Terry Crews is slowly becoming a master class of personal accountability, as shown in his recent interview with Shannon Sharpe on “Club Shay Shay.” While discussing underserved late-round NFL draftees who likely become journeymen, which he considers himself to be, Crews details failed NFL dreams and lean times at home.
“I spent at least six months on $200 a week sitting out,” Crews said while explaining his brief time with the Redskins in 1995. “(That) Monday, I’m preparing for the week. Brought my playbook up there and they said, ‘We’re going to let you go’. On that Tuesday, which is the NFL day off, they brought another linebacker from another team, and I was sitting out there the whole time, and I was gone. My kids are like, ‘So I can’t go to this school?'”
Crews lived his emergence to stardom in inches from menial jobs to becoming a top name in Hollywood. Forget “good to great,” for him it was from “horrible to great.” When he was in the NFL he saw the highs and extreme lows of being a pro ball player and told a cautionary tale for potential NFL hopefuls. Crews was cut from the then-Washington Redskins after the 1995 season. He would get one more short shot in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles but never again played a down in the league after leaving Washington.
Although a statuesque athlete, Crews was honest about his early beginnings before football and how he never loved the game. He just needed a way out of his hometown of Flint.
“Coming up in Flint, I always knew I wanted to be an entertainer because I came from the art thing. I was an artist, painting, drawing, and sketching; my first scholarship wasn’t in football. I had a scholarship to Western Michigan University as an artist and then I walked on to the football team. Football was a way out of Flint, Michigan. I followed all the greats: Andre Rison, Carl Banks, Glen Rice went to Flint. I knew athletics was going to be my way out because nobody was going to pay me to paint.
“It took me years to figure out I never really liked football. I walked on, earned a scholarship, got drafted in the eleventh round by the Los Angeles Rams in 1991, then got cut later on and went to the Packers, the Chargers, the Redskins, Eagles; hopped all around because it was the only way I saw to make some money. We played at the same time. You were you and became a superstar, Pro Bowler the whole thing. I wasn’t studying it and you have to go to a whole other level to be at your level and there was just so many other things I wanted to do.”
Crews thought that if the NFL didn’t work out, he should take his family to Los Angeles to try and get into the movie business. His longtime wife of over 30 years agreed, and they drove cross country to the City of Angels. However, a rough start was ahead.
“My first job in L.A. was sweeping floors. Everybody had counted me out by then. There was family members that said, ‘he had a chance and blew it.’ That was the consensus. First, they were looking like, ‘Why you e getting cut.’ It’s one of those things where you have a lot of family and friends waiting for you to fail. I love when you count me out,” Crews sang to close his statement.
Now worth $25 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, Crews is living his dream and saw it come by humbling himself and treating every job like it paid him millions. Ultimately, his emergence came in inches from menial jobs to becoming a top star in Hollywood.
Forget “good to great,” it’s “horrible to great.” When he was in the NFL he saw the highs and extreme lows of being a pro ball player and told a cautionary tale for potential NFL tryouts. In the end, Crews is able to live his life as a working artist who finds the screen after coming through the gridiron.
