There are outward signs of normalcy. During the victory parade through downtown Pittsburgh, two days after his team won Super Bowl XL in February, Troy Polamalu shimmied and shook like every other Steeler on the slow-rolling flatbed, his fluffy mane bobbing up and down in the wind, his thick torso swallowed up by an oversize gray "Super Bowl Champions" hoodie.
Polamalu is a fan favorite in Pittsburgh, right up there with Ben Roethlisberger and Hines Ward and the recently retired Jerome Bettis. His "43" jersey is a common fashion statement in western Pennsylvania, his mass of hair a beloved trademark; in a tavern round those parts, I saw a wall-mounted moose head adorned with a curly wig and a Steelers cap with "43" Magic Marker—ed onto it. (Pola-moose-u?) While the champion Chicago Bears of '85 had their "Super Bowl Shuffle," the de facto anthem of the 2005 Steelers was "Puhlahmahlu," a novelty hit created by a local band, Mr. Devious, after its members heard a Fox Sports commentator bungle Polamalu's Samoan surname. In homage to "Mah Na Mah Na," the old Sesame Street ditty in which a beatnik Muppet grunts the title phrase and is scolded by two lady Muppets who sing "Doo doo-doo doo-doo," the "Puhlahmahlu" video features a mangy puppet who repeats the Fox guy's mispronunciation—"Puh-lah-m'lu"—and is corrected by two pink cows who chide, "It's Pah-lah-mah-lu."
But it only takes a little digging to find out how not normal Troy Polamalu is. The first indication is the striking, ultrafrenetic way he plays—fast, blurry, on the cusp of recklessness, "like a controlled tornado, all that hair whirling," in the words of Chris Hope, who was the Steelers' starting free safety until he signed with the Tennessee Titans this spring. Polamalu is the team's strong safety, but at five feet ten, he's not a big guy, as strong safeties are supposed to be, and he doesn't really play the position as it's defined—or, for that matter, any position as it's defined. He's created his own position, menace-at-large, sometimes patrolling the intermediate range of the field like a linebacker, sometimes covering speedy receivers like a cornerback, sometimes rushing the quarterback like a defensive end, sometimes seemingly doing all these things on the same play. Last fall he dropped the Houston Texans' David Carr for three sacks, tying the record for sacks in a single game by a safety. "I mean, every time I looked up, it seemed like number 43 was in my face," the shell-shocked Carr said afterward. There hasn't been a defensive player this much fun to watch in the NFL since the New York Giants had Lawrence Taylor.
What truly marks Polamalu as a man apart, though, is his godliness. I don't use the word lightly. I refer not to his goodness or his decency or the regularity with which he attends church. (In fact, he doesn't even belong to a church.) Prior to meeting him, I had heard ad nauseam that Polamalu is a devout Christian who is as much of a gentleman off the field as he is a ferocious competitor on it, but so what? We've all met that guy before: Steve Largent, Reggie White, Roger Staubach. Dude with the hair, I was to learn, is something altogether different: a mystic, a man more fourth century than twenty-first, living in constant dialogue with the Deity. The first communication I had from Polamalu, after weeks' worth of fruitless attempts to reach him during the off-season, was a cryptic e-mail in which he apologized for being unreachable and explained, "I have been in seclusion these last few weeks from even my own family, soul-searching." He signed off with the Christian fish symbol.
The NFL is by and large a faith-based institution, abounding with Bible-study groups and postgame prayer circles. But even in this context, Polamalu stands out. The day he was drafted by the Steelers, in April 2003, Mike Wilkening, the reporter assigned to do wrap-up interviews with the new draftees for Pro Football Weekly, wrote that the young safety out of the University of Southern California was "the only player I've ever interviewed who finished by saying 'God bless you.' " Three years later, Bill Cowher, the Steelers' coach, who has seen every specimen of football player imaginable in his fourteen seasons with the team, remains respectfully bemused by his pious strong safety. A tough taskmaster, renowned for having the angriest jawline and tensest neck tendons on the NFL sidelines, Cowher nevertheless cops to indulging Polamalu when he's deeply submerged in prayer during games and practices. "You've gotta pick and choose when you talk to Troy," Cowher says. "After a play, he goes through his routine. You go up to him, and if he's got his head down, you have to wait and catch eye contact with him. That's the first step—you have to get his eyes before you get his ears. It's a little bit of a process."
