A new hope: The true story of Tamba Hali
NBC SPORTS - The true story of NFL player Tamba Hali.
NBC Sports – Seven years ago, I got to see one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in sports. I got to sit next to a woman named Rachel Keita as she watched her first American football game. She had just come to America for the first time, and she had been told by her son to watch the quarterback, always watch the quarterback.
So she watched a San Francisco quarterback named Alex Smith drop back to throw. And then she watched as a young man bashed into San Francisco’s 310-pound offensive lineman Kwame Harris, knocked him off balance, ran around him and crunched Alex Smith just as he was trying to throw. The ball popped free. Arrowhead Stadium broke out into a wall of sound.
That was Tamba Hali’s first sack as a professional football player. Rachel Keita watched her son, and there were tears in her eyes. She had not seen Tamba in 12 years.
“He’s so good,” she shouted after he made that play. “I never could have known he was so good.”
* * *
The story of Tamba Hali’s childhood journey from Liberia to America is unfathomable. It’s worth repeating every now and again. But his journey from moderate NFL prospect to flaming disappointment to NFL superstar for an undefeated Kansas Chiefs team is pretty wild too. We shouldn’t forget that.
Tamba Hali, you might know, grew up in war-torn Liberia. He was called Tamba because it a custom in the Kissi culture to name the second-born son “Tamba.” He has a half brother who is also named Tamba.
He has flickering memories of early childhood before the war, when he lived in a village home without water and with electricity only part of the day — he and his family bathed in the river. He remembers generally happy feelings. He remembers good food. When he was six, civil war broke out. Gunfire was ever-present. Danger was constant. He tells a story of the first time he found himself in the middle of all that shooting, and this overpowering feeling he had that it all had to be a mistake. He stood up in the middle of it all and shouted, “Don’t shoot! Stop shooting!” It was his older brother Tamba who grabbed him and held him down while bullets zipped overhead.
Like other refugees, the family fled into the wilderness. There were five of them — Rachel and four children. They lived for a time on cabbage and roots and whatever food they could find. Tamba’s memories of this time are not very clear. He remembers that they had to keep moving, always keep moving, there was death all around them. Tamba’s father Henry had escaped to America years before and wanted to bring his children too. But that seemed impossible. The only palpable hope was the hope of making it to tomorrow.
At some point, Rachel understood that their only chance of survival was to escape Liberia. They went on a risky escape mission into the Ivory Coast — something out of a movie, really — and through luck and small kindnesses and their own determination they ended up at a monastery in Ghana. That is when Henry went through the complicated, frustrating but ultimately successful process of bringing Hali and his three brothers and sisters to America.
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