NFL's man of the year has biggest heart

[HuskerBob]

What a great great man. Makes me so proud for Will Shields. Thanks for everything you do WS.

 

KC Star: NFL's man of the year has biggest heart --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NFL's man of the year has biggest heart

 

By JOE POSNANSKI

Columnist

 

HOUSTON — There are two images of Will Shields that stand out today. One is a picture of him after a football game. Nobody in the NFL plays harder than Chiefs guard Will Shields. You can watch him on any play, any given Sunday, no matter the weather, the wind, the quarter or the score, and you see a man fiercely smashing into linemen, pulling into linebackers, protecting his quarterback. You see pride.

 

When the game ends, Shields dresses quickly, speaks quietly to selected teammates and glares hard at people who approach. The message is clear. The game isn't over for him. And the man wants to be left alone.

 

“There are days after games — lots of days, really — when I just don't want to talk,” he says. “Football is a violent game. We are violent men. You can't just turn that off like a faucet.”

 

Then there is Will Shields away from the game, around children. He is the picture of joy. Shields stands 6 feet 3, weighs 315 pounds, but around children he somehow folds himself, like a collapsing telescope. He becomes their size. The violence is gone. The intimidation is gone. The uneasiness is gone. Children have to hug him. They do hug him. He hugs back. They ask him about bullies or football or a book they read or just how to stop feeling afraid.

 

And it's obvious that nobody, anywhere on earth, has a bigger heart.

 

“Sometimes,” he says, “you will ask a child what he wants. And he will say ‘I want to have meat for dinner,' or ‘I want a blanket.' And that's when you know that there's so much more for us to do.”

 

He stops. “If you can help one child,” he says. “Just one child.”

 

These are the clashing worlds of Will Shields. Today, he wins one of sports' most unique honors. Today he is announced as the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year. It is the one prize that crosses football frontiers — it is, after all, not given to the comeback player of the year or defensive player of the year or coach of the year or rookie of the year. No, it's the man of the year. It honors a man for violence and charity. And it takes a special kind of man.

 

The award has been given, through the years, to great players, to 12 Hall of Famers (13 if you count John Elway, who will be voted in Saturday), but more than that it has been given to the best of the best, to the men who have towered over the game, John Unitas and Roger Staubach and Mean Joe Greene, to Chiefs greats Willie Lanier and Len Dawson and Derrick Thomas and, of course, to Walter Payton.

 

Will Shields is in that class. He's at the head of the class. As a sportswriter, I often see athletes at their best. I see them visit hospitals, and I see them give advice to children, and I see them raise money for incredible charities. They do these good things for a million reasons: They feel like they should; they see it as a part of their jobs; they believe it makes them look good; they remember when an athlete changed their lives.

 

Some, a select few, do these things out of love.

 

Will Shields does as much out of love as any athlete I have ever known.

 

***

 

They have been giving out the man of the year award since 1970, but only twice before has an offensive lineman won the thing. Dwight Stephenson, the brilliant center for the Miami Dolphins, won it in 1985. And Anthony Munoz, Cincinnati's incomparable left tackle, won it in 1991. Both are in the Hall of Fame, and both are giants in their communities. As an offensive lineman, you have to do more to get noticed.

 

Will Shields has done more. He has done more than I can write here. When the Chiefs community-relations people typed up their nomination letter for him, they were told to keep his accomplishments to one sheet of paper. They dropped the type size and squeezed in the words and still could not fit it all. That one page is more crowded than the Plaza Cheesecake Factory after Sunday church.

 

Here are a few things he has done in the last few years. He and his wife, Senia, have donated more than $300,000 of their own money to Operation Breakthrough, which provides day care for some of Kansas City's poorest families. Every year, they throw a Christmas party for the kids at the Marillac Center, an amazing place where children who have been sexually or physically abused or have had a terrible trauma in their lives can find hope. Senia personally buys all the presents. Their three children hand out the gifts.

 

Will donated 10,000 books to the Argentine Middle School, and he provided a computer lab for the abused children at The Children's Place, and he gave $200,000 to the Good Samaritan Boys Ranch that helps troubled boys. He and Senia started a flag football tournament that raises money for SAFEHOME, which offers sheltered to battered women and children. They bought a van so low-income families could get to the Electronic Learning Center. They created a library at St. Monica's School, and donated another $3,000 to the library at Brookridge Day School.

 

Wait. We're only getting started here. They gave kitchen equipment to the Niles Home for Children, and they are on the board of Reach Out and Read Kansas City, and Will runs low-cost football camps for kids, and they donated money to the KU Medical Center burn unit and the Hope House, and they started “Team Esteem” which inspires kids to write, and they fund numerous scholarships, and they sponsor “A Day of Beauty” where battered women are taken to spas around the city and treated like royalty, and they are working on a way through the Internet for people to donate clothes and items directly to the families who need them most, and, well, there's so much more. They buy shoes for children. They have provided eyeglasses. They give backpacks filled with school supplies. They sponsor kids who show an interest and talent in music (Will is a vocalist himself). They appear at almost every charitable function you can imagine. On and on.

 

“And Senia,” Will says proudly, “is always saying ‘We can do more.' ”

 

Shields figures that the Will to Succeed Foundation has helped almost 89,000 people.

 

Of course, he's wrong. Those are just the people helped directly. The foundation has actually touched millions.

 

“You don't add up the numbers,” Will says. “You see something that needs to be done and you try to find a way to do it.”

