You might remember 1987. Bart Simpson became the first cartoon child to offend conservative parents everywhere with his insufferable attitude and blatant disrespect for authority. America just discovered this brand new band called Guns N' Roses and 1987 was arguably U2's best year with the release of five timeless singles packing the first half of Joshua Tree. In 1987, Jim Bakker showed Bill Clinton how it's done and this same year the United Nations proclaimed to the world the birth of its five billionth child out of an obscure town in Croatia.
And in 1987, a far less famous, little boy was born to Samoan-American parents at an army post in Oklahoma.
A genetic map had been inherited through the combination of millions of predecessors across time and humanity's home to eventually present itself as a male cell. And timed just right, it would beat out thousands of profoundly alternative brother combinations to be united with an equally unique, genetic inheritance assembled on its own ancient, biological path to end up as one female cell. Because of the nature of infinite combinations, this boy would be born like no other boy before or ever again.
But in 1987, Jimmy, Homer’s offspring, Axl Rose, genetic variations and nameless children were nowhere near the thoughts of a seven-year-old who was far more amused by the deep, slurred tone his Walkman would read Christian hymns back to him as it ran out of batteries. Which, two decades later, he would realize sounded exactly how one would after a round of whip-its (or Dory's whale-talk for all you kiddies out there).
Around this time, he was being verbally tortured by his thirteen-year-old babysitter who had caught him crying. You see, the younger boy's best friend had been taken away from him the day before in a hit and run. She was a cat named Patsy and embodied the burden of being the only creature that would choose to be his friend. This kid didn't have the social experience to attract real friendships with real people, even with those sweet racing striped socks pulled all the way up. Under this newly recognized institution at the time known as home schooling, he had been kept hidden away from any human judged as currently choosing to live "outside the umbrella of God's protection".
Ramie was his first attempt.
But all this eighth grader saw was a kid crying about a cat. So he did what any normal thirteen-year-old would do when he sees a younger, smaller boy crying. He told the first grader that he and his friends dug up Patsy last night and set off firecrackers in her skull.
1987 was the beginning of a new life for me, according to Dad, who insists the year mutated forever what he called an infinitely happy personality.
On April 27th, 2009, over two decades from that moment, I'm not sure what was running through this grown boy's mind the moment I spotted and unshelved the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. I had never once touched the magazine before. I was one of those people who listened for the sounds of cheering fans and testosterone-saturated announcers to subside during the Superbowl because it meant commercials. And even that lost its appeal fast.
I was never a fan of sports in the first place specifically because the untimely conclusion to the joys of Bugs Bunny was always associated with the immediate reappearance of Dad's nightly game and precipitated by my only enemy at the time, a small round dial that could be found at the bottom right corner of the fake-wood-sided TV. The dial's indignant click, by which a screen full of colorful life could suddenly surrender to black, also signified bedtime.
I'm a severely light sleeper.
For me, the requirement of any sport to win my picky favor is, A.) It could very likely kill me, and B.) It must be a solo sport. I'm uncontrollably competitive. I typically lay down the smack in the form of a deck of cards and a frustrating strategy for my opponent. After all, you can't gouge someone's eyes out with an ace of spades every time they beat you (or can you?).
Till that day in April, my weekly ritual to force myself out of my hermit habits was to visit the local magazine stand and silently, slowly, unblinkingly flip through each colorful page of the unreachable, far away lands of Islands magazine. So aside from the occasional hunt for the most dangerous rivers in the country, there was no objective logic to explain why I picked up that particular copy of an unrelated magazine.
But I did.
I suppose the other two players on the cover have names and statistics. I hadn't noticed. Before I picked the issue up, I immediately recognized a curious familiarity in the linebacker, cover center. I checked the index for the cover article, thumbed to the page and scanned it to his name (obviously the two other white guys aren't going to carry the name Maualuga) and read from there. I don't remember much of the article except that it felt exactly like getting only one slice of a Little Caesar's Hot n' Ready when you're stoned.
