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

by Michael Strahan

  We had a kid in last year’s camp who didn’t know how to practice. He kept grabbing Osi Umenyiora on every play, like it was the fourth quarter of a damn playoff game. He was what we call a Practice All-Pro. This kid needed to be knocked down a notch.

  The kid’s name was Nayshawn something-or-other. So we decided in a meeting one night that we would slow his ass down. I didn’t even know what his name was, but he pissed us off something fierce because he was, heaven forbid, practicing hard. So the next day, after every single play in practice, me and a couple of other guys made sure we ran after him and got in a cheap shot on him. Trust me, if we had to run backward ten yards to get in a hard shot or a punch, we did.

  Life as a rookie also means that you buy dinner. Sometimes you pay for a limo for your respective position players. The difference between limos and dinner and doughnuts is that any rookie could be tabbed to do this, even some practice squad guy making eighty grand a year.

  So, did all the torture inflicted on me change the way I treat rookies? Absolutely not. Aside from trying to help him after the Vince Young debacle, I treated Kiwanuka like crap. I bagged on his game every chance I got. First round or no first round, you’ve got to earn your stripes.

  It bothers me when I see kids come in, especially high picks, and they don’t act the way I had to. I knew my place. The only time I would show my face was when LT made us go to his parties. Those were mandatory and all I knew to say was, “Yes, sir.”

  Three years ago I flat out stopped stressing over learning rookies’ names. Some rookies are just bodies, nothing more, nothing less—bodies to throw to the wolves so that other bodies can stay preserved. There were a lot of rookies I’ve played with over the years who, if they robbed my house, I wouldn’t be able to identify in a lineup. At least twenty, every single year. Their faces start to morph together. If you’ve seen one sacrificial lamb, you’ve seen them all. They all look the same until one of them does something to stand out.

  There have been times during an interview in camp when a reporter will ask me about a certain rookie. I’ll have absolutely no idea who they’re talking about. I’ll answer their questions if I can wing it, but rookies really can be that anonymous to us longtime vets.

  Some rooks will come up to me and ask me, “You think they’ll keep me around?” Like I’m part of management? Trust me on this one, kid, the Giants would NEVER listen to me when it comes to personnel.

  Other rookies will lay this one on me: “How can I do better? What can I do to show them?”

  How can I tell some kid we’re just renting his body for a couple of weeks to beat up on him? Usually I’ll come up with a few stock answers straight out of the Vanilla Coaching Verbiage 101 Handbook.

  “Don’t worry about the things you can’t control.”

  “Focus on the things you can do better every day.”

  “Don’t focus on whether or not you’re going to get cut. Prove them wrong.”

  Or.

  “Rookies wear down, so show them you can hang in there longer than everyone else.”

  One rookie defensive end came to me, crying about getting cut. To be honest with you, all I thought about was, “Have I lent this kid anything? If so, I’d better get my stuff back.”

  I know it sounds callous, but every year of my life I see the hopes and dreams of about thirty-five kids get completely crushed. I’ll see grown men cry like American Idol castoffs.

  You think we enjoy watching men get fired from their jobs? Do you think I like looking at a rookie and thinking, “He is working his ass off and I know he won’t stay here.” It’s the lousy part, perhaps the worst part, of our profession. You have no choice but to be callous; otherwise it’ll hurt your soul.

  If I had to go through my rookie season all over again, with the hazing and stress of 1993, I’d rather give up football not have to live through it. There’s that much stress involved.

  And as much as I couldn’t stand my rookie year, at least I never had the pressure of Eli. I was invisible, just the way I wanted to be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Violence Under the Pile and Other Things That Won’t Get You Arrested

  October 1, Cowboys versus Titans

  Titans defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth made me sick today. He was a traitor to our brotherhood. Today I saw him take his cleat and stomp on a man’s head without a helmet for protection. He was clearly trying to cause injury, not pain. He took the foot of his 330-pound body and stomped on the face of Cowboys guard Andre Gurode, a downed player whose helmet had been knocked off.

