Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (13 page)

WE WERE SOON INSEPARABLE: REBECCA AND ME. AND
Naomi. It was a big life lesson for me, for sure. We spent hours over at Rebecca’s house, with Naomi sitting in her little seat, as cute as could be. But when she got grumpy, I had to learn to be patient. When Rebecca was at her house, and I was at mine, we talked on the phone, and I mean late into the night. It was one of those scenarios where we stayed on the phone until we were both falling asleep. She had the best voice ever, the sexiest, most beautiful voice. I was in love with that voice. But I hadn’t yet gotten clear on my feelings about Rebecca. I’d just turned twenty years old, and I’d never been allowed to date, so I was stunted in the extreme. This was my first girlfriend, and it took me a little while to catch up with her. Finally, after several months, Rebecca got real with me one day while we were talking on the phone.

“What are you feeling?” she said. “What do you feel about me?”

Now, my whole life I’d been told that I couldn’t date, but I’d eventually find a woman to marry and have a family with, and when I’d been in Maranatha, they’d told me if I wanted to even just date a woman, I had to get clearance from my pastor in order to be sure God really wanted us to be together. So that’s how I thought.

“Please don’t get offended,” I said. “But I think you’re supposed to be my wife. I just, I really do.”

“Really?” she said.

“I do,” I said. “I don’t know what’s happening. But I know I
feel like we were always meant to be together. I don’t know how to be a father. I don’t know how to be a husband. I don’t know any of this. But I’m willing. You make me want to do things I never thought I could do.”

“Wow,” she said.

I went over to her place that night, and as soon as I walked in, we kissed. And then she pulled back and looked at me.

“You know what?” she said. “I’m with that, too. I want us to be together.”

That right there was our engagement. The next time we saw our pastor I couldn’t help but beam at him.

“We’re engaged,” I said.

“That’s kind of quick,” he said. “I mean, you guys hung out for six months.”

“I know,” I said.

Rebecca’s mother flipped.

“What?” Rebecca’s mother said to her. “You’re getting married to this boy? He doesn’t have anything. What are you doing?”

My mother flipped. She had been in the same situation as Rebecca, a single mom, who wasn’t quite making it on her own. And she was afraid, as she’d always been, that a woman looking for a daddy for her baby would trap me. But I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me what to feel or how to live. I’d made up my mind.

“I love her,” I said. “And I know this is the decision I’m ready to make. I’m going to be with her, and we’re going to do this together, forever.”

Over the summer, I took Rebecca to Flint to meet my parents and my grandmother, and they treated her so coldly. At first, they did not like her at all. Rebecca is very independent, and she does not care what other people think of her, and that was in direct opposition to how my mother lived and expected
Rebecca and everyone else to behave. One day, Rebecca decided she needed a little bit of a tan, so she went out onto the front lawn of my parents’ house in a bathing suit. My father went crazy. He ran outside and started yelling and waving his arms.

“Rebecca, get off the front lawn,” Big Terry said. “Yo, you are about to get attacked, and I can’t help you when these brothers come running over here.”

“What?” she said. “I just want to get a tan.”

“No, no, get in the house,” he said. “You cannot do that here in Flint, Michigan.”

She’s from Gary, Indiana, which was basically the same kind of city, so she knew she’d be fine, but with him flipping out like that, she ended up going inside.

From the beginning, it was a real clash between everybody. But I actually kind of enjoyed the conflict. For me, it was my stand. It was my declaration of independence. And, of course, that made the situation grate on my mother’s nerves even more. But then, slowly but surely, Rebecca sat down and really talked with the women in my family, and they ended up loving her more than they loved me. Really.

Now, the fact that my family had come to love Rebecca and had gotten behind our marriage did not mean I was actually ready to get married. I was naive on so many levels. I didn’t know how to save, and I was very bad with money. Rebecca later told me that she saw warning signs from the beginning, but she ignored them because she was swept up in the bliss of dating. Although I worked all summer, I always took my check and spent it on Rebecca, or I went right out and bought new tennis shoes and T-shirts, leaving nothing behind for the bills.

“Yeah, but did you pay your rent?” Rebecca asked me.

“Oh, no, that’s going to be taken care of,” I said.

