Tamba Hali

by David Seigerman

  With Tamba, Mrs. Dunn had to start from scratch. Soon enough, though, he was reading. He would read aloud the words on the signs his father pointed to when they were driving somewhere together. Eventually, he began to read books on his own. He still can remember the joy he found on the pages of the first Goosebumps book he finished.

  “The story was so interesting,” he said. “I read the whole thing, and then it was like, now what?”

  A door had been opened for Tamba, who remains an avid reader and still loves to write—though he says that sometimes even now, in his thirties, he still feels like he’s catching up. Together, he and Mrs. Dunn wrote a happy ending, even if developing Tamba’s reading skills was not what Mrs. Dunn remembers most from their time together at her teaching table. It was his dedication and determination.

  “I never saw him be afraid of anything,” she said. “He was learning something completely new, and he decided he was going to be like all the other kids. At that age, that’s really important—to be able to fit in and do what everybody else can do.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

  Learning to read would remove one of the major obstacles that kept Tamba from fitting in with his new middle-school classmates. He brought down other barriers with a different weapon: a ball.

  Tamba didn’t play sports much during his childhood in Gbarnga. The opportunity didn’t exist, nor did the infrastructure. Maybe the kids would find an old, worn soccer ball to kick around from time to time; if a nice new ball somehow found its way into the village, only the adults would be allowed to use it. Often, the children had to fashion a ball by taping paper together or using a grapefruit.

  There certainly weren’t organized leagues like the ones that exist in the United States.

  “We didn’t have a team to play on,” Saah said. “If you wanted to join a team, you joined the rebel forces. That is your team. An AK-47 becomes your soccer ball.”

  Tamba didn’t join any organized sports leagues when he first arrived in New Jersey. “More study, less play” was the tone set in Henry Hali’s household, but Tamba and his siblings managed to find time to play. Usually with a real soccer ball.

  Big Tamba was pretty good at soccer. So was Saah, who would go on to play soccer at Caldwell College (now Caldwell University), an NCAA Division II program about twenty miles from home. They would take Tamba to Votee Park, just across Route 4 from Teaneck High School, to play in the neighborhood pickup soccer games.

  From the start, Tamba showed athletic promise. And he flashed some soccer skills, too.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Saah said. “He had very good foot skills. And he can dribble.”

  But it was dribbling another kind of ball that Tamba was drawn to. He had become enamored with basketball.

  In 1995, the basketball world was aquiver over Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA. The great Air Jordan had decided to come back to basketball, in the wake of a short-lived experiment in minor-league baseball. (Hey—even the greatest athletes need to find new ways to challenge themselves.) He left basketball abruptly in 1993 after leading the Chicago Bulls to three straight championships, and he would win another three in a row upon returning. The return of His Airness re-energized basketball fans across the country.

  If there was one American athlete the children of Africa would have been aware of, even in the midst of a civil war, it was Michael Jordan. So many of the Liberian children who found themselves in the refugee camps of Sierra Leone and Guinea were clothed in donations sent from the States. Overwhelmingly, the most common jersey delivered through clothing drives at that time was the Chicago Bulls’ number 23.

  “When Tamba got hooked on basketball, all the kids were into Michael Jordan,” Gail Dunn said.

  Dreaming about becoming the next Michael Jordan might have been the first truly American thing Tamba had ever done. Finally, he had something in common with his classmates.

  Fitting in had been a struggle for Tamba, more than it was for Saah. For some reason, one of the more popular kids at school befriended Saah from the start. “I shot straight to the top of the totem pole,” he said. Tamba did not find such an ally.

  In fact, the first interaction on his first day of school was a fight. A boy made an insulting comment about Tamba’s mother—pretty standard fare for a middle-school hallway—and Tamba hit him. Ironically, that boy became one of Tamba’s better friends, helping him through much of those first two years of school. But there were other insults and other fights. He was an easy target, who looked and sounded like no one else in the class.

  Then he started to play soccer and basketball. He and Saah would play together in a lot of two-on-two games on the courts at the local playground, with Tamba showing a knack for a big-man’s game. He was comfortable in a power-forward role— posting up around the basket, defending the rim, battling for rebounds . . . much more Karl Malone than Michael Jordan.

  He began to recognize some of the kids from school at the playground. They would play together, and slowly Tamba started to win them over with energy and effort so different from his usual gentle nature.

  Soon his classmates began picking him to be on their teams in gym class. It wasn’t too much longer before he started being one of the first players picked.

  “It was alarming to me that people wanted me to be on their team,” Tamba said. “People started coming around.”

  Sports became Tamba’s entry point into his new world. The insults didn’t stop entirely. Neither did the fighting. Slowly but surely, though, Tamba was finding his way. He was developing a new set of skills, discovering things that he had no idea he was good at. He was gaining confidence in the classroom and finding friends through the games he was playing. His new life was taking root.

  Roots provide stability, a foundation—even protection, as Tamba once learned the hard way. But they don’t dictate the direction a life may grow in. As he prepared to head to high school, Tamba Hali’s life was about to change again. In a direction he had never dreamed of.

