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Cowboys sign a local guy with a wild story
3:37 PM Mon, Jan 26, 2009 | Permalink | Yahoo! Buzz
Tim MacMahon E-mail News tips
The Cowboys signed two players to their futures list today -- defensive tackle Tim Anderson and cornerback Michael Hawkins.
Anderson was a third-round pick out of Ohio State in 2004 whose last game action came in 2007 with the Falcons. That's basically all I know about the 6-3, 325-pounder.
Hawkins, a Carrollton R.L. Turner product who quit the team at Oklahoma, is a familiar name. He has a ton of talent and a troubled background. Follow the jump to read the story that ran in the DMN after the Packers drafted Hawkins, whose last NFL regular-season action came in 2006 with the Browns, in 2005.
By RACHEL COHEN
Micheal Hawkins ricochets through a life so cursed yet so charmed.
He could be living on the streets. Or starting at cornerback for Oklahoma.
He could be selling pest control services door-to-door. Or starring in the NFL.
Today, the 22-year-old Dallas native inhabits scenes of childhood daydreams, of "I wanna be a football player when I grow up." Today, he is a promising draft pick at Green Bay Packers training camp.
Tomorrow? It's true these charmed moments have not lingered before. Hawkins will pledge only this: He won't be an inevitable outcome, another kid from a fractured family dismissed as doomed from the start. He is a parent now, and no way is he passing on that curse to his child.
"I don't love football. I don't love it like other people love it. I do it because I'm good. I do it because that's what God blessed me to change my life, to change that cycle that I have in my family," Hawkins said.
"I play it for the love of my daughter and just to show my daughter how much passion I have to do something."
On a fall day nearly four years ago, Hawkins, then a senior at Carrollton R.L. Turner, waxed hopeful about his impending college football career. He was as he remains now, defiant and cocky, thoughtful and articulate.
"It will be a whole new start," he told The Dallas Morning News then. "I can't say I'm leaving the past behind. But I can go somewhere and not deal with it."
Yet starts and finishes, past and future, never seem to align in any logical order for Hawkins. Who would believe these snapshots of his life belong to the same person?
Summer 2000: Hawkins is homeless for several weeks, a 17-year-old who has never played a high school football game, sleeping in parks after fleeing an abusive father.
Summer 2001: Hawkins is one of the nation's top cornerback recruits heading into his senior year of high school.
Summer 2003: Hawkins is working odd jobs, seemingly done with football, back in Dallas after clashing with coaches in his lone season at OU.
Summer 2005: Hawkins signs a four-year contract with a $144,000 bonus after the Packers draft him in the fifth round, even though he hasn't played traditional football in more than two years.
'I was never satisfied'
"So that rascal finally made it to the NFL?"
The president of Garland-based Summit Pest Control Inc. sounded downright tickled at the news about his former employee.
Arch Smith knew that the kid who answered a newspaper ad two years ago used to play college football, but never found out if he was any good. Not that it mattered.
"I was more interested in his attitude and willingness to work and listen to instruction," Smith said. "That's what I needed, and he was a very impressive young man."
Hawkins had left OU after the 2002 season with an infant daughter to support. He confronted the question that had haunted him since he was 12 and lost his grandmother, who raised him and sheltered him with so much love.
Where was home?
Not with his father, with whom he went to live after his grandmother's death. Not with his mother, who, Hawkins has said, battled drug addiction.
The answer was the same one that had rescued him from the streets - Trinia Roberts, a former neighbor and friend's mother.
His first unannounced appearance at her door launched a life-changing series of events: going to live with her brother and sister-in-law; enrolling at Turner; joining the football team; becoming a blue-chip recruit.
This time, he stayed at her North Dallas apartment.
"When you look around society now, the majority of teenagers and young guys out there are hanging out on the streets, doing drugs. Micheal isn't like that," said Roberts, who works as a collector for delinquent auto loans. "You couldn't help but reach out to him."
Hawkins figured he was through with football, and that was OK. At least that's what he told himself. He worked at a car dealership and at a Wendy's. But, no, this wasn't right. This wasn't how the streets-to-Sooners tale was supposed to end, with the protagonist hawking Nissans.