  He wasn’t trying to make a statement. He stomped on that man’s face with absolutely no acceptable provocation. He went where none of us want to go.

  This may sound strange coming from someone who used his helmet as a weapon. But what this guy and others like him never get is that our careers and jobs are based upon inflicting pain, not injury, that there’s a major difference between the two. We’ve got a code. You never try to prevent a man from feeding his family. In my view, Albert broke that law today and the NFL should have kicked his butt out of our league. From a personal standpoint, if I were Gurode, I’d consider suing the daylights out of his cheap-shot ass.

  Gutless. We’re all trying to provide for our families and this knucklehead stomps on a man’s head. Without a helmet! That, folks, is unacceptable, even in our world. We have rules for violence. But he violated the laws of our Sunday afternoons.

  If you want to kick a guy in the face, join the Ultimate Fighting Championship. If you want to get paid to play football, keep those internal demons locked up inside your own demented mind and body.

  We deal with enough garbage each and every week, we don’t need a guy blatantly trying to maim a guy. What if that spike had hit Gurode’s eye? What if it had hit his temple? Being permanently injured affects a man’s family.

  Look, I’m not saying I don’t want to put my opponent out, but do it within the limits of the written and unwritten laws that govern our game. I’ve done some awful things. Like when I hit not one but two of my teammates in their heads with my helmet. The difference? There was provocation. I was defending myself to the best of my ability. It was either stomp or be stomped. But what Haynesworth did was comparable to taking my helmet in my fight against Scott Gragg, running up behind him while he was sitting down with his back turned to me and just clubbing him. There’s a line there, a bit cloudy, I admit, but a line that we all view as unacceptable to cross.

  I guess what Albert did was to help define where we draw the line, how we separate what is acceptable in our world of violence and what is taboo. Even though Haynesworth said he was retaliating for getting chop-blocked a lot, it wasn’t acceptable in the eyes of anyone inside the NFL. I get chopped all the time, but you don’t see me out there stomping on a guy’s temple. You get him back with your play.

  Guys were outraged by Albert’s actions. Keyshawn Johnson wanted him kicked out of the league. John Lynch felt that suspension wasn’t enough. Simeon Rice said they would have had to call the game if he were Gurode, because they wouldn’t have been able to stop him from killing the guy. Brian Urlacher said if Gurode were his teammate, he would have sprinted off the sideline and lost his mind, in defense of his fallen teammate. I’ve never seen an incident that created so much unanimous outrage as when Haynesworth crossed that line.

  If you’re trying to prevent a man from earning a living, you’re a loser, a punk, and you should have some sort of adult time-out—forever!

  Let’s go over the rules again, boys and girls. Hearing a guy scream from pain you’ve inflicted can be sweet, sweet music. Making a guy scream from an injury, that’s a bad, bad song. Even making a guy scream by punching him under the pile, or even squeezing a guy’s private parts where the refs can’t see, is somewhat acceptable. Why? That just hurts, it doesn’t cause a man to miss a game check. Therein lies the great difference: If our play were limited by pain rather than injury, none of us would make a dime.

  P
ain is part of the world we live in. On any given play, you’re going to be put in pain. Literally, on three fourths of the snaps of a ball game, something happens that ranges from not feeling too good to being in downright agony.

  You should see what happens under a pile. I mean, it is ruthless.

  The best I can describe it is like a big mangled car crash—a ten-car pileup where the referees are our jaws of life.

  First off, it’s often claustrophobic. You don’t know who is who, things are somewhat dizzying as you try to reclaim your senses. First thing I usually do is shut my eyes real tight to protect from a finger finding its way into my eye socket, intentional or unintentional. I don’t know if everyone does that, but it’s not a bad idea. Not too many guys will try to stick a finger in your eye. But one is enough to get me to clench those lids shut.

  Then, within that same second, you shift your attention toward taking an inventory of your body to make sure nothing is snapped. Within the next half second you try to identify where you are in relation to the markers, which jerseys are laying beside you, on top of you, beneath you and across your limbs.

