planomateo
Member
Good read on Lacy. Wish him luck on his life journey, everyone goes through one.
http://www.jsonline.com/sports/pack...has-burden-to-carry-b9951355z1-215404221.html
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Packers rookie running back Lacy has burden to carry
By Tyler Dunne of the Journal Sentinel July 13, 2013
Green Bay — The moment Eddie Lacy steps into the Republic Chophouse, he beams. He cracks up in a scratchy, southern "heh-heh-heh!" bellow.
Rays from this 70-degree day in Green Bay don't break through the dim, quaint restaurant in downtown Green Bay. Yet Lacy, those pink and turquoise "RECK-LESS" letters glistening on his shirt, pumps in the electricity. Walking toward a booth in the back corner, he clearly just signed his rookie contract or won a lifetime supply of cheese curds.
And yet, it's a mirage, an illusion.
The Green Bay Packers' new running back is not truly happy, fulfilled. That alluring smile masks an emptiness Lacy cannot quite explain. He isn't sure if he'll be happy, how to be happy. National titles at Alabama didn't do it. Getting drafted into the NFL was a relief, a blessing, not much more. A legion of fans worshipping at his altar in college? Lacy shrugs.
Then, he points to 2005.
That year, Hurricane Katrina bashed through the levees and swallowed Lacy's home in Gretna, La. The cookie-cutter narrative is that a tragedy made Lacy tougher, wiser, fully equipped to take on the world with the blunt force of a lowered right shoulder. And to a degree — on the football field — that's true. He learned to "run angry." Football became Lacy's sanctuary.
But to Lacy, touchdowns and championships and celebrity have been Advil fixes to an illness with no cure. At least Lacy hasn't found the cure yet.
He's searching. He's hopeful.
He's here in Green Bay to find out.
At dinner, Lacy pours a layer of A1 sauce over his 16-ounce boneless ribeye. The appetizer, bacon-covered scallops, was devoured in record time. Lacy never ate scallops before, but when he heard "bacon" from the waitress he was all in. This size, this deceptive mass, is what the Packers coveted. Lacy's built like a bouncer, moves like a midfielder.
Green Bay invested a second-round pick in Lacy to resuscitate its torpid running game.
And this 22-year-old has no clue when he'll find every human being's No. 1 goal in life — true happiness.
Will he ever find pre-2005 bliss again? Lacy looks to his left, then to his right toward an empty booth. Candles are lit, his hands clasped.
"That's a great question," Lacy says. "I have no idea. I guess I'll find out."
A transformation
Mold climbed up the walls. His bunk beds were flipped. The ground was "shifted." All the furniture in the Lacy home? "Busted."
Family memories were ruined, too. Lacy's trophies were encased in mold, mildew. Family photos were warped. And the stench — it was unbearable. The Lacy family actually needed to wear white masks just to navigate through what was left of their home.
Lacy stared at the ruins — numb, emotionless. This was what his parents feared.
"I could see," Lacy says, "why they really didn't want us to come back and see."
In 2005, Katrina displaced more than a million people. The Lacys were among them.
Before fleeing Gretna, the Lacys propped many items high on shelves. The plan was to return after the storm with a U-Haul and salvage what they could. But even those items — even Lacy's 3-foot high piggybank filled with coins — were stolen by looters.
Lacy, his sister and their parents lived house to house, slept on floor to floor, survived meal to meal. First, they evacuated to Texas. They stayed with Lacy's aunt for a while near Baton Rouge, jammed into a three-bedroom home with five other families. Through the "Share Your Home" program, they later found a couple to live with from September to Thanksgiving.
Then, finally, they settled into a shoebox of a trailer in Geismar, La.
One night, Lacy finally cried. With his mother, Wanda, sitting at the foot of his bed, the ninth-grader released all emotion. Beyond that, nothing. He shut down.
"He became very withdrawn, not very vocal," Wanda Lacy says. "I wouldn't say he became totally anti-social but he lost himself in himself — 'How do I go through life day by day with all of these changes?'"
Katrina spiked the metronome to Lacy's day-to-day life.
