BROTHERHOOD

Ask not what your teammates can do for you; ask what you can do for your teammates.

—Magic Johnson

I went into the NFL thinking like a mercenary: this would be a business, and the goal was to get in, kick ass, and get out. I didn’t need to make friends. I just needed to provide for my family and move on. I learned this would also be the place where I’d find the truth about what I could be, and where I’d meet the people without whom I cannot imagine my life. It’s not the championships or the Pro Bowls. It’s the blood relationships that the intensity of this league allows you to build with the people around you.

I signed with the Seattle Seahawks in April 2009. Walking into that locker room for the first time, I felt so much doubt. When you are undrafted, the question of Do I belong here? shadows your every step. But then I saw people I knew from college, people I’d competed against, and they were kind to me. No one made me feel like I had snuck in the back door. All of a sudden I was just another rookie, and that’s exactly what I needed to believe. According to my coaches, I played like a first-round draft pick in preseason. Then, I was the last cut in training camp, and it rocked me. I was walking around in a fog. The team said they would re-sign me as soon as possible if I stuck around, but I couldn’t afford to take that chance. I signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and balled out. But Tampa was rough on Pele and me. We were a young couple, strangers in a strange land. Everyone assumed we were from somewhere in Latin America and spoke to us in Spanish. I love my Latino/Latina sisters and brothers, but it sucks when people try to talk to you, trying to make friends or something, and you don’t know how to respond. We were trying to build our family in a new city without a community.

I was also on a losing team, but I took my job so seriously, as prepared by Tellus, that my sole focus was on proving myself. I was trying to win respect as a player who wasn’t drafted, and I needed to feed my family, so that pushed me harder than most. I learned how to be a pro in Tampa, thanks to two veterans who might seem as different as Jekyll and Hyde in this league: Ronde Barber and Albert Haynesworth. Ronde Barber was a cornerback and, in my opinion, should be on the fast track to the Hall of Fame. His reputation as one of the most professional, personable people in the league is absolutely deserved. Albert Haynesworth was a defensive lineman, with as many physical gifts as anyone in the league: six feet six and 350 pounds of strength and speed. Big Albert was the league’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2008, but he is known to fans as someone who has gotten in trouble off the playing field and as the player who once stomped on an offensive lineman’s head, which, while I’ve never done it … I can understand.

The public perceptions of Ronde and Albert are irrelevant to me. They were my mentors. I still call Ronde Barber, when I see him, “Big Bro.” The way he talked to me, seeing the way he trained and the way he took care of himself, were like taking a master class in being a professional. Albert Haynesworth took me aside and taught me the tricks about how to play on the line, things coaches don’t know unless they played. He also advised me to be smart with my money, something every player should learn, especially considering the statistics about how many NFL players end up broke. Albert took me and another young player, Gerald McCoy, the third overall pick in the 2010 draft, under his wing—two future Pro Bowlers—and made us into a couple of young beasts. Gerald McCoy is a really good person and friend. We thought we’d be in Tampa together forever, like Warren Sapp and Simeon Rice. We talk once a week, and to this day, we’ll see each other and say, “Man, if they’d just kept us together, people would have talked about our Tampa legacy forever.”

But when I became a free agent in 2013, I went right back to Seattle, signing a one-year deal even though I had better, longer-term offers from other teams. People ask me if that was a tough decision, given the way I was cut from Seahawks training camp as a rookie, but the truth is that even after four years in Tampa, I never stopped thinking about Seattle or its team. While on the Bucs I even had a dream that I would make it back to the Emerald City and we would win a Super Bowl. I wanted to see that dream through. Seattle’s vibe had connected with me: new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things. I saw people collaborating and respecting others for being different. That was so important to me and reflected the kind of life I wanted for my family.

The move back was good for Pele, also, given her family’s roots in the Pacific Islands. If that’s your background, Seattle is one of the few cities in this country, outside of Hawaii, where you have some representation and cultural connections. We wanted that not just for us but for our babies, too. Texas was so black and white and Florida was even worse. I was in Florida when Trayvon Martin was killed. I’ll talk more about that later, but for now I’ll say that it was hellish to live through. Seattle instead put out an energy, with different kinds of people mixing it up—Black, white, brown—in a way that felt more open and less conservative than anything I had experienced. I thought, “Man, I could really live here for the rest of my life.” It was just perfect for me. I’m convinced the feel of the city is one of the reasons why our locker room is unique in the NFL.