But now I had a brief glimpse, like a shutter speed set to open and close faster than you can blink, of what exactly this connection was. I reshelved the periodical and flooded my laptop screen with articles to parallel our lives for a better grasp on my subconscious connections. ('95 was a good year for the world when the floodgates of the Internet burst open for humanity's infinite benefit.)
I found my intuition had been right on target when I saw he was the only player to have "Dad" written in white over the black sticker under his dark, Samoan eyes.
I read on.
His family had struggled financially at the same moment in parenthood as my family. From that point on, the parallel image of his life and mine were that of a graph, one red line breaking the limits, the other blue line steadily plummeting to hell.
Rey Maualuga probably didn't realize in sixth grade his ascent would spark to life by succumbing to the burning temptation of popularity.
"I wanted to be like that. So I told the coach I wanted to play football. But it was really just so I could take my pads and helmet to school," Maualuga tells USA Today.
By this completely unrelated act, he would uncover that one thing in every individual that indulges and nurtures the fires of passion till then unlit. From there, his path in life seemed simple, like the effort it takes to read a page of history over having to live it.
There's only one thing my brain bothered to record about sixth grade. I was eleven.
Come to think of it, I do remember something else.
I was also a shooting star under the same spell of young dreams. I possessed in my heart a treasure map that would lead me to exactly that one thing I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I had been wondering about the cosmos one day to find myself in the marine isle of the library and, under fate's watchful eye, opened some obscure author's photographic chronicle of his specialty. Sharks.
Through my perception, the ocean was quiet yet full of life, bearing its watery seal against humanity, like a nude siren tempting a mere mortal with her virgin mystery.
It was love.
I enthusiastically fell in line among the dead, the living and the yet unborn, all of us headstrong despite the irony in pursuing her beauty though blind our eyes might be to the damned bodies she claimed having tasted of her breast the poison of desire. I invoked an Ahabian persistence in my studies, absorbing weekly the pages that if stacked, reached half my height.
Inquire of this eleven-year-old any species of fish known to man. Ask me the scientific names they're assigned. Ask if it is a she or she a he. The order in which swimming creatures devour one another. The geological confinements where they can only be found. Saltwater or fresh. Icy and alive or clam happy at 112 degrees. All this I could recite to you as vigilantly as one might report to his senior officer in boot camp. The library ran of books on the subject! So I stayed bright-eyed through every sleepy Jacques Cousteau documentary.
Despite a regal offering in the finite potential of the human mind, my immortal mistress wouldn't have me. I was stunned to find myself tossed back out of the sea, coughing up hopes and dreams, back in a world I had wanted to leave behind.
I've seen movies where a character loses everything. He runs as fast as he can, systematically screams every profane word he's ever learned (some learned then) and in a lot of cases, breaks something that, prior to it's current state, was pivotal. It's then I wonder if that writer ever really lost everything at some point. When I found out I could never go underwater again because of the sensitivity of my ears, I didn't lose any possessions to violence. I didn't shout to the heavens' cold shoulder. Didn't feel like running. Didn't feel like saying anything. I soundlessly walked to my room and carefully stacked the books back up to half my height, returned them on time, and lay in my bed till the revolving planet hid me from the sun and lay there still as it remained faithful to force a new day on me whether I wanted it or not.
As these days renewed, Maualuga would accelerate through high-school with a perfect season for his team in his junior year and list of honors including SuperPrep Elite 50, PrepStar Top 100 Dream Team, Student Sports Top 100, SuperPrep All-American, Tom Lemming All-American, SuperPrep All-Farwest and PrepStar All-West.
I have no idea what any of these actually are.
But some of them sound super.
Bolstering these were the accolades from media sources like PARADE, USA Today, EA Sports, the Long Beach Press, Tacoma News Tribune and the Orange County Register. And coasting this momentum, he would close his teens with class, topping them off masterfully by participating in the invitation-only 2005 U.S. Army All-American Bowl around his 18th birthday.
