Table Of ContentALONE IN THE TRENCHES
MY LIFE AS A GAY MAN IN THE NFL
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.
CONTENTS
1. The Torments of Success
2. God Bless My Daddy
3. Baby Fridge
4. Who’s Esera Tuaolo?
5. Killer Beavers
6. Road to the Draft
7. Lombardi’s House
8. A Samoan in Green Bay
9. Mississippi Brawling
10. My Brother Tua
11. If You Make the Team
12. Play through the Pain
13. A McDonald’s Wedding
14. The Past Can Destroy the Future
15. Champions for Christ
16. We’re Going to Miami
17. Super Bowl XXXIII
18. I Can’t Lose This Man
19. That’s the Big Secret
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
The Torments of Success
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 34–19 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 he’s 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 screen—when I made a big play, sang the national anthem—I
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 over—places like
Japan and Lebanon, where they don’t even play football—report 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. I’d 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 teams—the
Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Jacksonville Jaguars, Atlanta Falcons,
and Carolina Panthers. I’ll 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 likely—as several former teammates
admitted—they 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.
It’s 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.
CHAPTER TWO
God Bless My Daddy
FIRST THING I REMEMBER, I’m 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. I’m 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 Daddy’s 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 mats—made out of lahala leaves—snuggled 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 land—about twenty acres—on 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.
Daddy was an enterprising man. He never went to school—he couldn’t read or
write—but he was savvy. I don’t know how he did it, but he leased that land. He
used to tell me, “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, make like you
do.” People didn’t question him.
He charmed people into doing things for him. Because he couldn’t read or
write, he couldn’t take the written test required for his driver’s license. He flirted
with the woman behind the counter, and she took the test for him. Leonardo
DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me If You Can reminds me of Daddy and the way
he was able to get people to do things for him. He was always a good talker.
Makes sense, since he was the first son of a high-talking chief, the one who
speaks for a village. His mother Tusipasi was the talking chief for the village of
Pago Pago. Once Daddy started his family, he did not want to carry the
responsibilities of chief that he would inherit from his father. He wanted more
for his family. He was a dreamer, an explorer. I think that’s where I get my
ambitions. He instilled in me the sense that there’s something more for me out
there to explore and try. That’s the way I felt on Oahu growing up. I felt there
was a lot more to the world and life than the island. That must have been the way
my father felt when he went searching for something better. His parents weren’t
married when he was born, so he gave up his father’s name, Deveaux, and took
his mother’s name, Tuaolo, and moved his young family to Hawaii before I was
born.
Like his father before him, Daddy was a ladies’ man. He was very handsome
and well manicured. He dressed sharply in clothes given to him by admiring
women. My job as a small boy was to shine my father’s shoes, to make sure they
were bright black or white. He used to tell me, “If you go into a bank dressed as
a hobo, you won’t get a loan. But go in looking put together and you will.”
That served him in business and other ways. He would tell Mama he was
taking me out for ice cream. Instead of going to the ice cream parlor, he would
take me to the house of one of his lady friends. I watched television in the living
room while Daddy worked his charms in the bedroom.
My mother, Laki Tavai Tuaolo, came from a respectable family as well. The
Tavai family was also one of the monarchies of American Samoa. Her father
was a high chief of his village. She met Daddy when he was working as a
chauffeur for the governor of Samoa.
One day, when she was still a teenager, my mother tagged along with her two
cousins to the governor’s house. The cousins went round the back to collect slop
for their pigs. Mama waited out front and decided to climb the mango trees to