"God didn't bring me through all the things I've been through to be selling no cars," Hawkins said. "That's not knocking cars, because some people, they're good at it, that's what they do.
"I was never satisfied. I was content sometimes, but I was never satisfied."
From AFL to NFL draft
A friend's uncle had played arena football, which inspired the idea to attend an open tryout with the Desperados in November 2003. Out of more than 400 hopefuls, Hawkins was one of two to make the cut. He earned about $30,000 his first season.
Hawkins didn't play much in parts of two seasons with the team, but he met a player named Cedric Bonner who mentioned Hawkins' talent to his agent, Fort Worth-based Alex Balic. When Balic learned Hawkins was only three years out of high school, he suggested he apply for the NFL draft.
Hawkins' name appeared on the early entry list, sending scouts such as the Packers' Alonzo Highsmith scrambling to figure out who this guy was. Highsmith, a former Cowboys running back, is friends with OU assistant coach Jackie Shipp, who told him Hawkins was one of the best athletes to come through the program in his time there.
That got Highsmith's attention. He left a message for Hawkins through the Turner coaches.
"One day," Highsmith said, "out of the clear blue sky, he calls me."
Highsmith arranged to have Hawkins participate in SMU's pro timing day. Hawkins ran a 4.3-second 40-yard dash, which really got Highsmith's attention. Highsmith took Hawkins to lunch, and the two chatted for nearly two hours.
Highsmith did his research into why Hawkins didn't stick at OU.
"It wasn't drugs. It wasn't alcohol," Highsmith said. "It wasn't those types of problems. I think it was immaturity and him not knowing what was expected of him."
Run-in with a Stoops
Mike Stoops understands. Why would Micheal Hawkins trust authority figures?
"He's had no family structure whatsoever, nobody to trust growing up," said Stoops, Hawkins' position coach at OU. "On the street, something you learn is not to trust a lot of people."
But football programs are built on trust. Hawkins said the coaching staff overreacted to him missing a weightlifting session after visiting his newborn daughter. Stoops, now the coach at Arizona, responded that Hawkins struggled to differentiate between being punished and being asked to make up a missed obligation.
"Coaching has a lot of tough love that goes with it," Stoops said. "He never felt secure enough to handle it."
Hawkins also felt Stoops' coaching style was too personal. Once, when he botched a drill in practice, Hawkins said Stoops told him "that I'm going to go back to Dallas and be like my mom."
Stoops denied saying that and called such a comment inappropriate.
"When you cross boundaries, when you say certain things, then that's when I'm going to get into you, coach or no coach," Hawkins said. "You don't respect me, I don't respect you."
Hawkins played as a freshman in 2002, returning an interception for a touchdown in a blowout win over UT-El Paso. But his college career ended unceremoniously, just as his high school playing days had. Hawkins said he quit Turner's squad after seven games his senior year instead of serving a one-game suspension for an argument with a teammate.
When Hawkins was staying with Roberts, she worried that his temper could cause him problems. Now she believes he has harnessed it. Desperados coach Will McClay said Hawkins took feedback personally at first but was learning to accept criticism.
Hawkins doesn't anticipate any run-ins with NFL coaches, saying they'll treat him like a professional, and he'll act like one. But what if he believes someone crosses that line?
"You could be President Bush - if you bring something personal up with me, I'm going to go right back at you," he said.
Coming back to family
A young man hardened beyond his years goes mushy at the mention of a little girl. Her name is Makhia, and she turned 3 on Aug.9. She lives with her mother and grandmother in Irving, and whenever she see guys in pads and helmets on TV, she exclaims, "My daddy plays football!"
Her daddy talks to her on the phone every day and would like for her to come to Green Bay for a game. He just worries about her ears hurting on the plane.
Asked what he hopes to provide for his daughter, Hawkins said, "Give her the best, in all aspects, as far as being a father: life, dreams, all that type of stuff. There's nothing more disappointing than when you've got a father out there who can't do nothing for his kids."
