It’s safe to say that the people of James Madison University certainly didn’t know what to expect with my arrival in the fall of 1982. Even more so, though, I had absolutely zero idea of what to expect. Outside of the football stuff, which was fine, I was probably more prepared to live among the Amish than what was awaiting me.
My challenges had nothing to do with James Madison, which is a beautiful place with green grass (not the kind you smoke, though they had that, too) and buildings that we certainly didn’t have in Gladys. Remember, we never traveled anywhere, so this was a new world for me. Anywhere was going to be a new world for me.
I didn’t have any white friends when I was growing up. Our town was segregated. But when I went to college, 90 to 95 percent of the campus was white. Yet they didn’t treat me or make me feel like people did when I was growing up. Everyone treated me with respect. No one looked down on me. So that was a big part of my new world, just feeling like another person, a peer even.
Also, there was just being away from home. The farthest I had ever been was Lynchburg, which is about 35 minutes outside of my hometown. And then I had to go all the way up to James Madison in Harrisonburg, which was like a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I remember when my mother dropped me off for my freshman year. She read me the riot act the entire ride there. I mean, she chewed my ass out in ways you couldn’t imagine. She told me that my room was gone back home, and that I could come back to visit, but that I wasn’t staying. I knew she wasn’t kidding around. It was her way of letting me know that this was my chance in life, this was my time to change my world, our world, and there was no running home. There was no failing.
So there we are, standing in my room on campus. My mother fixes the bed all nice. I’m scared as crap, and she sends me out to get my footlocker from the car. As I’m going back toward the dorm, she’s walking past me, and I figured she’d left something in the car and was going to bring it in. I brought the footlocker to my room and I went back outside to find her. She was gone. I’m talking nothing but a memory. No kiss, no final words of encouragement. She was headed back to Gladys. That was 12 years before Friday was released, but that was my “Bye Felicia” moment. And it was a very scary moment. I felt like she abandoned me because I needed her support. In retrospect she was showing me tough love, or maybe it would have been too emotional for her to say goodbye. I have never asked her about it, so I’m not sure.
We went down for our first team meal, and I didn’t realize that freshmen were supposed to be in the back of the line. I was up in the front. Those offensive guys, defensive guys, too, started telling me to get my ass in the back, and I said no. So they start telling me what they’re going to do to me in practice. Hey, they screwed up on that one big time. I don’t know what they smelled, but they didn’t smell the dog that I am. I lit them up. From the moment I walked on the field, I started and dominated whoever they threw in front of me. And I was barely 175 pounds at this point.
If college was just about playing football and socializing—not to mention James Madison having a lot more girls than guys—there wouldn’t have been a happier dude in Virginia. There was another aspect, though, one that became the greatest challenge of my entire life. It was obvious after my first week of taking classes that I had a ton of deficiencies, starting with reading and writing comprehension. Here I was sitting there at this prestigious academic university of higher learning and I could probably read and write at only a fifth or sixth-grade level. It was all because I was born in Gladys, where education wasn’t a priority. I am certainly not without blame in this; I don’t want to be that guy blaming everyone else for my own problems. Still, it was way too easy for me to float through the system.
Those last couple of years of high school, when it was obvious I could play football in college, no one helped me out in terms of preparing for the SATs or any of that stuff. The first time I took one of those tests, I just connected the dots when filling in the circles with a No. 2 pencil. I think the test was supposed to take three hours and I was finished in 10 minutes. That wasn’t a good sign. Someone should have noticed that I was struggling.
I guess they were understaffed, or maybe they didn’t like me, or maybe they didn’t think I would amount to anything because of the poor neighborhood I was from. I’m not sure. I never went back and asked. When I left my high school, I left my high school for good. I think I went back when my nephew graduated, but that’s it.
My biggest problem has always been that I have a hard time hearing words the correct way, so I would struggle to pronounce words. I couldn’t hear the syllables. To this day, I really have a tough time sounding out words because of that. Other kids could sound it out and spell the word. As for me, I was sitting next to them shaking my head and failing another spelling test. I’m not sure if I was dyslexic or what. I was a slow reader and writer, but part of that problem was not knowing the words. I couldn’t comprehend in the same time that others were. I needed it slowed down.