That didn’t exactly sound like a good plan to her, but she let it be. I don’t know who I thought was going to be taking care of my rent, because I certainly wasn’t paying it. My best friend, Darwin, had transferred to Western Michigan University and taken over Mike’s room in our apartment. I ended up being short on the rent several months in a row, and we had to sneak out in the middle of the night. I still feel horrible about that to this day. Back then I didn’t take responsibility for myself or my actions. I thought ignoring a situation was the same as fixing it. Once again, I had such a sense of entitlement that I thought what was good for me was also good for everyone else.

That fall I returned to school as a junior and threw myself into my first season of playing football since I’d earned my scholarship. Coming out of football camp the previous spring, what had once been the greatest thing ever had become something I hated. Now that I knew my scholarship was revocable if I didn’t do everything my coaches said, the pressure to conform felt like a heavy burden. It was wild to have gotten what I wanted, and then to despise it so quickly. My mind-set was much like it had been when I lost my virginity. I’d looked at my classmate like she’d used me because I couldn’t handle taking responsibility for my own actions. Now I did the same thing with my college coaches, projecting my guilt onto them about the fact that I wasn’t handling myself well at all, and becoming angry toward them for what I saw as their controlling and condescending attitude toward me.

This happened around the time I was dating Rebecca, so they understandably began to feel that our relationship was taking me off track. My grades were poor, but I knew that had nothing to do with Rebecca. I’d decided my major would be
football and forget the rest. Finally, the coaches called me into their office. “We think you’re changing your attitude with that girlfriend of yours,” Coach said.

“That is way out of bounds for you to say to any grown man,” I said.

“Well, you’re having these problems, and we think it’s that girlfriend.”

“Dude, I don’t talk about your wife,” I said. “Don’t bring my girlfriend’s name up in your mouth one more time.”

The coaches and I clashed hard from that moment on, and for the rest of my time on the team, it was a nasty conflict. They considered me a rebel and an ingrate, which was the stone-cold truth. I threw all of my resentment and anger into working out and playing harder than ever, and there was no stopping me. I’ve always said it takes a lot of pain to be a great football player, because your anger can take you a long way on the football field. A guy with two great parents is not very common in the NCAA or NFL. Thousands of young men fuel their athletic careers with the pain of childhood trauma or other rejections, when it should be fueled by inspiration and love of the game. And the problem is, when you’re off the field, you’re still angry.

I started making a name for myself at our school and beyond, and it became known that the NFL scouts had taken notice. Our team went all the way that season and ended up winning the Mid-American Conference (MAC) championship for 1988. It was our school’s first championship in nearly thirty years. I was really starting to feel like my entrance to the NFL was on the verge of happening, and so I did my best to stay positive.

My future looked bright, but my present circumstances were not. Without a place of my own, I moved in with Rebecca. She
had a government-subsidized apartment because she was a single mom, and I wasn’t really supposed to be there, so I snuck in and out. Naomi was getting bigger, but that part of it was still hard for me. Rebecca and I never had our time. Naomi was always there, and she was right in the middle of her terrible twos, which could be difficult. When I tried to study, she always seemed to be crying, and she wouldn’t stop. Honestly, it was really frustrating for me. I was twenty years old, and suddenly a stepfather, and I didn’t have the slightest clue about babies, or about patience. So I sometimes went and stayed with Darwin at his new apartment.

I was so close to finishing school and making good on my NFL dreams, and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that. Rebecca and I figured it would be best if I got back into the dorms, so I could do what it took to finish strong and take the next step, not just for myself, but also for our family. And then, that summer, we’d move in together, and get married, and we’d always be together after that.

Around that time, we also had some trouble with Naomi’s father, and I finally had to set him straight and tell him if he didn’t start respecting Rebecca, and me, we’d have real problems. It all started to feel like a lot, maybe too much. I found myself worrying I might not be ready, and I couldn’t hide my fears from Rebecca.

“Babe, I don’t know, am I ready?” I asked.

“Really?” Rebecca said.

I felt awful, and I didn’t say anything that would make it worse.

“Don’t even play with me like that,” she said. “If you say you don’t want to do it, then don’t. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. I’ve got too much at stake here.”

