By TERRY MCDERMOTT
September 13, 1987
Publication: THE SEATTLE TIMES
Kenny Easley, headhunter, maniac, ruthless merchant of blood and doom between the white lines, zeroes in for the attack.
Staring, measuring his opponent, he waits. He strikes.
“Goo-goo, ga-ga. Oooh-dah. Boo, boo, boo.”
A diaper for a shoulder pad, the new child Kendrick on the diaper, Easley has struck, and judging from the tiny laughter, won again. Another notch on his belt, he looks over the top of his half-height executive reading glasses and says, you know, people don’t understand me. They don’t understand what I do or why I do it. They don’t know me.
He’s right. No one knows Kenny Easley.
In a way, of course, everybody who follows professional football knows Kenny Easley, at least a piece of him. The piece they know is Easley the All-Pro, all-mean strong safety for the Seattle Seahawks, the former Player of the Year, the man expected to help lead the Seahawks to new glories in the season beginning today. But there are a lot of other little pieces of Kenny Easley, so many pieces scattered so far apart, that few people see very many of them. And he doesn’t want them to. Even Easley sometimes has a hard time putting Easley together.
Is he Easley the cheap-shot artist or Easley the thinking man’s football player? Is he Easley the adoring father or Easley the adored star? Easley the sullen loner or Easley the community man?
I am not and should not be a role model, he tells you. Yet you drive downtown and see his mug plastered all over a thousand Metro buses telling kids that he cares. People at the Griffin Home for Boys say he came into their midst unbidden and is the best role model their wayward kids have ever had. He shows up some nights uninvited just to chat. He goes to other schools and lectures on the evil of drugs.
“It’s not a shortcut to success. Ultimately, it’s just a shortcut to death. If I made it naturally, why can’t you?” he recently told a rapt audience of Gig Harbor prep football players, explaining to them the waste that was the cocaine death of Don Rogers, a football player and a friend of Easley’s.
Asked later how he reconciled his willingness to give strong advice with his insistence that he not be regarded as a role model, he says there is no conflict.
“That was real. There’s no hero worship in that. That’s just straight, hard-line, bottom-out facts. There’s an unwanted pressure of being a model, a hero, being an athlete. I certainly don’t welcome it and I don’t try to live up to it.
“I don’t go around with a banner and a board, saying: Here comes Kenny Easley, superstar. They don’t need that. They don’t need a false prophet. All you’re doing is setting a kid up to be let down. All they need is hard facts. My friend died because of his stupidity.
That’s a fact. That’s what I told them.”
The fact is, being an athletic star these days is a complicated business. All of the attention focused on a star’s non-athletic attributes has confused the role. The indiscretions of many and the deaths of a few have further fogged the issue. How is a modern athlete to act? What is his role? What responsibilities does he have? The athletic part of it might be the easiest. It certainly is the most pleasurable.
When younger and simpler, Kenny Easley was a gifted and dedicated athlete with no time for anything else. He cannot recall a single significant personal relationship from his school days except for the one he developed with his football coach at Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Va.
“I was intent on doing one thing in my life. At that age, you either have goals or you don’t,” he says.
He stuck pictures of Washington Redskin football players on his wall with bubble gum and ran stadium steps with ruthless repetition. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he knew he would be a professional football player. Knew not that he wanted to be one, but that he would. “I can’t ever recall not wanting it,” he says.
“Football is the thing I know best, better than anything else in my life. All the components that went into football came easy.
Running in the heat, absorbing the pain, none of it was hard.”
He starred in high school, starred at UCLA and stars with the Seahawks. Last year he finally returned to his home territory as a professional player when the Seahawks played the Redskins at Robert F.
Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C., near Easley’s hometown. Ninety-two Easley relatives showed up for the big event, and Easley got “teardrops as big as dill pickles.”
“ `Man,’ I said, `This is it. This has got to be heaven.’
“After I got out there and got the first hit in, it was gone.
But while it lasted, it was great.”
