Michael Strahan is still haunted by the memory of the worst fight he’s ever seen involving NFL players. Why? Because he was in it. And because he admit he nearly tried to kill another man.
In his recently released book, "Inside the Helmet,” Strahan writes about how he came close to killing former teammate Scott Gragg, the mammoth right tackle.
“It was during a mini-camp practice in the mid-1990s under Dan Reeves,” Strahan writes. “I remember it like it was yesterday … Scott Gragg, fresh off another altercation two plays earlier, took his bearlike mitts connected to his humungous 6 foot, 340-pound frame and tried to take his frustration out on me. He was going after my ribs, face, stsomach, whatever would cause me to crumble. This man was much bigger than me. Actually, that’s an understatement. Scott Gragg was the biggest man on our team, towering over me by four inches and taking a seventy-pound weight differential into our impromptu battle.
“I quickly surveyed the odds in my head, realized I didn’t like them and that’s when … some … thing … went … Cli-i-ck!
“Snap, my brain stopped working. My blood frantically raced through my body … My common sense jumped out of my skin and suddenly, I was left alone to do things I would never, ever think I was capable of …
“I grabbed Gragg by the facemask and violently ripped his helmet off his head. Target revealed. Remember the part about all common sense fleeing my mind and body? The sensible thing in any fair fight would have been to punch this man in the face, hope to get a couple of shots in, maybe a cut, and have my street cred in the locker room step up a rung or two. But now, that would have been too sane.
“Why I made the decision to do what I did next, I still haven’t figured out, but I guess I had to do what I had to do. Otherwise, I can’t bear thinking I’m actually capable of willingly trying to kill a man. Still, I took that helmet and swung it as hard as I could in a Tomahawk chop, right at my target, Gragg’s head.
“THWAAAAAP! I leveled the giant Giant, connecting good enough with my weapon to get him to fall on his back. Then the blood started trickling. I never once thought, ‘hat have I done to this guy?’Instead of feeling bad, my next though was, ‘Go over and kick this guy’s ass!” So I ran and jumped on top of him and proceeded to hit him in the face over and over. My horrified teammates thankfully stopped the carnage. Otherwise, I’m not sure when I would have stopped.
“It never once dawned on me that I could have killed him, only that he could have whipped my ass, a fate worse than death inside the warped philosophy of an NFL locker room. It also never dawned on me that he was a teammate, a friend and someone we certainly needed on Sundays.”
Strahan later writes how he still thinks about that day.
“I transformed into something ugly,” he writes. “But the part that scares me now is that I didn’t scare myself at the time. The only thing I was ashamed of was that I used a weapon first, then my fists. That’s the way you think out there … Sometimes, in order to survive, you are forced to find the ugly side of your most inner self.”
I asked Strahan about that memory the other day, and he said it changed him profoundly.
“That was serious,” he said. “I don’t fight any more. If there’s a fight, I’ll grab you and hold you. I’m not going to bang you in the head. I was young, dumb and aggressive at that stage of my life in football. I could have killed him or seriously hurt him.”
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