My teens on the other hand were infected before they even began by an unfortunate discovery for a Christian kid who was aware of no other world than the Christian one. This virulent, black paradox marked beginning of an internal civil war: what I was trained from an infant to believe versus indifferent, unquestionable reality. This fracture in my spiritual confidence would invade my teens like a mother might pass her sickness on to her child and slowly it suffocated my bright perception of the world.
Through my teens and the years to follow, I would claw against Mom's attempts to contain me in her Jesus camps and her obsession with Quaker chic and her mindset that even the presence of a girl was to endure the most sinful of temptations. Under her tyranny, the Originals (as we call the first four victims of parenthood) were never allowed to listen to music or read any literature with other philosophical alternatives. We weren't allowed to go to real school with real people or get a job because jobs equaled money equaled crack. We were prohibited from entering the homes of neighborhood kids, involuntarily subjecting ourselves to the verbal resentment of their parents.
All of these worldly, natural desires were to her the same as consciously exposing oneself to eternally terminal disease. I had no idea that there were actually people in the world who didn't believe in God until I had lost a whole decade of my life.
Each Original plotted desperately his own escape.
I vividly remember the trauma of seeing Mom burst into my room during the fascinating early stages of this new Internet invention and with wild eyes, she would shriek with righteous indignation, "What are you up to?! I smell sperm!"
(Granted the addition of an unlimited supply of clothes-free thumbnails and its unprecedented newness to my youthful eyes together multiplied by the green simplicity of html backdoors certainly elevated the production of dank, tadpole versions of me.)
Life was my daily punishment for being born and Mom was not even yet aware of my category of choice. I had a lot to look forward to.
I would run away from home sporadically, sleep outside an abandoned house, wander from one stranger's home to a co-worker's and to the piss mats where the Baker's Acted rejects are abandoned. I would sign in and drop out of vocational college and on leaving heartbreak in the walls of one final residence, I would find myself at the doorstep of a young girl named Daisy.
Whether you call it Divinity or Karma or molecules bouncing off each to form layers of the complex chaos that humanity's individual perception must try to make sense of, this nature, I've noticed, has a funny way of balancing out each life no matter how great you become.
No one escapes challenge.
And it seems at least to one highly talented, athletic prodigy that the counterbalance against the few born strong and fortunate under coveted coincidences may be manifested in the form of a tragedy struck of equal strength and disabling timing.
I stopped at this point in my studies and wondered if Rey Maualuga at 6'2" and 249 lbs ever dreaded the haunting memories that might cloud every October since 2005.
Rey was like any other freshman in college. Except he held the golden ticket to the BCS National Championship Game at the Rose Bowl. But that October, he got an urgent phone call to return home. Talatonu Maualuga was diagnosed with brain cancer. The odds were against him. The future NFL linebacker wouldn't be aware as he traveled to the hospital that the final days he could spend with his most intimate mentor were diminishing like crystals in a glass timer. His family didn't break the news till he arrived.
Not quite 48 hours after leaving the hospital, his derailed course would lead him to one fateful Halloween campus party.
I imagine the available alcohol had nothing special in it. Nor did the escalating argument. But somehow, he went from prospects to police station, his intense talent uncontrollable and efficiently unleashed upon one unlucky USC student.
A few months later, the countdown ended. Just as history decided a little Samoan-American boy would be born five days before Superbowl XXI, time would write that by just a matter of a two days, his father would never get to see Rey lose his golden ticket to Texas in the 2006 Rose Bowl.
Out of the last ten seconds of a dynamically matched game, the Longhorns would make off with the trophy and, according to ESPN, would rank number five in the greatest (college) plays of all time.
"Things were tough on Rey as a freshman," Trojan's assistant Rocky Seto says in a Rivals.com interview, "His father was bedridden in the hospital that whole fall, fighting for his life, while Rey was away at school playing football. He wanted to be by his side."