The same might be said for a football career: While it lasts, it’s great. Easley’s shedding of dill-pickle tears is something professional athletes often don’t get enough credit for: They have realized their wildest dreams. How many other people can say the same? We know these athletic stars have achieved something distinctive, but in the modern locker room of drugs, strikes and million-dollar contracts, it tends to get lost. Lost, too, is the price they eventually pay.
Their tools _ that is, their bodies _ fail them and fall apart.
In the first game of his professional career, Easley broke a toe and lost four teeth. It hasn’t gotten any better. Surgeries accumulate.
Easley notes that in football, there are no old-timers games; the bodies are all too wrecked. Families are subjected to stresses that often cause them to fail, too.
“You’re gone for seven weeks at training camp,” he says, leaving his wife, Gail, and their newborn son, Kendrick, home alone.
“Then when we’re home, when we go out to dinner, fans push her out of the way. When she wants to get cuddly, you’re too sore. Everywhere she touches you, it hurts.”
Things besides football have become more difficult, too.
He goes to a college alumni meeting and, seeing all the doctors, lawyers and construction-company chiefs in the room, asks Gail what went wrong _ why is his job so insignificant?
Easley, finely dressed and fitted in Nordstrom’s best business suit, was introduced to an audience of business people this spring by a man who joked he had to be careful what he said, lest Easley take offense and come bounding over the lectern to attack him. Easley did indeed take offense, and precisely because of the suggestion _ joke or not _ that he was one thing: a football player, on and off the field.
Among the contradictions Easley entertains is this exasperation with being known wrongly and his simultaneous resistance to being known at all. Because of the former, he resists the latter. He has limited his conversations with reporters and ceased reading local newspapers.
This is a man who has spent most of his cognizant life striving to be a football player. Now he insists that a football player is not what he is. He suffers from what sports sociologist Harry Edwards calls _ rightly if inelegantly – the unidimensionality problem.
“It’s analogous to a beauty queen _ a piece of meat with a head on top,” Edwards says. People see Easley the football player and figure that’s who he is, a sort of contemporary version of the natural savage, a wild man only temporarily restrained.
Some black athletes _ not including Easley _ think there is an element of race in this as well. Isiah Thomas, the professional basketball player, was widely quoted this year as objecting to the characterization of black basketball players who excel as being “naturally athletic” and white players who excel as being “intelligent” _ the savage vs. the civilized man.
Easley does not talk about race.
“It’s not a consideration to me because I haven’t been adversely affected by it. I’m not educated enough on the subject to know,” he replies when asked if being black has limited him. “If people say no to me, I take it as no. Conversely, if they say yes, I just take it that way.”
Easley speaks with the manner of a bright man, incompletely educated. He was graduated from UCLA in political science, but found school to be an ordeal, he says.
“I was determined to be a lawyer. Then I took the LSAT test and quickly changed my mind.”
He sometimes uses not quite the right word and his grammar is unpolished. Yet his points are clear and well-aimed. He is extremely perceptive and works hard at being so. It would be tempting to describe him as street smart, a cliche that fits nicely with the broader cliches about athletes, and particularly the cliches about black athletes.
Easley is not from the streets, however. His father was a brick mason, his mother a disciplinarian.
He is not street smart. He is simply smart, and too smart not to know that much of his image problem is his own creation. In this sense, at least, he is right in saying that what people see on the football field is illusion. At 6-foot-1, 192 pounds, Easley is well-made, but not huge.
“People, when they see me out of uniform, say: `You can’t be Kenny Easley. He’s 6-foot-4, 220, and Kenny Easley doesn’t smile, he growls.’ The uniform adds some size, but it’s the image, the way I play, that adds more,” he says.
Indeed. It was Easley, after all, who once was quoted in a Seahawk highlight film as saying, “Let’s face it, I’m vicious.” And it was Easley who set off a whole wave of MTV-style football posters by posing in black leather as Kenny Easley, “The Enforcer.” He acknowledges this and in fact uses his celebrity for access.
At business meetings, the small talk tends to be about football, about the team’s prospects and certain players.
“How about this Tony Woods?” a shopping-center executive asks, wanting to know if the rookie linebacker will make it.