Immediately, I knew she was right. This wasn’t just about Rebecca and me. This was about Naomi, too, and the family we were all forming together.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

We took the night to cool off, and the next day, I came right back.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said. “I’m in. I’m in. I’m in.”

All of the football players were given manual labor jobs. The team had hooked up with a local business, and we were supposed to do some work on campus for them. So that summer my job was to basically pound stop signs into the ground. I was working as much as I could, now that I was about to be married with a kid, trying to earn enough to get by. I was a senior, and the seniors often had dibs on the better jobs, and I was finally getting paid a nice amount of money.

For our next job, about seven of us—four black guys and three white guys—did some demolition on a dormitory. After two weeks, our boss let the four black guys go, and the three white guys stayed on all summer. It was obvious that racial discrimination was at play, and so I went to the coaches and complained.

“They can choose whoever they want,” the coaches said.

Again, I was so disappointed in the fact that the school didn’t take care of me that I whined about it for the rest of the summer. I was comparing my circumstances to rumors I’d heard about star players getting preferential treatment at other, bigger schools. The problem with my complaining was that I confused it with action. I should have hunted far and wide for another job, but instead, I just made excuses. I didn’t work again for the rest of the summer. And we were broke. I mean broke.

We couldn’t afford a big party, but I wanted to get married
before football camp started up again, so Rebecca and I set our date for July 29, 1989, the day before my twenty-first birthday. We didn’t have anything, so everybody we knew chipped in as much as they could, and our wedding was basically a big potluck dinner. It felt so cool to have everyone give back to us. Because I’d started to make a name for myself on the football team, we knew a lot of people on campus and in the community, and it was really special to be supported by them like that.

Rebecca was very active in our church and played music at services, but I’d kept some distance from organized religion after coming out of Maranatha. Still, it meant a great deal to us to be married by our pastor, since we’d first met at his church. Rebecca planned everything. I basically just rented a crisp white tux and showed up. I wore my practice shorts underneath my suit, and the words “Western Michigan #94” were visible through my white pants to anyone who looked long enough. I’d also experimented with my high-top fade and had a barber cut a part on a diagonal all the way through, from the front to the back. Everything left of the part was short, and everything to the right was long. It was a geometric wonder.

The ceremony was as good as I could have expected. As we exchanged our vows, two-year-old Naomi jumped up and grabbed onto my leg in the middle of everything. I held her for as long as I could to keep her calm, but when I had to put her down after we lit our unity candle, it was pure bedlam. She screamed as loud as she could for what seemed like an eternity. My brother, Marcelle, was my best man, and I had Darwin, JoNathan, Michael Lewis, and my childhood buddy Robert Blond as groomsmen. It was a full-on family affair. But when the ceremony was over, all I could think about was the bed-and-breakfast we had on reserve for the night in lieu of a real honeymoon. It was not easy getting Rebecca into my Chevy Nova
because she was having such a wonderful time socializing with everyone. But she looked absolutely gorgeous, and I wanted to socialize with only her. Finally, I actually picked her up and put her in the car. All in all, it was a beautiful day.

I couldn’t have been happier with Rebecca, and I loved Naomi and our little family, but as my senior year got under way, it was a very stressful time. I was so busy with the team that Rebecca and I would sometimes look at each other and wonder how we were going to do this, and if I could really graduate. Was it even possible? I started to see why athletes paid other people to do their papers for them. I never did, so I just submitted whatever I could, and then, whatever my grade was, that’s what it was. I also had a bit of a hustle worked out. If I got a D in one class, I knew the A from my independent study in painting would keep my grade point average up enough to let me playing football. So I painted two or three really great paintings, and I held on to them. Then I purposefully made the rest of my paintings subpar. Because art is so subjective, my professors never actually told me they were bad. They just encouraged me to keep trying. I brought in one of my really terrible paintings and asked my professor how I could improve it, knowing all the while how and why it sucked. Then I made sure everything I showed them became progressively better. Toward the end of the semester, I handed in the three beautiful paintings and complimented the professor on how much his advice had helped me and made me a better artist. Totally flattered, and impressed with my improved artwork, my professors gave me an A both semesters.