Tyrann Mathieu beat the odds
If you are not an LSU football fan, it can be difficult to like Tyrann Mathieu, the defensive back better known during his days in Baton Rouge as the Honey Badger.
His athletic ability is not in question. He was a star at LSU, winning the Chuck Bednarik Award as college football’s best defensive player. He has spent six years in the NFL, first with the Arizona Cardinals and this past season with the Houston Texans. His current teammates say he is a locker room leader and motivator.
But for all his talent on the field, Mathieu always came across as the self-important, entitled athlete who thought he could ignore the rules and get away with it. Because, after all, he was the Honey Badger.
Not quite. LSU had to dismiss him from the team for multiple substance violations, usually involving marijuana. And before Arizona drafted him, the team did plenty of research and even elicited a pledge from its star defender, former LSU player Patrick Peterson, that he would take Mathieu under his wing and make sure he behaved.
A revealing profile of Mathieu in The Washington Post goes a long way toward explaining why he has behaved so immaturely at times. The bedrock reason will resonate with many.
Mathieu, it turns out, lacked something as a child that most of us take for granted: parents. His biological father has been serving a life prison sentence for murder since Mathieu was 2 years old. His grandfather died at age 5. An uncle was killed, an aunt died in a car wreck.
Mathieu was the only one of his mother’s five children that did not live with her. As a child, he once asked her why, but she wouldn’t tell him.
“Mathieu, 26, has, for better or worse, conditioned himself to be comfortable in chaos — including that of his own making — in part because, years ago, he vowed to reach football’s mountaintop not because of size or speed but through fearlessness and will,” the Post reported. “That would be the only way to convince his family, specifically his mother, that he was worth something, that Tyrann Mathieu was worth keeping.
“Therefore, there would be no fight he wouldn’t pick, no cage he wouldn’t rattle. And with confrontation as his superpower, he would be lifted from the urban decay of New Orleans and into the college ranks ... and eventually the NFL.”
Against the odds, it has worked out for Mathieu. He gets paid millions of dollars a year to play a game. He has gone through rehab for his marijuana addiction and says he’s clean. He and his girlfriend have two kids and a nice home.
Relatives have told Mathieu that his mother’s story is nothing dramatic. They say she was an immature young woman who wasn’t ready for motherhood and had no idea how her decisions might affect her son.
Mathieu’s background is too common. How many kids today are being raised by grand-parents, as Mathieu was? How many of them wonder where one or both of their parents are, and why they rarely see them?
The obvious answer is too many. But it’s certain that too few of these children, wounded by a feeling that they are worthless, can generate the will by themselves, as Mathieu did, to overcome the handicap of parental detachment. This willfulness came with a price, though, and could have cost him a chance in the NFL.
Mathieu once again would like to ask his mother, for whom he now has bought a house, why she ignored him. Ironically, he believes there is a risk to getting an answer.
After all, not knowing why she kept her son away has fueled Mathieu’s overachievements. If one day she tells him, he fears it will douse the fire that made him such a good player.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