  Within a second and a half to two seconds, your head clears and you rely on your hearing to let you know what may have happened. You listen not so much to the crowd but for little or loud signals from the other players. You often hear a scream or a shriek of some sort, and as a player, you can immediately tell if it’s a shriek of a painful injury or someone’s just getting the business thrown his way.

  I once was on top of a pile when the Eagles running back Charlie Garner snapped his leg. It was like someone took a piece of firewood and smacked it against concrete, breaking it in half. Those are scary because the sound of a man’s bone snapping stays in your mind forever. It’s like a permanent mental scar and it rears its ugly head at the weirdest times. I may be at a black-tie dinner and something reminds me of it, maybe a highlight tape showing something regarding Philly, and I remember that SNAAAAP! Oh, man, I wish I could get some hypnosis to heal those wounds. Most of the physical pain doesn’t make you shiver later in life. But those awful sounds haunt you.

  And it’s not just the major injuries that cause guys to bark. Trust me, we’ve got plenty of reasons to scream. Eye gouging, punching, grabbing crotches, digging fingers and nails into flesh, it happens all the time. Not just here and there during a game, but all the time!

  Getting your manhood grabbed and squeezed under a pile is the worst thing short of injury that can happen down there. And it happens a lot more than people know. As you can imagine, it sucks. There’s nothing homoerotic about it, although you tend to call a guy some very politically insensitive adjectives if he pulls that garbage. They’ll do it to get you off the field for a play or two.

  Now you’re probably asking yourself, how could you get your nuts squeezed if you’re wearing a cup? Simple answer: We don’t wear them!

  Hardly anybody wears cups. You boot them from your equipment checklist because they slow you down by rubbing on your inner thighs. Anything that slows you down, you shed. Guys don’t wear knee pads, thigh pads and a lot of times mouthpieces, either.

  We are virtually exposed. For many of us, we’ve got absolutely nothing protecting us from the waist down except a pair of pants and some tape on our ankles. So when you’re under that pile, you’ll hear a guy let out a howl. And know exactly what happened.

  Sometimes you’ll hear a guy screaming, “My eye!” Remember when I mentioned that I immediately shut my eyelids tight? It’s because really dirty players will take their fingers under the pile and jam them under or through a face mask. Trust me, that doesn’t feel too wonderful, either. Imagine some idiot bracing your head and then taking his index finger and jamming it into your eye socket.

  Fat old Langston Walker from the Raiders eye-gouged me last year. He said he didn’t mean it, even though it seemed to me he didn’t try to avoid it. My damn eye closed up on me. I needed Mickey from Rocky to cut me. Cut me, Coughlin, cut me!

  I had a teammate, Brian Williams, our former center, who got a finger in his eye and it ended his career. He actually had blood pouring out of his eye socket. When you get poked in the eye, like when Walker got me two years ago, your first thought is, “Is my eye on the ground?” The pain is almost as bad as the anxiety of “that son of a bitch just poked my freakin’ eye out! I’ll be blinded forever.”

  The worst pile to be under is a fumble. There’s 2,500 pounds of flesh with no warden to police the inmates. Those few seconds of seclusion are brutal. Guys will do anything under the pile to get that ball and the problem is sometimes you’ll do it to your own teammates. You can’t tell whose fingers you are bending back or whose ribs you are digging your nails into. We consider that “friendly fire.” Sorry, my brother, I was just trying to get the ball away from every other human under that pile and into my arms.

  The fumble is the golden egg. Whatever it takes. Punching a rib to jar the ball loose, bending fingers in directions they don’t go, sticking your fingers in rib cartilage. Unfortunately, there’s only one guy with the ball. But half the time we’re unsure who it is, so there’s often collateral damage. Isn’t it amazing that we’re willing to play a game that has so many references to war? What’s wrong with us?

  When you’re the first guy to recover the fumble, you lay there and tighten your whole body because you know they’ll dive in with their helmets to get you to give up the ball. If you see that a guy is going to beat you to it, you use your helmet to pop him away. At that moment your helmet is your tool of choice to smash a hand, wrist, elbow or rib—anything to get that ball out of his hands.

