by Terry Crews
“You don’t know me, man,” I said.
I was wearing a hat. I pulled it down and made myself keep quiet.
Just take it, I thought. Understand it’s on you. No one’s going to help you. You might be sweeping floors for a while. This might be your life now.
MAYBE I DIDN’T WANT TO ADMIT IT AT THE TIME, but I needed that humbling. I needed to be broken. Because the moment when you’re broken is the moment when you can see what’s really happening. While I was sweeping, for hour after hour, I thought about how my wife kept telling me to do the right things, and how I ignored her and went my own way. I thought about my parents, and how I thought I was better than they were, and how I resented “factory work” and stuck my nose up at anyone who did it. Even with all of the problems my mother and father had experienced, they’d sacrificed so much to make sure I could live a better life, and they both loved me with all of their hearts. Then I thought about Ken, the man who had given me money and friendship and truly was the reason I was even able to move out to California in the first place. Here, he had a wife and kids, but he believed in me enough to take money from them and give it to me. It struck me how good his family had been to me, and how wrong it had been for me to expect him to be responsible for me. I felt ashamed. When I got home from work, I called Ken.
“Man, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was mad at you, and I had no reason to be.”
“It’s cool, man,” he said. “I just want to see you make it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
That job was a breakthrough for me. Before that, I’d been so concerned about my ego, and how I looked, and how people saw me. My main concern was preserving my image, no matter what. Rebecca had constantly been on me to put our family first, but I was just too immature and self-centered.
When I was in the NFL, I felt so entitled because I played football, and I thought everyone should feel lucky to help me get what I wanted. If I didn’t get what I wanted, I was resentful—and, honestly, mean—even to my own wife and kids. Well, let me tell you, that’s not how the world works. And there’s nothing like eight hours with a broom to set a man straight. After that, I knew I was willing to do anything for my family, especially now that we had another baby on the way.
Luckily, I only had to work as a janitor for about a week, and that week felt like a year. I’d had my humble time, and I knew I couldn’t do that job forever. I got myself over to a temp agency as quickly as I could and passed their typing test. They put me at the Veterans Administration Hospital in North Hills, in a mobile office, filing papers that had been displaced by the Northridge earthquake. It was definitely a step up from janitorial work. But it was still a far cry from the NFL and my plan to finish my movie and put it out into the world as a way to gain entrée into the entertainment industry. On top of that, I earned $8 an hour, for eight hours of work a day, even though I would have gladly taken on extra hours to earn more. I’d humbled myself, and we were still just barely getting by. I was soon depressed and wondering what had become of my life.
I didn’t want to abandon my Hollywood dream, no matter what, so I stayed up all night watching movies as research for my film. I lived on hamburgers and fast food, and I stopped working out. I quickly gained thirty pounds, and let me tell you, it was not muscle mass. I was really out of shape. Even though I’d always cared about looking sharp, I started just throwing on a big T-shirt and some sweats, lumping around and creating the outward representation of how bad I felt inside.
My friend Mark, who I’d met during my time with the Chargers, tried to rescue me from the brink. He owned a beautiful house near San Diego, and when we were really struggling, he always told me that if I had enough gas in our car to get us down to see him, he’d take care of the rest. I had not missed a payment on our hocked car, and we’d been able to get it back, but we were broke. His place was paradise. The whole family swam in his pool. He barbecued and made us the most beautiful food. He even put gas in our car for the return trip. He was a true friend to me in my time of need.
Mark could see I was in serious decline, and he called me about it one day.
“Terry, are you working out, man?” he said. “Are you doing anything?”
“Nah, I’m done with that,” I said. “I’ve been concentrating on this film stuff.”
“Come on, you’ve got to work out,” he said. “You can’t let that body go to waste. You’ve been playing, you’ve got your NFL body, man, don’t lose it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, just to get him off the phone.
I was so depressed that, without being conscious of it, I’d created a net-negative vortex, and I couldn’t bring myself to work out. I knew I should, but I couldn’t do it. Without anything to rouse myself out of my funk, I avoided taking care of myself, and I sunk lower and lower, while denying it was happening.
I think many men are like this. We don’t acknowledge any negative changes in our appearance, and we continue to see ourselves as we looked at our best. I definitely deluded myself about my own weight gain until Rebecca came up behind me in the bathroom. And pinched my back fat. It was like she had slapped me awake.
“What did you do?” I said, tensing.
“It’s cute,” she said. “You’re just so cute.”
She did it again.
“Stop, stop, stop,” I said.
It was as if the world had screeched to a halt. But I was still in denial.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“You got a little thing here,” she said. “It’s all right, honey. I love you. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Even with the burgers, and the sweatpants, and the weight I’d gained, I’d never acknowledged what was happening. I honestly never had. Suddenly, I looked in our bathroom mirror and saw myself as I truly was at that moment. I looked as miserable as I felt. I had dark circles under my eyes. My skin was broken out. I’m tired. I’m out of shape. I look terrible. Something’s got to change. I’VE got to change. I cannot go on like this anymore.