“Well,” says Easley, “we’ll find out when we lay a little wood on him. Find out how fast he gets up.”
“Or if he gets up?” the man asks, looking for a little peek at the game’s dark side.
Easley obliges: “Well, if he doesn’t, we’ll just roll him off the field.”
He would have you separate all of this. That’s not me out there on the football field, he says. It’s not real. That’s football. That’s a game and I’m a player in it. Don’t confuse it with life.
Those who do confuse it with life hold what might be called the Eton theory of athletics. The battle of Waterloo, said Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington, was won on the playing fields of Eton.
Bull, Easley says. What was won on the fields of Eton was a cricket match. It doesn’t go beyond that.
The Duke, however, has engendered an army of followers for his life-imitates-sport position, and Easley’s protests are trampled in the army’s march. Coaches echo the Eton line when they tell their charges what wonderful character they are building with the 25th one-handed push-up. Popular movies like “Hoosiers” and “Chariots of Fire” project sporting values beyond the arena. Children’s literature overflows with the same notions. The Duke’s minions would have you believe the values for success in sport are identical with the values for success in life: teamwork, hard work, dedication, gallantry, performance under pressure and self-denial, to name just a few.
They would have you believe it and you do, says Harry Edwards.
“Sport is used to reaffirm the blueprint for success,” Edwards says. “Athletic performance is seen as an indication of clean living, belief in God, physical fitness, mental alertness and good character. We take these to be assumptions of good athletic performance. The adulation heaped upon athletes is in part because of the presumptions, the presumption of perfection.
“Sport is used to project those ideals.”
Easley does not have choice. He will be held up for inspection on and off the field, according to Edwards. He must be a role model.
“It comes with the territory. If you take the adulation, the money, you have to take the other. It’s not a choice they have,” he says. “If you can’t take it, get out of the game. Give it up. They can go into picking up garbage, and I guarantee you no one will ask them anything about their private lives.”
Calvin Hill, a former professional running back, likens the treatment modern athletes receive to that bestowed on royalty.
“The difference is the queen is royal for life. The athlete is on the throne only as long as he can play.”
Easley, at 28, knows the throne can topple at any time. He is preparing for it. The average NFL career is 3.2 years. Men retire when they’re 24 years old, when, in Easley’s phrase, “you haven’t even scratched the surface of how the world works.”
“Football and life and death: As sure as you’re born, you’re going to die. In the National Football League, as sure as you come to it, you’re going to leave.
“How long will it take for these guys to realize this will end?” he asks. “They want to be adored longer than the system says you will be adored.
“You have to accept the reality it’s got to end. This is only a temporary job, a temporary pleasure. If you can’t make that distinction, you’re going to have problems. My career at maximum is 10, 11 years. I can’t sit back and relax. It just don’t work that way.”
Easley wants to start an agency to manage the financial affairs of other athletes. His own affairs _ with one exception _ have been successful and, typical of Easley, conservatively managed. He and his family live modestly on an allowance, despite a salary estimated at $630,000 per year. They live in a nondescript Bellevue neighborhood.
Gail drives a Mazda, Ken drives a Chevy Blazer.
“I’m not a very excessive guy,” he says. His investments are long-term and safe, with returns to be paid far after his football retirement. The one bad investment to date has been Inside the Seahawks, a struggling fan magazine he publishes.
But the magazine will be turned around, he says. He will force it to, subject it to the business equivalent of a Chuck Knox game plan _ run at it until it gives up. He credits Knox, his Seahawk coach, with teaching him how to manage. As you might expect from someone whose mentor is old Ground Chuck, Easley does not see management as a particularly difficult or complicated task. It will yield to practice, homework and aphorism. Organization will triumph over difficulty.
“All it is is mental discipline. And mental discipline is as much a part of my life as the air I breathe. You don’t go out and hit somebody full speed without mental discipline.”
Kenny Easley has a voice for each of his several personalities.
The norm is a deep, slow bass with old Virginia creeping out of it every now and again, especially in unguarded moments with his son.
“What’s up, chief? What you looking at, Buster Brown? Who you think you are?” he says to the baby, then turns and adds with evident pride: “This cat came out looking just like me.”