The Seattle locker room is a brotherhood. It’s a place where we can talk politics or talk shit, and the coaches believe strongly that we need to be ourselves. We need to be men. We don’t “belong to the team,” like one jackass columnist wrote about me last year. We belong to ourselves and to each other. In some other NFL locker rooms, if that kind of political environment developed and people were talking about real life in emotional voices, coaches would step in to say, “Don’t bring those politics in here.” There are teams whose head coaches even try to get players to sign a code of conduct, promising not to “bring politics into the locker room.” That’s a bullshit way of trying to keep people in a box. It’s also insulting: telling a group of grown-ass men basically not to talk to each other. Many players are willing to accept those kinds of terms on their humanity. But if a coach said to me, “I don’t want you saying those things,” I’d be like, “Then stop listening. It’s our locker room. Take your ass upstairs.” In our locker room, a critical mass doesn’t play that.

Our team is different. We talk about race issues. We talk about the NCAA. We talk about how to support one another’s foundation work. When people sign with our team and see how community-based the Seahawks are, and how we talk to one another, they’re overwhelmed: “Wow, your team pushes you to be out there, they push you to give back.” We reply, “No! Our team doesn’t push us to do it. We push ourselves.”

Early on in Seattle, I joked, “My only friends on the team are Benjamin and Franklin.” That was me trying to be funny. It also couldn’t be further from the truth. My teammates are my brothers. Most people go to work and hate their coworkers or never get to know them. They spend more time with their coworkers than with their own kids, but they never learn what makes them tick. This is one of the very few jobs where you need to be intertwined with those other people spiritually, because every movement you make has an end result—if you win or if you lose, if you walk off the field or if you’re carried off.

We’ve gone from teammates to brothers even though our backgrounds, educations, and even home countries are different. I can’t tell you how emotional it was for me when Justin Britt, our offensive lineman and a leader in our locker room, a white dude from Lebanon, Missouri, put his hand on my shoulder while I sat during the anthem during the preseason of 2017. It felt like Brian’s Song, like we were Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, except neither of us had to die. Afterward, Justin said to the media, “I’m going to continue talking with Mike and exploring and just helping myself understand things. I wanted to take a first step tonight. And that’s what I felt like I did.” He even told the press that if he didn’t see things getting better in this country, he’d sit with me. That’s a brother.

I think about Cliff Avril, how we’ve worked together in this intense environment and gotten to know each other’s families. We started out with different ideas about how to bring change into the world, and we’ve chosen to intertwine them because we’re both passionate about helping people. He’s seen what I do in Seattle, and I’ve gone with him to Haiti to see the remarkable work he does there. We may approach things differently, but we share the same soul.

The journey of moving from teammates to brothers is like nothing else. Yes, ego and money can get in the way. It takes the right people, the right team, and the right city, but when everything comes together it’s a blessing. Every time you go out there and take the field, you don’t just represent your team or your city. You represent each other in a way that’s personal. I know if I make a mistake, Cliff Avril can get hurt, and then I’ve got to look his wife, Tia, and their children in the eyes. When you reach that level of brotherhood, I truly believe that’s when you win. You lose the ego, and it stops being about you. It’s about the people around you. People get it backward and think winning is the end goal. But when the goal is brotherhood, the winning will come and mean so much more. Your locker room isn’t just a place with coworkers or people trying to make bank. You transcend the money and the accolades that come with it. You are tied to one another spiritually and physically, not just at the workplace but outside the workplace as well. You feel their pain when they get injured. You cry with their wives. You mourn with them when members of their family pass. You work on their projects, you go to their children’s birthday parties, their anniversary celebrations, and you leave this league as someone more than when you entered.

Let’s talk about who makes up the core of this brotherhood in Seattle. I should say that one of the reasons we’re brothers is because a lot of us have chips on our shoulders. “Chip” doesn’t even do it justice. Call it a boulder. Call it Pikes Peak. We are a team of Pro Bowlers and Super Bowl champions, but very few of us were high draft picks. We were disrespected and dismissed, and we play mad on Sunday, trying to remind every team that they done messed up by passing us by. Trust me, that goes from players whose chip is obvious because they play with a mean mug all the way to the quarterback who is the smiling face of our franchise.

