Finally Free (18 page)

When Judge Hudson announced my term, Kijafa kept waiting for him to clarify it. She expected him to maybe say “twenty-three months
of probation
” or “twenty-three months
of home confinement
.” But not this.

She was sad that Jada wouldn't see me for nearly two years—sad that London wouldn't even know who her father was. Because Kijafa didn't grow up with a father figure in her life, she wanted her kids to have a positive father figure in their lives. And here I was, sentenced to twenty-three months in jail.

Once I returned to my cell in Warsaw, I fell onto my bed and
cried for about an hour. That's when I hit rock bottom. That's when I hit the ground—when I crashed.

All I could think was,
For the next twenty-three months, I will be incarcerated.
I couldn't take care of my family; I couldn't do anything for my family.

I remember it vividly. I cried; then I stopped. Then I stood up and said, “Okay, I'm ready to go. Let's do it.”

Letters of encouragement or communication of any kind helped me early on.

I remember the first letter from my mother. The first thing I noticed was that she had horrible handwriting! But she really opened up. It's one thing I began to realize—that people can sometimes express more in writing than they can face-to-face. It may be easier to write things than to say them out loud.

What she wrote about were things I wasn't even thinking about. She was just very encouraging, very uplifting, and told me how she was looking forward to my last day.

Over time, I received personal visits from former Atlanta teammates Alge Crumpler, Keion Carpenter, and Kynan Forney; plus Curtis Martin, one of the best running backs in NFL history. It all helped me to know people cared, especially since it wasn't easy for them to get on the prison lists to visit me.

When people came, we talked about everything—what was going on in the outside world and what the new music was, for
example. We talked about working out and about all the experiences we had in Atlanta. We talked about relationships. We talked about moving forward and about how I could become a better man—a better person.

I received letters once a week from someone on the Virginia Tech coaching staff. Whether it was head coach Frank Beamer, assistant coach Bryan Stinespring, the defensive coordinator, or the head of football operations, someone wrote me a letter. They stayed in touch. It helped keep my spirits high.

Oddly, I was able to feel the family atmosphere of Tech again, and I knew they cared as much about me as I cared about them.

Slowly, painfully, I began to adapt to life in prison.

There was nothing like having my freedom taken away from me—being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to get up, or when I could go outside on the track. I was a twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old
man
, and I was taking orders … from another man. It was just a miserable feeling that I had to learn to tolerate and accept.

I was around 500 men every day, in a place I didn't want to be. It was rough. I had to learn how to live the prison life—how to move in prison, how to talk; and I learned when to say something, when not to say something, what to say and what not to say.

In prison you can't show your emotions around others because, in the end, it only puts you at risk for resentment or abuse from other inmates. You just have to be strong, and you have to be
able to overcome all the elements in the prison system. It can be brutal; and if you're not strong mentally, you'll break down. Then everyone will see you break down, and you'll have guys taking advantage of you and stealing your commissary purchases. I saw it happen to other guys.

One incident when I had to keep my emotions in check was during a basketball game. Another inmate, who wasn't happy with how things were going for his team, started a fistfight with me. He said, “Because you have money, you can do certain things. I don't care. @#$% you, @#$% you, @#$% you.” He cursed at me three times, and I felt I was being disrespected. The next thing I knew, we were in an altercation. It didn't go as far as both of us wanted it to go, and it was probably good that it didn't, but I was to the point that I didn't care at the time. He ticked me off.

You can't be disrespected in front of your peers in prison because a lot of them will look at you like you can be taken advantage of. Experiences like that forced me to adapt quickly, whether I wanted to or not.

The only reason I think I was able to adapt was because of the way I grew up—my upbringing, the environment I was in, the people I was around, and the way God made me. Prison helped mold and shape me as a man. I had to have that experience in order to move forward and become the type of man I've always wanted to be.

I was no longer No. 7, the football player. I was inmate No. 33765-183, and I couldn't change that, regardless of the fact that this number definitely didn't fit me.

I had that number on every day. I had to write it on each piece of mail that I sent out. It will forever be embedded in my brain.