"My first game was at Hawaii and the day before we played my dad underwent surgery. He had a tumor in his brain. Since then, my dad was never the same, lost 150 pounds. He knew who we were but didn’t know what was going on anymore," Rey explains to interviewer Darren Feeney, "I didn’t know he had surgery the day before the game. I called them after the game and said, ‘Hey, did you see me on the sidelines?’ And they said, ‘No, Rey, we're at the hospital, Dad underwent surgery.’ So that’s why I have 'Dad' under my eye black, because he saw every Pop Warner game, every high school game, but not one college game."
Even after a year's time, Maualuga would fall into the consequences of yet another a frat party delivered to the world's eye by the Los Angeles Times as disruptive behavior. And after three years, Tina Maualuga would speak of the effect her husband's disappearance had on her son's life.
"I'm sorry," she apologized, fighting tears through one rare interview (Rivals.com). "It's just too hard. I just know that he would've been proud of Rey. I pray to God that nothing happens to him. Whether he makes it to the NFL or not, I'm not the type of parent that goes around and talks about all of his accomplishments. I just praise God for his talents and pray every day that nothing happens to him."
Whether he was young and fatherless, whether he had too much public attention, money or alcohol, Rey had always looked up to his dad who had earned the respect of his small town of Eureka. Talatonu uprooted his family from city life to the boonies when Rey was just a high school sophomore, believing in a purpose to start a Pentecostal ministry for the Polynesian peoples of Eureka. Though Rey resented going from city lights to cow pastures, he would grow from this boy to a man recalling fondly the Polynesian folks brought into his life in his college years at USC.
"People like Fred Matua and Deuce Lutui, they took me under their wing, took care of me and showed me love," Maualuga opened up in an article by Steve Megargee. "Fred Matua said as the years go by and more Polynesian players come in, I have to take care of them like they took care of me."
Talatonu always raised Rey to believe he had a purpose in life, that he would one day after all his hard work unleash his gifts on the playing field for the inspiration and benefit of those who needed it.
I stared for a moment with new understand at the frozen 5"x5" record of Maualuga's eyes, the letters "RIP Dad" written underneath and the intense gaze that masked the strategies his mind processed at the time the shutter closed.
I fell then into a daydream as Alice falls into her Wonderland. And like the hallucinogenic-inspired character, I wondered how I got tangled up in my alternate universe and how or if one could even escape a nightmare.
After twenty years of life I had only Christian friends I no longer related to. So I alienated the only people I knew and made worse friends, all displaced kids with misplaced dreams. Eventually, I found my way home in the newest evolution in music, the indie dance-rock scene. It was like nothing I'd ever imagined. You were allowed to be anyone in the mosh pit. No regulations, no responsibilities, no racial or denominational restrictions and no religion.
That was where Daisy found me.
"Daisy! Like the flower!" She'd call up to me all the way down from four feet and ten inches above the dance floor.
"I'm not short! I'm fucking adorable!" She might answer to the banter nobody could avoid upon seeing her petite physique.
Daisy is a sultry blond with blue eyes, black eyeliner and the smile of a kitten. She's the kind of girl who still keeps in touch with all her ex-boyfriends. What can I say? She's a metamorphosis from farm girl to downtown woman and her name is Daisy.
Free love, baby.
Our chemistry worked like this: Here's this Keebler kid keeping up with boys nearly twice her height and I thought, who is this girl? She saw me burning the soles off my shoes in front of the Band Marino boys and it was then she said to herself, this boy is mine.
With a curl of the same smile that let me get away with anything as a kid, I somehow manage despite who I am to always surround myself with girls every boy tries to get to through me. (I smile using all the elements of my face. Even my eyebrows have this tendency to let you know exactly what I'm going to get you to do before you helplessly fall for me. Resistance is futile.)
And so, Daisy took me in. My license now read 4666 Hall Road.
"See you in Hall!" We'd tell each other.
