00:00Tony, do you believe that this has been a massive journey for you?
00:05Because of all the pressure that you had coming out of college,
00:09I mean, I remember when I was playing,
00:11you were named to the All-Madden team when you were at Michigan State,
00:16and you were the number two overall pick.
00:18How much pressure did that put on you going into the National Football League
00:22and where you are today?
00:25Oh, yeah.
00:26Yeah, I mean, talk about a whole, like, it's like two different lives, right?
00:31The first one, I remember Coach Lindy Infante,
00:34who was the head coach at Green Bay when they drafted me,
00:36I remember him telling the media, like,
00:39it's almost impossible for anybody to live up to the expectations
00:43that the media has set for me.
00:46But, you know, I'll take my own accountability on that
00:48because I tried to set those expectations really high.
00:51I wanted to get as much PR as I could for an offensive lineman
00:55because the only other time we get called is for a penalty, right?
00:58So I wanted more hype, more whatever it was.
01:02Once Sports Illustrated hit,
01:04it's like that media machine just took off like a rocket.
01:08That's when the potential Tyson fight was going to, you know,
01:12they started, you know, negotiating with a Tyson fight.
01:14And I think that was good because it kind of put a fire under Green Bay
01:18to get me signed because we were way off on numbers.
01:23But it was like almost like a media circus.
01:25And I think a lot of people don't realize you'll know this
01:28because you were there.
01:30Sports Illustrated at that time was like the print authority of sports.
01:35Today, they're still an authority,
01:37but there's, you know, 200 other authorities, right?
01:41So the value it carried, the amount of marketing it gave me,
01:47you know, got me on Letterman, got me doing cameos on sitcoms.
01:51You know, the Tyson thing, you know, happened because of the cover.
01:56All those things that spawned from that
01:59ended up becoming more and more marketing.
02:01But to your point, to your question,
02:04it created a ton of pressure.
02:07And you couple all that pressure with starting to abuse alcohol and opiates,
02:14you know, prescription painkillers.
02:16And it's, you know, it's a disaster.
02:18What you get is what happened in Green Bay,
02:20a total train wreck for four years.
02:22I wonder too, Tony, if you look at it this way too,
02:25you got to remember in our era, we had the Boz,
02:28we had Deion Sanders, we had Michael Irvin.
02:30It was really about promoting and beginning of promoting your brand.
02:35Did you ever think about that?
02:37When you look at today's athletes,
02:38the things that we did back in the 1980s,
02:41the things that you guys did, especially you high-end guys did,
02:44that that's what you see today.
02:46How much do you look at that and say, you know,
02:49this is something that we started back in the 1980s, working on a brand?
02:54Yeah, I think I knew when I saw, you know,
02:57because Boz I think is a couple years older than me.
03:00When I saw what he was doing, the attention he was getting,
03:03now he's a linebacker too, right?
03:04And he's got swag, you know, and he's not just that,
03:08but he's a great linebacker, right?
03:11I was like, you know, whatever he's doing is catching eyeballs,
03:15and I wanted to do the same thing.
03:17I felt it's going to be harder for any offensive lineman to do,
03:21say, what Boz did at linebacker, what Deion did at corner,
03:25what Michael did at wide receiver.
03:28But I think all of that also comes a little bit naturally,
03:31and it did to me a little bit too.
03:33It just becomes naturally.
03:34I was never, I shouldn't say this because there's probably clips of it out there,
03:38but I was never that type of guy or never wanted to be that type of guy to say,
03:43I am the greatest.
03:45And I know there's clips that say something similar,
03:47but when I look at those clips today,
03:49it's like I cringe so bad.
03:51And I'm like, get rid of that VHS stuff, you know?
03:56Absolutely.
03:57Thank God there wasn't phone.
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