Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior by Strahan Michael & Glazer Jay

Author:Strahan, Michael & Glazer, Jay [Strahan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Chess on the Gridiron

Sunday, October 8, Redskins at Giants

When the game starts, I’m so excited to put my fingers in the dirt, I literally feel like exploding, like my head may fall off. I look at football as the unequal opportunity profession. None of us are made the same and if I’m in a battle, my job is to make it unequal, tipping the scales in my favor, in favor of the Giants.

There’s a winner and loser every single snap of every single game. I’ll try to set my guy up and make him believe that by the time the game’s final tick counts off he’ll be thinking, “Damn, I just played Michael Strahan, and he’s everything they said he’d be and I don’t want to see him again.”

Football is actually one big game of chess, and the last thing I wanted was for the Redskins and Joe Gibbs, Mark Brunell and their buddies to start swiping at will all our pieces off the board.

Chess? You must think I’m crazy. Every snap of every play of every game, there are a handful of inside battles playing out that the fans don’t know about. There could be four or five different things going on between two players on any given play. A reaction to a reaction. An adjustment to an adjustment. It really is that intricate.

Coaches play chess games against the opposite coaches. There are numerous plots and subplots that go into every single play of every single game, many of which play out under the radar. Fans might see a right tackle and me battling it out like two heavyweights punching each other silly. But for both of us, there’s actually a mental checklist on every play that we run down before the snap which we then recheck as we’re clashing. It’s so incredibly specific and detailed, only the final action and result is what the fan usually picks up. Every little thing is accounted for as the coaches break down every minute factor and incorporate it into each and every call.

On some plays the coaches make a call that requires me to line up with my inside eye on my opponent’s outside eye. Sometimes they line you up foot to foot, inside foot to his outside foot, which places me a little bit farther out on the edge. Whenever Brunell lines up for the snap, we don’t just line up wherever we damn well please. Everything is controlled.

At the same time, I have to adjust based on my build and the build of the blocker in front of me. It’s those details that other players sometimes fail to grasp. If my opponent has really long arms, it could lead to imperceptible yet crucial shifts in how I bring on the heat. If he’s strong or weak, quick or too big to move, that all factors into a snapshot judgment of how I’ll bring on the heat every Sunday afternoon.

Fans see me lining up against a guy like Jon

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