Korey Stringer was the NFL's Enlightened Man

This article originally appeared in the September 2001, issue of Esquire with the headline "The Enlightened Man." Tragically, on August 1, 2001, Korey Stinger, the subject of the story, died after succumbing to heatstroke on the second day of training camp. The horrible news came just as the article was about to arrive on newsstands. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade toAll Access.

First we have the bull. Yeah, that was his first piece. He’s stretching his V-neck down to provide a view of that bull depicted on his splendid left breast. Yeah, he knows. It’s the size of a pasta bowl, that breast. Yeah, it’s a dark-brown hunk of human worthy of fear and awe and God’s glory. It’s a rock-solid, bulbous slab of man-flesh commanding adoration. Yeah. But what about the bull? Now, ain’t that a good bull?

Tattoo-wise, the bull was an obvious first choice for a man whose body has always been the main event. A more or less 338-pound, six-foot-four body with a forty-six-inch waist and a size-14 foot, a body that could easily bring to mind thoughts of steak and hide and cowboys getting thrown off it. The kind of body that was always different, always extreme; you know, his mom would get so sick of having to take his birth certificate to T-ball games back home in Warren, Ohio, to prove that, in fact, her son really wasonly eight years old, even though he looked more or less like a sycamore tree.

He shrugs. This movement makes him sweat. Yeah, he almost always sweats, beads of liquid pooling and spilling, pooling and spilling down a deep brown brow. A thoughtful, earnest brow that seems to bear the weight of centuries but actually is topped by dreadlocks sprouting happily, joyfully, as if dancing maybe to the theme song from Wally Gator.

Original Esquire magazine spread, September 2001.

His cell phone rings. Doodle-loodle-leet. Doodle-loodle-leet.It’s his dad on the cell phone. His dad is saying, How about I make liver and onions on the stove for when you come home to Warren, Ohio, tomorrow? Korey feels a glow of happiness inside him. It’s this whole situation, is what it is. Here in his roomy house in the fine Hillcrest Lakeview Farms development in suburban Minneapolis, with Kelci upstairs cooking chicken in the oven and their three-year-old boy, Kodie, watching Dipsy and Tinky Winky on the kitchen TV. And him, Korey Stringer, down here on the supersized black leather couch in front of the big-screen with the PlayStation on, and now with his dad calling about cooking liver and onions on the stove for when he comes home. Has there ever been a more perfect and comfortable intersection of time and space? This, he thinks, is what people long for. People don’t really long to be rich or famous. Most people long to be comfortable. Comfortable with their families and comfortable with their houses and comfortable in themselves.

He realizes, okay, comfort differs from man to man. Because for him, comfort is also the feeling of being in like thirty car wrecks every Sunday afternoon. Yeah. Comfort is trying to knock the living shit out of some enormous, angry, bile-spewing brute snarling at you from across the line, over and over again, every play, like eighty times, banging your head into a wall of viciousness and barbarity. It really is. You know, football is a violent game. That’s why you use words like destroy and crush and dominate and kill and all like that. Most people, like the average person, if you were an offensive lineman and you ached in the places that he aches after the game, after three hours of just heaving your entire body into men the size of side-by-side refrigerators, you would go to the hospital probably. You would go to the hospital and get yourself checked out.

But it makes him comfortable, so that’s his gig. It makes him comfortable because he’s an expert in controlled rage. He’s twenty-seven years old, he’s started all but three games at right tackle for the Minnesota Vikings since he entered the NFL seven years ago, he’s been doing this since junior high school, so trust him, he’s an expert. Football gets in your muscle memory, is where it gets. It gets to where the hard part is not doing it. That’s where in the past he has always messed up. That’s where, more or less, you could see his life falling apart. During the off-season. Never during the season, when he had the sweet, dependable rhythm of getting in thirty car wrecks every Sunday to count on.