He didn't want to start over in a new town, with new friends. In Gretna, Lacy's crew played "Manhunt," an extravagant neighborhood-wide game of "it." In Geismar, all of his peers were wannabe rappers. He especially loathed the trailer, too. Lacy's bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet.
That wretched smell — "a stagnant smell, like when you let water just sit out for a while," as Wanda puts it — combined with the shame of living with strangers, combined with the suffocating trailer, combined with an entirely new life took a toll on Lacy.
The images didn't necessarily haunt Lacy. They psychologically rewired him.
Write about it, his mother said. Unload all thoughts, all emotions, onto paper. Such an exercise could exorcise demons. As a nurse, this often worked with Wanda's patients. When Lacy sat down with pen and paper in hand, he couldn't jot anything down. Not a sentence. His mind was blank.
Talk about it, people suggested. To family. To professionals. Anyone. But as Lacy said with a chuckle, "I don't talk." He doesn't know how to vent, never did. In fact, during this dinner, a neighbor back on the Tuscaloosa campus sends Lacy a picture of his 1995 Caprice. His parked car is vandalized with what appears to be either dirt or vomit.
Lacy doesn't even flinch. Oh well.
All Katrina anger burned inside. Through high school and college, Lacy never brought up the experience to friends, teammates. It took a lot of convincing to get Lacy to agree to ESPN's E:60 predraft feature, too. He can't quite articulate the darkness inside.
"I never really got over it," Lacy says. "I don't really know how to explain it. It's something that I never really got over and I don't know how to get over it still to this day."
There was one way for Lacy to release frustration. At his new high school, Dutchtown, he punished defenders. The school's coach, Benny Saia, remembers Lacy ripping through 10 tackles on one 60-yard touchdown run in the playoffs. Between the lines, Lacy ran with raw "anger."
"He'd run over you. He'd run around you," Saia says. "He could do it all. He was the total package. It was almost effortless for him."
So he was a natural for Alabama. Lacy was precisely the brand of back head coach Nick Saban seeks. Katrina, in essence, awoke a giant.
But inside, something was missing.
Lacy remembers that after scoring touchdowns in high school — fans cheering, teammates slapping him on the back — he would walk to the sideline and take a knee. Alone.
"There was a lot of anger," Lacy says. "When I played back in Gretna, it was fun. You make a good play, you make somebody miss, you get back on the sideline and your friends are going to laugh about it. It was fun. It was a riot. After the hurricane, I was aggravated, angry."
He's been trying to recover since.
Filling the void
Lacy realizes how ridiculous, how unreasonable this sounds.
At Alabama, he grew into the bruising, spinning iron fist of a college football machine. He won one, two, three national titles. And yet, all along, the emptiness remained. He's told there are millions upon millions of athletes who would sell their soul to be in his shoes.
Lacy laughs with an "I know, I know!" and says he now understands all that "money can't buy happiness" nonsense. He's in a position to earn millions and it doesn't matter. Asked if football has ever brought him true, real joy, Lacy pauses for five seconds.
"It has its moments, I guess you could say," Lacy says. "It was a lot better for me (at Gretna), though. Football is not what it was to me in high school now."
Don't get Lacy wrong. He loved Alabama, loved winning. But football and football alone — "a game," he cautions — has not erased Katrina.
Take the national championship game this year. After eviscerating Notre Dame for 140 yards on 20 attempts with two touchdowns, he hoisted the crystal ball with a "National Champions" shirt draped around his neck. In his shadow, teammates gripped "BAMA AGAIN!" newspapers.
Through the celebration, however, was trepidation. That night, Lacy (again) tried to escape postgame interviews.
"I tried to get out of it," says Lacy, the game's most valuable player. "I tried to get out of every one of my interviews in college."
Fame never appealed to Lacy. Nobody knew it, but postgame interviews were real-life horror movies to Lacy. First, he'd hear his name called — Eddie Lacy — and the tension built. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead when the lights flicked on.
Then, he'd worry if reporters saw the sweat. Then, his heart raced.
"I come out sweating like, 'Man, why do y'all keep doing this to me!?'" he says.