 

Here's the kind of guy Will Shields is: This year, Senia asked him what he wanted for Christmas. Will said he has everything he wants.

 

So here's what Senia bought him: A buffalo. Apparently, there's a Web site where you can buy buffaloes and oxen and other useful animals and donate them to a needy families in third-world countries. So, Will got a buffalo. He's thrilled. When he returns from the Pro Bowl, he will decide to which country it will go.

 

“And I get to name it,” Shields says with this childlike wonder in his voice. “I can't wait to name it.”

 

***

 

There are many worlds for Will Shields. He's an assistant coach for his daughter Sanayika's basketball team. He's a color commentator for high school football games. He's an amazing guy to just sit down and talk life with.

 

“He's one of the truly great people I know,” Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham says.

 

“He is the perfect person to honor the memory of Walter Payton,'' running back Priest Holmes says.

 

And yet, there's another side. A tougher side to know. When you ask Will what thoughts were running through his mind when he was drafted by the Chiefs, his face hardens. He gets a firm look in his eyes. He's changed before your eyes. He says point blank, “To prove people wrong.”

 

People forget: Shields was no sure thing as a football player. He won the Outland Trophy at Nebraska, but he was still not taken until the third round in 1993. This was a time when scouts mistrusted Nebraska offensive linemen — ‘Huskers can't pass-block,' was the typical report.

 

“People doubted me, and that fueled me,” he says. He says he wanted to make every team in the NFL pay for passing him by in the draft. He wanted to let every trash-talking defensive lineman know that he was going to keep attacking. He tells a great story from his college days about facing Washington's freakish defensive tackle Steve Emtman. In those days, Emtman was so good (he was recently chosen one of the 100 greatest college football players ever by College Football News), that he became something of a legend.

 

“All year, I kept hearing the coaches say, ‘Man, I don't know how you are going to handle Emtman,” Shields says. “I mean that's all they talked about. By the time the game came along, I was thinking ‘Shoot, why am I even here? Why even bother trying to block this guy?' ”

 

The entire first half, Emtman ran around and made tackles and dominated. At halftime, Will was enraged with himself. He had been intimidated. He told himself that would never, ever happen again, and in the second half — though Washington was winning big — he bashed Steve Emtman, battered the man, until he saw something amazing.

 

He saw Emtman raise his hand. The legend wanted out of the game.

 

“After that,” Shields says, “I told myself, ‘Don't ever do that again. Don't ever think someone is better than you.' ”

 

And this is the driving force in Shields' football life. When you ask him how he connects so well with children, he says, “Don't forget, I was the soft, pudgy kid in school that everyone made fun of.” Football brings out the rage in him. And rage brings out the football brilliance in him. He goes next week to his ninth Pro Bowl. He is unparalleled as a pulling guard.

 

“He thinks he's a running back out there,” Holmes, says. “He's out there, running, moving, shaking like he's my size or something.”

 

People around Shields often wonder how someone who is so warm and cares so much about people can turn cold. One former teammate talks about how one day Shields would tell jokes and laugh easily, and the very next he acted as if he had never seen the teammate before. Reporters have run into walls and hard stares trying to talk to him.

 

“Will is a deep person,” his friend and former teammate Pellom McDaniels says.

 

Shields says: “The thing about being a football player is you always have to be on. You can't ever have a bad day. You can't ever feel like being left alone. Because then people will say you're a bad guy. That's pretty hard. Football takes up so many emotions.”

 

This is the delicate balancing act of a football player who pounds people on Sunday and goes to visit children on Monday and tries to give hope to a discouraged woman on Tuesday and starts bashing people again on Wednesday.

 

“I'm a different person on the football field,” Will Shields says. “I have to be different. The game demands that. My life demands something else.”

 

***

 

Will Shields tells a short story about his father. Will grew up in Lawton, Okla., and played on a high school football team with NFL player (and former Olympic sprinter) James Trapp and the Royals' new backup catcher Kelly Stinnett. He says it was a wonderful place to grow up. He says three or four families adopted him there. Hollywood Henderson, the old Cowboys star, once spoke at a banquet in Lawton and made an impression on his life. It was in Lawton where he saw how much of an impact people could make on others' lives.

 

“When you grow up in a small town like Lawton,” he says, “you don't understand why anyone should be lonely.”

 

Anyway, Will's father was in the army — the family lived near Fort Sill. And when Will was in school, his father was shipped to Germany for a three-year stint. Normally, this would be a time for army family to move. But Will's father did not want his family to move. They were happy in Lawton. The kids were doing well in school. Everyone felt at home.

 

So his father did something hard. He went to Germany by himself.

 

“He called home every single night,” Will says. “I mean every … single … night. It was like he was home. It was just like he was with us.”

 

He doesn't say any more about that, but the lesson is clear. Will's father went to Germany and left his family out of love. Will Shields learned the lesson well. Do your job the best you can but live your life out of love. That's how you become the NFL man of the year. It's also how you become a man.

[Guest Cornshucker]

I've worked quite a bit in KC. Will is revered there. When they were having a down year a couple of years ago, the press urged people to go to a game and just watch Shields every snap. They were praising him for his outstanding play on every down regardless of the score. The man is genuine and a rarity.

[Blackshirt]

I agree completely. I live in KC, and it makes me even more proud to be a Husker when he does the great things he does on and off the field. Thanks for the post Bob.