Tiffany Parson, Hawkins' high school girlfriend, said he does all he can to help her and their daughter. She can sense Hawkins sees in Makhia the family life he missed.
Hawkins said he's not in contact with his father but sees his mother, Noreen, and older brother, Rondell, often. He spent his 22nd birthday with them in Cleburne, but he was the one buying them clothes.
So poised, so candid about everything else, Hawkins turns hesitant, uncomfortable when pressed about his mother and brother. He acknowledges that his mother has spent time in jail, but he is passionate about defending her.
"She's made some bad choices in life, just like anybody," Hawkins said. "My mom's a good person, a real good person."
He says he'd toss aside his NFL career in an instant for the kind of family he has mostly peered at from afar, where home is never a mystery and trust never an object of doubt. He is also adamant about pointing out how many people have supported and sustained him, who have even allowed him to speak the language of family. So it feels good and right to call Roberts his aunt.
Impressive debut
The Packers had 11 picks in the seven rounds of this year's draft, including two in the fifth. It was the perfect situation to gamble on a player with Hawkins' upside, said Green Bay director of pro personnel Reggie McKenzie.
Hawkins is 6-1, 179 pounds. He's not just fast, scouts and coaches rave, he boasts remarkable skills for closing on the ball.
Stoops dared utter the words Deion Sanders. "His natural ability is off the charts," Stoops said.
In his first day of minicamp in April, Hawkins intercepted a pass. McKenzie said Green Bay's staff was impressed by how quickly he picked up the system and how developed his technique was.
Durability is a concern, though, especially after Hawkins missed the second minicamp because of minor knee surgery.
"The coaches felt like, 'Hey, we can work with this guy,'" McKenzie said.
Training camp started, and Hawkins kept turning heads. No longer is the question, "Can he play?" but, "How much will he play?"
Word out of Green Bay is he will probably be used as an extra defensive back in nickel and dime packages.
But there is one certainty in Micheal Hawkins' life. Asked what he hopes his daughter will say of him when she's older, Hawkins didn't hesitate: "I wouldn't ask for no other father than my dad."
"That's it," he said. "I don't need her to say I was a good football player."
3:37 PM Mon, Jan 26, 2009 | Permalink | Yahoo! Buzz
Tim MacMahon E-mail News tips
The Cowboys signed two players to their futures list today -- defensive tackle Tim Anderson and cornerback Michael Hawkins.
Anderson was a third-round pick out of Ohio State in 2004 whose last game action came in 2007 with the Falcons. That's basically all I know about the 6-3, 325-pounder.
Hawkins, a Carrollton R.L. Turner product who quit the team at Oklahoma, is a familiar name. He has a ton of talent and a troubled background. Follow the jump to read the story that ran in the DMN after the Packers drafted Hawkins, whose last NFL regular-season action came in 2006 with the Browns, in 2005.
By RACHEL COHEN
Micheal Hawkins ricochets through a life so cursed yet so charmed.
He could be living on the streets. Or starting at cornerback for Oklahoma.
He could be selling pest control services door-to-door. Or starring in the NFL.
Today, the 22-year-old Dallas native inhabits scenes of childhood daydreams, of "I wanna be a football player when I grow up." Today, he is a promising draft pick at Green Bay Packers training camp.
Tomorrow? It's true these charmed moments have not lingered before. Hawkins will pledge only this: He won't be an inevitable outcome, another kid from a fractured family dismissed as doomed from the start. He is a parent now, and no way is he passing on that curse to his child.
"I don't love football. I don't love it like other people love it. I do it because I'm good. I do it because that's what God blessed me to change my life, to change that cycle that I have in my family," Hawkins said.
"I play it for the love of my daughter and just to show my daughter how much passion I have to do something."
On a fall day nearly four years ago, Hawkins, then a senior at Carrollton R.L. Turner, waxed hopeful about his impending college football career. He was as he remains now, defiant and cocky, thoughtful and articulate.
"It will be a whole new start," he told The Dallas Morning News then. "I can't say I'm leaving the past behind. But I can go somewhere and not deal with it."
Yet starts and finishes, past and future, never seem to align in any logical order for Hawkins. Who would believe these snapshots of his life belong to the same person?
Summer 2000: Hawkins is homeless for several weeks, a 17-year-old who has never played a high school football game, sleeping in parks after fleeing an abusive father.
Summer 2001: Hawkins is one of the nation's top cornerback recruits heading into his senior year of high school.
Summer 2003: Hawkins is working odd jobs, seemingly done with football, back in Dallas after clashing with coaches in his lone season at OU.
Summer 2005: Hawkins signs a four-year contract with a $144,000 bonus after the Packers draft him in the fifth round, even though he hasn't played traditional football in more than two years.
'I was never satisfied'
"So that rascal finally made it to the NFL?"
The president of Garland-based Summit Pest Control Inc. sounded downright tickled at the news about his former employee.
Arch Smith knew that the kid who answered a newspaper ad two years ago used to play college football, but never found out if he was any good. Not that it mattered.
"I was more interested in his attitude and willingness to work and listen to instruction," Smith said. "That's what I needed, and he was a very impressive young man."
Hawkins had left OU after the 2002 season with an infant daughter to support. He confronted the question that had haunted him since he was 12 and lost his grandmother, who raised him and sheltered him with so much love.
Where was home?
Not with his father, with whom he went to live after his grandmother's death. Not with his mother, who, Hawkins has said, battled drug addiction.
The answer was the same one that had rescued him from the streets - Trinia Roberts, a former neighbor and friend's mother.
His first unannounced appearance at her door launched a life-changing series of events: going to live with her brother and sister-in-law; enrolling at Turner; joining the football team; becoming a blue-chip recruit.
This time, he stayed at her North Dallas apartment.
"When you look around society now, the majority of teenagers and young guys out there are hanging out on the streets, doing drugs. Micheal isn't like that," said Roberts, who works as a collector for delinquent auto loans. "You couldn't help but reach out to him."
Hawkins figured he was through with football, and that was OK. At least that's what he told himself. He worked at a car dealership and at a Wendy's. But, no, this wasn't right. This wasn't how the streets-to-Sooners tale was supposed to end, with the protagonist hawking Nissans.
"God didn't bring me through all the things I've been through to be selling no cars," Hawkins said. "That's not knocking cars, because some people, they're good at it, that's what they do.
"I was never satisfied. I was content sometimes, but I was never satisfied."
From AFL to NFL draft
A friend's uncle had played arena football, which inspired the idea to attend an open tryout with the Desperados in November 2003. Out of more than 400 hopefuls, Hawkins was one of two to make the cut. He earned about $30,000 his first season.
Hawkins didn't play much in parts of two seasons with the team, but he met a player named Cedric Bonner who mentioned Hawkins' talent to his agent, Fort Worth-based Alex Balic. When Balic learned Hawkins was only three years out of high school, he suggested he apply for the NFL draft.
Hawkins' name appeared on the early entry list, sending scouts such as the Packers' Alonzo Highsmith scrambling to figure out who this guy was. Highsmith, a former Cowboys running back, is friends with OU assistant coach Jackie Shipp, who told him Hawkins was one of the best athletes to come through the program in his time there.
That got Highsmith's attention. He left a message for Hawkins through the Turner coaches.
"One day," Highsmith said, "out of the clear blue sky, he calls me."
Highsmith arranged to have Hawkins participate in SMU's pro timing day. Hawkins ran a 4.3-second 40-yard dash, which really got Highsmith's attention. Highsmith took Hawkins to lunch, and the two chatted for nearly two hours.
Highsmith did his research into why Hawkins didn't stick at OU.
"It wasn't drugs. It wasn't alcohol," Highsmith said. "It wasn't those types of problems. I think it was immaturity and him not knowing what was expected of him."
Run-in with a Stoops
Mike Stoops understands. Why would Micheal Hawkins trust authority figures?
"He's had no family structure whatsoever, nobody to trust growing up," said Stoops, Hawkins' position coach at OU. "On the street, something you learn is not to trust a lot of people."
But football programs are built on trust. Hawkins said the coaching staff overreacted to him missing a weightlifting session after visiting his newborn daughter. Stoops, now the coach at Arizona, responded that Hawkins struggled to differentiate between being punished and being asked to make up a missed obligation.
"Coaching has a lot of tough love that goes with it," Stoops said. "He never felt secure enough to handle it."
Hawkins also felt Stoops' coaching style was too personal. Once, when he botched a drill in practice, Hawkins said Stoops told him "that I'm going to go back to Dallas and be like my mom."
Stoops denied saying that and called such a comment inappropriate.
"When you cross boundaries, when you say certain things, then that's when I'm going to get into you, coach or no coach," Hawkins said. "You don't respect me, I don't respect you."
Hawkins played as a freshman in 2002, returning an interception for a touchdown in a blowout win over UT-El Paso. But his college career ended unceremoniously, just as his high school playing days had. Hawkins said he quit Turner's squad after seven games his senior year instead of serving a one-game suspension for an argument with a teammate.
When Hawkins was staying with Roberts, she worried that his temper could cause him problems. Now she believes he has harnessed it. Desperados coach Will McClay said Hawkins took feedback personally at first but was learning to accept criticism.
Hawkins doesn't anticipate any run-ins with NFL coaches, saying they'll treat him like a professional, and he'll act like one. But what if he believes someone crosses that line?
"You could be President Bush - if you bring something personal up with me, I'm going to go right back at you," he said.
Coming back to family
A young man hardened beyond his years goes mushy at the mention of a little girl. Her name is Makhia, and she turned 3 on Aug.9. She lives with her mother and grandmother in Irving, and whenever she see guys in pads and helmets on TV, she exclaims, "My daddy plays football!"
Her daddy talks to her on the phone every day and would like for her to come to Green Bay for a game. He just worries about her ears hurting on the plane.
Asked what he hopes to provide for his daughter, Hawkins said, "Give her the best, in all aspects, as far as being a father: life, dreams, all that type of stuff. There's nothing more disappointing than when you've got a father out there who can't do nothing for his kids."
Tiffany Parson, Hawkins' high school girlfriend, said he does all he can to help her and their daughter. She can sense Hawkins sees in Makhia the family life he missed.
Hawkins said he's not in contact with his father but sees his mother, Noreen, and older brother, Rondell, often. He spent his 22nd birthday with them in Cleburne, but he was the one buying them clothes.
So poised, so candid about everything else, Hawkins turns hesitant, uncomfortable when pressed about his mother and brother. He acknowledges that his mother has spent time in jail, but he is passionate about defending her.
"She's made some bad choices in life, just like anybody," Hawkins said. "My mom's a good person, a real good person."
He says he'd toss aside his NFL career in an instant for the kind of family he has mostly peered at from afar, where home is never a mystery and trust never an object of doubt. He is also adamant about pointing out how many people have supported and sustained him, who have even allowed him to speak the language of family. So it feels good and right to call Roberts his aunt.
Impressive debut
The Packers had 11 picks in the seven rounds of this year's draft, including two in the fifth. It was the perfect situation to gamble on a player with Hawkins' upside, said Green Bay director of pro personnel Reggie McKenzie.
Hawkins is 6-1, 179 pounds. He's not just fast, scouts and coaches rave, he boasts remarkable skills for closing on the ball.
Stoops dared utter the words Deion Sanders. "His natural ability is off the charts," Stoops said.
In his first day of minicamp in April, Hawkins intercepted a pass. McKenzie said Green Bay's staff was impressed by how quickly he picked up the system and how developed his technique was.
Durability is a concern, though, especially after Hawkins missed the second minicamp because of minor knee surgery.
"The coaches felt like, 'Hey, we can work with this guy,'" McKenzie said.
Training camp started, and Hawkins kept turning heads. No longer is the question, "Can he play?" but, "How much will he play?"
Word out of Green Bay is he will probably be used as an extra defensive back in nickel and dime packages.
But there is one certainty in Micheal Hawkins' life. Asked what he hopes his daughter will say of him when she's older, Hawkins didn't hesitate: "I wouldn't ask for no other father than my dad."
"That's it," he said. "I don't need her to say I was a good football player."
