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Panel Discusses Off-Field Issues With Players
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| Eugene Robinson, Bill Curry and Vai Sikahema |
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by Mike Spofford, Packers.com
posted 10/16/2007
Just before heading out for their five days off during the bye week, the Green Bay Packers held a team meeting on Tuesday that gave them something to think about outside of football.
Guest speakers Eugene Robinson, Bill Curry and Vai Sikahema, who all played for the Packers at some point in their NFL careers, held a roundtable discussion moderated by former Packers center and current TV and radio broadcaster Larry McCarren during which they openly shared some of the pitfalls and personal setbacks they experienced during and after their careers.
"Each of them had a very powerful message about life, about mistakes they've made, about ways to correct things they've had happen and things that they'd do differently," defensive end Aaron Kampman said. "It was things that they've learned from their experience transitioning out of football and into real life."
The meeting wasn't meant to be a "watch out" for this-or-that discussion - "The guys don't need that. They won't listen to that," said Curry - but an explanation of some true, personal accounts the players could learn from.
"If we tell them, 'Here's where I almost destroyed my life, and here's what happened, and here's what you can do to prevent having to pass that way,' they'll listen to that," Curry said. "I would have."
Curry's not just saying that, either. He described to the players how absolutely devastated he was when his career ended. After 10 seasons with four different teams (his first was the Packers, in 1965 and 1966), Curry wasn't the same player after a serious knee injury and saw his career end in Green Bay when he couldn't beat out, coincidentally, McCarren for the center spot in 1975.
"When that day comes and either you're in the ambulance or you're called into the GM's office, and you know in your heart I'm not going to play anymore, it is so crushing," Curry said. "It is such a precipitous fall.
"I wasn't ready. It crushed me. It was so demoralizing that I fell into a lot of bad habits, and I'm not proud of that."
Curry said it took him a few years to straighten out, stop wallowing in self-pity, and realize he had a family he was responsible for and a life yet to live. When he came back to Green Bay as an assistant coach in 1977, it was therapeutic and it helped get him back on track, knowing he couldn't stand up in front of his players and tell them to mind their personal lives if he wasn't doing so himself.
"If I can just tell that little story here and somebody says, 'Yeah, it's probably my last year, and that day is going to come for me so I'd better get ready, I'd better prepare myself emotionally and financially and physically,' maybe they can avoid the pitfall I fell into for a couple of years," Curry said.
Sikahema, a running back and special teams standout who played for three franchises over eight years, including the Packers in 1991, said the reason it can be difficult for players to think about their futures is they're trained to have nothing but next week's game on their minds.
"The paradox is this - the coaching staffs have a vested interest in making sure these guys have a single-minded focus to their jobs," Sikahema said. "It's not in their best interests as coaches to have them thinking about anything other than this week. But they have to, I'm not talking football-wise, but in their lives."
Amongst the many serious anecdotes shared, Sikahema told a humorous one that illustrated how easy it is to be unprepared for life after football. In his final year at Brigham Young University, Sikahema's Cougars were on national television and in the midst of a good game, Sikahema's personal profile (height, weight, hometown, etc.) was put up on the screen.
Watching the videotape of the game afterwards, Sikahema was embarrassed to see that, as a fifth-year senior, his profile noted his major as undecided.
"I was just cringing," Sikahema said. "A fifth-year senior, undecided major, but that's what happens. You go to college and think you're going to play football the rest of your life, and you manage to get in the pros and you think you're going to play the rest of your life and continue to make this money. But I try to tell them you have to plan ahead.
"What we share with them is they need to plan and prepare for the future. If they didn't do it before, they need to start now."
It's a message that hit home with a lot of players, whether rookies or veterans.
"Something I've been thinking about a lot is the balance," rookie kicker Mason Crosby said. "They talked about balancing your personal life and what you want for the future, and right now with football and everything.
"That's the hardest thing coming from college. You had school and everything scheduled, and you knew what was going to happen. Now you're responsible for your own life and everything that's going to happen, and you have to find the balance."
Hearing it from former players who had to go through it themselves, with varying degrees of success and failure, helped the players connect to the message being delivered.
"The big component everyone saw is you don't want your identity wrapped up in what you do, but rather in the person you are, the man that you are," Kampman said.
"The biggest thing for me is I really appreciated the guys sharing their hearts. Their lives were on display pretty much in front of the guys. I know I really appreciated it, and hopefully a lot of guys did as well." |
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