5-Day Devotional To Dreaming BigSample

Hope was as essential to me as air. But I had another hunger that was getting sharper. Football. I had played football for the first time when I was four years old and I was mad crazy for it from that moment. I had a knack for it too. I played in a flag football league when we lived in Fontana, California, and I was such a fanatic that my mom made me wear Pull-Ups during games because I wouldn’t come out even for a bathroom break. I didn’t want to miss a single second of the game. I wanted to win but more than that, I wanted to play. It was the first time I found myself driven to something. And I really got after it.

For a kid growing up in a single-parent household, it was nearly impossible to get on a team...

But a former hood kid named Calvin Broadus Jr. was about to change the rules of the game. He knew better than anyone that there were tons of kids like me: kids who didn’t just want to play ball, they needed to play ball. He knew that football was one of the few positive diversions disadvantaged kids living in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods could turn to in order to get away from gangs, poverty, trouble with law enforcement, hopelessness, and the other problems that plagued life in the hood.

Yes, Calvin knew as much as you could know about all that. See, Calvin had been there. He knew because he was at one time a member of the Rollin’ 20 Crips on the east side of Long Beach, California. He dealt drugs, did drugs, and carried a gun. That was all before he became the world-famous multiplatinum rapper named Snoop Dogg. And it was long before he founded the youth football league that would bear his name. That program would be a saving grace for me, a gift from a loving God. It would be the start of my football career that, in turn, would provide me a path out of the hood.