The following comes from the New York Times: The ramifications hit Hargrove with the same force as his bone-rattling collisions with Vikings quarterbackBrett Favre in New Orleans’s overtime victory against Minnesota in the National Football Conference championship game.
“This is a Super Bowl,” Hargrove said Wednesday during an interview at the Saints’ practice facility here. “I might only have one shot at it. I don’t want to come all this way and blow it. My teammates have said I can go out one night and have fun, but I know I can’t. The one night I do try to enjoy myself is when something can happen.”
Hargrove’s team last season consisted of counselors and recovering addicts at the Transitions Recovery Program in North Miami Beach, less than nine miles from Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, site of Sunday’s game between the Saints and the Indianapolis Colts.
The rehabilitation center was Hargrove’s home for 10 months after the N.F.L. suspended him for the 2008 season for his third violation of the league’s drug policy.
Described as a thug by officials from his former team, theBuffalo Bills, in notes that preceded his arrival at the center, Hargrove, 26, showed up wearing a smile that disarmed everyone he met. He came across as a 6-foot-3 teddy bear. Trying to square the gentle giant in their midst with the “angry young man who may still be using” described in Hargrove’s admittance papers, the program’s executive director, Lee Barchan, was perplexed.
“We didn’t understand,” he said the other day from his second-floor office. “Did he have a twin? Was he schizophrenic?”
As his therapy would reveal, Hargrove’s smiling facade masked enduring pain from a Dickensian childhood. He spent three years in and out of homeless shelters and foster care after the Brooklyn tenement where Hargrove, his mother, Rosa, and two of his four half-siblings were living burned down when he was 6.
He has few memories of his father, and his mother died of AIDS when Hargrove was 9. Shortly after, in the summer of 1993, an aunt who lived in Port Charlotte, Fla., adopted him.
A quarterback and defensive back at Port Charlotte High, Hargrove played at Georgia Tech for two seasons before flunking out. For the next year, to help support the first of two children he fathered, Hargrove worked as a teacher’s aide, a security guard and, for seven months, a baggage handler at the Hartsfield airport in Atlanta.
Phil Williams, an agent who played football at Florida State, met Hargrove through a Georgia Tech connection and was immediately drawn to him. “When my family met him, we instantly knew there’s something different and beautiful about this kid,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment