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| WR Brice Butler with guest speaker Chris Herren. Photo courtesy of Brice Butler |
June 24, 2013
Yesterday, we had a couple speakers come. We had a guy that was the head of player personnel at the Kansas City Chiefs. He came and gave us six characteristics of just being a successful ballplayer in the NFL. Those six characteristics were pretty much life principles that you should live by and how even if you're not in the NFL, you should take them wherever you're working, which was really good. That's pretty much what we did last night. We also had an introduction to what we're going to be doing the next couple of days. We had little breakout sessions after it was all done. Our guys and Jacksonville [Jaguars] get together and we have an open discussion about what we talked about.
Today was a really good day. We had four different seminar discussions – drinking and driving, learning about domestic violence, drugs and anabolic steroid usage, and one about discrimination. After lunch, we had a really good speaker today, Chris Herren. He had a big story on '30 for 30,' when they were making those, about a basketball player from Boston that was one of the best basketball players in the world and had a drug addiction for about 15 years. He basically survived to tell his story.
[Before Herren walked in to the room], you could tell guys were tired (it was after lunch). Then, Chris Herren comes in, and I haven't seen a room so alert like that in awhile. He had everybody's attention the whole time. For 45 minutes, everybody was sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for the next thing he had to say. It was a really, really good testimony. He touched on some very hardcore things. The things he touched on today you didn't see in the '30 for 30.' I'm pretty sure he didn't even give us the whole story; he just gave us bits and pieces of it. He was the guy that I really took something from today.
After that we had dinner and then we had Adam Jones and Maurice Clarett come speak to us and they talked about the decisions they've made in the past and how all their bad decisions led them to where they are now. Even though they're still not perfect now, they're happy it happened to them when it happened so now they can look back at it and know what not to do and what to do in certain situations.
That's pretty much what's been going on so far. It's been good to meet up with some of the guys that you've known prior to being drafted and get to see them now in the area that we want to be in, which is in the NFL. Even though we're not in it yet, we're knocking on the door. So it's been a good experience so far.
- Brice Butler, WR, Oakland Raiders
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