I honestly never minded school. Learning about history was interesting, and I’ve always been fascinated by people who changed the world like Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King, even an evil man like Hitler. I mean, how was this awful lunatic able to get all of these people to follow him? And I could listen to every speech Dr. King ever gave again and again.
Let’s be honest, though, there was one reason I was at James Madison. That was because I played football. Now, I don’t know what was going on at big-time programs then in terms of going to class or having someone write papers for the football team, but I’ve heard stories. At James Madison, though, academics was first, and football was second. At least that was the case under the head coach who was there my first two years. He was Challace McMillin, a soft-spoken Christian and one of the finest men I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.
As I mentioned earlier, coach Danny Wilmer, the savior who found me in the middle of nowhere and recruited me to James Madison, told my mother that he would make sure I graduated. And he meant that, too. I was fortunate to come in contact with some really decent and honorable men. However, Coach McMillin was the one who truly believed I could graduate college. He had a few rules. He was by no means a stickler, but there was one set in concrete: his players would attend class. I’m talking about every class. If you skipped a class, he would find out, and there would be repercussions. He didn’t care if you were an All-American, the singular most important player on the team. If you missed a class without a reason, he would sit you down without hesitation. Those first few weeks on campus, he explained to me that the school would offer whatever support, whatever extra help was needed for me to succeed in the classroom.
Know what? I’ve never really thought about this, but I was incredibly lucky that none of those big-time schools were smart enough to recruit me because I wouldn’t have just walked on the field that first day and been the best defensive player. So I would have needed to focus more time on football. And who knows what the academic situation would have been like, if they were strict about players attending class? On every level James Madison was perfect for me.
This is important to understand: I never, ever, ever thought about playing in the NFL. Hell, I barely knew what the NFL was. I knew “Mean” Joe Greene and the names of a few teams. That was it. I knew zero about the league and/or professional football. My dream was going to college, earning a degree, having a real job that required me to think, and not having to return to Gladys.
I was not going back. I couldn’t do it. All those people, teachers, coaches, guys in the neighborhood, who predicted I’d be back after hearing I was going to college, weren’t going to win. I love proving those who don’t believe in me wrong. I think we all do. That’s what college was to me. And football gave me a chance to do that. I always tell coaches, almost every day, just give someone a chance. You never know what’s going to happen.
When you’re on the wrong side of the tracks in life, you don’t know there’s an opportunity for college. And that’s not only back in my day; it’s still happening. So I try to go down to those places, the worst neighborhoods in this country—the worse, the better for my message—and tell them to dream big. That’s what happened to me. I dreamed big. So when I say academics were my focus more than football, that’s not revisionist history. That’s the absolute truth.
The first week I signed up for multiple reading and writing labs, which I wouldn’t receive college credits for. There were several women there who ran the labs, and those ladies did me right. I wish I remembered their names. They were so wonderful, the most selfless teachers imaginable. After every other student had left, they spent countless hours working with me.
And I’m like a pit bull. When they told me I could go to these labs, I bit and I held onto it. I went every day. Every single day the doors were open, I was in those labs trying to catch up from a lost childhood of education.
Know what story I find myself telling a lot? The first time I went to a writing lab they had me write a paper for homework. So I come back and hand it to the woman, and she says, “Oh my God. This is…how is this possible?”
And I’m standing there like, yeah, I wrote it, I killed it, I’m the next Hemingway, watch out world, here I come. The woman in this soft, kind, voice looks at me in almost disbelief and says, “This is a paper of maybe an eighth grader. How are you at James Madison?”
I yanked the paper out of her hand, ran outside, and tears started coming to my eyes. As I stopped crying, though, I realized that if I was going to stay in college, then I had to go back in there. So I walked back in, handed her the paper, and I said, “Please help me. Please help me. I don’t want to fail. I can’t fail.”
And bless her, she did. She helped me through a lot. I spent so much more time in those labs than on the football field. That’s no lie. The football team also offered us tutors, and I took advantage of those, too. I used every tool available to me academically. They taught me how to structure papers, they taught me ways to increase my reading comprehension. They taught me all those things I should have learned in high school. I stayed there during the summers to make sure I was on pace to graduate. During the season I could take three or four classes so I could dedicate myself to both football and school. I would then take two classes every summer to catch up.