This was the world of Hall: David Bowie blasting from her bedroom in the morning, dashing myself in and banging beats out our feet whether either of us were dressed or not. An endless current of band kids streamed in and out of the venue-size band room day or night hauling the usual suspects: acoustic and electric guitars, bass and keyboards, amps and snakes of heavy cords all bookended by duel speakers up to six feet tall.
There were epic, all-night tripping parties with Christmas lights pegged to the ceiling in a maze connecting every room in the house. We awakened an old 70s intercom system and installed an Ipod to it. Now any music we wished for manifested itself into a solid house of sound. (The Kills, Of Montreal, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, Vampire Weekend, Spoon, The Dandy Warhols, The Decemberists, Kings of Leon, Passion Pit and the Shins. With the power of our WI-FI connections combined, the music world was ours!) We lived by the code of MGMT lyrics interpreted only at face value.
This is our decision to live fast and die young. We've got the vision. Now let's have some fun!
On a table in the middle of the lawn, Bugs Bunny (of course) was displayed on loop for our dilated eyes to ogle and webbing the oak limbs above it, a canopy of white Christmas lights. With a ladder permanently leaned against the roof rain or shine, we had an unobstructed view of every color of star or planet clearly visible through acid eyes (red, green, blue, yellow, and amber) and watched as the constellations popped out of the sky to melt in its form down toward us. At one point, there were enough illegal party favors scattered about the floor to make snow angels with them.
Yeah, it's overwhelming but what else can we do? Get jobs at offices and wake up for the morning commute?
The only care in the world for the 'Kids in the Hall' was who would have to take care of the eternal stack of dirty dishes.
Then one day, transcending the damnation of physical attraction, I fell in love with my girl. As one Celtic singer once observed, "You're heart ain't yours to control."
Maybe heaven's kaleidoscopic eyes had been watching down on us living away our youth in perpetual distraction. We looked heavenward only in momentary nostalgia, a Santa fantasy we abandoned with broken hearts when we were children, each of us united in our own story of empty liberation.
Maybe it was then the stars became mad with jealousy. As perceived by one, heaven's wrath unleashed itself upon our lives and as I fell, this man would toil out of his own emotional expense to buy me back from a force he had no leverage over with nothing to offer in payment except the years of his life and an immortal, unexplainable love.
Dad.
As the hairs on his head turned gray, he kept his promise to answer any phone call at anytime of the day or night, sacrificing work or sleep to give value to anything I had to say, to cry my tears with me, to be shouted at when the heavens silently rejected my company, to afford a hospital visit that would rebalance my chemicals after one bad acid trip or to talk me down after the truck I was driving turned into a Chinese dragon as Asian accents and bells and chimes maddened my mind.
There are words I share with no man other than the greatest man I know. About as judgmental as a hippie, he was the only human being who would be faithfully ready after a text I sent one midnight.
"Shrooming! Wish me luck! Be there for me when I'm crazy!"
He was the first person I confided in when Daisy confessed she would one day honor me above all men, choosing to unite two timeless lines of ancestry with our love and the same man I turned to after someone more special than me snatched my little girl out of my hands and spirited her away from our spiraling life.
"You're heart ain't yours to control," heaven mocked me.
I am at this moment hauled helplessly out of my daydreams like a fish reeled in from the sea. Some nagging element of my subconscious was forcing me to face that connection I wanted to avoid at this point.
See to face it, I have had to look up out of the gutter toward Maualuga from a dizzying height to answer an overwhelming stream of questions. Like Charlie D's little Pip profoundly observes in Great Expectations, I may be young enough to misunderstand why but I have always carried a strong, righteous and persistent suspicion that I have been carelessly dealt a great injustice.
I've always felt cheated of purpose.
Here in the presence of all with cable and a remote is one lucky man riding talent to the top, born with just the right physical qualities. This might imply he had first dibs in the grab bag of circumstantial luck in this metaphysical womb of my own fiction.
Except (and the coincidence burned through my insides the highly combustible fuel of jealousy) that he was merely like me, an outcast looking for acceptance. And in wanting the same things I wanted, he found his purpose.
