Two years ago, ESPN’s coverage of the NFL became so overwhelmingly macabre that we assumed their on-air pick biography formula simply had to include the worst moment in a prospect’s life.
Graphics included players whose mothers had survived West Nile virus, battled drug addiction or died prematurely in some heart-wrenching way. The network defended the approach by saying that they aimed to tell a prospect’s stories on and off the field, “including the obstacles their families have overcome as part of the journey to the NFL.” Some players, like Broncos defensive end Bradley Chubb, openly criticized ESPN on Twitter. Others referred to their content strategy as tragedy porn or flat-out exploitation.
But it also shined a light on how numb we’ve become to the absolutely incredible and beyond heroic life journeys of so many NFL prospects and current players. When personal hardship is distilled and poured down our throats at mach speed during a televised event with wanton disregard for context and the proper breathing room someone’s life story commands, we begin to lose our grip on how amazing each and every person is on an individual level. We forget how to digest the totality of someone’s journey and give proper respect and admiration. Two hundred and sixty-three people are going to be drafted from Thursday to Saturday, and if any of us knew 80% of these players personally, what they traversed to arrive at this moment, we’d lionize them relentlessly. We’d bring them up to strangers. We’d tell our kids about them at night.
This thought came to mind last week while chatting with Rachaad White, a running back out of Arizona State. We spoke on the phone while his eight-month-old daughter babbled and cooed in his arms. He’s already spoiling her, he said, so the NFL lifestyle isn’t going to change her much. She already has the latest iPad (even if the electronic device she really wants is the television remote, to whip it across the room).
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Raised by his mother, White grew up just west of Highway 71 on the Missouri side of Kansas City. Twice in his life he had a gun pulled on him. He had—and had to ditch—friends who would try to undermine the seriousness with which he wanted to pursue certain life goals. He was underrecruited, landed at a Division II school in Nebraska (Nebraska–Kearney) and transferred to a junior college in California (Mt. San Antonio College, near L.A.), where he was one of roughly a dozen running backs herded inside the football factory.
During a time when so many of us barely possess the maturity to balance a checkbook, White was living in unfurnished apartments, managing food stamps, working at a recycling plant or, to earn extra cash—completely alone, more than a thousand miles from where he grew up—using a gig-working app called PeopleReady. He said he would wake up at 4 a.m. on the weekends during the offseason and drag himself to a Bob’s Furniture Warehouse and assemble and load beds for hours at a time. He worked concert security at Coachella and the Electric Daisy Carnival.
“I just remember telling myself, ‘This is not what you want to do, and this is not what you’re going to do,’” he says.
Any of these facts could be a bullet point on White’s draft-day graphic. Perhaps we’ve become so desensitized to stories that fit a tidy narrative arc—faced and overcame challenges, now successful, amen—that these assembled pieces of his personal narrative wouldn’t even register on a network’s Richter scale of what constitutes broadcast-worthy content. After all, the current setup forces mass desensitization. And yet, when pulled apart, held and analyzed on their own, each strand of White’s story represents such a Sisiphean haul—a feat of mental and physical strength the likes of which some of us couldn’t fathom.
Anything and everything mentioned to this point would have been enough to force hundreds of people in the exact same situation to quit. Only Nebraska-Kearney wants me to play football? Forget it. All my FAFSA money is gone? Time to go home. All my friends are goofing off in class? Why shouldn’t I? It’s 4 a.m. on a Saturday and I have to go where and do what just to earn enough money to keep playing in this football outpost? For the outside chance of getting recruited to a better school? For the even more outside chance—if I stay healthy—to one day catch the attention of an NFL team? Think about that for a second. Imagine doing something you loathed for a chance at a chance at a chance at a chance.
“He would tell you he wouldn’t change anything about his journey,” says John Waller, who began mentoring White at 8 years old through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. “It made him tough. He had to be tough.”
White, of course, is now one of the best running backs in the class. He’s 6'0", 214 pounds and ran for 1,000 yards (on the dot) and 15 touchdowns last year. His head coach at Arizona State, Herm Edwards, has said that White reminds him of Marcus Allen. His highlight videos conjure some deep NFL Films vibes with long-ago running backs rerouting their way around helpless defenders.
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During our conversation, White spoke often about gratitude. I asked him what kind of little gifts he’d receive from the universe on a given day—stuff the lay person would never think to appreciate—that made him thankful. “A bed to sleep in,” he said. He amended that to include a couch to sleep on. It’s better than sleeping in a car.
“I’m the type of guy, I’m just blessed,” he says. “I’m thankful to wake up every day.”
If we’re honest with ourselves, where would this story rank for us after spending the whole night fire-hosed with little vignettes of personal struggle and hardship, which, while not intentionally, flood our psyche and force us to weigh one against the other. After a full weekend, we come away with some kind of sliding scale of, This person had it really hard versus this person just had it kind of hard.
The reality, of course, is that White is incredible. So were any of the prospects that made up ESPN’s controversial broadcast two years ago. So are many of the players we might hear about this weekend. So are the players we may not hear about this weekend because, for some reason, maybe their own narrative won’t make the cut while Todd McShay talks about sideline-to-sideline speed. I hadn’t read much about White during the pre-draft process and wondered if his life story to this point would be given some time to reach a larger audience. I wondered how many people in the draft made so many of these similarly and immensely difficult choices in their lives to get here and how many of them will be properly dignified.
It’s a noble feat for any network to try and teach us about the life and times of a draft prospect on the most important day of their life. It becomes less noble when those facts get trivialized, condensed or exploited. Maybe there’s a right way to celebrate and honor it all. Let’s think about it—and think about White—while laying in that bed we get to sleep in tonight.