I am fortunate, and this is the case to this day, in that I have a one-track mind. If I’m doing academics, that’s all I think about. If I’m playing football, that’s all I think about. And while I felt more comfortable at James Madison than ever before, I was hardly a social butterfly, so I didn’t have many friends. I probably had two or three guys I hung around with here and there. That made it that much easier to spend almost all of my time studying or even just reading a book that wasn’t assigned. The more I read, the quicker the process became. I was recognizing more and more words.
I was obsessed with turning my greatest weakness into a strength. My freshman and sophomore years, I earned almost all C’s. Know what, though? I earned every damn one of them and I’m not ashamed in the least. I tell my kids all the time: from where I came from, making C’s at a school like James Madison, any school really, was a big deal. Even all these years later, I have the highest regard for the professors at James Madison. Being a smaller school helped me so much. They knew all the students by name and they wanted to see you succeed. They would spend time with you after class, or you could stop by their office later in the week, and I did that all the time. Look, if there was anyone on that campus willing to spend a few minutes with me, anyone who could help me attain my goal of learning and graduating, I was all-in.
Coach McMillin, or Coach Mac as we called him, was an awesome, awesome coach. He treated all of us like we were his kids. And while he was incredibly demanding academically, there was a lot more to him. He was the first one to teach me how to break down film. I don’t even remember watching film in high school. Maybe we didn’t have a projector, or maybe they watched film on the days I was suspended. But Coach Mac really focused me in on watching for tendencies, habits opposing players had that could benefit me, that I could take advantage of. Over the years, especially later in my NFL career, I am guessing no defensive player watched more film than me.
He was also the first coach who taught me about visualization, how to see yourself being successful. He would talk to us about all these great things we could do, on and off the field, and how we should visualize ourselves doing them. This is something I would do for the remainder of my career. I would walk around campus thinking about being handed my diploma.
Now, so far, I’ve been painting quite the warm and fuzzy portrait of my college years, and that’s no joke. I truly enjoyed myself, and the people I encountered changed my outlook on the world. Not everyone was out to get me. For the most part, I behaved myself, but, of course, there were some issues. Although trouble wasn’t at every corner like back home, there was still just something in my brain where I almost needed to find trouble.
There was a track around our football field, and during practice I’d run players out of bounds and then launch them onto the track. For no reason either. I didn’t need one. I drew some dumb penalties during games as well. There were far fewer fights than in Gladys, but there was some pushing and shoving here and there. For the most part, I was playing mind games with people, especially my teammates. I always wanted to know just how far I could push someone.
You know what I enjoy? I enjoy ripping you a new one, and then when you’re ready to fight, calming you back down. My dad told me once that if I can make you laugh and I can make you cry, I control you. So it was psychology. I took a lot of psychology classes and I found more and more that I loved playing mind games. It was fun.
It wasn’t long before Coach sent me to see a psychiatrist, which was actually pretty cool. She helped me relax and not be as angry with the world. I got a chance to go talk things out with her a little bit. I’ve spent my life going to these kinds of doctors, and some have really made an impact on me. Others are full of BS and needed a doctor more than I did.
We would spend hours in Coach’s office just talking about life. Not so much football, just life. He was very proactive in my life, and without him those first years just making me believe in myself and believe that I belonged there, then I probably would have left because the next head coach that came in, Joe Purzycki, didn’t care. All he cared about was winning and losing.
They fired such a good man who made sure his players were student-athletes. That’s the BS they have been trying to sell us as a society all these years, right? Well, Coach Mac went 17–16 in my first three years there and graduated all of his players. The man started the football program at James Madison with a bunch of walk-ons in 1972 and ended up winning more than he lost, but that wasn’t enough for what was an all-girls school 20 years before I arrived. Thing is, we went 5–6 in my last season, so the move didn’t make much of a difference.
We had some talent despite being a Division I-AA program. That’s a step down from the Notre Dames and Alabamas of the world, but we did beat the University of Virginia in 1982, my freshman year, and they were a Division I school. That was a big deal, a first in James Madison’s history. The best player on the team that season was junior wide receiver Gary Clark, who went on to become a four-time Pro Bowl selection and two-time Super Bowl winner with the Washington Redskins. I looked up to him from a football perspective. He was great returning kicks, catching the ball. He was very determined to be the best. I watched how he carried himself. I learned a lot from him.