  CHAPTER 7

  PUT YOUR HAND ON THE GROUND AND GO

  Shortly after they had arrived in America, the Hali family found themselves in a car, driving through some nearby North Jersey community. Looking out the window that early autumn evening, the kids spotted something they had never seen before.

  Banks of bright lights towered over metal bleachers that bordered a stunning green rectangle. Perfect straight lines spaced at precise intervals may have been painted across the length of this perfect lawn, some of which would have been straddled by numbers, making the whole thing look like a ruler a hundred yards long. Saah can’t remember for sure; it may have been just a practice on an unfinished field or it may have been an actual game.

  An actual football game.

  What Saah does remember are the white jerseys. Set against the pure green backdrop, the white glowed, the light from above bouncing off them the way sunlight dances on gentle water. It was the first glimpse he and his half brother, Tamba, would have of American football.

  Love at first sight this was not. In fact, it left little impression on Tamba whatsoever. His father, Henry, mentioned something along the lines of “That sport is very violent,” and Tamba’s attention turned elsewhere. After all, everything the kids saw these days was new to their eyes. A high-school football team really was no different from the Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant on Route 4 in Paramus. Everything was part of this brand-new American landscape, and the Hali children were soaking it all in.

  If Tamba came to the United States knowing nothing about reading and writing, he knew even less about football. At least he knew that words existed. Football was nowhere on his radar before moving to Teaneck, and barely registered more than the occasional curious blip for the first few years after he arrived.

  Surely, he was aware of it. You can’t live eleven miles from Giants Stadium, an eighty-thousand-seat facility parked right next to the southbound lanes of the Jersey Turnpike, and not
be aware of football. It was the only building in the country home to two National Football League franchises—the New York Giants and the New York Jets (yes, they are both New York teams though their shared stadium sits squarely in the swamps of Jersey). Not knowing would have been impossible.

  Not caring . . . that’s a different thing. Tamba’s plate was already full, mostly with Hooked on Phonics flash cards and Michael Jordan dreams. Football was less than an afterthought. Once, when football appeared on a television screen he was watching, entirely by chance, Tamba commented on the size of the shoulders of the men who played the game. He hadn’t realized that the players were wearing shoulder pads.

  It never occurred to Tamba to give the game a try. Not until it was suggested to him by Ed Klimek, a physical-education teacher at Benjamin Franklin Middle School. Klimek had just been hired as an assistant coach at Teaneck High School, and he mentioned Tamba to the head coach, Dennis Heck.

  “He said that kids were always picking on him and there were fights, but that Tamba was very raw and athletic and we should convince him to come out and play for us,” Heck said. “And that he knew nothing about football.”

  Klimek and Heck made their pitch to Tamba, who decided to give it a shot. He agreed. Just like that, Tamba would play for the Teaneck Highwaymen as a high-school freshman.

  When he worked with Mrs. Dunn, Tamba took to the ABC’s pretty quickly. The complicated Xs and Os of football were another story.

  Basketball and soccer, the two sports he loved and was most familiar with, are played on the fly. Sure, there are plays and strategy, but those games have an organic flow to them. Most of the time, you react to a nonstop sequence of evolving game situations with minimal opportunity to plan ahead.

  Football was entirely different. A play would be called in the huddle, the players would walk to the line, the ball would be snapped, the players would do the one or two things they were assigned to do on that play, then they’d go back to the huddle and do it all over again. This structure was foreign to Tamba and, usually, frustrating.

  “I didn’t realize that in football I would have to memorize plays,” he said.

  Every time he and his teammates broke the huddle, Tamba would have to ask the guy next to him, “What do I do?” At that time, he was an offensive right tackle, a blocker whose job was either to protect the quarterback or open holes in the defense for a running back. Typically, the right side is considered the strong side of an offense; the majority of a team’s running plays are called to go to the right side. For much of his first season, Tamba had to rely on the right guard—the lineman lined up to his immediate left—to remind him what his job was and point out which of the guys lined up across from them he was responsible for blocking.

  Once he knew what to do, he showed a natural ability to do it. As was the case in soccer, Tamba displayed good balance and footwork. And just as he did as a basketball power forward, Tamba demonstrated a taste for physical contact. He quickly came to like everything about the football experience: specifically, putting on the pads and running into someone.

  Before the start of his sophomore season, Tamba grew. His oldest brother was still Big Tamba (and would always be), but Little Tamba was becoming a bigger Tamba. A stronger and faster Tamba, too. He would turn sixteen years old late that season, and he had already grown to about six foot one, 170 pounds.

  Still, Tamba remembers being discouraged before that season began. He saw that there were bigger, better, more experienced offensive linemen, which likely would compromise his playing time. He never watched the game growing up; he certainly didn’t want to start watching it from the Teaneck sidelines.

  When Coach Heck moved him to the defensive side of the ball, Tamba became encouraged. At least he’d be out on the field. And when he started to learn the responsibilities of his new position on the defensive line, he became ecstatic.

  “I embraced that part of the game,” he said. “I got to run around and chase the guy with the ball. That was fun.”

