Just My Thoughts

I look back over my football career and I have internal debates with myself over what was the official year my professional career ended.  The last officially sanctioned football game I played in was the 2006 NFL Pro-Bowl as a New Orleans Saint.  Following that season, I signed a free agent deal with my hometown Cleveland Browns but never had an opportunity to play in a game due to a knee injury and severe complications from a Staph infection.  The three years I spent on the Browns roster were "accrued" seasons which simply mean they counted towards my retirement but the technical aspect of that is for another time.  In order to keep it simple, each year counted as an earned season in the NFL although I spent the time in extensive rehab programs.  As a competitor, you want to go out on your own terms so I count the Pro-Bowl as my official exit but understanding the business side of professional athletics, the 2009 season seems like a pretty good year to end my career.

     Now that I'm a bit older and wiser I find myself looking at the entire situation through a completely different lense.  The most formative years of my life as a man came when football was no longer an option for me.  The three years I spent travelling the world to turn myself back into the player I once was actually ended up being the time I discovered who and what I really was as a person.  This understsanding allowed me to segue out of football and into other facets of my personality that I never knew existed until football was packed away into the boxes as simple memories.  If you are reading this and you know me, you know that I was never much of a conversationalist.  How in the world did I end up hosting a nightly two hour radio show?  I've prided myself on being a private person but here I am typing on my own personal blog about my life.  Social media is something as a player that I stayed away from, albeit it wasn't nearly as popular five years ago but knowing me there wouldn't have been a Facebook or Twitter account with my name on it.  Some may argue that embracing unexplored parts of my personality is just my way of staying relevant.  Well, relevance has never been a concern of mine, especially when I can go to my basement and open plenty of boxes that will remind me how "relevant" I was.  When the sound of small feet running in the house is the first thing heard in the morning, life is pretty damn good and relevance becomes relative at that point.  Many athletes don't feel the way that I do and this is why 80% end up downtrodden two years post career. I was an anomaly considering my career ended three years post career (chew on that) and I had a grace period to discover who I was.

     Part of my discovery was understanding that I never wanted to be a coach.  Well, that's what I thought atleast.  I opened a training center for offensive linemen that is my way of coaching without the crazy hours of coaching.  There were two major programs that extended me opportunities to coach offensive line at the collegiate level but that's not where I want my life to go.  I fought the idea of being a coach until this year.  I didn't call the programs that offered me an opportunity and ask for the job back, I walked on at a local high school to volunteer my time.  This decision might be one of the best that I have made post career.  My respect level for the game and for coaches is now through the roof but most importantly, my passion for youth development has taken on an entirely new meaning.  I never understood what real coaching was about until I had my own group of guys that depended on me.  Coaching to me had always been about xs and os which is partly why I never wanted to coach.  The xs and os component of coaching for me is the easiest but the challenge is connecting with each and every player in order to get their best out of them.  The discovery tools that I used to discover who I really was during my three year hiatus from football, I now apply to my kids in order to pull their greatness out of them.  Greatness is a relative term in the sense that not all of the kids are future NFL stars but their greatness is knowing who they are and  knowing what it takes to push themselves to be the best they can be.  To me that's the measure of success for coaches at every level.  I used to joke on my radio show that I wasn't a media guy but a "life coach'', well I guess every joke really does have a little truth to it.