Speaking of UVA, before my junior year started in 1984, someone from its program came and asked me if I wanted to transfer there. They played in the prestigious Atlantic Coast Conference with Clemson, North Carolina, Maryland, and schools like that. But I would have been lost on a big campus in the world of big-time college football. I wasn’t ready for any of that stuff. And those lecture classes with like 200 people in there? I wouldn’t have learned a thing. As difficult academically as James Madison was, I was told Virginia was even tougher and I didn’t need any more stress with the books than I was already dealing with. I stayed put.
Later that year, while I was becoming the first All-American in the program’s history, I started seeing Karen, my ex-wife and the incredible mother of our four children. She was working the front desk at the Student Union, and I wrote her a poem: Roses are red, violets are blue, if you look over here, you’ll realize I love you. I handed it to her. She was doing something else. She opened it up, read it, looked over at me, read it again, and smiled, and I knew I had her then. So that was a really great moment in my life. On our first date, we went to McDonald’s.
We had known of each other for two years, seen each other around, but she was dating someone else, and I had heard that she didn’t really like athletes. I was shy, too. I’m obviously very passive-aggressive and I was more introverted in college than I am now. I still was struggling with trusting people. I didn’t have many friends. James Hairston was my roommate. He was quiet, and I was quiet, so that was a good deal. I hung out with Warren Marshall, who played for the Denver Broncos, and Wayne Robinson, who went into the military, and that was more than enough friends for me.
Karen was very into her academics. She wanted to be the best, be at the top of her class. She wanted to be a lawyer. After graduating college she earned her master’s degree. And that was part of my attraction to her. She helped me immensely with my schoolwork. We were always doing homework together. Karen was all about education.
It’s frustrating for me, and people don’t understand, but I was all about education also. They tend to roll their eyes when I say that since I made mostly C’s. Let me tell you, though, I worked just as hard as anyone on the dean’s list. Nothing came easy for me. There is probably nothing in our lives that Karen and I agreed on more than education, and all four of our kids graduated near the top of their classes. I am proud as hell that we were on the same page for them, no matter what else was going on.
I ended up being named the team’s defensive MVP in each of my last three seasons there and an All-American as a junior and senior. They tell me I still hold the school record with 506 tackles. As a senior I was 6’4” and 200 pounds. My weight fluctuated depending on how much I was running. There were times when I was closer to 190, which is kind of crazy to think about with how much I was eating. I was burning a whole bunch of calories.
There is nothing in this great world better than an all-you-can-eat cafeteria. There would be mornings when I’d be at the door waiting for them to open it. There were lunches when I was there for two hours. I would sit there, eat a few plates, and head back up for more. When you grow up like I did, dinner could turn into a contact sport.
During my final season, nobody to my knowledge was scouting me. The only reason any NFL teams saw me was because we played UVA a few times, and they always had scouts there. And every year, I would light those dudes up. I also heard their head coach, George Welsh, told some of the scouts and coaches he knew that they needed to go across the mountain and see this linebacker. That was awfully nice of him.
So that’s more or less how I was noticed. Remember, this was 1985. There was no Internet, no ESPN2, no Mel Kiper. What I didn’t know until much later was that San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh was telling his staff about me during my entire senior year. He had tape and would make them watch me. He told the team’s front office that they were going to draft me.
I knew none of this. The NFL wasn’t in my thought process. I was hoping to graduate on time, earn my sociology degree, and maybe do some teaching and coaching. That was my plan. And if you asked me during my senior season which was more important, being drafted or graduating, I would have given you my answer in less than a second. Give me that degree.
I only had one class left that final spring, and that April was the NFL draft. I took so many credits in summer school that there was just the one class remaining. And I earned another C. There were a lot of C’s on my report card. I think my GPA was around 2.4 or something like that, but let me tell you this: aside from the birth of my four children, graduating from James Madison is the biggest and greatest highlight of my life. It’s more important than the five Super Bowls, the Hall of Fame, whatever. That degree let my family, everyone in Gladys, everyone at James Madison—who must have been wondering how this guy ended up here—know that all you need in life is a dream and an opportunity.
