When I got here this morning, Suh was on the ground pouring with sweat, doing push-ups with chains draped over his back and neck, chains as thick as my arm, doing what he's told, all obedience—to his trainers, to his coaches, to the NFL, to America. We did, after all, ask for this. The biggest kid, the toughest kid, the kid who doesn't hold back, uses his gifts, develops them, fine-tunes them, becomes the machine. He's a masterpiece of our creation. And now, if he's run amok, well, shame on...him? For America to take any responsibility is to take the fun out of football, so forget that. Forget all the chatter about concussions. We're not supposed to think about any of that stuff when it comes to our most successful sports league ever. We're supposed to buy into the new narrative that the NFL cares. Crack down on hits. Fine players who can't stop their bodies at eighteen miles an hour in the split second before impact. It's a truce. We know it's pretense; they bank on our willingness to deny our own hypocrisy.

I was thinking about this stuff when Ngum called, asked me if Suh had talked to me yet, and I said no. Then Suh finished the workout and walked up to grab a towel, came so close to me I could feel the heat off him, and I smiled as anyone would smile to begin a conversation, but he took a towel and without once looking at me passed by and headed to the locker room. A few minutes later I got a call from Ngum saying he'd meet me in the cafeteria. He was going to talk. She told me he was definitely going to talk.

···

He has eggs. He's sitting across from me, and the cafeteria is closed, no one else here at all except the people in the kitchen who were kind enough to cook the eggs. "A lot of people don't know truly who I am," he tells me. "And at this point in time, there are not a lot of people I let close enough to find out."

I tell him I noticed. I decide it's not my place to tell him his evasiveness is extreme to the point of creepy.

"I don't want anybody in my circle that's a cancer to what I'm trying to create," he says. "So stay on the outside and make your opinions. They're going to be meaningless to everything in the circle. The boundaries are up for me to keep, and a responsibility of my family, too. That's why, like, I guess you've gone through a good screening process."

Apparently, there's a compliment in here somewhere. (Cancer?) I ask him about being named the dirtiest player in the NFL.

"It's not the norm, I guess, to see someone as aggressive as me being more or less very athletic. You see me running, having a big, violent hit, it's going to look bad, but that's the natural ability I've been given. Why would I let it run to the wayside and not use it?

"Football is a violent sport. Somebody's going to get hurt. It's the game. Just hopefully, you're on the good side of it. So I don't, I really don't get the controversy. It's the game."

"You play it dirty," I say. "Dirty is wrong."

He says no. Emphatically no. He's not dirty. "A dirty player is somebody who ultimately is trying to hurt somebody. There's a huge difference. There's no gray in that. Like, you have no conscience, no nothing, no guilt. I don't have that mean streak in me. I don't play angry. It's not anger."