That’s Russell Wilson. If you had never watched the NFL and I told you our quarterback was a Pro Bowler, perennial MVP candidate, Super Bowl champion, and a college All-American who set the NCAA record for passing efficiency, you’d think he was some kind of golden child, number-one draft pick: Archie Manning’s other son.

But Russell Wilson was a third-rounder—and he was actually picked behind a punter. A punter! The main reason for that, in my opinion, is that a lot of NFL scouts just don’t know their business. They are risk averse, scared of doing something different or thinking outside a very tiny box. They have a type, and if you don’t fit that type you might as well not play. Russell Wilson is five feet ten, and that was enough for no one to take him seriously. Scouts have lost jobs that they would have right now if they had just picked Russell Wilson.

Beyond the play, Russ is central to this brotherhood. I see Russ evolving every year. I love him because he has laid claim to his own style of leadership and his own way of looking at the world. He is so genuine that people who don’t know him think he’s fake, which is ironic as hell. He’s himself. It’s crazy that people call him phony. One thing about an NFL locker room, you know who the phonies are within five minutes. If Russ were screaming like Tom Brady, with spit flying out of the corner of his mouth, that would be phony. Russ is himself. It’s like Muhammad Ali said: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”

Somehow a rumor became a big media story—that defensive players were mad because Coach Carroll “protects” Russell Wilson and treats him differently. The whole thing was just stupid. Everybody in the world is treated differently, in some way or another. Nobody is treated exactly the same. Even when you’ve got kids, you don’t treat every kid the same way. Also, Russ is a quarterback, and all quarterbacks are treated differently. Every team I’ve been on, from flag football on up, the quarterback has been treated differently. Not in a bad way. They’ve got a different sort of relationship with the offensive coordinator. I don’t like to talk to the defensive coordinator. Just tell me the play and let me do my job. But the QB and offensive coordinator have to be closer than brothers: they have to share a brain in order to understand the vision and what the other is doing.

Russ is a good friend and good people, and kids are attracted to him like he’s covered in candy. My oldest daughter told me Russell Wilson was her favorite player. That was too much. I took her TV. I said, “Russell Wilson can buy you a new TV.”

But I do have to give Russ credit. He helped me get a table when I called a restaurant and they were all booked up. I called them back a few minutes later and said, “Hey, this is Russell Wilson. I’ll be attending your restaurant today. Do you have any tables?”

And the hostess was like, “Yes! We can make a table for you! You were 22 for 30 the other night, 130 quarterback rating!” She knew every stat.

When I got to the restaurant with my wife and kids, I said, “Oh, thank you. I’m Russell Wilson.”

She was like, “Good joke.”

I said, “Gotcha.” She took me to the table and it was separated with a velvet rope—a makeshift VIP section. They had sparkling water and everything.

My brother is also Steven Hauschka, our former kicker. I miss Hauschka. The only NFL jersey I have in my house, other than my own, is Steven Hauschka’s. People think that being the place kicker is the simplest job on the team, but to me, you have to have a very special mind. The game is on your feet several times a season, and you’re only as good as your last kick. Adam Vinatieri won two Super Bowls on the last play, but if he’d missed his final field goal with the game on the line, he’d be a bum.

Hauschka is a really cool dude. I think of Hauschka and Justin Britt in very similar ways. One is a kicker and the other is six feet six and 320 pounds, but they are both my brothers. They have taught me that there are times when race doesn’t play a part in our interpersonal relations, and we all just become spiritual. People are friends simply because they have the same moral code. They believe in the same things because they are good people. Not on a shallow level, but on the level of being vulnerable, really getting to know somebody, and being there for each other. My white brothers are important to everything that we do, especially in confronting racism and what divides us. I want them standing with me, as Hauschka did when he was on the team and as Britt did on the sideline.

Marshawn Lynch is my brother. He is the best running back I’ve ever seen, a star at Cal–Berkeley, a star in Buffalo, and then a legend with the Seahawks. He retired for a year but then came back and played on his hometown team, the Oakland Raiders. Marshawn sat for the anthem the night before I did, holding an unripe banana. The significance of the banana is known only to Marshawn. After that preseason game, people were joking that maybe he came out of retirement just so he could sit for the anthem, that he’d felt left out in 2016.