I am invited to the home Polamalu shares with his wife, Theodora. I am even invited to stay over and hold my own temporary share in their home, because, my host explains, "We have blessings, and these blessings, we don't believe, are really ours." The Polamalus live in an anonymous, brand-new housing development in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh. By pro-athlete standards, it's a modest spread, conspicuous in its inconspicuousness: no consumer electronics, no phallic sports cars in the driveway (just a blah Toyota SUV), no home studio, no trophies, helmets, or paraphernalia displayed in homage to the glory of the resident jock. The only distinctive flourishes I notice are the crosses in each room.
At home in repose, Polamalu wears his hair tied back, which brings out his seldom-seen facial features: a broad island-man's brow; a wide-bridged nose; huge, solicitous eyes that perfectly complement his sweet, kidlike speaking voice. In a loose-fitting waffle-pattern tee that obscures his scary muscles, he couldn't be more gracious and accommodating.
But glib and conventionally mediagenic he is not. He has no interest in dissecting the "Puhlahmahlu" song, a phenomenon he tolerated more than enjoyed, and manages only a weak, polite smile when he's asked if anyone has ever mistaken him for Kirk Hammett, the guitarist in Metallica. (No one has.) What was he doing in that state of seclusion he alluded to in his e-mail? At this, he brightens. He was reading ancient philosophy and Scripture. "I'm only 25 years old, and I've experienced as much as a 25-year-old can," he says, "but it's only what I've experienced. When I read this knowledge that's been passed down from the philosophers, I'm not as young as my years."
Believe me, Polamalu has his Scripture down. When Theodora puts out a platter of steak sandwiches with heavy cheese sauce, I express surprise to Troy that an athlete of his intensity doesn't subscribe to a strict dietary regimen of whey shakes and nutritional supplements. "I did that for a while, but I stopped," he says. "As it says in Matthew, what comes out of your mouth is more important than what goes into it." When I ask Polamalu if he, like many a Samoan and pro athlete before him, has gotten any tattoos, he responds, "I was just reading something about that in Leviticus 19. It basically says don't do it, don't mark your body. I don't feel that I need a tattoo to represent myself as a Samoan or a Christian."
Often enough, a straight question elicits a straight answer. But at times, our conversation seems to bend into surreality, taking place on two different planes: mine literalist and empirical; his elliptical and mysterious. "I can tell you honestly, and this is from man to man," he says at one point, "that I have seen, physically seen, demons."
Well, this isn't like the kind of stuff you get from Tom Brady.
"What do you mean?" I say.
"Like in the movies," Polamalu says. "Like, I could be sitting here and actually see, like, a demon walking across."
"Is it some kind of horrific creature?"
"No, it's just... " He pauses to consider his answer. "It's not like a monster," he continues. "There's an emptiness. It's a complete emptiness, where nothing is right. It's an experience that... it's really empty, is all I can say. Not empty like 'I broke up with my girlfriend' or even 'My wife died.' I can't explain it. Just like you can't really explain God's divine law, it's hard to explain this evil."
"Okay, but the reporter in me wants to understand," I tell him. "Physically, you're seeing something? Is it a literal sensory experience—an actual vision?"
"Once, that has happened to me, yes—once," Polamalu says. "But feeling evil around me has happened to me several times. I realize I'm taking a leap of faith in describing this to you."
I try to take the leap with him. "What is a demon, Troy?" I ask.
"A demon is anything that is doing the Devil's work," he says. "And that could be the Devil in me or the Devil in you."
"So it's not a literal monster, then?" Somehow I'm disappointed that Polamalu's demons seem to be morphing from horned, tusked bogeymen into allegories.
"Like I've said, I've seen that once," he says. "A demon, in a way, is a test of your faith. Because if you're doing God's work, there's no reason for any demon to do anything to you."
We back-and-forth like this for a while, with him expounding on God's role in his life and me trying to draw out connect-the-dots explanations of what, exactly, he's talking about—when what he's talking about is fundamentally unexplainable.
"I don't know," he says, "it's just hard for me to say these things without sounding really crazy. Anybody who's away from what's normal is just kind of pushed aside as, 'Oh, he's crazy.' But in reality, this world is crazy. It's just chaos everywhere. It's really hard to be part of this world, because it's very possessed. And very egocentric."
I tell Polamalu that I want to hear him out, but that he should be prepared for the reality that his words will paint him in some readers' eyes as, yes, crazy, a nut, a Jesus freak. "I understand that," he says. "But probably the label 'Jesus freak' is fine with me. Because I know who I am."
···
He was born Troy Aumua in 1981, the youngest child in a family that was falling apart just as he came into the world. His father left shortly after his birth, and Troy spent the first nine years of his life as a self-described "city rat" in Santa Ana, California, the seat of Orange County.