  There’s a whole different level of communication under that pile as well. Sometimes, believe it or not, I’ll start having little conversations with guys down there if you know it will take a while for the refs to unravel the carnage. Being forced to lay face-to-face with somebody also gives me a chance to talk a little smack. Like that one time we were in Philly playing against the Eagles and their running back Duce Staley needed a certain number of yards to get a bonus in his contract. So here we are, on the bottom of the pile, we’re lying face-to-face and I said, “Tell your coach if you want that money, tell the man to run you the other way. You won’t get it this way.”

  “Shut up, Strahan!”

  “No, I’m serious, tell your coach to run the other way. Hey. I’m just trying to help you poor suckers out.”

  Wouldn’t you know it, that son of a gun ripped off a big run…to my side, no less. I once told Eddie George that if he wanted to get 100 yards, he should run the other way for the rest of the game. He started laughing but looked at me like I had a good idea. I said, “No, I’m serious, tell your coach to run the other way.” He said that after that, he ran 95 percent of his runs the other way.

  Every player on that field has a little trick of the trade to inflict at least an annoyance of pain. A running back will kick at you or get up with a knee placed perfectly in a spot that hurts like hell. He’ll innocently put his knee on your rib and accidentally put all his weight on his knee as he stands up. Hey, it’s survival of the fittest out there. Any running back from Clinton Portis to Jamal Lewis to Edgerrin James may use this trick. So we’ll get them back. When a back is under a pile, a defender will grab his ankle and twist that sucker about ninety more degrees than it’s willing to go naturally. Or if he’s lying there, we’ll “accidentally and innocently” step on his hand before he has a chance to get up.

  Anything goes. But like I said, the running back can retaliate once he gets up. He can kick a guy but make it look like it was just part of the natural motion. Or he can stand up on a guy’s knee or calf and put all his weight on the defender and act like, “My bad, I was just trying to stand up, I didn’t see your stomach under there.”

  Receivers have their shots, too. Out wide, they act so innocent in their own little paradise. But in reality sometimes these cats are like snipers. The wideouts use a technique called a cut block. It’s complete BS. I call it a
coward’s block. I don’t believe it should be legal, because it allows a guy to pretty much sneak up on an unsuspecting defender, usually a defensive back, and throw his body into a guy’s knee. Sometimes it feels like a man walking up to you from behind with a crowbar, whacking you behind or on the side of your knees.

  Guys like the Colts’ Marvin Harrison and the Steelers’ Hines Ward—the guys who are seen as classy—are two of the worst snipers. They take those kinds of shots often. Players hate them on the field. Don’t grin and smile in our faces, then dive at our knees when we aren’t looking!

  The offensive line has the high-low attack. They especially love to use this cheap shot when their opponent is talking crap. What it is, they’ll have one guy post you up high and then another guy will take you out at the knees, low. That’s probably the cause of more fights between linemen than anything. I’d rather a guy punch me in the mouth than high-low me. If your knee is planted, there’s a very good chance this will blow out at least one ligament in your knee, if not more. In some cases this isn’t called in a game. But when something is blatant, and if the NFL recognizes the viciousness of the ploy and they flag you, they’ll fine you. Sometimes a lineman will high-low or cut you if you’re talking smack to one of their teammates. Linemen know how to stick together.

  The Denver Broncos offensive line is the worst and most notorious for this. The players, and especially the coaches who teach those guys to play the way they do, are garbage. They intentionally go down low after your knees and ankles. There is a difference between coaching players to play hard and coaching guys to injure. They must have read the Albert Haynesworth Handbook on Game Day Etiquette.

  There’s a difference between a cheap-shot artist and a hard player. But Denver has blurred the line. A cheap-shot artist will go after your knees or ankles with the intent to injure for no apparent reason. A hard player is a guy who plays to the whistle or maybe one step past. He doesn’t intend to hurt you, but he does have every intention of making Sunday the worst day of your week.