Marshawn is an example of somebody people judge based on how he looks and talks, and they don’t understand the depth of who he really is or what he is saying. He rocks that look because it’s true to who he is. Mentally and spiritually, he’s as good a dude as I’ve ever known. He works for his community and his teammates, and whenever you call him, he answers the phone. He could be mayor of Oakland just by having his name on the ballot. I think he’s a great leader, who people might misunderstand much of the time, but what’s cool is that he doesn’t even care. When he sat for the anthem in the 2017 preseason, a reporter said to him, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.” And Marshawn replied, “I think that elephant just left the room ’cause a little mouse ran in here. Didn’t they say elephants are scared of mouses or something? That motherfucker left, cousin.” What does that mean? I have no idea, and that’s kind of what makes it perfect.

We also saw it before the Seahawks Super Bowl, when he said, “I’m just here so I don’t get fined” to the media, over and over again. I loved that. He just stayed true to who he is. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who didn’t say anything to the media and somehow got more commercials out of it. By saying nothing, he inspired the rest of us to speak our minds. He defies all expectations, and there are NFL fans who will never get that. But great leaders don’t conform to the norms, and he defies the norms every time.

Marshawn is obviously very charismatic on the field, and that’s where it starts. His two “Beastquake” runs, where he ran through the entire Saints team and then the entire Cardinals team, are like nothing I’ve ever seen on an NFL field. His big “Beastquake 2” run was the best touchdown I’ve ever seen. Afterward, I said he ran that like he was running to the North for freedom. We hadn’t seen a run like that since the Underground Railroad. When he is really motoring I see linebackers and safeties make “business decisions” to whiff on tackles instead of letting Marshawn hit them. That on-field charisma carries over to our locker room. His vibe is so intense that when he leaves a room you feel the void. When I walk past where his locker used to be, it’s like I feel his ghost. It’s beautiful and creepy. But I’m not scared of ghosts, so it’s cool.

Richard Sherman is our shut-down corner and a future Hall of Famer, and one of the most outspoken players in the game. He’s a four-time Pro Bowler who made the journey from Compton to Stanford, one of the smartest people in any room he’s in. He was also a fifth-round draft pick in 2011 and has proven himself the best corner in that draft, so he’s got that chip on his shoulder, also. We share a lot because Richard believes he was drafted so late because his coaches talked him down to NFL scouts for being outspoken. Richard is more cerebral than any player I’ve lined up with. You will never beat his mind on the field. His mind is tough to beat off the field, too. Richard has pushed me to think more deeply about what I’m doing and what I’m thinking. He has spoken out about the NCAA and about racism, and he’s written essays for Sports Illustrated challenging journalists to think through their use of words like “thug” and “posse” when they write about Black athletes. No doubt he has changed the language of sports journalism.

Richard also gives back to the community in ways that go unreported. If I’m doing a project and working with kids, I know I can get Richard—bam—on FaceTime and see their faces light up. I talk to Sherm all the time because he’s just who he is and I love him. We also had a public debate about the Black Lives Matter movement that cemented our bond, but we’ll get to that.

Kam Chancellor, our strong safety, was somehow also a fifth-round draft pick, and is another future Hall of Famer from our defense. He is central to why they call our secondary the Legion of Boom, because when Kam hits you, you stay hit: he has linebacker size and safety speed. When Kam was having contract issues, I did what you’re not supposed to do and spoke directly on national television to Seahawks owner Paul Allen to say, “Pay this man!” I just wanted to show Kam I had his back and that he should get his money. A lot of people have said, “I can’t believe you called out your owner on national television. Nobody’s ever done any shit like that.” But I thought, Fuck it, man, Paul Allen said that he respects me for being me, so I’ll just keep being me and see how that goes.