That’s what this world is all about. First you need the dream, and mine was an education. Second, I needed the opportunity, and football allowed me to attend a great school. They said I was from the wrong side of the street for that sort of dream, that sort of opportunity. There were a lot of young men who were every bit the football player I was but who didn’t have the opportunity or didn’t take advantage of their opportunity. That wasn’t going to be me.
There were many mornings at James Madison when I was in those reading and writing labs before and after my classes. Then I went to practice and back to the labs. Maybe I was going to flunk out because I wasn’t smart enough, but it wasn’t going to be from a lack of trying.
You can’t be scared of failure. There ain’t nothing wrong with failing. It’s part of life. I’ve failed many times. There’s only something wrong with never giving yourself the chance to fail. It often takes courage to fail.
I tell groups I talk with now, especially kids, younger players, that everything comes in steps. There’s nothing wrong with having a goal at the top of the steps, but don’t overlook the journey there. Pay attention in school, read and write at every opportunity, get the best education you can in high school, and somehow, someway, get into college. Junior college, four-year, whatever, just find a way, and then dedicate yourself to earning that degree. Whatever happens after that is that, but if you have your base, you are all set. Sure, there’s still going to be ups and downs, but if you have that education, you can adapt, you can succeed. You’re not going to be living in a trailer in Gladys.
I owe James Madison a ton. I’ve tried to pay them back by bringing positive publicity to the college. I have nothing but love for them. They ended up inducting me to the school’s athletic Hall of Fame, which was a real thrill. And Coaches Mac and Wilmer were there. I showed up struggling to read and write and left with a degree. That’s the American Dream right there.
The 49ers came and visited me at school. I did run the 40-yard dash in 4.49 seconds, but I only bench pressed 225 pounds two times. That’s the weight they have the players do at the NFL Scouting Combine to this day, and a Dallas Cowboys kicker did it 25 times a few years back. I never lifted weights. It wasn’t my thing. I ran, did drills, and watched film, but the weights, not so much. I was country strong, my legs were strong, and I’d be there on gameday.
One of the coaches gave me $50 and told me to take my girl out to eat, so Karen and I had a nice dinner. That was my pre-draft experience. Well, the New York Giants flew me up there. That was the first time I had ever flown, and they brought me to their headquarters. I lifted and then they took me back to the airport. No one talked to me. There was no interview. I was there for like 20 minutes.
I never heard from anyone else. Heck, I barely heard from the 49ers and the Giants. I just figured I wasn’t good enough, which had always been my mind-set anyway. My brothers were born doing everything great, and then there was Charles, tripping over his own feet, the class clown, the clown in general. Why would any NFL team have an interest in me? This was my thought process.
A few folks were telling me I was going in the second or third round, but I had no idea. There were like 12 rounds back then. Karen and I went down to the movies on a bicycle. I was peddling; she was sidesaddle. It must’ve been April 29, 1986. I have no idea what movie was playing. My roommate came running into the theater and told me the 49ers had just drafted me. He literally ran there. It was just down the hill from campus, and he was so excited. He was breathing heavy when he told me they were on the phone. He said they wanted me to call them back. I didn’t know whether or not he was doing a prank, so we stayed and finished the movie.
It wasn’t a prank. They took me in the fourth round with the 96th overall selection. They told me to take a plane out there. They had booked the flight and all that. So I flew from Harrisonburg, Virginia, to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. This was my first time in a big city by myself. I walk off the plane, and there was no one at the gate when we landed, so I asked this white guy where the baggage claim was. He turned to me and started speaking another language. I found a black dude and asked him, and he starts speaking another language. I was scared out of my mind. I really wanted to go back to the gate and ask the pilot to take me back home. I’m honestly not sure I have ever been that scared. I’d never met people that spoke different languages before, and it was frightening. It was a frightening experience for a country boy like me.
At that point a man walked up to me and said he was there to take me to the team headquarters and that he was running a little late. It was Jon Gruden, who later won a Super Bowl as the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and is now the television analyst for Monday Night Football. He was an entry-level errand boy at the time. That’s when the magic started. He mentioned on the ride there how excited I must be to be playing for Bill Walsh and with Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott. I asked him, “Who are they?”