The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.
The Weight of the Game is an original work of fiction, conceived and directed by me, developed in collaboration with a writing partner. It is a unique perspective, a hypothetical discussion between legendary football personas, living and deceased. The words are invented. The themes are intentional. I hope that the humanity is real.
The echo of Jim Brown's last words, "Nobody ever does," is still in the air. Michael Vick had glanced at O.J. Simpson when he said it. O.J. caught the glance. He knows what's underneath it. He's known for the last several minutes. He straightens slightly in his chair.
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| The elephants in the room. 1 |
O.J. SIMPSON: Go ahead and say it, Michael. You've been circling it since you sat down.
MICHAEL VICK: I said what I said. About the players who came back from domestic violence charges faster than I came back from what I did to animals. I left it open. I didn't name it.
O.J. SIMPSON: You named it without naming it. Which is what Black men in America learn to do very early. Name the thing without naming the thing so you can't be accused of playing the card.
JIM BROWN: I don't play cards. I'll say it directly. Race is in this room. Race has been in this room since we sat down. The only question is whether we're going to talk about it like men or keep stepping around it like it's furniture nobody wants to bump into.
WALTER PAYTON: Then let's talk about it.
JIM BROWN: Every man in this room is Black. The victims in our various situations were not, for the most part. The institutional responses to what we did, the cultural responses, the media responses, they were not racially neutral. That is a fact. It doesn't excuse a single thing any of us did. But it is a fact and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
MICHAEL VICK: When I was sentenced, the response from a significant portion of white America was visceral in a way that I had to examine carefully. People who had never attended a dogfighting event, who ate factory-farmed meat without a second thought, who had seen NFL players return from domestic violence suspensions within weeks, they wanted me gone from the game permanently. I had to ask myself honestly, is that because of the specific nature of what I did? Or is some portion of that reaction about who I was and where I came from?
O.J. SIMPSON: The answer is both. And both matter.
MICHAEL VICK: Yes. Both matter. What I did was genuinely horrific. I'm not constructing a racial defense for animal cruelty. But the intensity of the response: the calls for lifetime bans, the death threats, the people who said they cared more about those dogs than about Black men being shot in the street, that intensity had a texture to it that wasn't purely about dogs.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I grew up in foster care with predominantly white families. I was a Black kid who couldn't be placed permanently anywhere. The system that was supposed to protect me was not designed with me in mind. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's the documented history of American child welfare. However, I became a football player and the same institutions that had failed me for eighteen years suddenly had a great deal of interest in what my body could do on Saturdays. Then when I became inconvenient, when I stopped being manageable, those same institutions discarded me with remarkable efficiency.
JIM BROWN: That's the transaction. That's always been the transaction. Black athletic excellence has been welcomed and celebrated and monetized by institutions that had no interest in the full humanity of the people producing it. The NFL was segregated until 1946. The Heisman Trophy wasn't won by a Black player until Mike Garrett in 1965. And we act like those are distant historical footnotes when the men in this room played in that direct lineage.
WALTER PAYTON: I want to push back slightly. Not on the history, the history is indisputable. But I played in Chicago for thirteen years and I never felt like my race was the primary thing people saw. I felt like they saw Walter Payton. Sweetness. Number 34. I worked very deliberately to be that, to be beyond categorization. Was that naïve?
JIM BROWN: Yes. I say that with enormous respect for you, Walter. You were beloved in Chicago. Genuinely beloved. But being beloved by a city doesn't mean the city has transcended race. It means you performed Blackness in a way that was non-threatening enough to be fully embraced. "Sweetness" is a persona that white America could love without complication. I'm not saying you manufactured it cynically. I'm saying the reception of it was racially coded whether you intended it to be or not.
WALTER PAYTON: That's uncomfortable to hear.
JIM BROWN: It should be. I spent my career being uncomfortable for people. There's a reason Cleveland loved me but America found me difficult. I was not "Sweetness." I was Jim Brown who ran over people and spoke his mind about civil rights and Muhammad Ali and Vietnam and didn't smile for the cameras when smiling wasn't honest. The reception I got from white America reflected that. I was respected. I was not loved the way you were loved. And the difference is racial and political and cultural all at once.
O.J. SIMPSON: (with painful self-awareness) Can I talk about my own relationship with this? Because I think it's relevant, and I think it's the most honest thing I can contribute to this conversation.
JIM BROWN: Please.
O.J. SIMPSON: I spent the majority of my adult life actively, deliberately constructing an identity that transcended race. "I'm not Black, I'm O.J." I said versions of that for twenty years. From the Hertz commercials, to the movie career, to the country clubs in Brentwood, I cultivated a life that said to white America: I am safe. I am palatable. I am not a threat. I am not Jim Brown (glances at Brown). I am not that kind of Black man. I am your Black friend. Your golf partner. Your dinner guest.
MICHAEL VICK: And then 1994 happened.
O.J. SIMPSON: And then 1994 happened. And overnight...overnight...I was the most Black I had ever been in my life without choosing it. The same white America that had embraced me for twenty years looked at me in that courtroom and saw something they'd always been prepared to see if I ever stepped out of line. And the Black community, which I had spent two decades carefully distancing myself from, closed ranks around me in ways I hadn't earned and didn't deserve.
