But I didn’t know how deeply it had affected Martellus until years later. ESPN did an episode of the show E:60 on the Bennett brothers, and my appendix rupture came up. Martellus talked about seeing me in the hospital and just started crying on camera, bending down, sobbing. I was as shocked as the camera people. I didn’t know what to do, so I just put my hand on his back and let him go. Growing up, I had always seen this story first through my own eyes—my fear, my pain—and then through the anxiety of my mom and dad. I didn’t know how much baggage from that experience my brother had been carrying.
Now I stare in the mirror and look at this scar. It’s wide, long, jagged, and ugly. It’s also a tribute to what I’ve been through: a reminder that I could so easily not be here. It reminds me that life can be over in an instant, so live every single day. People look at me and think, “Oh, he’s so happy, he’s always laughing. He’s so carefree.” Why would I ever sweat the small stuff? I almost died. I’m alive, so to hell with every single thing that you think I should or shouldn’t be. I love looking at the scar. I hate that I had to feel that pain, but I love the lessons it taught and the way it still motivates me. Years ago, I got a tattoo of Frankenstein on my leg. Underneath it reads, “Near death experience. Keep on rising.”
After I healed up I got back on the football field. Martellus and I both played on the defensive line and put other teams through hell. Martellus was a prodigy, starring in both basketball and football, something unheard of in in Houston’s Alief School District. I wasn’t the athletic freak that Martellus was, but I held my own. Also, through someone on the football team, I met a girl. I was sixteen and she must’ve been fifteen. I thought, “This is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.” One day there was an open seat next to me on the school bus. She sat down and I couldn’t believe it. Her name was Pele Partsch. She and her family were like no one I had ever met: traveling musicians from Hawaii, all in the same band, like a Polynesian Partridge Family. Now they’re my in-laws, and Pele and I have been together ever since.
She gave me confidence to push forward with football. After high school, I was supposed to play at Louisiana Tech, but they messed up my paperwork, which gave me a semester to try to land somewhere else. During those months out of school, I sent my game tape to everybody I could think of. I packaged it up and sent it to top football programs. Then I’d call the college coaching staffs, pretending to be a high school coach, saying, “I’ve got this kid named Michael Bennett. He’s got the goods! You guys should check him out. I sent you his highlight tape.” That’s how I ended up getting a ton of scholarship offers: I realized the recruiters usually didn’t watch the full game film—they just heard about a guy and then watched his tapes.
Texas A&M was one of the schools that offered me a scholarship. That’s also why my brother ended up at Texas A&M; he was originally going to go to LSU. But now it was all set. The Bennett boys were going to drive two hours from Houston to College Station to attend Texas A&M, but the real education, the real higher learning, would not be going down in the classroom.
THE NCAA WILL GIVE YOU PTSD
For those of you who think the life of a college athlete is all glitter and glamour, you couldn’t be more wrong…. But just as with every injustice, wrongs don’t get righted unless we keep raising our voices again and again.
—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
There was a player on Tampa Bay in 2010, when I was there, a defensive lineman named Brian Price. He was a star at UCLA, a second-round draft pick. The NFL didn’t work out for him, and Brian was out of the league after twenty games. In the spring of 2017, Brian was in an auto parts store in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The video of what happened next is crazy. He was “acting erratically,” so the store managers called the police. When they showed up, Brian ran as fast as he could at the glass doors and burst through them, as if the shattering glass were a left guard trying to get between him and a quarterback. Afterward, he said he couldn’t remember what happened and that “mentally, some days I struggle a lot.” His wife, Candice, believes his problems are signs of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy—where the brain just starts to fall apart because of repeated hits), and it affects them every day of their lives. Brian is twenty-eight years old.
Remember, Brian played just twenty games in the NFL. So before I say anything about the NCAA, and all the many—many—ways I think it does young people wrong, we need to speak about the price we pay for these
