The first mention of Tyreek Hill is sure to come early in Sunday’s Super Bowl, with the Chiefs’ wide receiver/kick returner pegged by many as Kansas City’s game-changing key to beating San Francisco. Hill only added to his mystique as the fastest man in the NFL when he mused during media availability in Miami that he might try to make the upcoming Olympics as a sprinter. His speed on the football field is indeed one reason Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes spent the season exploiting him against overmatched defenders.
What we’re unlikely to hear during Sunday’s broadcast, however, is any reference to Hill’s history of domestic violence, and the uncertainty he would even play this season after police investigated whether he broke his 3-year-old son’s arm back in March. The incident did not end up in criminal charges and thus no NFL suspension of Hill (who was also heard on tape speaking in threatening tones to his fiancée, the mother of the injured child) after prosecutors said the evidence was not enough to determine how the child’s injuries were sustained.
Outside of Roger Goodell’s annual escape from self-imposed witness protection and answering a solitary question about the state of the NFL’s domestic violence policy during his press event Wednesday at the Super Bowl in Miami, the issue continues to take a back seat to the action on the field.
And I get it; that’s how life works. The game is still the thing, so much so that the Chiefs rewarded Hill with a lucrative contract extension before the season began. According to an ESPN story, team chairman Clark Hunt defended that move during the week, saying, “We never had any issues with him. He always was where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to be doing, accountable to the team, listening to his coaches, [being] a good teammate. I think we’ve seen that grow the last three or four years. Certainly I sense a heightened level of maturity from him this year, which is probably a byproduct of the challenges he went through earlier this year.”
Related: Tyreek Hill apologizes for putting Chiefs in tough spot, says he’s ‘on new journey’
Hill’s career has flourished, despite his past.
Anyone paying attention to this issue knows that was not the case with Ray Rice, whose elevator attack on his then-fiancée (now wife) that was revealed to the world on video ended his career not only with the Ravens, but in the NFL. This time seven years ago, it was Rice at the center of a Super Bowl game plan against the 49ers, helping to lead the Ravens past San Francisco on a night that would prove to be his professional peak. When the video surfaced two years later, exposing the NFL’s shortcomings when its investigation failed to uncover it and Rice was initially suspended only two games, the league hit a hard corner, ultimately changing course, rewriting its personal conduct policy, and doing anything it could to look like it was serious about stopping incidents of domestic violence by players.
They might well be called the Ray Rice rules.
Back in November, I spoke with Rice for about an hour on the phone, thinking at the time that the current version of the Ravens would end up meeting the Patriots in the playoffs (derailed when both teams were upset by the upstart Titans). I remembered how Rice and the Ravens had beaten the Patriots in Foxborough on the way to that championship, and I wondered, frankly, whether he had followed through on the promises he made back then to learn and change in the way that Hunt believes his player Hill has, changes I find difficult to accept as easily given Hill’s admitted violence toward his fiancée when they were in college and he punched her pregnant belly.
For Rice, it turns out leaving the NFL was the best thing that could have happened to him, affording him, he explained, the chance to get to know the person he wanted to be outside of that insular world of masculinity and violence. What he discovered were mental health problems that dated to his youngest days, when the violent death of his father when he was just a year old set a path of not processing emotions properly. That’s why part of the message he shares now as he speaks to high school, college, and NFL players (at places such as Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, USC, Rutgers, Florida State, Georgia, Alabama, Florida State, Liberty, the Ravens, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) is the approach he takes with his own family: “I have to teach my son how not to be ‘the man’ but be a man. You can only be ‘the Rice man’ for moments of your life, but you can be a man for a lifetime.”
In other words, when you learn to value what’s in your insides, you’re no longer consumed with projecting something different on the outside.
“I no longer embody that person in the video,” Rice said. “What some people see as a change is just finding out who you really are. I think that me finding out who I really am was the ultimate change. I think it’s knowing your value, knowing your worth. I know that forever I’ll always be associated with that video, but there’s so much more of me. Without making excuses for what I did, it just allowed me to figure out who I really am and what really fulfills your life.
“It’s not that I don’t love football. I love the game of football, I do, I love sports. I just know now that reasons I was going after it doesn’t add up to how you say you were living your life in that moment. Taking that step back, two steps back, I’m taking a lot of steps forward. I’m not afraid to ask for help anymore. I do counseling. I see a psychologist regularly. Not to say everything is perfect, I have good and bad days, but you’re not wearing them. Your family is not getting the results of a bad day or a bad moment. I have people to lean on for help.”
As most people know, Ray and Janay, his girlfriend since high school, stayed together after the incident in Atlantic City and later married, raising their family together. Ray said he has a good relationship with Goodell, the Ravens, and the NFL, though he doesn’t venture much into the public eye anymore. He worked as a volunteer assistant coach for his high school in the fall, a calling that had much more to do with mental health and wellness than playbooks and playoff games, and continues in therapy. He has no issue with not getting another chance in the NFL (at 33 years old, 28 when the video came out, he had plenty of hard mileage from playing such a bruising position so his career was likely in its waning years anyway), insisting the real tragedy would have been being unable to raise his kids.
He endorses any plan that takes players off the field when they violate the domestic violence policy. “That’s only a start,” he said. “Nobody wants to see that guy on the field. When I did work with Joe Torre’s Safe at Home foundation, I heard this saying that ‘you just don’t throw people away.’ I love that statement. Not just for me, but for the understanding of people can be rehabilitated. And I happen to have to learn the hard route. The process wasn’t going to be easy, but life is hard. The best teacher you have is experience and I’m trying to learn from mine.”
I have no idea if Tyreek Hill learned from his. But I’m pretty certain we won’t find out during Sunday’s broadcast.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.