This brings to mind his second tattoo. He pulls his sleeve up to provide the view. Yeah, they make belts for women that would be too small to fit around this upper arm. Yeah. But here on this upper arm, we have the initials “FTW” forming an arc over the planet earth, which is being cupped by a human hand supposedly intent on crushing it. This piece, inscribed on Korey’s right arm when he was twenty-two years old, bears full and exact witness to the sum of his belief system at the time of its inscription: “Fuck the World.” Yeah. That pretty much said it. He calls this period of time his FTW stage. It was his second year in the NFL. It was ugly. It was the culmination of everything. It was the dark cave into which the pilgrim retreats and, if it shall come to pass that he truly is to become the mythic hero, finds the way.

Which is damn convenient. Because now in his sizable square head, he has converted FTW from “Fuck the World” to “Find the Way.” And when you really examine the tattoo, you have to note that the hand isn’t really going to crush the earth at all; matter of fact, that hand is holding up the earth and all its people with all their problems and all their badness and all their goodness, whatever their gig may be.

His gig. Is he wandering too far off his original point? He’s sorry, but this is the way his head works. He spends a lot of time alone with his head. That’s like his most comfortable place probably in the world. He’ll just sit there and talk to himself in his head, and of course when you’re talking to yourself in your head, it doesn’t matter how much you wander off your original point. It’s funny. People don’t automatically associate the word pensive with a giant football player such as him. Matter of fact, people don’t expect anything they first get from Korey. Like, he’s a clown. He’s an entertainer. He can do impressions of anybody; he’ll keep the crowd happy no matter what it takes. His perspective on it is, he has a duty to give you every opportunity to have the chance to like him. But people have no idea, like maybe only a couple people have an idea, that in his head he isn’t funny, he’s serious, he’s thinking stuff through constantly.

He’s sweating. He brings up a towel to wipe off the sweat. He almost always has a towel with him to wipe off the sweat. His position on it is, you’ve been blessed with an automatic sprinkler system, you should always bring a towel. He changes the big-screen from PlayStation over to ESPN. He holds the remote gently, like it’s a gerbil or a hamster maybe. His fingers are long and thin and still and tender, his forearm as thick as a car door.

His gig. Don’t get him wrong, there are frustrations during the season. There are the ones you’ve probably heard of. Like a defensive lineman, that guy could be on the field for fifty plays in a game, but he gets two sacks, and, you know, he had a great game. He’s player of the week. Then you take an offensive lineman who doesn’t really get a break, doesn’t get to rotate and stay fresh like the defensive linemen do, has to continually stand there and bash himself into guys, and he might be on the field for eighty plays in the game, but he gives up two sacks and he’s a bum. He’s trade bait. Regardless of whether the other seventy-eight plays were excellent. It’s those two sacks that everybody is going to talk about. It’s not a good position to play if your intent is glory.

But there is another frustration. There is this whole business of being cut off from where you just came from. From the past, you might say. When you think about it, his job as an offensive lineman is to move forward into a place that doesn’t actually matter except to the people in the present, who haven’t even gotten there yet—okay? Just stay with him on this. It’s like once you break the huddle, you’re thinking about the play, the snap count, the guy that’s lined up over you, what the defensive alignment is. You’re thinking about which way your man is going to go and how that’s going to affect the play that you’re running. You’re blocking. You’re attempting to move a three-hundred-pound man in a direction he totally does not want to move in. This goes on and on; time is elongated, you might say. You’re blocking so long—at least it feels so long because you’ve got your back to everything, to the action, to the quarterback, to the running back—on and on and on it seems like, because now all you’re feeling, it’s like you almost can’t stop yourself, it’s like you just gotta know, you want to turn your head around and look back and see what the hell is going on in the play, in the present, in everybody’s whole reason for being here today. You get curious is what you get. But you can’t ever look back. You are being paid almost $4 million a year to be a forward-headed bull, to use every available ounce of your God-given talents of explosive acceleration. You are among the best in the world at being a forward-headed bull. Even though looking back is basically 100 percent fundamental to who you are.

