But it’s more than the fear. My family had been in Louisiana since the late 1700s, but after slavery they didn’t have access to bank loans; they weren’t able to own anything in their community other than the church my Popo built with his bare hands. We built our own community on Bennett Road. But we had no ownership. Seeing this with my own eyes was a crash course for my experiences in the NFL. That’s why I talk all the time about the lack of Black ownership in pro football and why it’s so important for us to own and not be owned. There is no self-determination without control, and there is no control without ownership, whether it’s your house, your car, or an NFL team.
I only have the tools to navigate both that past and my present because my parents taught us history, including what we had to overcome as a people. Malcolm X once said, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.” I don’t think he ever said anything truer.
Way too often, as athletes, we get pulled out of our environment, get some money, get some fame, and become so focused on “the life” that we forget we are still Black men living in this society. It’s so easy to lose our sense of self, to just float away on the cheers and forget who we are, who came before us, and how they bled. That mindfulness came from the people who raised me. As I got older, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the people I grew up reading about in those encyclopedias. I wanted to be a person who made an impact with my mind more than I wanted to grow up and be Charles Haley or my friend the late Cortez Kennedy.
Growing up in Houston also helped me understand this world and my place in it. Living there was an education. You’d see so many diverse cultures and run into so many different types of people that you couldn’t help but think about the world outside of H-Town. People don’t realize that Houston takes in more refugees than any city in the United States. If Houston were a country it would rank as the fourth-largest refugee population on earth. Look at the ways people pitched in to save one another after Hurricane Harvey, setting out on boats, pulling people from cars, opening up their mosques, synagogues, and storefront churches. That’s Houston, and that was my community growing up.
Our house was where the kids went. We were “the house.” Everybody knew where we lived, and they were like, “Let’s go to the house.” There was always basketball going on and the sounds of kids having fun. Big Mike was the dad for the kids who didn’t have dads, or who were in home situations that felt unsafe. They knew they would be all right in “the house.”
As for football, I didn’t even realize I was “college-scholarship-good” at it until high school. I played because it was something to do. I liked doing science projects, and I also liked football. It was just another pursuit on the list of my interests. I never thought I was going to the NFL. I never believed, “This is exactly what I want to do. This is the dream.” But when you’re big and Black, the grown-ups push you to play sports. They take an interest that is hard to ignore or resist. Also, when you’re big and Black, your peers challenge you all the time to scuffle. They challenge your manhood, as if fighting makes you a man. I never liked to fight, but I really didn’t have a choice, because I was Martellus’s big brother. Martellus occasionally would start the fights, but I always had to end them. People knew that if they fought one of us, they would have to fight both of us, which really meant that if someone tried to fight Martellus, they would be fighting me. Back-to-back fighting: the big Bennett boys, swatting people down like flies. That was just life. Everybody wanted to test us, every single day. My grandpa said, “Y’all need to stop fighting at that schoolhouse!”
In San Diego, we were “country” to the West Side kids, but in the summers, as soon as we were back in Louisiana, we were “city kids.” In Houston we were “the Bennett boys,” but no matter how people saw us, we were joined at the hip, two peas in a pod. Growing up, we spent so much time side by side that people thought we were twins. We had the same friends and took part in the same activities. We also shared a bed. I spent my childhood sleeping foot to head with that man. The house had three bedrooms, but my father wanted to have a guest room, so we shared a bedroom. Before we had to split a mattress we had bunk beds, but Tellus got bigger and heavier, growing up to six feet six and 270 pounds, and he was on the top bunk—until it collapsed. I’m still mad about that shit.
We both went to Texas A&M, so it wasn’t until we got to the NFL that we