Doug Baldwin is one of the best wide receivers in the sport. He’s another undrafted Pro Bowler on the Seahawks. We might have the most Pro Bowlers drafted in the fifth round or later on one team in NFL history. He’s also out of Stanford, like Richard. Doug has been outspoken from the jump, addressing issues like police reform and mass incarceration and how it affects the Black community. He is driven by religious principles and the social gospel to make the world a better place. Doug practices his politics differently than I do, and that’s cool. He wants change and he tries to make it happen by sitting down with politicians and police chiefs. A lot of us are wrestling with how to go from tweeting about change or giving an interview to actually seeing it happen and sustain itself. I’m trying to do it grassroots, to make change through community organizing. I don’t think I’m right and he’s wrong for taking his own path. It’s like the three legs on a stool; we need all of them. We need people who are outspoken in interviews. We need folks sitting across from the powerful. And we need people at the grassroots.

I also had so much respect for Doug when he wrote this condemnation of the 2016 election and just put himself out there, vulnerable. Here is a portion of his essay:

The fact is that we are not currently living in a democracy. The fact is that the 1% of the 1% buy politicians and write policies. They control the gathering/distribution of wealth and power by distracting us with the importance of keeping up with the Kardashians. We’ve become a society [so] concerned with being individuals and looking out for oneself that we have forgotten the meaning of democracy. I know my thoughts may be concerning to some, but being on both sides of the coin has given me a great perspective. It’s scary to think that we are on a path to granting the wealthiest people in the world the power to control the masses. And maybe that is why so many people were willing to vote for a president that didn’t meet previous expectations for a president. The way of life of many Americans is being destroyed. Inequality is greater than it has ever been. And solidarity is nowhere to be found. The dream that America once promised has become a nightmare for a lot of people. The lack of hope and empathy has created despair and pain. Empathy and sympathy for not only your fellow American but your fellow human has been lost. We are more concerned with status [by] any means.

I mean … damn.

Jeremy Lane is our cornerback, a sixth-round draft pick and now one of the top corners in the league. He has taken a knee during the anthem, he has sat down, and he turned his back facing Justin Britt and myself. Jeremy’s outspokenness doesn’t surprise me at all. He’s a Black man from East Texas. You grow up in Tyler, Texas, you know racism is real. You don’t need anybody to teach you.

Earl Thomas, our other future Hall of Famer safety, is the outlier—he was actually drafted in the first round. Earl was so good at the University of Texas that not even an NFL GM could mess up his selection, although there were players picked ahead of him who are now out of the league. Earl is a quiet assassin. He’s quiet until you get to know him, and then he starts opening up. I texted him when I traded in my car for a Tesla. “You’re still getting gas, Earl. I’m electric, I’m trying to save the world!” What I love about him is that in both football and life, the man is a sponge, soaking up all the information in the room. It’s been great to see him become a leader.

Frank Clark is a player we need to discuss. He’s a linebacker we drafted in the second round, in 2015, and a very special talent. Frank came from a rough background. He grew up homeless. He has a history of violence against women, from back in college, an issue that means a great deal to me. But Frank’s trying to change. He’s trying to understand. He could very easily be a broken person by now. That he is not broken and continues to try to be better means, I believe, that he will stay on a trajectory to become a leader and reach kids who can’t otherwise be reached. He needs to be at peace with his past, make amends, and move forward. By virtue of being on my team, he’s also family, and when you are family, you help people to change and stand behind them on their journey. I don’t know what pushing people away accomplishes, especially when they’re young and need guidance. Frank sat with me when I sat for the anthem during our first home game of 2017. It was Cliff and I and young Frank. It meant so much to me, not just to have his support but also because it shows he is growing. I hope people give him the chance to show the person he’s becoming.

The 12s are also my family. For the uninitiated, that’s the nickname of the Seattle fan base. We may not agree on every issue, but you don’t agree with your family on everything. Seattle fans are some of the most famous in this sport for a reason. Their passion and their ability to hit record noise decibels when the other team’s offense is on the field are without compare. I once joked that the Seahawks are so popular in Seattle that “Russell Wilson got pulled over and the cop got a ticket.”

There are definitely some who don’t mind our being political as long as we keep winning and making the playoffs every year. If we start losing, the chorus of “shut up and play” might be as deafening as the fourth quarter of a tight playoff game. But there are enough politically grounded people in Seattle who would still support us.