Looking back is Korey’s way of understanding. Looking back at where he came from and how he got here. He spends a lot of time in his head doing this. Just in everyday life even, he spends a lot of time in his head going back to Warren, Ohio. You might say he spends a lot of time in his head gaining historical perspective.

It’s funny to think about. He’s just making this connection right now: His high school coach at Warren G. Harding High School was a history teacher. Maybe that’s how he came to appreciate history so much. He loves to read. Mostly biographies. He loves to read how other people got where they got. And anyway, he’s just thinking about this now: Do you know now they got a coach at Warren G. Harding who doesn’t even teach—his whole entire job is to coach football? That can’t be good for the kids. It certainly can’t. How can it be good for a kid to idolize a man who is paid to think football is the center of the universe?

That’s Korey’s job with his rookies. He calls them hisrookies. He thinks of it as his job. Keep the young guys reminded of the fact that there is more to life than football. Keep the vibe in the Vikings locker room loose. It’s a high-pressure situation, but it’s still the game you grew up playing as a kid. Oh, there’s so many things to teach his rookies.

Like, earlier today, he drove his rookies back to their hotel. Oscar and Mo and Isaac. More than thirteen hundred pounds of human in one car. It was after a blazing-hot day of pushing the five-man sled around while offensive-line coach Mike Tice was riding on top, Tice all clean and perfect with his Bermuda shorts on and his skinny calves, yelling with that booming voice, you know how he does, Get your hands inside, there’s a helmet there, I want your hands on each side of the helmet, I want the drill done perfectly, keep your hands on each side of the helmet, push the pad, if I see fingers outside the pad, you’re gonna go again, I don’t have anything else to do today. Set, thirty-eight, thirty-HUT! We’re not done yet, all right, here we go, all SET, thirty-eight! Thirty-HUT!

Oscar and Mo and Isaac, they were tired. They probably had headaches. They were stuffed like giant baked sweet potatoes in Korey’s car, reminding you why General Motors invented a car as big as a Yukon. “Is there any particular music you’d like to listen to?” Korey said to them. “Okay, we got the oldies station. We got a little bit of every kinda CD, you know, I take requests: EPMD, Jackson 5, Bill Withers, Keith Sweat, Al Jarreau….”

The guys didn’t respond; they just sat there, smelling like a pine forest after rain. So Korey put in Al Jarreau, cranked it.

“Yo, Korey,” Oscar shouted over the music. “I gotta get me some new pants. Where I’m gonna get me some new pants?”

“All right, okay,” Korey said, pleased to oblige with the inside track on where a giant man might find clothes in Minneapolis. “I’m gonna write you down the directions. I’m gonna tell you how to get to the mall with the Big and Tall.”

See, now, most guys, they don’t pay any attention to the rookies, whereas Korey gives them directions to the Big and Tall. Korey routinely has them over to his house, throws some burgers on the grill. Hey, he believes every human being on this earth, no matter what their station in life, has the right to be comfortable.

He believes “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He mostly came to this belief when he was a rookie, wishing he was done unto better. He was barely twenty-one. He left Ohio State a year early to become a Minnesota Viking. Overnight he went from not being able to afford to pitch in for a pizza to making like a million dollars a year. He was supposed to be happy. He was supposed to be on top of the world. Instead he was sitting there all by himself in a Minneapolis hotel room with free soap and free shampoo, bored and afraid and soothing himself with TV and beer and calling home to his mom and his dad and his brother and his sister and Zig and Pap Pap and anybody else who would talk to him. They would say it’s going to get better, they would say it’s always hard starting out new somewhere, but of course what they couldn’t know was that first it had to get a lot worse.

It always comes back to this. In his head it always comes back to FTW. In a thousand languages over thousands of years, this is the story of the enlightened man.

