It’s Super Bowl week and Eugene Robinson is back in the news. But this time, he wasn’t wearing handcuffs.
This time, he didn’t look weary from having cried all night while being consoled by Falcons’ teammates. This time, he wasn’t a national punchline.
“I thought, ‘How did I get from way over here to way over here?’” Robinson said Tuesday. “It’s easy to lose your way when you’re selfish. That’s what I was. Selfish.”
Robinson, the former NFL and Falcons safety and now a radio analyst for the Carolina Panthers, spoke to the team’s players before they left Charlotte for this week’s Super Bowl. The subject of the talk: How to handle the distractions and temptations of Super Bowl week.
Coach Ron Rivera agreed with Robinson’s request because 17 years ago, the former player became one of game’s all-time examples of how quickly and drastically something can jump the rails.
Painful flashback time: The 1998 Falcons made a run to the Super Bowl. Robinson was one of the team leaders, a man who wore his Christianity on his sleeve, a player who was honored on the Saturday morning before the Super Bowl in Miami as the NFL’s Man of the Year. But that night, on the eve of the game, Robinson was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman.
He played in the game but it was believed — and Robinson confirmed so Tuesday — that the hangover of the arrest and his lack of sleep from the experience contributed to Denver torching the Falcons’ defense for 457 yards, including 336 passing, in a 34-19 Broncos win.
A key moment of the game came in the second quarter when Denver receiver Rod Smith beat Robinson for an 80-yard touchdown pass.
Robinson said he had been thinking about the possibility of speaking to Carolina players since the fourth week of the season, believing the team was going to go to the Super Bowl. He did so, without the media knowing, last week in Charlotte. Word leaked out at Media Day on Monday but Robinson declined comment when approached by the Charlotte Observer’s Joe Person.
On Tuesday, Rivera acknowledged Robinson’s speech, saying he “spoke to the pitfalls of being here and I thought that was a very courageous thing he did. Our players seemed to respond very nicely and were appreciative of that as well.”
Robinson showed up late in Carolina’s media session Tuesday and was stopped by a handful of media members that soon grew to a large group. Suddenly, he was on stage again. But in a good way.
“I told them, ‘Look, I really love this team. I don’t want this to be the story because it’s (about) the Carolina Panthers but there are some things you need to know,’” Robinson said. “’When you get down here to the Super Bowl, it’s easy to lose your way. It’s easy to be distracted. It’s so easy, for all the hard work you put in, to jeopardize that because of your own internal selfishness, and that’s basically what it was.
“So I wanted to remind them: ‘Dude, you have to remember why you’re here. Those dudes you lock arms with, that’s important. And you’ve got to remember that. If a team beats you, that’s different. But if you beat yourself, that’s criminal.’”
Robinson said he apologized to Falcons players and for the embarrassment and distraction he created for them and the NFL. He said for those reasons, his faith and the pain he caused his family, “I wanted to give them the story. They know about me. They know I work for the team. So (I thought), I want to tell you before somebody else admonishes you.”
Robinson said he still feels sick “every time I hear the word ‘solicitation.’”
Five years later after the arrest, when Carolina reached the Super Bowl in Houston against New England, Robinson had already taken the radio job with the Panthers. Approached then by an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, Robinson would make only brief references to the incident and added. “My deepest prayer is that nothing like what happened to me happens to anybody else.”
But he did not speak to the team at that point, saying, “I wasn’t ready yet.”
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