Tyrann Mathieu: Outrunning addiction

Tyrann Mathieu has beaten addiction.

Check that: Tyrann Mathieu wakes up every morning and decides he wants to be more than addiction. There was Mathieu’s well-documented addiction to marijuana, and then there is something else entirely. The most looming addiction that Mathieu has escaped is to chaos—an invisible addiction that doesn’t need to be officially diagnosed in order to ruin a person’s life or potential.

Mathieu is only 24 years old, but he has already lived a long life. He has seen things, experienced things and done things that the majority of the human race never will.

In an articulate and excruciatingly detailed profile of Mathieu in Men’s Health, Paul Solotaroff walks us through this laundry list: all the people he loves who have died tragically, drugs ravaging the majority of those around him growing up in the 5th Ward of New Orleans, both of his birth parents leaving him as a young child, people needing him to take care of them, becoming the third defensive back to ever be a finalist for the Heisman in 2011, risking his potential by getting kicked off of LSU’s football team on August 10, 2012, losing out on millions of dollars that could have secured himself and those he wants to help in Round 1 of the NFL Draft because of addiction.

Mathieu could have easily permanently succumbed to any one of these items on his exhaustive life laundry list. He could have decided to take the cards the world dealt him, stuff them in his back pocket and accept what fate was seemingly his.Who of us, given these persistent obstacles, could clear them without fail or falter? And who could have blamed him, really? Millions of people naturally become products of their environments every day.

But Tyrann Mathieu didn’t succumb. He teetered on the edge, but he couldn’t fall all the way into the abyss. Maybe the only person in the world who would have blamed Mathieu the harshest was himself. After his arrest on October 2012, for possession of marijuana and a subsequent jail stay, it became apparent to Mathieu (and soon everybody else) that all the negatives that were given to him externally couldn’t match the power of his internal gifts. His faith, his desire, his passion, his work ethic, and his talent.

And then came August 2, when the Arizona Cardinals (who took Mathieu in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft and haven’t regretted it since) extended Mathieu with a five-year, $62 million contract with $40 million guaranteed. This makes Mathieu the highest paid safety in the NFL, currently. But he is not just a safety, and that is part of his appeal: He can be anything on the field that you want him to be, and he is proving that he can be the man off the field that he wants to be.

Mathieu has yet to play a full season in three years as an NFL player. Most recently, Mathieu tore his ACL last December and is currently still recovering it, but that didn’t deter the Cardinals from securing one of their cornerstone faces of the franchise alongside his long-time mentor and friend Patrick Peterson.

On August 3, Josina Anderson said this on ESPN’s NFL Insiders: “I had an opportunity to talk with John Lucas, who has mentored people who have had issues coming into the league. One of the things that he said was really key behind Tyrann Mathieu was having the gift of desperation. Wanting to get out of that pain and healing yourself and taking yourself through that journey of self-examination. And that’s perhaps what other athletes need to be willing to do to get over that hump.”

Desperation. Everybody visits desperation at 1 Rock Bottom, USA, at least once in his or her lifetime. And for the longest time, Mathieu owned a key to the guest house. Desperation forces you to confront your life head-on: What am I doing with my life? What am I not doing? Why? And most of all, Am I willing to change?

Mathieu was a self-proclaimed and universally recognized Honey Badger. (He has since said publicly that he wishes to no longer be associated with the nickname, but rather be known as Tyrann Mathieu). A honey badger is a small animal that is said to be the “World’s Most Fearless Creature” by The Guinness Book of World Records. A honey badger wreaks havoc on larger animals, as Mathieu does on all of his opponents.

But there was one other nickname, Mr. Chaos—a moniker that Eli Saslow unveiled in a profile of Mathieu for ESPN The Magazine in April 2013, and a moniker that Mathieu wanted his teammates and friends to call him rather than Honey Badger while still at the height of LSU popularity and production.

Perhaps Mathieu is still the Honey Badger—on the field, where he should be. But he has is no longer Mr. Chaos. He has built himself into a balanced, healthy and stable young man—a son, a teammate, a friend, a believer, and a father of his own two boys.

He is a someone who has been and will be written about or talked about an abundance of times. But the most powerful story you will ever see about Tyrann Mathieu is the one he continues to write about himself.

Look at him now. He is a prisoner to nothing and no one. The world is his.