by a sockful of coins.

  That one single incident in New Orleans completely killed hazing. We’re now forced to tame things down to a more pedestrian speed. The worst we now do is take a guy and throw him in the ice tub. During last night of camp, we’d look for any rookie, including a rookie equipment guy or trainer. We’d begin with chants, “Ice tub, ice tub, ice tub,” until half the team apprehended our victim, sometimes tying him up, and we’d throw him in a tub filled with ice and water. The ice tub is our only retribution. If a guy won’t get up and sing for us, ice tub. If a kid refuses to carry our pads, ice tub. It’s the universal answer for everything now.

  Young kids today, be glad it’s just guys like Brandon Short and myself or Shau
n O’Hara and Tiki you have to deal with. Be glad your first day didn’t include LT, Simms, Pepper Johnson, Howard, Jumbo or William Roberts. Those guys and their whole generation took hazing to a different level.

  It’s real easy for a rookie to get under our skin. All a kid has to do is be himself. What I mean is, if you’re trying to impress, what do you do? You work your butt off. Sounds like the correct approach, right? WRONG! In fact, it’s the wrongest thing in the history of wrong! Hey, rook, we’re old and beat-up. The last thing we need is for some young gun to come into camp going a million miles per hour. Leave that for the game, son.

  My first year, I played with a defensive end named Mike Fox. Big, nice, quiet, strong guy. But Fox also had a great motor, which is why they drafted him in the first place. It’s also what got the whole team to hate him his first couple of weeks.

  Big Mike had been going full speed in practice while the old offensive linemen like Oates, Jumbo and William “Big Dog” Roberts got fed up. They chop-blocked him and then hit him over the head with a helmet. Two guys held him up in a drill and the third guy went low after his knee. They figured they’d calm him down by beating him up!

  After the chop, Oates ripped Fox’s helmet off and smacked him in the forehead with it. Fox’s reaction scared the living crap out of everyone. After getting hit, he didn’t budge. It only made him angry. The guys ended up feeling bad about it and the guilt from the hazing led to his acceptance. It took him getting chop-blocked by three teammates and hit in the face with a helmet to finally be deemed okay. Fox ended up being a hell of a player, a great guy and teammate and then signed a big free-agent deal in Carolina.