  No longer did Tamba have to worry about the intricacies of pass protection or a run-blocking scheme. Coach Heck gave him one rule to remember in those early days of his position transition: “Don’t let this game be confusing. Just put your hand on the ground and go.”

  That was it. “Put your hand on the ground and go.” Instructions so short and sweet they could’ve fit inside a fortune cookie.

  Coach Heck spent the next three years reminding Tamba of that simplest of mission statements. After Tamba went on to play college ball, if he ever found himself struggling, he would hear those words echoing in his memory and get himself back on track. Even when he reached the National Football League, the mantra remained top of mind. In 2015, Coach Heck visited him on the sidelines in Kansas City—the first game at Arrowhead Stadium that Coach had ever attended. The Chiefs had gotten off to a slow start that season, losing five of their first six games. Before that late-October home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tamba came over to greet his old coach with a handshake and a smile. Coach pulled him close for a second and delivered his eight-word pep talk to his prized pupil: “Put your hand on the ground and go.”

  (For the record, Tamba Hali got 2 sacks that game, including one that caused a fumble and ended Pittsburgh’s last desperate bid for a comeback. The Chiefs would win that game and the next nine in a row to qualify for the playoffs, then extended their streak to eleven games with an opening-round win at Houston).

  As a high-school sophomore, Tamba lived by those words. He felt right at home with his hand on the ground. And, boy, could he go.

  More than that, he just wouldn’t stop.

  Early in his sophomore season, Teaneck traveled up to play St. Joseph Regional, a traditional powerhouse located, fittingly, at the top of New Jersey, right along the New York border. The Green Knights were a monster, which made for some long nights for anyone unlucky enough to wind up on their schedule. At various points during that 1999 season, SJR was ranked number one in the state of New Jersey and as high as number seven in the USA Today national rankings.

  The Highwaymen got hammered, 36–0. But you would never have known it from watching Tamba Hali. The teams may have been mismatched, but for the first time Tamba was showing that he belonged on the same field as the big boys.

  “These parochial schools come with a reputation, and here I am, a sophomore, and I’m hitting them. They’re staring me down, as if I’m supposed to stop. I didn’t understand it,” Tamba said. “I found a lot of joy being out there on the field.”

  Tamba played like that the rest of his sophomore season. And people noticed. After his first season playing defense—only his second season of playing football period—he was named first-team All-Northern New Jersey Interscholastic League Division A, a mouthful of an honor but a nice surprise.

  A far bigger one came from a little farther north. The football coaches from Boston College wrote a letter to Tamba, offering him a full scholarship. That wasn’t just stunning. “It’s unheard of,” Coach Heck said.

  Unfathomable. It had never occurred to Tamba that playing sports could create such opportunities. Sure, he would have liked to be the next Michael Jordan, but he’d never really thought about how to go about doing that. College might have been part of some far-off plan (surely for Henry it was), but it certainly was not something he was thinking about as a sophomore. And the prospect of playing college football certainly hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “I wasn’t aware that you could get scholarships or make money playing this game,” Tamba said.

  He declined Boston College’s lightning bolt of an offer. But it was official: Tamba Hali was on the recruiting radar, which meant more attention would be coming. More offers, too. It was time to plan and prepare for the next step. The first sacrifice was going to be a tough one.

  “Between his sophomore and junior year, I told him he couldn’t play basketball the next season,” Coach Heck said.

  So much for becoming the heir to A
ir Jordan. Reluctantly, Tamba agreed. He knew that Coach Heck had worked with a couple of players who had gone on to the NFL, including Dave Szott, whom Heck coached at Clifton High School before taking over at Teaneck. Szott played offensive guard for fourteen professional seasons and was wrapping up a decade-long run in Kansas City while Tamba was weighing the BC offer. Tamba trusted Heck and put basketball on the shelf for a year. Instead, he would focus on football and the weight training he would need to do in order to ramp up his development.

  When Tamba showed up for his junior season, Heck knew something special was on the horizon. He saw it right away. He was impressed by Tamba’s physical condition and marveled at his work ethic. Every sprint he ran at practice he wanted to finish first. Every drill the team did he wanted to be first in line. Football scouts and analysts talk admiringly about a player’s “motor.” Tamba’s never stopped purring.

  In team meetings, the Highwaymen would watch films of their previous games. Coach Heck would stop the film whenever teaching points presented themselves. Much of the time, these moments were examples set by Tamba. Heck loved to point out Tamba’s toughness. “This kid never played football before in his life,” he would say, rewinding and reviewing any number of plays, “and he still has the audacity to run over this kid.”

  At practice, Heck had to force Tamba to sit out plays from time to time. Tamba neither needed nor asked for a break. But he had to take a knee so Teaneck’s offense could get some work done. Whenever he lined up against them, they couldn’t block him. Neither could anybody else.

  He was developing a reputation as the fearless fighter Mrs. Dunn had seen in the reading room. He was afraid of nothing on the football field—and after what he’d witnessed in the killing fields of Liberia, how could he be? To some players, football was life or death; Tamba Hali had seen enough death to know better.