New Looks For Stephon Heyer and Mike Williams
Posted by Matt Terl on October 21, 2009 – 4:55 pm
When Mike Williams gets a haircut … well, it’s honestly not that worthy of note. Williams’s hair was fairly unremarkable. If you had stopped me on the street and asked me to describe it, I probably would’ve stammered a lot and said something like, “Um, it’s dark?”
But when Williams shows up to the locker room bald AND fellow offensive lineman Stephon Heyer shows up with his characteristic dreadlocks gone, at that point it start to looks more like a story. Like it’s something they’re doing out of solidarity in the face of a world turned cruel.It looked like more of a story, but it turned out to just be one of those bizarre coincidences.
“I did it because I needed a haircut,” Williams said. “Stephon was a surprise. There was no coordination or nothing like that going on. I guess guys just got haircuts all at the same time.”
Disappointing.
(Less disappointing: Williams’ calm confidence regarding the addition of Sherm Lewis to the chain of command. “We’re still running the same plays,” he said. “We just went over game-planning today. We’re still blocking the same way, so we just gotta do our job no matter who’s behind the helm calling plays.” And, later, “You can’t get tied up into ‘what’s going on?’ Those are distractions that have no place. I have to go to practice now, and I’m not thinking, ‘who’s calling the plays?’ That doesn’t go through my mind. I’ve just gotta block this guy.”)
Still, Heyer cutting of his dreadlocks — surely THAT’S a big deal, right?
“Yeah, it’s a shock,” said Edwin Williams, who has known Heyer since college. “It’s been, like, four solid years of the locks. I haven’t seen him with the low cut for a while, and I think it’s an improvement.”
So is it a big deal? “Just change,” Heyer said. “It was a situation where you kind of get a little depressed about what is going on in the season so you want to change something up, so you change it up.”
Heyer cut the hair yesterday so today was the first full day with the bald look — which also required a trip to the equipment room for a new helmet. “It’s just a smaller one,” he said. “They may change the style a little bit. We’ll see.”
Well. That was anti-climactic.
(Kind of exciting: Heyer also seems to think that just maybe this Sherm Lewis thing will work out okay. “[Today] was the first time I ever heard him speak,” he said, “so, yeah, it was one of those situations where you’re like, ‘What is he going to say? What is he going to do?’ I think a lot of our guys are starting to warm up to him now. They have confidence in him that he knows what he is doing — especially in this offense.”)
Santana Moss is another guy who went for a new tonsorial look this year, so I figured he’d make a good final arbiter of the importance of the experience — and who is better suited by their new look. Moss, at least, didn’t disappoint.
“Man, both of those guys are big guys,” Moss said. “When they make changes like that, it’s pretty drastic for them. When it comes to judging them … neither one of them gets my applause for what they’ve done, but we can at least say for right now that Stephon doesn’t look like Chewbacca anymore, and that’s a good thing.”
Tags: Mike Williams, MikeWilliams, Santana Moss, SantanaMoss, Stephon Heyer, StephonHeyer
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