Our pastor at our church in San Diego had once said something that had really stuck with me: If you do something for twenty-one days, it will become a habit, and that means you can change your life in twenty-one days.
Even though we were broke, I knew I couldn’t use that as an excuse.
“Becky, I’ve got to take a little bit of money, and I’ve got to join a gym,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
“Okay, I’ve got no problem with that,” she said. “You go ahead and do what you’ve got to do.”
Now here was my next big shock. Not only did I have to pay to work out for the first time in my life, but also there was no schedule that told me what exercises to do and when to do them. I had to do it by myself, and I had to do it for myself. I didn’t even know where to start. I just knew I had to get in my twenty-one days.
On that first day, as I walked around, it all came crashing down on me. I was a professional athlete. No, I wasn’t, not anymore. Now I worked at the Veterans Administration, and I wasn’t even in good shape. I was at least forty pounds overweight, with a spare tire of fat around my middle. I sighed and climbed onto a little recumbent bike. I got so depressed, I lasted only five minutes.
“I’ve got to go home,” I said. “I can’t do this.”
I ran right out of there. But at least I’d gone. That was day one.
I went back the next day, stayed for maybe fifteen minutes, and then I went home. No matter how bad it felt, or how down I got, I made myself go back every day. By the twenty-first day, amazingly, I was actually doing a full workout.
Even more than that, three weeks was long enough for me to see a change. Honestly, my body hadn’t really changed much in that time, but my mood had. I felt so much better, happier, and most of all, clearer. I realized there had been something wrong with my brain before because of my inactivity. It was almost as if my thoughts had become cloudy, and my spirit had become depressed. Now, by contrast, I felt so much better. There seemed to be something healin
g about the movement itself. I realized that some of my happiest days, ever, had been when I was running in the sunshine across a grassy football field. And then I came to understand that, as humans, we’re meant to be much more active than we are. There was also something so positive about actually having an impact on my situation.
Let me tell you, I was hooked. I started eating right, the pounds came off, and that twenty-one days turned into years. Even though I was still right where I’d been, filing paperwork for eight hours a day, I noticed that everything else had changed for me. My mood was better, as well as my thinking, and my reactions to the things that happened to me, even when they weren’t good in and of themselves.
That’s why I always tell people to treat working out like the spa, not as something we force ourselves to do, but as an indulgence, a treat, an activity we do to get our minds together. Honestly, for me, it’s really not about my body anymore. Working out calms me. And it’s always been like that for me. When I was a little kid, I dealt with feeling scared or out of control by lifting the furniture. Now exercising is something I look forward to doing every day. I go to the gym to find my peace, especially now that I’ve got an iPod. That changed everything for me. I fill it up with my audiobooks, teaching tapes, books on anything I want to learn about—Hollywood, acting, writing, working out—not to mention great podcasts, amazing tapes by inspirational pastors, and music. Once I have all of that good stuff going into my system for an hour or two every morning, I feel good. I feel pumped for the day. It’s honestly become my joy. This is why I always tell people it’s the wrong approach to feel like we need to go to the gym to get in shape. Rather, we should adopt the attitude that because we’re in shape, we must go to the gym.
I WAS SOON LOOKING AND FEELING BETTER, BUT IT WAS still a very intense time. Rebecca was pregnant with our third child, and money was very tight. One night, I had a dream. I was at a high school football game, watching my son play on the field. I couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a helmet, but I knew he was my son, and all of the other parents were complimenting me about how athletic he was. Only I didn’t really care about his performance because I was so elated to have a son. In fact, when I woke up, I was disappointed to find I’d only been dreaming.
“Rebecca, I dreamt we had a son, and he was playing football,” I said.
“That reminds me of a vision I had that I was in a big, beautiful house, standing on a large staircase, holding a baby boy,” she said.
I put my hand on Rebecca’s big belly, convinced there was a boy in there.
“It’s a boy,” I said, giddy with excitement.
“No, Terry,” she said. “I’m telling you, it’s a girl.”
Rebecca knew the baby was a girl and told me so whenever I brought up the possibility that she was pregnant with a boy. When the doctor was finally able to tell us the baby’s gender, I was excited to find out for sure. Even once it was confirmed that Tera was indeed a girl, I still felt like she was my namesake. I’d always believed children should have their own name and was never interested in having a junior, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We saw a Terah in the Bible, and every time Rebecca drove me to work at the Veterans Administration, we passed the Terra Bella exit on the 5 Freeway. Our third daughter’s name would be Tera.
We were really struggling financially, but I did my best to hold on to my newly discovered positive attitude. When my alarm went off in the morning, before I could be crushed beneath the weight of the day’s many stresses, I took a moment to think: I’m alive. I’m alive. I can keep going as long as I’m alive.
As I got dressed, packed my sack lunch with a sandwich and a PowerBar, and headed off to my eight hours of filing, I kept talking to myself the whole time: I’m bigger than this. I am not this situation. This is not for me.