Is there purpose? Or blind luck? Losing my treasure map could suggest life was pushing me in an alternate direction. Or life could easily be interpreted meaningless, especially if I were brave enough to look back on my life as it were.
Had another nineteen-year-old been robbed of a central figure in his life just as his dreams were coming true because his father had been too stubborn to seek further medical attention? Had a young man's limitless potential been intersected with the disabling moment of his father's death simply by chance? Or did some all-seeing eye make sure this life would always end young? Would I really have been king of my own slice of the world if my ears hadn't failed me? Despite one's efforts to fly away, are we destined to a Prodigal return under Destiny's wing?
If we contribute an educated confidence toward saying yes, then there is a harsh conclusion we must face.
Rey's dad was taken while mine was allowed to live.
I can't even handle imagining life without dad. It gives me the creeps to think I'd be bones under a gravestone, or worse, left in the hands of a raging religiholic.
And if we wish to be foreign settlers with any hope of building on the grounds of this argument, then the element of timing comes into picture.
Maualuga would never have continued pursuing football if his dad hadn't thrown him in the family car one day to sign him back up. If the moment of his father's death had been shifted slightly back on the line of time, it would have had an esoteric effect on where this young man would be in the world currently. It would have an effect on every gut, side, legs, brains and all other perishables of the victims he's tackled since. And, consequentially, the infinite variations of teams victorious or defeated and the thousands of fans impacted by the profound change in the world's spin, if say, a man's death was timed before the simple and unique moment a father acted on behalf of his son.
Rey would certainly not have been at Cincinnati's Ronald McDonald House in June of this year among the throngs of admiring, little faces of the seriously ill, watching these children as he once had to watch another man under the same conditions. He wouldn't be autographing the money he lost in the alert hands of those who caught his passes or starring in the photograph of a teenage girl like it was, as Rey himself observed, an unforgettable moment of her anticipated prom night.
And still despite it all, his words rise up out of an everlasting inspiration to battle against everything he has faced and, as his bolstered confidence suggests, ever will.
“We were there for a reason and a purpose and I didn't want to leave without finishing what we came to do,” Rey explains in one Geoff Hobson article, “That's something I've always done. It's something my dad taught me.”
I am no hero. I did not inherit the spirit of the modern day warrior, pigskins in place of pikes. But I am not afraid to champion my father even if my gender is as focused on the exposure of weakness as the other gender is obsessed with weight. In theory, I might have invoked the luck that comes with being born Rey Maualuga, success with the price of a monumental loss.
If exchanged, Dad's time on earth would have been cut short before an irreplaceable moment in fatherhood that is respected and valued by all sons. A moment which defined my mentor as a true hero and role model to all you fathers and sons who read this, not in the specifics of the moment itself but in the unfathomable nature of unconditional love.
Here is the allegory of the difference between my parents.
After I came out to Mom, household objects were first mangled and then hurled. As I ran up the stairs in blind rage, Dad was already at the top, quick to rush to the sound of a midnight brawl. I was crushed under embarrassment, having been caught outside my finer moments, especially at the expense of humiliating exposure. I had broken a promise that a seven-year-old made one day to never again betray his most secret feelings. But the first question he asked me had nothing to do with the newest edition to the list of objects in the house broken out of anger.
"What's wrong, Nick?"
Since I may or may not have been sobbing hysterically and possibly talking with my chin on my chest to hide my face, I'm assuming he heard only the words 'mom', 'hate' and 'I'm gay'.
"What."
There was no question mark.
"I'm gay."
I try not to imagine the pathetic state of my sorry face as it looked up to him for his reaction. But immediately his broad shoulders softened, he sighed, wrapped his gentle, giant frame around me and gave me the biggest bear hug of my life.
In the freedom America pretends to live by, it is currently acceptable for people to hate you for the crime of doing absolutely nothing but possessing the same natural desire for love. Love that everyone else who has passed the requirement of being straight is unquestionably entitled to.
