The Sportsman: Unexpected Lessons from an Around-the-World Sports Odyssey

The Sportsman "Now in his 11th season in the NFL, Dhani Jones has had an unusually long career for a football player. Just a few years ago, however, Dhani thought his playing days were over. Cut by the Eagles and the Saints, he was at a professional crossroads. When the Bengals called, though, he was more than ready and in the best shape of his life. And for that, he credits his off-season. The Sportsman follow Full description

Dhani Makalani (Potomac)

My parents took 2 weeks to name me. They wanted to figure out who I was before locking it down. Per the wishes of Commander Samuel L. Jones, U.S. Navy (Ret.)--a.k.a. Dad--my name also had to satisfy three requirements.

(1) It would call me to purpose, demanding some action from me.

(2) It would honor my ethnicity, which, according to my father, was an African American spirit with a Eurocentric mind.

(3) It couldn't be shortened into a nickname.

My parents finally settled on Dhani (Hindi for "thinking man") Makalani (Hawaiian for "skilled at writing"). And while I tried for years to find a nickname--everything from "D.J." to "Oscar the Grouch"--my father is satisfied that his mission was a success.

I didn't play a down of football until high school. My mother didn't let me. Thought the game was too violent. She was an anesthesiologist, so she knew something about pain and injury. I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

So instead of playing football as a kid, I played every other sport.

I swam and raced mountain bikes. I played competitive tennis and wrestled. There were baseball, soccer, and basketball teams. I messed around with lacrosse and hockey on in-line skates. In the summers I'd canoe and kayak; when it got cold, I'd go snowboarding.

I played for fun, but for as long as I can remember, I played to win. You'll often hear people talk about someone having a "competitive nature." I am that someone. Winning was always in the front of my mind. The only option. Whatever I did, I wanted to be first.

It's like being in a classroom. You sit in the back, and you'll see a big room with a lot of people. Intimidating. Easy to get lost.

Sit in the center if you like being caught up in the middle of the pack. But who wants to be in the middle of the pack?

I want to be in the front row, where it's just the professor and me. That's where I can focus, unfiltered, on whatever it is I'm supposed to be learning.

I was also born with the proverbial chip on my shoulder. For as long as I can remember, I've been arguing with just about everyone: friends, teachers, coaches, my parents. I was also blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with a sharp tongue. I set an elementary school record for trips to the principal's office.

Sometimes I was just being a brat, acting out. Like when I told my swim coach I wouldn't get into the water. Too damn cold. I knew he couldn't do anything to me, not really: I was the one who was going to win all the events come Saturday.

But I like to think it wasn't always about immaturity. Sometimes I was taking a stand, arguing for something I believed in. Like when I got into it with the middle school teacher who didn't believe that I'd completed my project on time travel without help. I was really into time travel, a young Albert Einstein, for all I knew. I fully expected that my efforts were going to be celebrated for their obvious genius.

When the teacher had the audacity to question those efforts, I think I told her to kindly suck my left nut. Or maybe that was the time I argued with my track coach. Who cares? You get the idea.

Point is, there's no way to say that kindly.

Another trip to the principal's office.

What frustrated me the most was that the teachers and coaches weren't looking at me the way one person looks at another person-- they were looking at me the way 40-year-old adults look at 13-year-old kids. I am all for respecting one's elders, but I was sure, even then, that if I had some pertinent information, backed up and well justified, I should be able to say it. Just because you've been through something doesn't mean that you know everything. That's the whole point behind that show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Little mofos know some shit.

Anyway, I wasn't always an easy kid. My mother once kicked me out of the car for lipping off. Told me to walk home. Fifteen miles away. My father, a Navy captain who'd seen and dealt with much tougher cases than mine, had more of a "buck stops here" policy. He told me, when I was 13, that if I continued down the path I was travelling, I'd be dead by 18. Maybe at his own hands. As far as he was concerned, he brought me into the world--and he could take me out. Didn't stop me from arguing, but at least taught me to be a little more strategic with my words.

A NOTE FROM COMMANDER SAMUEL L. JONES (A.K.A. DAD)

There is a saying that I like to use: "Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

Dhani was running around with a group of young men who, in my eyes, lacked sufficient character. Now, two things came out of this. The first was a big hole in my basement wall. A Dhani-size hole. The second was that he quickly moved away from that group. But I didn't try to tell Dhani to move away from them; I engaged those young men in a way that moved them away from Dhani.

I challenged them in their own lives. I got in their faces and stayed with them, letting them see that they couldn't stay up with me, they couldn't match me, and they weren't going to have any influence on this son of mine because I was going to be right there in their Kool-Aid. I gave them a choice: Either they come the way we want to go, or they go away.

But I never tried to force or otherwise convince Dhani to choose between me and his friends. Because another saying that I use is "What you do speaks so loudly that what you say I cannot hear."

I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, one of maybe five black kids in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. I knew how to do the Hava Nagila long before I knew the steps to the Humpty Dance.

Potomac was a welcoming place, relatively free of racism, at least in any overt way. There were a few subtle things now and then, like a teacher who told me to take my "cotton-pickin' hands" off something or another. The Congressional Country Club, where I played a lot of tennis, wasn't exactly integrated when I was a kid, and there were certain line judges who made calls against me that left me feeling suspicious.

But mostly I felt welcomed. My parents were both world travellers-- my mother caught the bug after a college year abroad in Africa, while my father's naval career took him to Japan and the Philippines-- and as soon as my sister and I were old enough, they began taking us with them. The international flavor didn't end when we got home. Mom's best friend was Egyptian; my parents had friends from Russia, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Jamaica.