Off the field, Lacy had friends run his errands. Online, messages cluttered his Facebook inbox. When Lacy received "dozens" of messages daily after the draft — many from "Lacys" across the country he never heard of — he shut the account down.
Big man on campus? An off-day for Lacy was spent in bed. He'd think nothing of laying in bed for, yes, 24 straight hours. He'd sleep, sleep, amble into the kitchen for some water and sleep some more.
Maybe sports have helped other athletes blindsided by tragedy come full circle. Lacy deadpans, "it doesn't do it with me," adding that football — to him — is a way to get his parents out of that trailer.
"As far as for me, I have a lot of stuff that I never had," he says. "I'm able to do a lot of stuff that I never did. But it's like there's still something missing. So I don't know....You're happy because you made it, but there's just something that's keeping you from enjoying it 100%.
"And it's all from that 2005 thing."
His signature laugh mutes. Lacy's tone turns cold, direct.
The emptiness can trigger depression.
"Yeah, I could see that," Lacy says. "Nobody really knows I'm depressed. I have that feeling here and there."
All the cartoons, please
They heard the voice, the name. Eddie Lacy was on Line 1. The rookie pegged by many Packers fans as the elixir for a lost running game was setting up his subscription television service with AT&T.
No problem, the receptionist told Lacy. We know exactly which packages are for you.
"OK," Lacy recalls the AT&T receptionist telling him, "you'll want all the sports..."
And as the receptionist began reeling off the various sports packages, Lacy interrupted.
"I'm like, 'I just want whatever comes with a lot of cartoons. I'll take all the cartoons,'" Lacy says. "And they just started laughing."
Disney. Cartoon Network. All animation available in Northeast Wisconsin, sign Lacy up. Whenever Lacy does drift into depression, he calls his sister to make him laugh or, if there's a TV nearby, he's watching cartoons. This is the small part of Lacy's life the hurricane couldn't wash away.
Lacy almost never watches ESPN. He rarely watches football — period. Arguably the best running back in college football has watched only two of his Alabama games outside of film sessions. Cartoons trump all. They extract the "real childish" kid from Gretna that Lacy misses so much.
No, Katrina never stole Lacy's love for, um... Little Quacker on "Tom and Jerry."
"I love whenever they have the little duck, that little orange duck!" Lacy says. "I love the way he sounds when he talks."
In countless ways, he's still that kid from Gretna. Sure, he owns an Xbox, Playstation and Wii, but Lacy can still appreciate a Mario Kart marathon on oh-so-ancient Nintendo 64. He still hates onions. The mention of French onion soup from the waitress as a side order makes Lacy cringe, like he sunk his teeth into a lemon.
Back in high school, Lacy didn't drink beer and chase girls. He talked about comic books with his coach's 7-year-old son.
And the cartoons. Lacy can camp out on a couch and watch cartoons for two, three hours at a time.
He's a fan of "American Dad," will search for YouTube clips of Cartman on "South Park" and has a soft spot for "Family Guy." But, above all, Lacy loves the classics, the ones he watched growing up. During college, inside the training room, Lacy always caught "Tom and Jerry" between classes and team meetings.
"In his room. On his cellphone," former Alabama receiver Marquis Maze says. "Anything you could watch a cartoon on, he found it. You name it, he probably watched it on anything you could think of."
Already in Green Bay, Lacy is noticing that time slows down. He calls himself a bit of a loner, an outsider. In every new setting, he tiptoes into relationships. The rookie decided to rent, alone, in De Pere.
Are there really enough cartoons out there to pass the time?
"I'm going to find out starting tomorrow," Lacy says. "I'm going straight to the cartoon package. I don't even know how to get there but I'm going to find it. And I hope they have all the old cartoons. My favorite one is 'Dragon Ball Z.'"
Dragon...what?
Lacy's brow furrows, his eyes widen. He is not amused.
"You never watched 'Dragon Ball Z' before?"
Passive or punishing?
A sheet of paper is set in front of Lacy. On it are three names.
Giovani Bernard. Le'Veon Bell. Montee Ball.
The three running backs drafted ahead of Lacy. The three running backs that should elicit a snarl, a twitch, a ... something out of Lacy.