The O.C., along with neighboring Los Angeles County, is home to a large Polynesian-expat community. Its biggest heroes are football stars; many Samoans, whether immigrants straight from the islands or second-generation local products, have thrived in the major college programs nearby. The first big wave of Samoan gridiron standouts, in the late '70s, featured Mosi Tatupu, a running back for USC, and Manu Tuiasosopo and Terry Tautolo, a defensive end and a linebacker, respectively, for UCLA. All three men went on to play in the NFL, and two of them, Tatupu and Tuiasosopo, have sons currently in the league.
Troy, too, had football in his blood—his much-older brother, Kaio Aumua, played at the University of Texas at El Paso; an older cousin, Nicky Sualua, briefly caught on with the Dallas Cowboys and Cincinnati Bengals; and an uncle, Kennedy Pola, started at fullback for USC in the early '80s. None of these connections, however, translated into anything resembling a life of privilege. The Aumuas—Troy, Kaio, their mother, and their three sisters—lived on welfare, and Kaio ran with a bad crowd. It was the dark flip side of the football-prodigy Samoan stereotype: the baggy-shorted SoCal thug life as captured in the songs of the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., the Samoan gangsta-rap collective from L.A. "My sisters had babies in high school, my brother was in and out of jail," Polamalu says. "I still have this picture in my head where, as a kid, I'm just wondering what's going on. I'm in first grade. My brother's in the backseat of a police car, waving for me to open the door. What am I supposed to do?"
The summer before fourth grade, Troy's mother, Suila, sent him to Oregon for a visit with her brother, Salu Polamalu, and his wife, Shelley. It was a beyond-rural setting, in a tiny, remote inland town called Tenmile, eighty miles south of Eugene. The Polamalus were by no means well-off—Salu worked for the department of transportation, and he, Shelley, and their three teenage sons made their home in a double-wide. But "it was just perfect and beautiful," Troy says. "I saw cows in the pasture, horses, the sun. And man, it must've just rained, 'cause everything was green."
Troy was old enough at this point to know what kind of life awaited him in Santa Ana. Already, he'd fallen into some bad habits back home: stealing his lunch from the grocery store every day, breaking into buildings—the half-pint version of his older sibling's exploits. He pleaded with his mother not to make him go back to California. He wanted to be a Polamalu, not an Aumua.
Suila relented, "but I wouldn't say she was thrilled," Troy says. "There's a lot more to that story that I'd rather not explain. I'll say it like this: Things can't be too right in a home if your youngest son is living in Oregon, your three daughters are gangbanging, and your oldest son is in and out of jail."
Salu Polamalu, the eldest of ten siblings, adhered to the strictures of Fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way, the old tribal code of respect for family, church, and community. He was a disciplinarian, "from the old school," he says, "carrying through the way my father raised the ten of us in my family in American Samoa." To the wild-child Troy, this was less a burden than a relief. "Taking our last name was Troy's idea, his decision," says Salu. "It was much easier to be a full part of our family than to be 'the Polamalus plus an Aumua.'" Salu discovered his nephew to be heartbreakingly unfamiliar with the ways and rules of organized sports ("He'd only ever seen them on TV"), but as soon as Troy caught on, he excelled. At Douglas High School in Winston, Oregon, he lettered not only in football (as a two-way player, starting at running back on offense and safety on defense) but also in baseball and basketball.
There was never any explicit religious epiphany but it was no coincidence that Troy's spiritual awakening coincided with his athletic one. He started to question why, after an early childhood of struggle, his life was falling into place, and these questions turned into prayers. "It got to a point in high school where I was almost constantly in prayer. Praying through the whole football game, praying through the meetings, praying as I'm driving—this constant conversation with God," he says. "Football was not, and is not, a sport to me. It's a spiritual battle. So it wasn't like after a play I would go 'God! Why did I miss that tackle?' It was more like 'Okay, God, you've blessed me, and this is play, but I want to thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to play this beautiful sport.' "
When he was in sixth grade, Polamalu committed his final crime: He stole a Bible from a gift shop, to give himself a scriptural underpinning to his newfound faith. (Polamalu thinks God meant for him to do the deed, arguing, "After the intent, the action doesn't matter: 'If I give you a gift, I give it out of love.'") The way things subsequently snowballed, the hand of God seemed undeniable. His Uncle Kennedy (who uses a shortened version of the family name, Pola), the former USC fullback, persuaded the then coach at his alma mater, Paul Hackett, to look at film of his small-school nephew. Hackett agreed in 1999 to take on the kid: Troy, a Trojan! Hackett's successor, Pete Carroll, turned the struggling USC football program around just in time for Polamalu's junior and senior years. The team's tight end, Alex Holmes, happened to have a pretty, slender, pre-law kid sister named Theodora who precisely resembled, physically and personally, the dream woman that Troy had prayed God would one day deliver to him. Given that Theodora is Greek on her mother's side and black, white, and Cherokee on her father's side—a heritage that gave her a lovely face that's pale in color but African in its contours, with a spray of freckles across her nose—this was a pretty tall order for God to fill.
