To me probably the biggest disappointments, as far as a football career goes, is I feel like I didn't live up to my potential, and I didn't win a Super Bowl ring.
I always hear people saying, "If I can just help one person, or if I can just stop one person from doing what I did." I don't think one person is enough. I feel you can help more than one person, help as many as you can. That's something that I would like to leave as my legacy: That I helped a lot of people and made some people make better decisions after looking at the decisions I've made in my life.
Ever since I was a kid I've always loved history. I think that kind of catapulted things, but I would say the two major factors were maybe 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama.
I do know that there have been many Native people - I don't like to call them "Native Americans," I guess, definitely not "Indians" - I've seen and read a lot about there's a big number of Natives that don't mind the Redskins name and they actually embrace it. Although there are a number of groups as well that are opposed to it.
I think whenever you go through something of that nature, you get to see who's really on your side and who's really there for you. That happened in my case. And it really let me understand that no matter how small of a decision you make, it's going to have a subsequent action or reaction, and something that started out very innocent turned into the tragedy that it was.
I think that we do have a great country, but there's a lot of things that we're not so great at. Unfortunately, education is one of them.
Anyone that knows me will tell you that any time we're going somewhere, if there's a US flag, they'll always point it out because they know I love it. Just how our whole country started and just the migration of Europeans to this country, all of that, just the history of everything has fascinated me, but my biggest thing is I want people to understand that when there are hostilities between nations there's always two sides.
I get a lot of people that are thanking me for speaking out about certain issues. I get people telling me, "If you don't like it here, then there's plenty of other countries to go to," which is hilarious to me. I don't take anything personal. A lot of people are blinded by their love for this country.
I've never thought that I would see any man of color, not just a black president, but any man of color, I never thought that I would live to see that. I thought maybe my grandchildren would, but I never thought I would. So when Barack Obama first started to run I was like, "I've never heard of this guy - he probably doesn't have a shot." But then he started picking up steam and that piqued my interest.
For me, 9/11, it was my last year in college and I didn't know anything about Al Qaeda, I didn't know anything about bin Laden, I had no idea. I think probably after a few years when I started seeing how the country and the policy was shifting due to terrorism, I wanted to know: Why are these people terrorizing us, and who are they?
It's like, 'Wow. Yes, I had fun... but damn, was it really all worth it when I'm in a wheelchair at the age of 45 and can't play with my grandkids?'
Malcolm Gladwell was on TV talking about wanting to have college football banned. It's interesting just because of him even bringing the topic up. Sooner or later, whether people are for or against it whether they like it or not, that is going to be a discussion that is going to come up. That's how it all starts - someone brings up the inquiry: Should we continue to let our children play Pop Warner, high school, and college football? Ten, 15, 20 years from now, who knows where that conversation is going to be.
I don't know what the NFL's going to look like in 15 years. Who knows. It's a great game; it's done a lot for me in my life.
You're never going to get rid of the injuries. The injuries are going to happen as long as there's football, especially the way it's always been played. So that's something that won't go away. But I guess they're trying to do the best they can to reduce those injuries and really take guys out of harm's way as much as they can.
Player safety is definitely something that has to be at the top of the list. I think that the union and the NFL are doing all they can to make sure they're protecting the players the best they can.
I think every year you're in the NFL you probably lose three or five years off your lifespan.
I think that the whole stigma of the name may still burn deep with some of the Native people, but there are some that it doesn't bother. They actually think it brings enlightenment to the contributions that the Native Americans had in the establishment of our country, but I haven't come up with an idea. I'm not saying the name "Redskins" wasn't derogatory, but the actual changing the name to the Washington Redskins was an honorary move.
I'm not going to be the guy to be 36, 37 years old still trying to hang on and play in the NFL. I'll be 33 in a couple weeks, and there's a million things I want to do with my life before my time is up, which is hopefully 40, 50 years down the line from now at least. So I'd
