Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One by Terry Crews Page B

sounding convinced.
    “Yep,” I said, rolling my eyes at him and his doubts.
    I had no use for anyone telling me the odds. I didn’t care. Iknew I was going to make it because I knew I would do whatever it took. Not only that, but I decided to use any bit of rejection I’d ever received as fuel. Looking back, I’m not sure how healthy that was. But at the time, it worked. It made me work out harder, lift more, and strive to be somebody. And I never, ever stopped, even when it got tough—and let me tell you, it got a lot tougher for a long time before it started to get easier.
    WHEN I HIT WESTERN MICHIGAN AND TRIED TO GO right into football camp, the coaches told me I had basically missed it while I’d been at Interlochen. They let me join the team as a walk-on and be a part of the practice squad, but I had to really fight my way up from the bottom. And so I got beat up, literally. But I didn’t care. I had my little art scholarship, and my mother was paying for the rest for a year, and I was just so happy to have my pads on.
    I knew it was up to me to earn a scholarship to cover the rest of college. From my first practice, I was doing my thing, hitting people.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM
. It was a challenge, but I loved it. Like I said, I never minded hard work when there was a clear purpose and something to be gained.
    Football was great, but the rest of my college experience was a major disappointment, almost immediately. After being under my mother’s strict control for so many years, I was sure I was going to go crazy as soon as I tasted my first bit of freedom. That lasted for about a week, and my version of wild was tame compared to what we’ve come to see as the normal college experience. From my first night at school, it seemed like everyone around me was falling-down drunk. I immediately thought of Big Terry and knew I didn’t want to be that foolish.
    “I’m not drinking,” I said.
    That was fine. No one was going to force me to drink. But the problem was, all that drinking turned me off from everyone else. I didn’t like being around drunk people, and so there really weren’t many people for me to be around. But I wanted to be around somebody. So I joined the Western Michigan University branch of the Maranatha Campus Ministries, which was keen on a brand of Christianity called discipleship. Given my extremely religious upbringing, this world felt safe to me. As much as I’d wanted to rebel from Trish, now that I was on my own, I was drawn back into the same strict structure without even being conscious of it. I truly believed in my heart that something horrible would happen to me if I didn’t do right by God, and so it felt comfortable to join a church where everyone lived by the same beliefs. It was like the island of misfit toys, a group of people who were hurt and broken, but when we were together it was easier for us than it was in the outside world.
    And so, at first, I didn’t protest when my new pastor told me I couldn’t listen to the rap music I loved. And when I was instructed that, if there was a girl I wanted to date, I should go through our pastor to make sure God wanted us to be together, I opted not to date. As long as I had a few people to hang out with on the weekends, I was fine. My main obsession was earning a place on the football team, and from there, a scholarship, and I didn’t want anything else to distract me.
    I was working extremely hard and putting a tremendous amount of pressure on myself, and so when I felt overly stressed, I began acting out in familiar ways. When my roommate left for the weekend, I snuck out to the drugstore and bought porn. And then, before he came back to school, I put it in the trash. I felt really guilty and threw myself more resolutely into the church, but my prayers never made me stop. I didn’t share my problem with anyone, and so I just learned to live with it.
    ———
    I DID VERY WELL DURING THE FALL FOOTBALL SEASON, BUT then the