WALTER PAYTON: Why did they close ranks?
O.J. SIMPSON: Because the history is longer than I am. Because Black Americans had watched the criminal justice system function as a racial instrument for generations before I ever set foot in a courtroom. And when they saw me, regardless of what I had or hadn't done, they saw the pattern. Rodney King had been beaten on camera just two years before. The acquittal of those officers had just torn Los Angeles apart. The jury in my criminal trial was predominantly Black. They acquitted me, white America was stunned and Black America, a significant portion of it, cheered. The cheer wasn't entirely about me, not really. It was about every Black man who hadn't had Johnnie Cochran. Every man who'd been convicted on less evidence by an all-white jury in a county courthouse nobody televised.
JIM BROWN: That's the most honest thing you've said since we've been sitting here.
O.J. SIMPSON: It cost me something to say it. Because it requires me to acknowledge that my acquittal was partly a product of a historical correction being applied to the wrong case. If I did what the civil court determined I did, and I've said in this room that I believe I did - IF I did it - then twelve jurors applied a legitimate historical grievance to an illegitimate set of facts. Nicole and Ron Goldman paid for that with their deaths going formally unpunished. The Black community's mistrust of the criminal justice system was weaponized in a specific case where it produced the wrong outcome. That's a knot I don't know how to untangle. I don't think it can be untangled.
(Silence. Deep and genuine.)
MICHAEL VICK: I want to say something about that and I want to say it respectfully. What you just described, the way race and justice and historical grievance collided in your trial, that is one of the most consequential things that happened in America in the last fifty years. Not because of you specifically. But because of what it exposed about how differently Black and white Americans experienced the criminal justice system and how little common ground existed between those two experiences. Your trial didn't create that divide. It just put it on television in prime time for eight months.
JIM BROWN: And nothing was resolved. The cameras left and the divide remained and everyone went back to their corners having confirmed what they already believed.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Can I say something that might be unpopular?
JIM BROWN: This is the only room where unpopular things get said.
LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Race is real in everything we've discussed. The system failed me early and that failure has racial dimensions I can trace clearly. The way the NFL used me and discarded me has racial dimensions. The way America celebrates Black athletes and then turns on them has racial dimensions. All of that is true. And....
The things I did to women, the violence, I can't put that on race. I can contextualize it. I can explain the environment I came from, the modeling I received, the cycle of violence in foster care. However, at some point I have to own that those were my hands. My choices. And I worry sometimes that the racial framework, as true as it is systemically, can become a place to hide from personal accountability. I used it that way for years, and I don't think that's right either.
MICHAEL VICK: That's not unpopular. That's necessary. Both things have to be true simultaneously. The system is racially compromised and we made choices that hurt people. One doesn't cancel the other.
JIM BROWN: That is the most difficult thing to hold. Both hands full at the same time. In one hand, a system with a documented history of racial injustice that shaped every one of our lives and careers and public perceptions. In the other hand, our own agency. Our own decisions. The people we hurt who had nothing to do with systemic racism and everything to do with who we chose to be in a private moment.
WALTER PAYTON: I think I spent my career using the football to avoid holding either hand. On the field I didn't have to think about race or accountability or who I was failing at home. I was just running. And when the football was gone, when the disease came and I knew I was dying, both hands came full very fast and I didn't have the practice to hold what was in them.
RAE CARRUTH: I've been sitting here thinking about Cherica. About whether race had anything to do with what I did. And I don't think it did. I think I was terrified and selfish and I made the worst decision a human being can make. That was personal. That was mine. Race didn't pull that trigger. I did.
The room receives that without comment. It doesn't need comment.
JIM BROWN: I want to leave this part of the conversation with something I've said publicly and I'll say it here again. The most revolutionary thing a Black man in America can do is be excellent and honest and accountable simultaneously. Excellence alone gets you celebrated and then discarded. Honesty alone gets you labeled a troublemaker. Accountability alone gets you used as an example by people who don't actually care about you. But all three together: that's the thing the system is least prepared to handle. Because it can't categorize you. It can't make you a symbol or a cautionary tale or a mascot. You're just a man. Fully a man.
Most of us got one or two of the three right. Some of us got none. But the standard was always all three. And the game, and the culture around the game, never asked for all three. It asked for excellence on Sundays and manageable behavior the rest of the week. That's not enough. It was never enough.
MICHAEL VICK: No. It wasn't.
WALTER PAYTON: I wish someone had said that to me when I was twenty-two years old and the whole city of Chicago was deciding I was Sweetness and nothing else.
JIM BROWN: I was saying it. Nobody was listening.
WALTER PAYTON: No. We weren't.
A note on authorship: The Weight of the Game was conceived, directed, and shaped by me, including the premise, the participants, the thematic architecture, the dramatic turns, and the decision to treat these men as full human beings rather than symbols. The dialogue was developed collaboratively, in the long tradition of writers who work with creative partners whose names don't always appear on the final page. I've reviewed, edited, and taken responsibility for the content. Any factual inaccuracies in statistics or public record are mine to correct. What you're reading is fiction. Please treat it as such. With that said, I hope it makes you feel something true.
1) Image from istockphoto.com
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