Let’s be honest—being a fan is its own kind of thing. The ego of an athlete can quickly get it twisted. They aren’t fans of you the person. They’re fans of the way you hit the QB, catch the ball, or run and jump, and that’s fine. They’re fans of your uniform or the city you represent. But a fan is also someone we can reach. If they hear about the work we do off the field, maybe they won’t care. Or maybe they’ll see the hope we can bring to a poverty-stricken area, a prison, or our hometown, and maybe they’ll come out of their shell, and we can be more than just people who wear the same colors. I’ve seen it: the transformation of people in the 12s from being fans to feeling inspired. They start to look at you and root for you in a different way. It’s a different feeling. I love the 12s, and I feel a special connection to those who are taking this journey with me.

None of this brotherhood could develop without our coach, Pete Carroll, the man who gets younger every year. Coach Carroll is one of the few NFL coaches who are comfortable letting people be who they want to be. Everyone on the team also knows that when Coach Carroll was the big cheese at the University of Southern California, a private college in South Central Los Angeles, he didn’t hang out in the ivory tower. He went into Compton and Crenshaw to speak with players who were dealing with gang issues and lives that were torn apart, not just to recruit them for his team but as mentoring work. So when Pete Carroll walks into an African American family’s home and tells a player’s parents, “I’m going to take care of your son,” and means what he says, it builds up a lot of trust. He understands that people are individuals. A lot of coaches in the NFL, and coaches in general, want players to reflect their own ego. A coach who’s uptight and stressed out wants his players to be as anxious and unhappy as he is. But Pete is the opposite: his open-mindedness has let people be their true selves. We have a locker room full of characters. Pete has opened up the door for them to speak their minds, and it’s letting them grow into men.

Pete also understands that there are some people on this team who come from difficult situations, and others who do not. He doesn’t see all Black players as a mass. That’s important because it means we trust him when he comes to us.

Our brotherhood has been earned the hard way. It comes from winning the Super Bowl against Denver in 2014 and then losing against New England the next year. We have our scars, and we wear them like medals. We collaborate to inspire each other, and we support each other even when we disagree. Collaboration and solidarity are so important when you’re trying to change things. This came together for us in a whole new way when Kaepernick first took that knee in August 2016.

After Kaepernick made his stand, I spoke to him on the phone, along with thirty or forty other players on the line, to discuss what we could do to offer support. People were arguing, and it was chaos. Finally, I said to everybody, “Do what you feel is right. It doesn’t have to be taking a knee. It could be doing a back-flip. We don’t all have to agree on the idea of what we need to do, but we all have to agree on the message. The message needs to be that there are a lot of racial injustices going on in America. However you want to make a stance, be like Nike and just do it. And as long as that message goes out to everybody, it will be great.” But the media focused more on who was or wasn’t taking a knee than on the message. That’s propaganda and the disinformation machine at its finest.

In the Seahawks locker room, we did something before opening day that I bet few teams did. Pete Carroll brought us together and we talked for hours about the issues animating Colin’s move. We decided, as a team, to link arms before the opening game of the season, held on the explosively patriotic fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The NFL had all kinds of military tributes planned for that day, and even though Colin’s protest—all together now, for the thousandth time—had nothing to do with the military, it was a dicey atmosphere for planning an action. Some people criticized us for linking arms during the anthem, saying we should have done nothing but put our hands on our hearts. Other people were critical from the opposite perspective, angry that we didn’t all take a knee or burn a jersey at the fifty-yard line, because we’re the big, bad, outspoken Seahawks. But not every player is out there and political, and we agreed to do something that we could all buy into. Like I told the media afterward, I’ve got three kids, and if I ask what they want to eat for dinner, they are all going to say something different. It’s hard to get people to agree on a plan, and at the end of that emotional, hours-long meeting, when we all agreed to link arms, I felt like it was a big deal for us to come together—Black players, white players—and connect on one gesture. We wanted to do something symbolic of bringing the community together, and that’s what we did.

Linking arms also was a good organizing principle. It allowed us to involve the widest layer of people on the team. Instead of just a couple of us taking a knee, we wanted to expand it. The criticisms afterward, especially from people who supported Kaepernick, were hard to hear, and, in my view, they also aided the people who wanted to shut us up and shut us down. I believe that you have to meet people where they are at, and the easiest way to disable a whole bunch of folks is to turn them against each other. That didn’t happen. Our goal was to plant the seeds in the locker room and in these communities where we work and are seen as role models. We also wanted to pose an all-important question to everyone, not just players: “If you are concerned about these issues, what’s next? What are you prepared to do?”

