The Dark Knight Unmasked

[Moorgan]

@Captain Morgan shared the link for this article that someone tweeted and I thought it needed it's own thread. It's VERY long and a fantastic read. Goes in depth with Josh and his family. How he grew up and some of his charity work. Here are a few excerpts:

http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2016/1/13/10753992/the-dark-knight-unmasked

Later in the season, they’ll call him clairvoyant, but that’s because they didn’t hang around practice long enough to see him put in the work that made it so. Deadline reporters will tell you he came out of nowhere. That’s not exactly how he sees it. Norman’s been playing this game a long time - this is his fourth year in the league, and third, really, as a starter — and nothing about the way he plays is an accident — - not the drill and not even the calling out of his own quarterback. Norman knows, more than anyone, that his fate is his own, no one else’s and he entered the 2015 season feeling both underpaid and underappreciated. So what he wanted, and who he wanted to be, he would have to take between his own two hands.

 

It is these moments, when ecstatic celebrations did not yet end in fines for excess, that Josh Norman most appreciates. There are elements of that world he misses — riding the tractor with his grandfather, eating a Southern breakfast of biscuits and liver mush with his grandmother. Even now, these memories override the dark façade he projects today, using that shield before his face to protect the memories, so fragile, that he carries them around inside of him like precious glass.

 

He is seated at his dining room table, leaned over a plate of peach cobbler. He sips a homemade Arnold Palmer and sets the glass on a coaster — of his face. No false idols here. Nothing made of flesh is sacred. Still cautious after a concussion he acquired during a preseason game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, he sits in the dim light and answers questions. He admits that his most recent head injury isn’t as bad as the one last season that forced him to sit out for two games, as if this is consolation to anyone that knows the impact of this brutal sport.

 

Josh Norman is the man behind the mask. Not quite Bruce Wayne, but not just Batman. Body searing and crackling with pain underneath his pads — he’s worked so hard to be here. He wonders how to take hold of the scene before him, how to harness the electricity in the crowd, the deafening sound of the cheers. There will never be another moment like this one.

[Datawire]

Read this during my lunch hour earlier. Very good read.

[Paa Langfart]

This team is built from the ground up with guys I really respect - off the field as much or more than on.