DeAngelo Hall's Mom Writes A Book
Posted by Matt Terl on September 23, 2009 – 1:30 pm
The event last night at Maté in Georgetown was marketed as a launch party for DeAngelo Hall‘s website. And, to an extent, it certainly had all the trappings: other players in attendance, a charity auction, computers set up displaying the site (which Hall is hugely proud of), screen showing DHall highlights and snapshots, the whole fooferaw.
But secretly, to Hall himself, the website launch was pretty much secondary.
“This is about my mom’s book,” Hall told me. “It was a no-brainer for me. At first I had gone back and forth for even doing this event because I didn’t feel like I needed to do it to launch the website again. I feel like we had a good enough buzz coming off of training camp but when I had the chance to partner with my mom, that really made it a no-brainer.”
Hall looked around at the whole scene, waitresses carrying trays of sushi and drinks and people seeing and being seen, and shrugged. “It’s her, and I’m behind her. If my name can get one more person to pick the book up … once you pick it up, you’ll instantly be hooked.”
The book in question is called Bitter Sweet: A Woman’s Journey, and it’s the work of more than twelve years for Hall’s mother Joan.
“It’s about my life,” she said, “and the struggles raising my children as a single parent. The loss of my son, when my 25 year old was murdered; raising my two daughters with MS … just the struggles that I went through trying to raise my children and the challenges that I faced. Going to college, teaching 28 years … just to let people know that the journey to get there was not an easy one.”
And DeAngelo has become, in many ways, the book’s number one fan. He’s enthusiastic when he talks about the book, like he’s preaching a gospel he’s really bought into. “Its just amazing,” he said. “As children, we think of our parents just as Mom and Dad. To see the things that she went through, it just opened my eyes on my life, the things I took for granted.”
Which is, in turn, one of the lessons Joan Hall says she’s tried to instill in DeAngelo. “Money only buys things,” she said. “It cannot buy happiness, and at the end of the day if you’re not happy, money’s not gonna make you happy.”
So when DeAngelo signed a hugely lucrative contract extension after being traded to the Raiders and received the kind of money that most of us can only dream of … his mother wasn’t totally surprised when things still didn’t work out.
“He was unhappy,” she said. “And I think at that point, he learnt that lesson that I had been trying to teach him. When he went to the Redskins, money was not the reason. It was love, for the place and the team. So he grew up during that time, and realized that you could have a lot of money, but it won’t make you happy.”
DeAngelo Hall has taken care of his mother since he started making good money, at least as much as she lets him. He encouraged her to retire; she initially refused, then complied and found that she missed teaching too much and went back as a substitute. “He tries to give me a new car,” she said, “I still have one that was new in 2004.”
Being DeAngelo Hall’s mother is only part of her identity, but it’s a big part of the reason she elected to write the book. “People see me as DeAngelo Hall’s mom. Maybe when I was teaching, they’d see me as a teacher. But I wanted just to let them see that my life is no different than theirs. to hopefully encourage any single mothers or anybody, really, that’s experiencing struggles in their lives. Sometimes when we experience struggles, we feel like we’re all alone and nobody else is experiencing the difficulty we are. I wanted to let people know they can make it, but they have to keep going.”
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And here, for your entertainment, are Rocky McIntosh and Clinton Portis from last night. See more pictures of the event — including one of me and my 27 favorite chins — in the gallery at Metromix DC.
Tags: books, Clinton Portis, ClintonPortis, deangelo, DeAngelo Hall, DeangeloHall, rocky mcintosh, RockyMcintosh
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