"Uhh, I really don't have a thought, man," Lacy says. "I mean, it is what it is. They're great players, too. Real cool dudes."
This is the sort of passive, blasé response that alarmed teams. Many scouts, Lacy admitted, questioned his love for the game. They're skeptical, unsure if this cartoon-loving kid has a deep passion for his profession. To Lacy, football is "the childhood game." He views it "from a kid's perspective."
That spin move? It's fun. Makes Lacy feel like the Tasmanian Devil. Said Lacy, "You can watch it and be like, 'Ha ha!'"
"I know a lot of teams questioned how much I love football because I don't talk about it 24/7," Lacy says. "But I feel like it's not how much you know about it or how much you watch it. It's all about production and obviously up to this point I did what I was supposed to do. You put me on the field and I'll contribute."
Back when Katrina hit, Lacy learned how to escape to "a fantasy world." For 2½ hours — Fridays in high school, Saturdays in college and now Sundays in the pros — nothing else matters. Not Katrina, not the trailer, not the emptiness. He escapes reality.
For anyone worried, Lacy points to practices at Alabama. On the scout team, he was a punching bag. One play, on a blitz, Javier Arenas drilled Lacy's AC joint. Someone on the sideline stuffed a pad over the tender shoulder, tapped Lacy on the back and sent him back in for seconds.
"Unless you were dead or your leg was physically broken or something like that," Lacy says, "there was no way to get out of practice."
At Alabama, this was the culture. Play through pain or lose your spot. There's always another player in waiting. And Lacy, linebacker Nico Johnson repeats, is "all business." If he doesn't speak with a passion, he plays with a passion. By midseason last fall, when Alabama's good-not-great ground game was a concern, Johnson remembers telling Lacy to "play with a purpose."
From then on, he did. He turned it on.
Johnson and Maze never knew Lacy harbored a shred of pain inside. He wasn't a rah-rah guy, either. But on the field, on Saturday, he delivered.
"Eddie is not a vocal leader," Johnson says. "He leads by example. He wanted to let his play take care of itself and that's what happened. Everybody saw that and responded."
Adds Maze, "Eddie, when he comes to work, he comes to work. It's a business approach to him."
Given every opportunity to trash the Denver Broncos and Pittsburgh Steelers for passing on him, Lacy smiles that passive smile. He asks the waitress for a straw, bites the end off of it and sticks into his glass of water. In a low rumble — briefly, barely audible — there's a sign of a different Eddie Lacy.
The one who punishes, the one who told Johnson on the phone he'd make teams pay.
Says Lacy, "I'll get to play against them."
The search continues
Steak is a welcomed change of pace. In Green Bay, Lacy admitted, he's been splurging too much on fast food. During off-season practices, he weighed in at 238 pounds, a high number that, believe it or not, might be kind.
Back in Geismar, over the July 4th weekend, Mom gave him hell.
"You better start running! You better start running!" Wanda yelled.
Each time, he told her not to worry. Lacy never worries. Whether it's a wife, his career, the NFL, new friends — at some point he expects to feel complete. Soon, he'll buy his parents a new house in Louisiana. Mom believes that's the missing piece — a home, a tangible return to normalcy.
"He loves the journey that he took to get where he is. It wasn't easy," she says. "But he knows it was necessary. It was God's plan for him. And the future is brighter for him now because he'll be able to restore some of the things that we lost."
For those fuming, "Get over it!," Lacy is only 22 years old. Yes, it's been eight years, three championships and one draft since the storm, but Lacy is still soul searching, still a kid finding himself.
This evening, Lacy finishes dinner, tucks away his three cell phones and slips into downtown Green Bay. The streets are practically vacant. No hurricanes, no cameras, no skeptical scouts. Only Eddie Lacy, a mild breeze and complete serenity.
Walking into the parking lot, Lacy says a guy once told him college football was more fun than the NFL. You play with your buddies. The game is pure. Lacy stops mid-stride in deep thought. If that's true, he's not sure if football can fill this void.
"Hope so," Lacy says. "Someday, somehow."
And with that, Lacy ducks into his rental car.
