Devin Hester & My Love of the Game
February 5, 2006 in Chicago, Illinois on the eighth floor of a south-ish Chicago condo, my dad made me sit down with him and watch the Seattle Seahawks take on the Pittsburgh Steelers in what I recall as a pretty mediocre Super Bowl. I remember little of the game, largely due to being eight years old, but primarily because I just didn’t care much for sports. Sure I played football at recess with my buddies who were all a year older than me, but I wasn’t overly concerned with how the NFL season went, be it for the Chicago Bears nor the National Football League at large. Something changed in that off-season. I started playing organized sports as I got to 4th grade. I grew into my athleticism a little. I fell in love with baseball; the summers in Chicago are characterized by a few things, not least of which is that there is always a baseball game you can scalp a couple tickets for, something my father and grandfather did regularly. Baseball and football don’t necessarily have anything in common as far as liking one or both, but in Chicago if you fall in love with one of the major teams, you fall in love with all of the major teams.
The 2006 NFL season kicked off on September 7. Coincidentally this was Roger Goodell’s first season as NFL commissioner. Three days after the season kicked off the Chicago Bears opened the season stomping the lowly Green Bay Packers 26-0 in Lambeau Field. My dad had me on the weekends so we watched that game together. At the 14:24 mark of the 4th quarter, Green Bay Packers punter Jon Ryan kicked a ball to the Chicago Bears’ returner, a thing he had done four times prior. Those four previous punts had resulted in 18 total return yards and one touchback. Then, 45 and a half minutes into a game long lost, the Packers special teams unit assisted in starting something the league had never seen, and will never see again. They punted the ball to a man who would juke and weave his way into the NFL history books and change the game of football forever.
Devin Hester was drafted by the Bears in the second round as the 57th overall pick in the 2006 NFL Draft. Coming out of Miami, Hester was one of those rare “Athlete” prospects who didn’t have a natural position. He was a kick and punt returner no doubt, but he played both Corner and Wide Receiver at The U. Greg Gabriel wrote a lovely piece on Windy City Gridiron detailing how Hester came to be drafted by the Bears that I recommend. All that to say, Hester wasn’t someone an eight year old kid just getting into football would have any idea about. I knew about the big name Bears at the time like Brian Urlacher, Thomas Jones, Mushin Muhammed, and Lance Briggs. A rookie corner drafted in the second round to mostly return punts (he, unfortunately, did not return the Packers’ only kick off in the game) was not going to be a player on my radar.
Eighty-four yards later, Devin Hester had this eight year old mystified. He starts in between the numbers, angles outside, cuts back inside to make one defender miss, cuts back to the outside to make another miss and just blasts past every single Packers defender down the sideline, completely untouched. The thing that strikes me about watching that first return touchdown is how smooth, calm, and effortless it looks. It’s entirely possible I have never seen an NFL player go from a light jog to a full sprint easier than Hester did on a regular basis.
The 2006 Chicago Bears season would be one largely of triumph. The Bears would go 13-3 on their way to a one seed and a first round bye in the NFC Playoffs. In his rookie season, Hester would return three punts and two kickoffs for touchdowns. Over the course of that season I would fall in love with the game of football, in a way I wouldn’t with any other sport. Hester’s incredible season was a large part of that. Watching a human being navigate space the way he did was something I had never seen before. I didn’t really know humans could move the way he moved and with that much burst. It would be another decade until I started listening to more classic hip-hop but a particular Big Boi and Sleepy Brown refrain would have been sung quite a bit had I known the song at that time. What solidified it for me though, was the Super Bowl that year.
Peyton Manning (I believe named after Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton, though I could be wrong, I like the idea that I heard that story somewhere, and I would rather be wrong about such an innocuous thing than know that isn’t true) would get his well earned ring and do it by dismantling the best defense in the NFL. However, if the game had ended after that magical opening kickoff, I’d have been the happiest kid on the planet. Now nine years old, watching my second ever Super Bowl, Hester did what he always did, and that’s defy logic en route to breaking records. Devin Hester started the Super Bowl back deep, awaiting the kick from all time great kicker Adam Vinattieri. The Colts, like many other teams that year decided to tempt fate, and did so at their own peril. Hester, like a coiled viper, received the ball, waited for his blocks, and exploded into the openings for the first ever opening kickoff return touchdown in Super Bowl history. I watched the game with three forty year olds and cheered louder and more emphatically than any of them. Hester made watching football fun. He was easily one of my three favorite people in the world at that time and he did the thing. He did the thing he was known for and the best at, on the grandest stage of them all. I had no shot at fully understanding what that meant, but for roughly four minutes, nine year old Julian reached football enlightenment.