The message didn’t get out there as much as I wanted, but for me, linking arms was a way to say, “If we’re going to talk it, we’ve got to live it, and the hardest thing for people to do is to live it. We want to protest. We also want to set an example as being the kind of people who take care of our families and our community; the kind of people who don’t do commercials with McDonald’s, poisoning kids; the kind of people who do more than tweet hashtags when a sister or brother is killed.”

My man Steve Hauschka was a vital voice in this meeting, telling white players that we needed to make a stand together. It took hours, and I mean hours, to talk it through as an entire locker room. People had tears in their eyes and were getting choked up while talking. It made me realize that when it’s all said and done, no matter who we are and no matter what we achieve on the field, we all feel one another’s pain. That’s when I felt that brotherhood cement itself, and I’ll tell you, it was one of the greatest feelings of my life. It was better than winning the Super Bowl. There was something about that meeting and the way we opened up to each other that I will never forget. You sit next to a person for four or five years and think you know them. Then it gets real and you say, “Wow, I never knew you felt like that. Dang, we really are brothers.”

I also felt I was seeing the possibility for men to evolve in this country, and not to hold anything inside. It’s tough to imagine a more macho atmosphere than an NFL locker room. Nobody ever wants to be emotional, unless it’s getting emotional about winning the next game and kicking ass. It’s easier, always, to be hard than to be vulnerable. But when I see teammates of mine, who can knock someone into next week between the lines, shedding a tear when they talk about the world outside the NFL bubble, it really changes your mind-set.

Of course we have our cliques. It’s a big locker room, and you’re drawn to people who think like you, dress like you, come from the same part of the country as you. It’s like, “Okay, I don’t know anybody here, but you’re from Texas, so we got something in common.” But the core that defines this team is the slowly expanding group of us that is socially minded. We understand that we are living in a defining moment. We are at a crossroads when it comes to our youth, their lives, the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the kinds of lives they are going to lead. We understand that because of technology and social media, we can play a role in shaping this future. Ten of us in a room can reach fifty million people. That’s power, and we take it seriously. We also know that this is why the big sports media networks, as well as the NFL, police and scrutinize our platform so hard. They want us to be brands, not men. They want us to keep it to sports—and I get it. It’s not us buying the season tickets or the luxury boxes, but at the end of the day, we’re human beings. We’re not just equipment.

My friends on other teams, they say, “Man, what are you guys doing? You are crazy! We could never do that here.” I’m talking about the best players in this league: top ten players going to the Hall of Fame. They feel constricted, yet they are the ones with the most job security. They love that we can be ourselves. For the majority of NFL players, the only time they really act like themselves is when they’re at home. They can dance and sing in the shower and shimmy with a hula-hoop, with Al Green playing. They see us and ask, “How is Michael Bennett saying whatever he wants to say? I want to do the same shit.” But more players could be themselves if they just tried. It’s like that expression, “You don’t know you’re chained until you try to move.”

If I were traded to another team, there would be no guarantee of a brotherhood. We fought for this as a team, and as long as some of us are in this locker room, it will remain a brotherhood: a political statement of a different way for a team to operate, and a break from the NFL macho “shut up and play” code of self-destruction. This team has taught me that sports don’t have to be toxic. They can be a force for good. What makes sports toxic so often is the greater society, which puts people on pedestals and lets people—from star athletes to Hollywood executives to presidents—get away with toxic behavior.

The essence of sports is beautiful: people coming together to achieve a goal regardless of their color, race, or religion. Everything about that sounds beautiful. It sounds like a healthy marriage. It sounds like commitment. It sounds like dedication. It sounds like passion. It sounds like everything worth rising out of bed for. But it gets destroyed by society, by valuing wealth over play; by professionalizing sports for our kids, which sets them against each other even when they are on the same team; by having locker rooms where people can’t be themselves; by caring about winning more than the process of how you get there. The glorification of those kinds of values is what makes sports toxic. I believe that sports has a role in changing society, from youth leagues to the pros. If nothing else, sports offers us a platform, both culturally and financially, to try to effect the kind of change that can transform entire communities and even shake up the world.