Starting in training camp July 26, he'll begin to find out.
http://www.jsonline.com/sports/pack...has-burden-to-carry-b9951355z1-215404221.html
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By Tyler Dunne of the Journal Sentinel July 13, 2013
Green Bay — The moment Eddie Lacy steps into the Republic Chophouse, he beams. He cracks up in a scratchy, southern "heh-heh-heh!" bellow.
Rays from this 70-degree day in Green Bay don't break through the dim, quaint restaurant in downtown Green Bay. Yet Lacy, those pink and turquoise "RECK-LESS" letters glistening on his shirt, pumps in the electricity. Walking toward a booth in the back corner, he clearly just signed his rookie contract or won a lifetime supply of cheese curds.
And yet, it's a mirage, an illusion.
The Green Bay Packers' new running back is not truly happy, fulfilled. That alluring smile masks an emptiness Lacy cannot quite explain. He isn't sure if he'll be happy, how to be happy. National titles at Alabama didn't do it. Getting drafted into the NFL was a relief, a blessing, not much more. A legion of fans worshipping at his altar in college? Lacy shrugs.
Then, he points to 2005.
That year, Hurricane Katrina bashed through the levees and swallowed Lacy's home in Gretna, La. The cookie-cutter narrative is that a tragedy made Lacy tougher, wiser, fully equipped to take on the world with the blunt force of a lowered right shoulder. And to a degree — on the football field — that's true. He learned to "run angry." Football became Lacy's sanctuary.
But to Lacy, touchdowns and championships and celebrity have been Advil fixes to an illness with no cure. At least Lacy hasn't found the cure yet.
He's searching. He's hopeful.
He's here in Green Bay to find out.
At dinner, Lacy pours a layer of A1 sauce over his 16-ounce boneless ribeye. The appetizer, bacon-covered scallops, was devoured in record time. Lacy never ate scallops before, but when he heard "bacon" from the waitress he was all in. This size, this deceptive mass, is what the Packers coveted. Lacy's built like a bouncer, moves like a midfielder.
Green Bay invested a second-round pick in Lacy to resuscitate its torpid running game.
And this 22-year-old has no clue when he'll find every human being's No. 1 goal in life — true happiness.
Will he ever find pre-2005 bliss again? Lacy looks to his left, then to his right toward an empty booth. Candles are lit, his hands clasped.
"That's a great question," Lacy says. "I have no idea. I guess I'll find out."
A transformation
Mold climbed up the walls. His bunk beds were flipped. The ground was "shifted." All the furniture in the Lacy home? "Busted."
Family memories were ruined, too. Lacy's trophies were encased in mold, mildew. Family photos were warped. And the stench — it was unbearable. The Lacy family actually needed to wear white masks just to navigate through what was left of their home.
Lacy stared at the ruins — numb, emotionless. This was what his parents feared.
"I could see," Lacy says, "why they really didn't want us to come back and see."
In 2005, Katrina displaced more than a million people. The Lacys were among them.
Before fleeing Gretna, the Lacys propped many items high on shelves. The plan was to return after the storm with a U-Haul and salvage what they could. But even those items — even Lacy's 3-foot high piggybank filled with coins — were stolen by looters.
Lacy, his sister and their parents lived house to house, slept on floor to floor, survived meal to meal. First, they evacuated to Texas. They stayed with Lacy's aunt for a while near Baton Rouge, jammed into a three-bedroom home with five other families. Through the "Share Your Home" program, they later found a couple to live with from September to Thanksgiving.
Then, finally, they settled into a shoebox of a trailer in Geismar, La.
One night, Lacy finally cried. With his mother, Wanda, sitting at the foot of his bed, the ninth-grader released all emotion. Beyond that, nothing. He shut down.
"He became very withdrawn, not very vocal," Wanda Lacy says. "I wouldn't say he became totally anti-social but he lost himself in himself — 'How do I go through life day by day with all of these changes?'"
Katrina spiked the metronome to Lacy's day-to-day life.