The next season Devin Hester would repeat his return stats, adding an extra punt into the mix. That extra punt return came on December 30, 2007, in a meaningless game at Soldier Field. The 6-9 Bears were in full Super Bowl loss hangover mode and just playing for pride. To me though, the Bears were about to take part in one of the most meaningful games of my life, because it was my first time ever attending a Bears game.
During that magical 2006 season, my dad had managed to get us tickets to go to the December 17 game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The week of that game my grandfather (on my mothers side) got sick. He was sick to the point of not knowing if this was going to be a trip up to Michigan to say goodbye or not. My mother picked me up from school the Friday before, on December 15. The game was a surprise, but my mother told me about it because she wanted me to have the choice of whether or not to go to the game. I chose family. I chose to make sure that if my grandfather did pass, I would be there. My grandfather did not pass, the Bears won in overtime to improve to 12-2, but I made the right decision.
On December 30, 2007 the Bears played in one of the most meaningless games an NFL team can play in. One that if they won, would actively hurt the future of their team as they would wind up with a worse draft pick and absolutely nothing to show for it.
On December 30, 2007 the Chicago Bears hosted a 10 year old boy, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. The stadium would be filled with fans almost to the brim despite the 30 degree weather with a light Chicago breeze making it feel like sub 25 degrees. Sitting in the second to last row of the west end stands, sat a 10 year boy about to have his entire life ripped apart by death, re-marriage, a soon to be absentee father, and bouts with anxiety and depression for the foreseeable future.
But on December 30, 2007, that 10 year old boy would not only get to witness the Bears win a game, his first time seeing it in person, but that boy would get to watch one of his favorite players of all time do what he did best. In the third quarter of that meaningless week 17 game, Devin Hester would return a punt 64 yards for a touchdown. It would be his sixth return touchdown of the season, setting the NFL record. And I saw it live. In that moment, despite the cold and the frankly AWFUL seats, the world was a place of pure bliss. A 10 year old boy got to witness the greatest of all time do what he did best. Not a damn thing in the world could ever sully that moment.
On Thursday February 8, 2024 the NFL made it official, Devin Hester would enter the Hall of Fame. Officially he is the 374th player to be enshrined. Of the tens of thousands of men that have put on the pads to play in the NFL, Devin Hester is officially recognized as one of the 400 best to ever do it. The story of the NFL can not be told without this man and the NFL recognized it, a few years too late if you ask me. When I found out he would be officially inducted I got shot back in time for a moment, to that incredible, cold as fuck day in 2007. My nose was red and runny, my core temperature dropped 15 degrees, but I was as happy as I had ever been. Thursday was like that for me, even for just a moment.
Devin Hester did things on the football field no one has ever done; he holds 11 different NFL records, not including being the only man to return the opening Kickoff of the Super Bowl for a touchdown. One of my favorite players of all time got the full recognition he has long deserved and for someone as deeply connected to him as I am, few things could have made me happier that day.
In the grand scheme of things, sports are relatively meaningless. Its dudes getting paid a good chunk to crazy amounts of money in order to move a ball (or puck) from one place to another place in a semi-specific fashion. What that oddly simplistic thing provides humans with is connection, to communities and to ourselves. We find conduits of joy and passion and anger, and we channel those feelings (often in unhealthy ways but you can’t win ‘em all) into the people talented enough to play the silly games; and those silly games become far less silly. They represent hope and despair. They represent love and loss. Sometimes, in really special instances, they provide 10 year old kids with a beacon of light in an ever darkening period of their lives.
Devin Hester helped me fall in love with football more than most. For that I will always be grateful. Congratulations to the 2024 NFL Hall of Fame inductee Devin Hester. The number 23 is reserved only for the greatest in Chicago, and few represented it as well as he did.
Thank you, Devin. Your career meant more to me (and so many others) than you may ever know.