Tuaolo Esera - Alone in the Trenches

ESERA TUAOLO
with John Rosengren

Copyright 2006 by Esera Tuaolo

Cover and internal design 2006 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover photo courtesy of Esera Tuaolo

Tip-in photos courtesy of David Carlson, Mike Shield, and Esera Tuaolo

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tuaolo, Esera.

Alone in the trenches / Esera Tuaolo, with John Rosengren.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0505-7

ISBN-10: 1-4022-0505-8

1. Tuaolo, Esera. 2. Football players--United States--Biography. 3. Gay athletes--United States--Biography. I. Rosengren, John. II. Title.

GV939.T78A3 2006
796.332'092--dc22

2005025014

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

LB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my husband, Mitchell

I can only thank God above for sending me you.

Your love saved me,
Your smile embraced me
Your hugs comforted me,
Your tears awoke me

Ote Alofa ia te oe
I Love You

To Mitchell Jr. and Michele

I just wanted you both to know that I did this book so someday when you read it, you will truly know who your father was (or is). Also, this is my two cents for creating a world of tolerance, praying that when people read it they will realize that there is hope and that hate in any form is wrong.

ISETTLED INTO MY STANCE for the last play of Super Bowl XXXIII. The field glowed under the lights. Flashbulbs popped around the stadium. We, the Atlanta Falcons, faced the Denver Broncos led by their superstar quarterback John Elway. Denver had the ball with a 3419 lead. I lined up at my usual position, nose guard, across from the Denver center, who was poised to snap the ball to Elway. My knuckles gripped the turf.

The Broncos quarterback took the snap and dropped to his knee to let the clock run out. I touched him first. When the ball carrier is on the ground, someone on the defense must at least touch him so hes ruled down. Since I touched Elway, I was credited with the tackle.

A routine play, but it terrified me. And that was not the first time. That game and that play were televised to one billion people around the globe. Someone could have recognized me and blown my cover. In the past, whenever my image appeared on the screenwhen I made a big play, sang the national anthemI lived with the fear that I might be outed. This was January 31, 1999, and at that point I had been playing for eight years in the NFL. Before that, I had played four years of college football. In all that time, not one teammate, coach, or sportswriter knew I was gay.

The National Football League is the number one entertainment in the world, and the Super Bowl is its showcase event. Media from all overplaces like Japan and Lebanon, where they dont even play footballreport on the spectacle. The Super Bowl is the biggest event that happens every year in the United States.

What if one of those billion people watching recognized me as the stranger he had picked up in a gay bar? All he had to do was out me to the press and the story would be all over the headlines: Gay Man Makes Final Tackle in Super Bowl. My football career would be finished.

No more Super Bowls, no more Sundays playing ball. No more paychecks, no more financial security. No more locker-room banter, no more camaraderie with the guys. I would be banished from the NFL fraternity.

During my nine years in the NFL, I lived that close to the edge of destruction. My success tormented me. The better I did, the more exposure I received. The more exposure, the greater the chance of someone discovering my secret. A secret that a man who plays the most macho of team sports is not supposed to have. The stress nearly killed me.

I am a Samoan who grew up in Hawaii. My family lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Id gone from that poverty to the fortunes of the NFL. Football gave me a college scholarship, the chance to buy a house for my mother, the opportunity to travel, and much more. My NFL career lasted nine years with five teamsthe Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Jacksonville Jaguars, Atlanta Falcons, and Carolina Panthers. Ill go down in history as the first player to sing the national anthem and then start an NFL game, the first rookie nose guard to start all sixteen games, and the last guy to tackle John Elway in his storied Hall of Fame career.

The dream to succeed in the NFL and achieve all that football had to offer was a nightmare at times. I struggled to survive the combative, macho world dominated by a culture that despised who I really am. Had opponents and teammates known I was gay, they would have mocked me the way I heard them ridicule others with sexual slurs. More than likelyas several former teammates admittedthey would have tried to injure me so that they would not have been viewed as guilty by association. In other words, they would have taken me out so that their own masculinity would not be questioned for playing alongside a sissy. Its rough down in the trenches, where linemen weighing more than threehundred pounds hurl themselves at one another in brutal handto-hand combat, but it is nothing compared to the pain I kept buried inside so I could play out my dream.

This is the story of how I dared to dream, not only of surviving professional football, but of living openly for who I am, a gay man.

FIRST THING I REMEMBER, Im running naked on the beach. Racing across the strip of sand that separates land from sea. Four years old, racing naked, free. The ocean breeze bathes my skin. Im happy as far as you can see the water.

That sand, Makaha Beach, was my home away from home. My family traveled there every summer to fish. We camped on the beach in a hut my father and mother fashioned from coconut leaves woven over two-by-fours. To my playful imagination, the hut looked like a fort.

My parents fished with my older brothers. I watched them lay out their nets, and they told me to stay out of the way. They packed their catch in the coconut-leaf baskets my mother made and drove to the market in Daddys green Thunderbird. I played games with the ocean, pretending I could control the waves like Aquaman. I would summon each wave to the shore, and the ocean obeyed my command. I commanded tsunamis to smash against the mountain. It was a magical time.

The smell of opakapaka fish cooking over an open fire filtered through the evening air. Stars cluttered the sky at night, tons and tons of them. So big and bright that it looked like you could reach right up and grab one. I would lie inside our fort on the fala matsmade out of lahala leavessnuggled under a blanket beside my mother. She rubbed my back in a hypnotizing rhythm. I would fall asleep wrapped in her arms.

I was born July 11, 1968, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, to Laki Tavai Tuaolo and Maiuu Mike Tuaolo, the youngest of eight children in an immigrant Samoan family. Our summers on the beach ended when I was five years old and we moved to Waimanalo, directly opposite Honolulu. My father, Maiuu, leased a small piece of landabout twenty acreson the windward side of the island with plans to transform it into a banana plantation like those back home. This was part of his plan to give his family a better life when he left Samoa.