Man, that story’s crazy. It was Christmas Eve, and we went to Dollar Tree, my son and I. Outside the Dollar Tree, there’s a homeless man and he’s kind of asking us for change, and it’s cold as hell. So I’m kind of looking like, “man, I don’t have much but I got some change I’m coming out here with so I’ll give it to him.” Then he asked for a ride, then driving him to where he was going, he was kind of like looking at my son and saying “man, you’re going to be great one day,” and saying some positive things about me, as well. I’m looking and I’m like man that dude knows a lot about God! He’s really enlightening. He was reading scriptures I hadn’t ever heard before, he was teaching me. That was big, because sometimes God puts you in situations for a reason. Then, closer to New Years, I’m leaving my business partners house and I was running later. As I’m leaving taking a different route home and I run into the same individual. So we vibed again, and the guy starts to sing. I’m thinking, “this dude is talented.” He ends up giving me his wife’s number, he tells me to try to stay in touch, through her, she’s the one person who’s hard on me and tries to help me. When I called his wife, she told me what was going on and she’s telling me positive things about my life. She’s relating to me that sometimes you run into people for you to learn and that was big for me: kind of weird, but big for me. At the time, I was trying to get to the next step in my life and trying to be as selfless as possible. It was a connection, where I’m going through this stage and he’s going through this stage and we met at a certain point and we helped each other out. I told him, “I may not see you again, so hopefully what we talked about and did, that will encourage you to change you life.” I was passing that wave along. There were a lot of people around looking like “what is this dude doing?” We stopped at a gas station and this dude is singing at the top of his lungs. Sometimes you just got to embrace that, because you’re giving somebody else that confidence to say, “you know what, I’m going to break out of this box I’m in.” The song he was singing was a song he wrote in prison. He’s never sung to anybody. So, maybe I’m doing something right by just being there. I didn’t have much to offer him, but him expressing himself was big. I’m learning about this now, as we speak, but it’s not always about materialistic things.

It’s about what you do and what people do for you as far as moving to a positive atmosphere and not being stuck in that negative realm and just staying there. How can you help the other person and serve? That’s what I learned the most out of that day and I’m still learning still to this day. Life is not easy but little stuff like that kind of encourages me.

Coach Clark, off the bat. If there’s anyone I can think of off the top of my head, that’s misunderstood but that’s him. We didn’t always get along (chuckles) but he was hard on me.  

And it’s like, now, even through this past year, when he’d come up to me and tell me something, I’d really sit there and listen. He doesn’t just come up to people and give you words of encouragement. When he lets you in, it’s like, man, it’s big. You know, he’s got a mental integrity. He has coaches that have been with him, for damn near his entire career, but he’s just the real deal. Just seeing Coach Clark able to encourage me, now he says, “come to my office, let’s get you opportunities in your life, get you on track, starting a career and stuff like that.” He’s been saying that since my senior year. So him just trusting me still, and looking out for me, while I’m training. He still comes up to me, asks me how the family is, how’s this, how’s that? It’s little things he does. He’s a great man, and he has a lot on his plate, and it’s the little things he does, the way he carries himself, the way he talks to us constantly with the same message, being the same stand up guy. He’s able to take blame for losses, knowing they fell on the players, sometimes. I learned a lot from Coach Clark. He’s a business minded person. That helped me out, not having a father growing up, and going through this program with how strict it was. It helped me out because I say these things in my household, like things have to be a certain way. A lot of the times, I was like, “man, why is this guy like this? He doesn’t care about me?” When I matured up as an individual, not as a football player but as an individual, I started to see that he was saying a lot of things that were true and I would translate to life. It’s the little things he’s done, so with all of that I say Coach Clark.

If I could start my own foundation, it’d be centered on helping kids, especially, but other people period. Just being able to help people. And for us, it was kind of do my grandmother’s thing, make her live her dream of the orphanage, but she opened another door in my mind, that, as I started working on my own personal development and seeing from my mentors, like Les Brown, Tony Robinson, people like that, these people literally serve other people. That kind of sparked my brain, instead of just trying to do it for my grandmother, do it for yourself. Like really go out there and try to serve other people. Don’t just do it because your grandmother did it, work hard. Don’t use her story, like what’s your identity? I’ve been learning that, as I got closer to God, as well, serve other people, serve the world. My foundation would definitely be centered around helping kids and helping people, period. But I definitely want to push my grandmother’s thing, as well, because that’s me. Man, my grandmother and I, we’re the same person. I want to incorporate helping that big dynamic of people, definitely in my country. There’s not in between: you’re either poor or your rich. If we could, push that middle class persona to Africa and kind of help the economy, help as much people as possible, that’s big to me.

Oh yeah, definitely that’d be inspiring and I think it’d be inspiring for the simple aspect that there’s a lot of intelligent people that are in Zimbabwe. There’s a lot of really educated people, but you could be book smart but you don’t have that pride or that click in your brain that you can do anything or travel anywhere or that anything is possible. Sometimes, it takes somebody with a lot of flaws, like myself to kind of go back and show them that you can do anything if you put you unlocked your whole mind and say, “you know, I can leave this place one day,” or “I can make this place better,” so I think that will allow us to meet in the middle because there are a lot of intelligent people, but there’s a lack of opportunity because you can’t really move or start anything. It’s tough. We talk to my uncles and aunts, it’s hard to get opportunities or to just have your own thing going for them it’s just fighting to live or you got something going on. It’s a lot. I feel like I could definitely inspire other people and sparking their brains to say, “you know what, I can do anything if I just keep believing.”

One moment that still sticks with me was when I was in 8th grade. Graduation caps were banned because the grade before me threw them sort of like a frisbee and they were hitting people in the face. We were told we were not going to be able to wear graduation caps just gowns. For an assignment in my English class, I had to write a persuasive essay and my topic was to get graduation caps back, my audience was the school board. Long story short my teacher gave me the idea to bring my paper to the board of education and we ended up getting to walk across the stage that spring with caps. This was me stepping up and fighting for what I believed in, even if it meant talking to people of higher power. I wanted them to realize what they were taking away from us and that’s exactly what happened.

It was in junior college at College of the Siskiyous at our local bowling alley. There’s not a lot to do in Weed, California, so we would go bowling every Tuesday night. It was somebody that I knew went to school at College of the Siskiyous, but they weren’t in our friend group. I overheard them talking about a situation that to me didn’t feel comfortable and made me feel uncomfortable as a person and so I went over and voiced my opinion to them and they realized and we kind of talked about it, that it probably wasn’t the smartest thing for them to do and that in that sense they needed to apologize to that person.