For once, my confidence didn’t come from an egotistical place. I really didn’t agree with my circumstances. I knew I had greater value than $8 an hour. And I truly believe it was my ability to hold on to my sense of my own value that helped me to get through that time, even when things got worse. Our landlady went crazy and evicted us from our apartment, which we could barely afford. In order to keep the older kids in the same school, we took on an apartment across the street. It was a beautiful, barnlike structure, but small and more expensive. It seemed impossible that things could get any worse, or more stressful, but through it all, I hung on to my positive attitude. And I learned a major lesson, which is this: We determine our core value. We do. And we have to keep that value strong, no matter what.
Eating healthy, exercising, and working hard, even at a job I didn’t love, all helped to keep my core value intact. But I still had bad habits that did not. We were able to afford an early iMac around this time, and soon I discovered that pornography was readily available on the Internet. These were the days of dial-up, and it took half an hour to load an image, but now there was no more sneaking out to video or liquor stores to get a fix. It was right at home and easily viewed with the push of a button. As the years went on, pornography became easier and easier to find and moved from pictures to full-on videos. It was like discovering I could jimmy the cable box all over again. I was able to become even more secretive, because my vice was pretty much evidence-free. Delete the image and search history and no one would be the wiser. But there was still a cost. My core value was continually battered by the pornography I snuck during times of stress. I couldn’t objectify women like that, and keep a secret from my wife, and still feel good about myself.
During that time, my brother was in a terrible car accident. When the paramedics first arrived at the scene, his face was completely crushed, and they thought he was dead. He was airlifted to the hospital. They put metal plates in his face, and he had a very slow and painful recovery. I was devastated because I couldn’t afford to fly home to visit him in the hospital, or to help him in any way. I felt so guilty, like this had happened to him because I hadn’t taken good enough care of him. Here I was, out in LA, chasing my dream, when I should have been doing more for him. But I also knew I had my own family now, and I had to put them first.
It was a very difficult time, with so many emotions ricocheting around inside of me. Is this ever going to work? Am I ever going to see anything out of this? What if I end up going back to Michigan anyway? I knew that couldn’t happen, ever, and I pulled myself together. I vowed, again, I’d never leave LA. And I limited my contact with my family back in Michigan, because talking to them made me feel like a loser.
I had made some initial progress with my film, Young Boys, Inc. I’d managed to attract the interest of director Reginald Hudlin, and my friend Anthony and I had found a manager. But after nearly a year of being convinced it was about to happen for us at any moment, while Anthony lived on our couch, Anthony and I had a falling-out. That was it, not only with our friendship, but also with the movie. Clearly, it wasn’t working out.
I still worked at the Veterans Administration, and I was also doing some bouncing at Timmy Nolan’s Tavern and Grill in Toluca Lake. While there, I made a good friend, Trevor Ziemba, a police officer who also did security for fitness icon Billy Blanks. Trevor took a liking to me and used his influence to land me a job as a security guard on movie sets. This was the best thing to happen to me since I’d left the NFL. The job was a minimum of twelve hours a day, and it paid $12 an hour, $18 if we did music videos or commercials, so I instantly doubled my earnings.
There was just one problem: my attitude. Many of my coworkers had recently been released from prison. My supervisors had barely finished high school, and yet they talked to me like I was an ex-con: “Go over there. Tuck in your shirt.”
I didn’t like it. At all. In fact, I was often really offended. My ego once again reared its ugly head. Even though I was making good money, because I hated being talked down to, I became depressed. Even after the humbling of janitorial work, I felt I was still this big-time ballplayer, and now I was working for people beneath me. I was hurt b
y my situation, and so I had a very bad attitude.
And then, one day, it hit me: Terry, look at what you have here. Really sit down and examine it. I was working on my first movie, Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman. There I was, at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown LA, wide-eyed, watching them move the lights and cameras, learning where the trailers were and what time they went to lunch. All I had to do for my job was to keep an eye on the extras, and so I had plenty of opportunity to observe everything else.
It was heaven. For lunch, there was steak and lobster and crab. I couldn’t believe it. Now, of course, I’ve never had that again, even as an actor. But it was an amazing moment in my life. I’d literally been starving, you know, digging in the couch cushions in search of money for a burger. But now I could eat on the set, leaving Rebecca and the kids to have whatever was at home. And I was learning all of these film facts I never would have known unless I was on a set.
You are making more than double what you were making at your Veterans Administration job. They feed you. You get to spend twelve hours a day on a movie set, watching how all of these movies are made. This is basically paid film school, if you just open your eyes and see where you are.
I went home that night and told Rebecca what I’d realized.
“This is a godsend,” I said. “My attitude has been totally wrong. Right now, I have to treat this job as if I’m getting paid a million dollars a day.”
From that moment on, I ironed my shirts every day. I made sure my flashlight had batteries. I gassed up my car the night before. I decided everything was going to be a learning experience, and I was going to make good use of every single moment of every single day. I was the super security guard. There were days when I worked twelve hours, and I didn’t have time to work out. So if I was at my guard post watching a trailer, and there was nobody in sight, I jogged in place for an hour, and that was my day’s workout. I did push-ups. If there was a light post, I did pull-ups.