He didn't want to start over in a new town, with new friends. In Gretna, Lacy's crew played "Manhunt," an extravagant neighborhood-wide game of "it." In Geismar, all of his peers were wannabe rappers. He especially loathed the trailer, too. Lacy's bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet.
That wretched smell — "a stagnant smell, like when you let water just sit out for a while," as Wanda puts it — combined with the shame of living with strangers, combined with the suffocating trailer, combined with an entirely new life took a toll on Lacy.
The images didn't necessarily haunt Lacy. They psychologically rewired him.
Write about it, his mother said. Unload all thoughts, all emotions, onto paper. Such an exercise could exorcise demons. As a nurse, this often worked with Wanda's patients. When Lacy sat down with pen and paper in hand, he couldn't jot anything down. Not a sentence. His mind was blank.
Talk about it, people suggested. To family. To professionals. Anyone. But as Lacy said with a chuckle, "I don't talk." He doesn't know how to vent, never did. In fact, during this dinner, a neighbor back on the Tuscaloosa campus sends Lacy a picture of his 1995 Caprice. His parked car is vandalized with what appears to be either dirt or vomit.
Lacy doesn't even flinch. Oh well.
All Katrina anger burned inside. Through high school and college, Lacy never brought up the experience to friends, teammates. It took a lot of convincing to get Lacy to agree to ESPN's E:60 predraft feature, too. He can't quite articulate the darkness inside.
"I never really got over it," Lacy says. "I don't really know how to explain it. It's something that I never really got over and I don't know how to get over it still to this day."
There was one way for Lacy to release frustration. At his new high school, Dutchtown, he punished defenders. The school's coach, Benny Saia, remembers Lacy ripping through 10 tackles on one 60-yard touchdown run in the playoffs. Between the lines, Lacy ran with raw "anger."
"He'd run over you. He'd run around you," Saia says. "He could do it all. He was the total package. It was almost effortless for him."
So he was a natural for Alabama. Lacy was precisely the brand of back head coach Nick Saban seeks. Katrina, in essence, awoke a giant.
But inside, something was missing.
Lacy remembers that after scoring touchdowns in high school — fans cheering, teammates slapping him on the back — he would walk to the sideline and take a knee. Alone.
"There was a lot of anger," Lacy says. "When I played back in Gretna, it was fun. You make a good play, you make somebody miss, you get back on the sideline and your friends are going to laugh about it. It was fun. It was a riot. After the hurricane, I was aggravated, angry."
He's been trying to recover since.
Filling the void
Lacy realizes how ridiculous, how unreasonable this sounds.
At Alabama, he grew into the bruising, spinning iron fist of a college football machine. He won one, two, three national titles. And yet, all along, the emptiness remained. He's told there are millions upon millions of athletes who would sell their soul to be in his shoes.
Lacy laughs with an "I know, I know!" and says he now understands all that "money can't buy happiness" nonsense. He's in a position to earn millions and it doesn't matter. Asked if football has ever brought him true, real joy, Lacy pauses for five seconds.
"It has its moments, I guess you could say," Lacy says. "It was a lot better for me (at Gretna), though. Football is not what it was to me in high school now."
Don't get Lacy wrong. He loved Alabama, loved winning. But football and football alone — "a game," he cautions — has not erased Katrina.
Take the national championship game this year. After eviscerating Notre Dame for 140 yards on 20 attempts with two touchdowns, he hoisted the crystal ball with a "National Champions" shirt draped around his neck. In his shadow, teammates gripped "BAMA AGAIN!" newspapers.
Through the celebration, however, was trepidation. That night, Lacy (again) tried to escape postgame interviews.
"I tried to get out of it," says Lacy, the game's most valuable player. "I tried to get out of every one of my interviews in college."
Fame never appealed to Lacy. Nobody knew it, but postgame interviews were real-life horror movies to Lacy. First, he'd hear his name called — Eddie Lacy — and the tension built. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead when the lights flicked on.
Then, he'd worry if reporters saw the sweat. Then, his heart raced.
"I come out sweating like, 'Man, why do y'all keep doing this to me!?'" he says.
Off the field, Lacy had friends run his errands. Online, messages cluttered his Facebook inbox. When Lacy received "dozens" of messages daily after the draft — many from "Lacys" across the country he never heard of — he shut the account down.
