Russell Wilson Never Owed Anyone a Performance of Toughness.

Russell Wilson Never Owed Anyone a Performance of Toughness.

(ThyBlackMan.com) Sit in any barbershop long enough and you will hear a young man’s whole character decided over the hum of the clippers. Russell Wilson got decided in mine years back, and the ruling came down the same every time somebody said his name. Soft. Too polished, too churchy, grinning like the country had never once pressed its knee to his neck. My uncle would wave a hand at the set and say it flat, that boy is soft, and half the room nodded along like he had read it off a page of scripture.

I never could bring myself to nod with them. Something in the verdict sat crooked in my chest, though I will admit it took a long stretch of years before I understood exactly what.

There is a certain notion of what a brother is supposed to be, and it gets passed down like an heirloom nobody remembers buying. He is meant to be granite. Unbothered. A little dangerous, or willing at least to look the part. The face stays still. Tears do not fall where folks can witness them, love does not get spoken aloud, and Lord knows a real one does not sit on camera talking about faith, and gratitude, and drinking his water and guarding his recovery. To plenty of us, that kind of living looked like a get-up. Like a performance staged for a camera owned by other people.

Here is what I have finally come to understand about the granite, though. It was never vanity. It was survival.

My father wore it. His father wore it deeper. Both came up in a place that punished tenderness in men who looked like them, a country that read a smile as weakness and gentleness as an opening. So the wall went up. Hurt got swallowed. Softness got answered with a set jaw, because the world outside that door was hunting for any reason. The pose kept them breathing. I will not sit here and mock what kept a whole generation alive.

The trouble is what came after. We took the shield and started bowing to it. We forgot it was only ever a shield. Somewhere along the road the armor stopped being protection and became the entire definition, until a young brother who refused to strap it on could look, to the wrong set of eyes, like a counterfeit.

That is the room Russell walked into.

He came grinning about possibility. Why not you, he kept telling children and telling himself. And a hope that plain made people suspicious. We have been sold so many bright teeth over the years that a real smile now reads as a hustle. When the quarterback spoke about faith, folks rolled their eyes and called it a brand. When he loved his wife openly, lifted her up in front of the entire world, some cackled and questioned the man’s spine, as though devotion were a thing to be ashamed of. He did not run the streets. He did not drink himself sideways. He guarded his health and his body like they were worth guarding. And for all of it, the verdict came down quick. Corny. Fake. Not really one of us.

Sit with how strange that arithmetic is. We had reached a place where clean living, and open affection, and a fella saying he believed in something larger than himself became the evidence used against him.

Now, I am not handing you a saint. Russell is a whole person, with the ego and the misjudgments and the odd business venture any of us would have carried. Seattle grew tired of him and he grew tired of Seattle, and there is history in that split that has nothing to do with our subject here. I am not composing a hymn to the athlete. He is a door, and I want to walk you through it into the wider room waiting on the other side.

Because the true matter was never one player. It is the narrow little box we built around ourselves and then had the nerve to call freedom.

Consider all the men who never got to be gentle. Who had jokes but were not permitted grief. Who could dance but could not tremble. Fellas who buried three friends before thirty and were told, by their own people, to keep it moving, hold the face flat, do not let anybody catch the water in your eyes. We handed each other that instruction like it was affection. Maybe, once, it was. But plenty of good souls died lonely inside it, cradling a whole ocean they were never allowed to pour out.

What truly unsettled folks about Russell, I have come to believe, is that he declined the audition. He would not act out the hardness for their comfort. He was optimistic in front of a people trained to distrust hope. He was warm in front of a people taught that warmth gets you played. He prayed aloud in a culture that had learned to keep the Lord inside the building and off the field. And every single time he did it without shame, he was quietly posing a question a lot of us were not ready to face. Who told you that you had to be stone. And who profits from you believing it.

I think about the boys watching. Always studying, always sorting out what a grown one is permitted to be. A son reads his father for the list of what is allowed, and if the only item on that list is grit, then grit is the whole inheritance he receives. A cramped inheritance. He hands the same tight little will down to his own, and the ocean gets buried one more generation deep.

So when I hear that a brother proved he owes no one a show of toughness, I do not receive it as an insult to strength. I have known powerful men my entire life. My grandfather could break a chain and hum a spiritual while he did it. Real fortitude was never the enemy. The enemy is the imitation, the pose we mistook for the person, the shield we knelt before so long that we could no longer tell it apart from our own faces.

Optimism is not softness. Loving your wife where everyone can see is not softness. Faith is not a costume, rest is not laziness, and a grown one weeping at a funeral is not less of what he is. None of that should sound daring. It only sounds daring because we let a stingy definition wear the crown for far too many years.

Finish story here; Russell Wilson Never Owed Anyone a Performance of Toughness.