In the world I left behind, there is no defense, no compromise and no exceptions. It is a world of unfortunate discoveries, labels and then alienation. You have only two options, condemnation or starvation.
Beginning that night and through the years all the way to today, I am on an endless search for a hug that could ever be man enough to match the one that effortlessly obliterated an ancient wall separating 'us' from 'them' for centuries.
Had the date been shifted back sooner, had he never come out of that coma in 1985 after spinal meningitis swelled his brain unresponsive, we would have been robbed of the moment when one man defined to the world the limitless potential of true fatherhood.
That is the essence of a loss one man endured.
In closing, it has come to my attention the arguments of speculation-over-sense brewing dirty deep inside the bowels of the NFL community. It seems the football world is very different from where I left it on that station that wasn't airing Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears twenty years ago. Football is apparently about college party drama, GM drama, aptitude test drama, and the effeminate indecisiveness of recruitment leaders who seem to consider circumstances played out everywhere but on the football field. No matter that Rey Maualuga is the 2008 winner of the Chuck Bednarik Award or the defensive MVP of 2008's Rose Bowl or that he contributed to three years of victory in a row for the Trojans at the Granddaddy of Them All.
I realize I'm in no place to argue a topic I'm not qualified in. So I'll simply state the definition of the Chuck Bednarik Award. The award is presented annually to the defensive collegiate football player adjudged to be the best in the United States by the Maxwell Football Club (NCAA Head College Football Coaches, members of the Maxwell Football Club, sportswriters and sportscasters).
Under the mathematically precise leaders in NFL logic, all this somehow unquestionably adds up to the 38th overall pick in the 2nd round?
If it’s test scores you're looking for, give me a subject I know nothing about and somehow I manage to rack up straight As.
We've covered where this has gotten me.
And dear NFL community, are you claiming to have a purely legal college past even after every one of our lives were to be unraveled to the public in its entirety? Because if that is not the case, not only would pointed fingers be thoughtlessly judgmental, it would also be hypocritical. If the NFL wants professional respect, then maybe it should consider respecting the dead and the effect a death can have on the still living and the true value of one who still stays on top of his game despite it all. Not because the man's name comes up alongside Erin Andrew's on the first page of a google search.
But I'm sure you don't need some rock n' roll junkie to remind you that football is supposed to be, wait for it, all about playing football.
I have this sinking feeling though that comes with understanding. This is all about the strange nature of human beings the minute business gets involved.
"The main difference between a first-round player and a sixth is the money portion of it," Who-Dey Rey tells Feeney.
And as Anthony Stalter wisely posted for the Score Report, "No pro team is going to want to invest first round money on a player who was (reported to be a handful) while in college."
This may seem discouraging but I have been convinced through his escalating comeback on and off the field that he will assume his original momentum and when the time is right, Rey Maualuga, son of Talatonu Maualuga, will prove them wrong.
I cannot proclaim to the world that there is a purpose in our suffering or why Rey Maualuga finds himself wearing a tiger-striped helmet for work every day or why Daisy's mom was diagnosed with the same cancer on the same October of the same year or why my little girl must be united with Rey in helplessly watching their hero slowly dying from a great distance or why all of these surreal connections leave us with nothing more than unhappy, unanswered questions in their painful wake!
I am at the point in life where I can no longer rely on other people's experiences anymore, whether it be divined by ancient records nobody truly knows the origins of or by defaulting on Daddy's faith. Life must be individually lived to understand it. If we each stand alone as the only one of our genetic kind, subject to development or destruction under the circumstance of environment and nature's timing, all of these elements spinning around like a wheel of fortune, then one can only go so far in mimicking somebody else's path. And each new day I must perpetually tread water in the deep, dark oceans of the unknown, having no foundation to settle and build.
But I do have this truth to embrace.
Out of great struggle, no matter if the battlefield is under bright lights or beside a hospital bed or wherever I am lost now, history proves only out of great struggle is there ever potential for ultimate greatness.
Go Bengals.