It was stressful. I wanted to break out, wanted to get out, but I couldn't. I was in the same place with the same people every day, all day, with the same guards telling me what to do, what I could or couldn't do, and sometimes, just for spite, conducting shakedowns. It was a constant mess.

There were times I was down and out and just feeling like I was the scum of the earth. But there was another side telling me I could pick myself up and make this all right. Adapting to the environment didn't just mean properly handling conflicts. It also meant trying to stay uplifted, which is probably one of the most important and yet most difficult things to do in there.

When you're in prison, it makes you feel like there is no hope. I was very discouraged at times. But at the same time, I held my head up high, and I knew what was most important. There was the fact that I didn't have to spend my entire life there. One day, I was going to go home and have another chance, a chance to make amends and make things right. It was the only thing I was focused on after a while.

I never lost hope because I had so many of my fans and so many people who wrote me every day. It was like I was talking to them. They wrote back so frequently that I was able to know what was going on in the outside world. It helped me keep my mind. I felt
loved by family members, people I had never met, coaches, and others.

I received about 27,000 letters, and only six or seven were hate mail. I read all of them. And I responded to most of them. People were thinking about me when they didn't have to be thinking about me. I was humbled.

Writing letters helped pass the time. I watched television, worked out, wrote letters, made a quick phone call, and before I knew it, I had burnt five hours. So then I'd do it again.

Besides writing letters to family, friends, and fans, I read books like
The Art of War
, an ancient Chinese work considered a classic piece of military literature;
The 48 Laws of Power
, a book written in 1998 that has been compared to
The Art of War
;
The Shack
, a Christian novel; as well as various urban books and lots of magazines and business books. I once read a book in two days that was 480 pages. I never would have done that on the outside.

During my incarceration, I read more books than I had ever read in my life. I did more writing than I had ever done in my life, and I did more thinking than I had ever done in my life. I tried to stay sharp while I was in prison. I had a lot of idle time, but I didn't want to have an idle mind. So I read, and I also learned how to play chess, some card games, and dominoes.

There's one letter I'll never forget. It was the first letter Kijafa ever wrote me. At the bottom, it said, “PS: Do your time. Don't let the time do you.”

From the moment I first heard those prison doors slam behind me, I began to turn back to God—praying, reading the Bible, and recommitting my life to Him.

The only thing I could do was to have faith and stay strong, and to trust and believe that God would give me another chance. It was all I had. There were so many times that He was the only person I could call on. I could talk to my mom, I could talk to Kijafa, I could talk to my kids; but I couldn't talk to them all night. You only get 300 minutes a month on the prison phones—an average of ten minutes a day—so you have to ration them out.

When I called Kijafa, I had so much on my mind that I wanted to tell her, and I'd have to cram it into five minutes.

I had to lie in that bunk in a cell by myself when the lights went out at 11:00—and I'm a night owl, so from 11:00 until 1:30 or until I fell asleep, I was thinking about how I could make this right. Those were lonely hours.

Just like high school, I read the Bible every night. My Bible, once again, found its place under my pillow. Scriptures from my childhood, like Psalm 23 and Jeremiah 29:11, began to bring me comfort again. It felt like I was starting my life all over again, only in a different place.

Some may question my sincerity or say, “Of course he found God in prison,” as if it is a crutch or an excuse or an easy way to show remorse or reform. But in reality, I didn't find God; He found me. He put me in a place to be alone and to have conversation with Him. And I needed to listen.

As I look back on it, I had to come out of jail and take baby steps to get back to where I wanted to be. There was so much that needed to change, including breaking ties with longtime friends and associates who weren't the best influences on me in my pre-prison days.

God knew that I couldn't walk away from the dogfighting situation without my friends saying, “How are you just going to walk away from it? How are you not going to do this anymore?” God knew that in some ways I was arrogant, and He also knew that when I was younger, I used to pray. God gave me the strength to get through the prison sentence. He knew that I didn't have the strength to say no—that I didn't have the heart to tell people that they had to go their own separate way, that they couldn't be a part of my life anymore, that I needed to start a new life and it would be family-oriented—family first.