"I was around when they met, I was around when Troy asked Alex's permission to ask out Theodora, and I saw them fall in love very quickly, at a very young age," says Carson Palmer, the Cincinnati Bengals quarterback, who lived with Polamalu and five other teammates in an off-campus house on Adams Boulevard and Hoover Street. (It was a quiet house; Palmer wasn't nearly as glam as the QB who would immediately follow him as the starter at USC, the modelizing Matt Leinart. "A lot of DVDs watched, a lot of dominoes played," says Palmer. "Besides, the house was in South Central, so no one wanted to visit us.")
In 2003, the Steelers traded up eleven spots to take Polamalu with the sixteenth pick in the draft. The move was widely criticized in the press, which felt that the team had overspent; Polamalu had had a concussion and a hamstring injury his senior year, and he was a safety, not one of the so-called skill positions. But since then, the only other '03 first-rounder who has consistently performed at Polamalu's level is the very first player taken, Palmer. The following year, the Steelers landed their franchise quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, and they were off to the races. Roethlisberger won his first thirteen starts, and Polamalu, after a middling rookie year, found his pro game. On October 3, 2004, Polamalu iced Roethlisberger's second-ever victory by snagging his second-ever interception—off of Palmer. Juking and jittering during the snap count like he was going to blitz, Polamalu instead hung back, picked off the pass, broke several tackles, ran twenty-six yards, and scored a touchdown just before the two-minute warning.
"He actually ran me over in the end zone and hurt my shoulder," Palmer says. "He's the most respectful, humble, kindhearted guy I've ever met, but afterwards, I was like 'Did you have to run me over?' "
Last season was even better. Cowher and his defensive coordinator, Dick LeBeau, effectively turned Polamalu loose, letting him deploy on nearly every play the head games and hyperkineticism he displayed on the Palmer play. The Indianapolis Colts' Peyton Manning, who has long bedeviled defenses with his pre-snap histrionics, mixing fake audibles with real ones, rearranging his receivers, and flapping his wings like an aroused whooping crane, finally met his match. Polamalu patented some moves of his own, like zooming up to the line as if to blitz, turning his back as if he's heading back into coverage, and then, as the snap is called, whirring around 180 degrees like one of Gladys Knight's Pips and blitzing after all. In a barn burner of a playoff game, the Steelers interrupted Manning's seemingly inevitable march to the championship, defeating the Colts even after referee Pete Morelli overruled a Polamalu interception in the fourth quarter. (Polamalu cleanly caught the ball, rolled on the ground, fumbled, and recovered his own fumble, but Morelli ruled that Polamalu never had possession of the ball in the first place. The league later said that Morelli made the wrong call.) Three weeks later, the Steelers defeated the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl.
"With my life, there's no way that I could deny divine intervention," Polamalu says. "Coming where I've come from, the way that I've ended up at certain places where everything went just perfectly for me, whether it's here in Pittsburgh, with a perfect defensive scheme, or the way it was at USC, when Pete Carroll came in and kind of just gave me the whole defense and allowed me to become a first-round draft pick. It's just beautiful the way that it all worked out. And very humbling as well, because I see so many other, better, greater athletes than me on other teams that, if they traveled this road that I traveled, I believe they could be more successful."
I see his point, but what about all those guys on historically losing teams like the Arizona Cardinals and the pre—Carson Palmer Cincinnati Bengals, the hardworking players for whom it didn't all work out? Is God not on their side? "Well, I can only just see it from my eyes, because this is what I've experienced," Polamalu says. "Maybe they have a different mission. I'm sure they have a different mission."
And what meaning might there be, I ask, to the June motorcycle accident that sent Ben Roethlisberger to the hospital with multiple head injuries, temporarily terrifying the entire city of Pittsburgh? Sensibly, he demurs from answering this one. "I don't think it's up to me to understand what happened; it's up to Ben," he says. "I prayed for him. What I've found is, after some of the worst things that have happened to me, I've come out on top."