Big man on campus? An off-day for Lacy was spent in bed. He'd think nothing of laying in bed for, yes, 24 straight hours. He'd sleep, sleep, amble into the kitchen for some water and sleep some more.
Maybe sports have helped other athletes blindsided by tragedy come full circle. Lacy deadpans, "it doesn't do it with me," adding that football — to him — is a way to get his parents out of that trailer.
"As far as for me, I have a lot of stuff that I never had," he says. "I'm able to do a lot of stuff that I never did. But it's like there's still something missing. So I don't know....You're happy because you made it, but there's just something that's keeping you from enjoying it 100%.
"And it's all from that 2005 thing."
His signature laugh mutes. Lacy's tone turns cold, direct.
The emptiness can trigger depression.
"Yeah, I could see that," Lacy says. "Nobody really knows I'm depressed. I have that feeling here and there."
All the cartoons, please
They heard the voice, the name. Eddie Lacy was on Line 1. The rookie pegged by many Packers fans as the elixir for a lost running game was setting up his subscription television service with AT&T.
No problem, the receptionist told Lacy. We know exactly which packages are for you.
"OK," Lacy recalls the AT&T receptionist telling him, "you'll want all the sports..."
And as the receptionist began reeling off the various sports packages, Lacy interrupted.
"I'm like, 'I just want whatever comes with a lot of cartoons. I'll take all the cartoons,'" Lacy says. "And they just started laughing."
Disney. Cartoon Network. All animation available in Northeast Wisconsin, sign Lacy up. Whenever Lacy does drift into depression, he calls his sister to make him laugh or, if there's a TV nearby, he's watching cartoons. This is the small part of Lacy's life the hurricane couldn't wash away.
Lacy almost never watches ESPN. He rarely watches football — period. Arguably the best running back in college football has watched only two of his Alabama games outside of film sessions. Cartoons trump all. They extract the "real childish" kid from Gretna that Lacy misses so much.
No, Katrina never stole Lacy's love for, um... Little Quacker on "Tom and Jerry."
"I love whenever they have the little duck, that little orange duck!" Lacy says. "I love the way he sounds when he talks."
In countless ways, he's still that kid from Gretna. Sure, he owns an Xbox, Playstation and Wii, but Lacy can still appreciate a Mario Kart marathon on oh-so-ancient Nintendo 64. He still hates onions. The mention of French onion soup from the waitress as a side order makes Lacy cringe, like he sunk his teeth into a lemon.
Back in high school, Lacy didn't drink beer and chase girls. He talked about comic books with his coach's 7-year-old son.
And the cartoons. Lacy can camp out on a couch and watch cartoons for two, three hours at a time.
He's a fan of "American Dad," will search for YouTube clips of Cartman on "South Park" and has a soft spot for "Family Guy." But, above all, Lacy loves the classics, the ones he watched growing up. During college, inside the training room, Lacy always caught "Tom and Jerry" between classes and team meetings.
"In his room. On his cellphone," former Alabama receiver Marquis Maze says. "Anything you could watch a cartoon on, he found it. You name it, he probably watched it on anything you could think of."
Already in Green Bay, Lacy is noticing that time slows down. He calls himself a bit of a loner, an outsider. In every new setting, he tiptoes into relationships. The rookie decided to rent, alone, in De Pere.
Are there really enough cartoons out there to pass the time?
"I'm going to find out starting tomorrow," Lacy says. "I'm going straight to the cartoon package. I don't even know how to get there but I'm going to find it. And I hope they have all the old cartoons. My favorite one is 'Dragon Ball Z.'"
Dragon...what?
Lacy's brow furrows, his eyes widen. He is not amused.
"You never watched 'Dragon Ball Z' before?"
Passive or punishing?
A sheet of paper is set in front of Lacy. On it are three names.
Giovani Bernard. Le'Veon Bell. Montee Ball.
The three running backs drafted ahead of Lacy. The three running backs that should elicit a snarl, a twitch, a ... something out of Lacy.