With his teammates he switches to a modified black jive, higher in the register, more emphatic in tone. “Hey, T, how you been, man?”
On the golf course, not an infrequent place to find him, Easley adopts a Southwestern drawl and the pro golfer’s laconic self-criticism.
“Ooh, Ken, what were you thinking of? You should have hit the ball.”
He also has a boardroom business voice, full of official phrasings.
“That might be an option we could consider, but I will have to consult with our attorneys. Yes, I shall keep you apprised.”
He used to do this intentionally, but doesn’t even notice it anymore.
“I’ve learned to shift automatically. You do what’s appropriate,” he says.
Very little is left to chance. All is calculated. In his football personality, Easley wears a glistening black rubber jacket beneath his uniform at training camp, even to the point of suffering heat exhaustion during twice-a-day summer drills. The jacket, all shiny and black, hot and tough, is a costume, part of the image. It’s appropriate, and doing what is appropriate is an Easley dictum.
Easley sits by himself on the sideline at games. He is an acknowledged team leader, the elected players’ union representative, and he insists on being alone. He doesn’t want to get involved in discussions of the game. Talk is a distraction. Everything is a distraction.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he says. “Don’t tell me your problems. The game is on.”
When the game is going, Easley is back where he belongs. Even the 25-second interruptions between plays disturb the equanimity he feels when he is with the game.
“Every play is 25 seconds of madness, five seconds of calm,” he says with an unself-conscious beauty a Zen master would envy. On the field, where he knows all and has nothing to fear, Easley is free, a missile searching for a target. Off the field, where he is smart enough to know he doesn’t know it all, he is perpetually wary.
“I’m a different person on Sunday afternoon,” he says. “I have to be. My job description breeds that. You can’t carry the same demeanor you have here. You have to have a different grind. Football demands controlled violence. I didn’t make it that way. That’s the way it is.
“Doing this story, giving speeches, will give people a chance to know me different than they know me from the 300 level at the Kingdome. . . . I used to not do any at all. I used to do the things I really wanted to do, but now I do the things that I feel are necessary.
The business demands that of me. It forced me to get out.
“You can’t grow and develop when you don’t do what’s required.
Actually, I kind of enjoy meeting people, and it will change the image of Kenny Easley as private, secluded, a malcontent.”
In a way, Easley is right in saying it isn’t him you see out there on the field. He has so absorbed the game, he loses himself in it. When he comes outside, into the real world, he is constantly faced with questions about who and what he is. He knows he is something other than a football player, but what? What he is doing now is building his answers, building a new self in the same way he built his body in the weight room.
The danger to Easley the football player is that people will know this other Easley and not like him. This is the athlete going outside his field, outside his expertise. Some athletes carry their athletic confidence with them and swagger into the real world. Others are timid and crawl. They see the world as complex and recognize that their skills are not. As usual, Easley is somewhere between the extremes, treading carefully. He swaggers, but his heart is faint. He carries his athleticis m with him, but knows he will not be the instant master of every situation. He’s wary.
Easley first played golf, not a popular sport at Oscar Smith High, as a senior in college. He was in Arizona with a group of other college stars filming an anti-drug television commercial when several of the other collegians asked him to go golfing.
Despite never having played before, he went along, thinking it shouldn’t be any problem. Easley, the ultimate jock, thought: I can do this. It’s a sport, isn’t it? Off he went. Three years later, he was one of the best golfers in the NFL, a member of Sahalee, the Seattle area’s toughest and one of its most exclusive clubs.
It is indeed a sport, isn’t it?
“I watch a friend of mine who’s a chief executive officer of a major corporation. I see the way he handles a room,” he says. “If you haven’t noticed, my social skills need some development. I guess that’s what corporate America calls for, so that’s what I’ll do.”
Easley, of course, will succeed at this. While disclaiming it, he will continue to be the perfect role model. Easley, in his careful, deliberative style, will run the corporate ladder as if it was just one more set of stadium steps.
It’s a sport, isn’t it?
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Date: September 13, 1987