Kerry Collins never made you feel quite comfortable enough for your liking as a sports fan. Certainly, he was built in every “safe” way an NFL quarterback can be built. Standing 6’5” and built with a cannon that had been groomed under one of the sacred cows of college football, Collins burst into the NFL after a single season of dominance at Penn State, taken with the fifth overall pick by the expansion Carolina Panthers. In two years, he led the Panthers to the NFC championship game on the strength of his stellar performance. In three years, his battle with alcoholism thrust him into public shame after an ugly racial joke made in a drunken state resulted in Collins being branded as a racist. In four years, he was benched and cut from the team after telling his coach that his heart wasn’t in the game anymore. After spiraling to the bottom of the castaway barrel in New Orleans, a drunk driving arrest should have been the end of a whirlwind career standing as a lesson in just how fragile everything around us is, and how we are often the engineers of destroying it all in a matter of moments.
That’s a good lesson, and an important one, but it’s less rare than what Collins wound up demonstrating. The next four years were, quite frankly, remarkable even before considering the success Collins achieved on the field. After the Giants took a flyer on Collins in 1999, Collins committed to spending the next four years in therapy. This would be admirable in the everyday working world; in the rigid psychological world of the NFL, where the admission of need or weakness is tantamount to admitting you are Not a Winner (“Not A Winner” is a trademarked property of the NFL media), it’s amazing. Over that time, Collins took the Giants to a Super Bowl, losing to the Ravens after an NFC Championship performance that showed Collins could demolish teams with his talents if given the chance. After a stint in Oakland, Collins drifted to Tennessee, where he once again seized an opportunity to lead that resulted in the Titans having the best record in the league. Over the last decade of Collins’s career, he climbed back to the peak of the NFL by believing that his personal demons and difficult circumstances couldn’t change who he was fundamentally: an unquestionably talented quarterback with a record that proved his ability.
I think we misunderstand how unbelievably difficult that must have been. Too often we look at the second or third chances a person is given and imagine that there is no real net gain for the individual involved, as if they simply return to a place they should have already been and deserve no credit for it. This is based on the fallacy that there are objective, static measurements for the success of a life. The reality, however, is that we make people into neat stories as quickly as possible, and in most cases people just accept them, or at least accept that this is how others will see them. In continuing to exist on his own terms, let alone succeed in the NFL, Kerry Collins earned our admiration. Quitter? Unquestionably defeated by a career of success with three different teams over 14 years. Racist? While there is no definite answer as to how Collins actually feels (the real danger of a label such as this), the idea that Collins would have 14 years of successful, positive relationships in a predominantly black league on five teams’ worth of players makes the accusation rings false. With each passing year, he buried the labels prematurely placed upon him instead of letting them bury him.
We don’t appreciate Collins because his career, despite its various peaks, isn’t marked by any fundamental changes in Collins’s style as a player. Throughout his career, he remained the same prototypical old school quarterback, changing only in terms of usage, not gameplay. Instead, what changed was Collins’s life off of the field. The four years of therapy stand out in particular as an example of a man who knew he needed to change how he approached life if he was going to be who he was at his core with any success. He recognized that if he just learned to survive long enough, his talent would win out, and so he set about the business of survival even when he was young enough that everyone could have expected him to try and change who he was as a player. In short, Collins proved that there is a value to just figuring out how to hang around long enough to be ready for the opportunities given to you. So while we may never look back on Collins’s career and think of any one shining moment of brilliance, there is a comforting glow that surrounds his entire body of work. It is the sense of a job well done, and one that should encourage all of us that if we just keep moving, figuring out what we need as people to remain who we are as professionals, becoming warriors of the mind, victory is never as impossible as it may seem.
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