"Uhh, I really don't have a thought, man," Lacy says. "I mean, it is what it is. They're great players, too. Real cool dudes."
This is the sort of passive, blasé response that alarmed teams. Many scouts, Lacy admitted, questioned his love for the game. They're skeptical, unsure if this cartoon-loving kid has a deep passion for his profession. To Lacy, football is "the childhood game." He views it "from a kid's perspective."
That spin move? It's fun. Makes Lacy feel like the Tasmanian Devil. Said Lacy, "You can watch it and be like, 'Ha ha!'"
"I know a lot of teams questioned how much I love football because I don't talk about it 24/7," Lacy says. "But I feel like it's not how much you know about it or how much you watch it. It's all about production and obviously up to this point I did what I was supposed to do. You put me on the field and I'll contribute."
Back when Katrina hit, Lacy learned how to escape to "a fantasy world." For 2½ hours — Fridays in high school, Saturdays in college and now Sundays in the pros — nothing else matters. Not Katrina, not the trailer, not the emptiness. He escapes reality.
For anyone worried, Lacy points to practices at Alabama. On the scout team, he was a punching bag. One play, on a blitz, Javier Arenas drilled Lacy's AC joint. Someone on the sideline stuffed a pad over the tender shoulder, tapped Lacy on the back and sent him back in for seconds.
"Unless you were dead or your leg was physically broken or something like that," Lacy says, "there was no way to get out of practice."
At Alabama, this was the culture. Play through pain or lose your spot. There's always another player in waiting. And Lacy, linebacker Nico Johnson repeats, is "all business." If he doesn't speak with a passion, he plays with a passion. By midseason last fall, when Alabama's good-not-great ground game was a concern, Johnson remembers telling Lacy to "play with a purpose."
From then on, he did. He turned it on.
Johnson and Maze never knew Lacy harbored a shred of pain inside. He wasn't a rah-rah guy, either. But on the field, on Saturday, he delivered.
"Eddie is not a vocal leader," Johnson says. "He leads by example. He wanted to let his play take care of itself and that's what happened. Everybody saw that and responded."
Adds Maze, "Eddie, when he comes to work, he comes to work. It's a business approach to him."
Given every opportunity to trash the Denver Broncos and Pittsburgh Steelers for passing on him, Lacy smiles that passive smile. He asks the waitress for a straw, bites the end off of it and sticks into his glass of water. In a low rumble — briefly, barely audible — there's a sign of a different Eddie Lacy.
The one who punishes, the one who told Johnson on the phone he'd make teams pay.
Says Lacy, "I'll get to play against them."
The search continues
Steak is a welcomed change of pace. In Green Bay, Lacy admitted, he's been splurging too much on fast food. During off-season practices, he weighed in at 238 pounds, a high number that, believe it or not, might be kind.
Back in Geismar, over the July 4th weekend, Mom gave him hell.
"You better start running! You better start running!" Wanda yelled.
Each time, he told her not to worry. Lacy never worries. Whether it's a wife, his career, the NFL, new friends — at some point he expects to feel complete. Soon, he'll buy his parents a new house in Louisiana. Mom believes that's the missing piece — a home, a tangible return to normalcy.
"He loves the journey that he took to get where he is. It wasn't easy," she says. "But he knows it was necessary. It was God's plan for him. And the future is brighter for him now because he'll be able to restore some of the things that we lost."
For those fuming, "Get over it!," Lacy is only 22 years old. Yes, it's been eight years, three championships and one draft since the storm, but Lacy is still soul searching, still a kid finding himself.
This evening, Lacy finishes dinner, tucks away his three cell phones and slips into downtown Green Bay. The streets are practically vacant. No hurricanes, no cameras, no skeptical scouts. Only Eddie Lacy, a mild breeze and complete serenity.
Walking into the parking lot, Lacy says a guy once told him college football was more fun than the NFL. You play with your buddies. The game is pure. Lacy stops mid-stride in deep thought. If that's true, he's not sure if football can fill this void.
"Hope so," Lacy says. "Someday, somehow."
And with that, Lacy ducks into his rental car.
Starting in training camp July 26, he'll begin to find out.
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