Okay, now, this right here is Southwest Boulevard. This is his street. It looks a lot smaller now. It was huge when he was coming up. He’s crammed into the driver’s seat of a bright-red Jeep Grand Cherokee rented from the Avis corporation, and he is dressed up fancy to come home here to Warren, Ohio. He’s in his mustard-yellow velour warm-up suit and he’s got on his big triangle diamond earrings and his big charm bracelet and a platinum necklace as thick as a copperhead snake.

This is the house he grew up in. His brother, Kevin, lives here now. He just had this garage built. It’s kind of swampy back in that corner. But for the most part, this is it, you know. In Warren you could get a decent job, either at the GM plant or at Packard Electric. You got one of those jobs, you could afford a little house to raise your kids in. There were blacks and there were whites here in the Palmyra Heights section. You grew up knowing which you were, but you grew up wondering why it mattered, since everyone had more or less the same basic job and the same basic house.

Him and Kevin, they shared the room with that window right there. Kevin is two years older. Kevin had allergies. He was all brains, you could say. Korey was brains, too, but a different kind. Korey had a certain philosophicalness to his being. His main thing was, he just wanted to do what he wanted to do. This, you might say, was at the root of his philosophy.

Okay, Chris and Grady lived right here. And Shug and Shawn there. And Michael and Terrence. Clarence and Junie. Jermaine and Elbert. Clyde and Mitchell right there. Kevin and Toot. Popeye, Trevor, and CC. It seemed like every house had boys his age in it to play with. Baseball was Korey’s main sport coming up. He was a natural athlete, good at anything he played, one of those kids who could hypnotize you with his power and rhythm and flow. His mom would not let him play football until he reached junior high school, which was kind of ridiculous when you consider football was everything in Warren, Ohio. Like in the old days when his father was born, like, if a baby boy was born, they’d give him a small miniature football at the hospital. Yeah. That tells the story right there.

But really, to Korey, any game was cool. Kickball, stickball—he’d compete at how many lightning bugs you could catch. His main thing was not losing. Just like he and his mom and Kevin would play Parcheesi or Trouble or something, every single night they played a board game, and if Korey came out the loser, it would be like something inside him was dying, like he was saying goodbye to a friend, having a damn funeral. Tears would start pouring out.

Korey was hungry all the time. No matter how much he ate, it was never enough. It was like he just needed constant fuel for a body on fire with growth. One time he was in the backseat on a family trip to Detroit, he was like in seventh grade, and he was like, this is ridiculous. He told his dad to pull over. His legs hurt. It was like his bones were just growing right there in the car. Eventually, the doctors gave him support sleeves for his legs to give the tendons a chance to catch up with his bones growing. By the time he was fourteen, he was six foot one, 210 pounds. Another kid might’ve gotten made fun of for being so big, but Korey had charm on top of his bigness. He knew how to use his bigness. He was the one to say, “Yo, this is stupid” to guys bashing each other up on the bus, and his bigness really helped the point be made.

He stops at the stop sign, leans in to see if anybody’s at the Corner Store. All right. Yeah. Now. This is his other street. This is Fourth Street. This is the house he lived in when his mom and dad fell off for a while. They’re together now. His Aunt Becky lives here now in this house. His father’s parents still live next door. You want to go meet Pap Pap?

Pap Pap is waving out the window. Pap Pap is wiry thin with practically nothing on him but a belly and a smile. He sure is glad to see Korey. Grandma is upset because she didn’t know anyone was coming or she would have made herself presentable. “You’re still the most beautiful girl in the world to me,” Korey tells her, and plops himself into the Barcalounger because Pap Pap took the couch in front of the big-screen, where Tim Conway and Don Knotts are starring in The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. Pap Pap, he’s complaining about the Troy-Bilt rototiller he got, it’s so hard to switch the gears, he should have gotten the Honda.

“I guess you noticed all my teeth fell off the top,” says Grandma, who is sitting out of view, in the dining room. “They just up and fell apart.”

“They fell apart?” Korey says.

“Well, something happened!” she says.

“Uh-huh,” Pap Pap says.

“It just means you went through a lot of chewing, Grandma,” Korey says.

“Yeah.”