This felt natural to me. It didn't even feel like being an outsider, just the completely normal experience of a young man looking for his place in society.

A young man with a huge chip on his shoulder.

By the time I reached high school, that chip was more like a log. Everybody was pretty sick of arguing with me. My father encouraged my mother to let me make more of my own decisions, so I could learn to live with the consequences. One of the first was to go out for the football team.

Consequences there were. I hated it. Autumn in Potomac was hot and muggy. Two-a-day practices sucked. I felt like I was being taught how to steer a car at full speed into a brick wall, then being told to enjoy it. Every practice I got my ass beat, my body £ded into the ground. Every day there was someone to drive me back 60 yards, put me on my back, and step on me on his way off the field. I was definitely sitting in the back of the classroom.

Was I frustrated? Hell yes. I was dealing with people who were better than me. There were fights. But the experience helped to motivate me. I wasn't the king of the world anymore. I had to look at my teammates, every practice, and say, "You know what? You guys got a lot on me right now."

One part of my brain told me I could quit, that I had too many other things to do with my life. But my subconscious mind was building a rock-solid foundation. If you're going to do this, it told me, these are the hurdles you have to climb. This may not have been the experience I expected when I signed up, but I'd signed up. I'd made a commitment to football, and I was too proud, too stubborn, and too competitive to admit I'd made a mistake.

Fortunately, football paid an immediate dividend: The game turned out to be the perfect antidote to the chip on my shoulder. When I got home after two practices, all I wanted to do was my homework so I could go to bed. I was too damn tired to argue. It felt good not to have to argue anymore.

There's a conference table in my mind. Eight guys, maybe more. One's drinking coffee, one's drinking tea, one's drinking orange juice. Others have scotch, gin, or vodka, maybe a gimlet. One guy is happy with a glass of water.

They're all dressed differently. Bow ties and neckties. A ratty T-shirt and a pinstripe suit from the 1930s. Slacks and shorts. Woolworth's and Ralph Lauren. One is butt-ass naked.

Who am I? I'm the moderator of this roundtable discussion. It's my job to make sure that all these characters accept one another for who they are. I've got to mediate arguments and make sure that everyone's drink is kept full. Sometimes extra full: No one's too upset when the Angry Guy gets so drunk he passes out in the corner.

Sometimes I'll let one of these characters take the lead. There's a very different guy, say, meeting with a TV executive than there is when I'm on the football field. But mostly I just try to keep them all on the same page. I'm a Pisces: As long as the fish are swimming in the same direction, things will go well.

But when they start fighting, it can really mess me up.

I remember one time, just walking down the street, I got to a corner and didn't know which way to go.

So I sat there.

For 3 hours.

Finally, it got late and I got hungry. Then it was time to go eat.

I played fullback and defense, at least until the coaches got to see my hands. I had terrible hands. They told me to concentrate on defense, where my hands wouldn't be a liability. The move also made my mother much happier- -she felt a lot better when I was tackling people instead of the other way around.

I got better at finding the fun within the game, eventually learning to enjoy it. Football started to mean a lot to me. But it never meant everything to me. I had too many other things going on.

My junior year in high school, I was still competing in swim meets, tennis matches, and mountain bike races. I was a varsity wrestler and lettered in track. I still went snowboarding whenever I could. I entered triathlons and went on white-water rafting trips.

I played saxophone in the school band, performing at football games until I made varsity and the coaches asked me to quit. I kind of wish I hadn't--it would have been cool to come out at halftime, in pads, to get down with the band.

I had school projects. I raised money for muscular dystrophy. I had a social life. On top of it all, I had a full load of AP classes. Sports were my avocation, not my vocation: I was going to be a doctor.

It was a dream that started when I was a kid, bragging about all the things that I was going to do with my life. My father told me plainly that if I wanted to do all those things, I was going to have to find a job that paid a lot of money. That afternoon, after some quick research into potential careers and their expected salaries, I hung a sign on my bedroom door: Dr. Dhani Jones, Pediatric Neurosurgeon.

Let's just say there weren't too many other football players discussing their AP biology exams during practice.

My coaches worried that all my activities were going to distract me from football. Pretty much everyone else thought I was crazy, that I should slow down. Life shouldn't be that chaotic.

But for me, the chaos was part of the routine, as long as I stayed focused on the task at hand. When I was playing football, I was concentrating on football. When I was in class, I was concentrating on class. Being busy didn't make me scattered--it helped me to focus better on whatever activity I happened to be participating in.

More importantly, my performance got better in everything I did.

Football workouts are about three things: getting faster, getting stronger, and getting more explosive. That meant a lot of running, lifting, and slamming my body into blocking sleds. But the benefits extended beyond the football field. All that running made me better at track. The lifting made me a more formidable wrestler and an absolute beast when I was pedaling a mountain bike up a hill. The explosiveness allowed me to close faster to the net and hit the ball harder, helping me to win more tennis matches.

It wasn't a one-way relationship: The other sports helped me to become a better football player. Tennis forced me to practice my lateral movement, hand-eye coordination, and quickness. Track and biking improved my aerobic fitness. I could play football faster and for longer stretches without getting tired and with greater agility.

In the end, all those "distractions" helped me go from a practice scrub to the guy getting his name in the paper: All-County, All-Met, and one of the top-rated linebacker prospects on the East Coast.