···
Beatific as he is, Polamalu is not an angel on the field. He has incurred his share of personal fouls. In the early going of the Steelers' first-round playoff game against the Bengals in January, he got into a scuffle with Cincinnati's center, Rich Braham, and drew a fifteen-yard penalty for tossing a football into Braham's face mask. "I just lost myself, on a very important drive, which I'm extremely ashamed of," he says.
Still, Polamalu resists the facile, sportswriter notion that he has a "split personality" schizo-toggling between kindly man of God and crazed Samoan warrior. This is, in fact, the only thing I see him get ercised about. "I play football the way it's meant to be played, with a passion, and that's how I live my life!" he says, a rare measure of exasperation in his voice. "If you say otherwise, you're not being authentic—either you're not yourself on the football field or you're not yourself at home."
Unlike the wayward Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams, who seems to regard football as a chore that happens to underwrite his spirit-quest pilgrimages to Asia (and who is playing with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League while he serves out his second NFL drug suspension), Polamalu adores the game and regards it as fully woven into the fabric of his being. "There's no separation," he says. "It's all life. I don't understand how businessmen can say, 'It's just business, don't take it personally.' This is life, and everything in life needs to be taken personally."
Polamalu corrects me when I bring up the subject of working out in the off-season. He doesn't work out, he says, he trains or, better still, immerses himself in what he calls "spirit training." Spirit training, he explains, is a regimen he's devised that "transcends what's physical. 'Cause when you look at 'working out,' it's all horizontal. You know, you do a couple sets, a couple reps. But intensity is what transcends vertically, divine-wise."
When spirit training, Polamalu works at a certain ercise—running on a treadmill, say, or doing push-ups—until he feels like he's going to retch and/or pass out, until his body tells him to stop. And then he keeps on going. "When you're really intense in your training," he says, "you transcend your body. If you go till your mind says you can't go anymore, but you keep going, where you start making crazy sounds, where you really lose yourself, where you have to pull all the love and hate out of yourself—that's spirit training."
···
Unfortunately for Polamalu, there are more earthbound aspects of NFL life to be dealt with. He recently filmed a Nike ad under duress, "because my agent told me it was part of the shoe contract I signed." With his recognizability, popularity, and decoratedness (he's been to the last two Pro Bowls), Polamalu could command a fortune in ads and appearance fees, but he's turned off by the "nonauthentic prestige" of celebrity, the fact that he'd be getting paid simply because he is a football player.
And he has not acclimated to the fact of life that the NFL, at some level, is a business. He was devastated that the Steelers decided not to make a serious effort to re-sign Chris Hope, his fellow safety and best friend on the team. "I'm very hurt by it," he says. "You spend so much time forming a relationship with somebody, and it's crazy how they can just be gone the next day. It's like losing a family member to death. Because you'll never, ever have the relationship that you had."
Hope, now with Tennessee, is a year older than Polamalu and is regarded in the league as a happy-go-lucky, outgoing character. But he admits that Polamalu, with his empathy and generosity, got to him. "He's a special guy—his intellect, his wisdom," Hope says. "At the beginning of each game, we'd come out of the tunnel, hug each other, and say, 'One of many more.' It's sad, man. The safety I'm playing next to now, Lamont Thompson, has a lot of hair on his head, and in the blink of an eye, I'll think 'Troy!,' and then I come to my senses. It was something we never thought would happen, us being apart. It's like gettin' old: You never think you will, and then it happens."
Hope is gone, but hope is not lost—Polamalu intends to finish his career in Pittsburgh. It's a matter of principle: This organization accepted him as family, and he has a duty to it. He claims to have no idea where the rumors came from, rampant in the blogosphere, that he is planning to bolt to a West Coast team in two years, after his contract is up, because he and Theodora, who is from La Jolla, pine for their native California.
The Polamalus do, however, have a California endgame: They intend to purchase land in Sonoma County with an eye toward starting up a winery and self-sustaining farm. Troy was a teetotaler until the more worldly Theodora turned him on to what she calls "the beauty of the grape," and he now studies wine books the way he studies Scripture. He insists that I take from his home a parting gift of a 1999 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cask 23 Cabernet Sauvignon. "That's Stag's Leap Wine Cellars," he tells me. "Distinct from Stags' Leap Winery."
I thank him for the wine and the experience of pleasure it will soon offer and tell him it's been quite an experience experiencing him; it won't be easy explaining Troy Polamalu in an article. "That's the problem: People try to define everything," he says. "They try to define my character. They try to define your articles. They try to define God, rather than—"
"Let it be a mystery?" I ask.
"Not a mystery," he says, "but more of an... abyss. A beauty that just continues to come, over and over."
