Tyrann Mathieu Talks Childhood, Jimmy Graham, More in Men’s Journal Interview

Arizona Cardinals star defensive back Tyrann Mathieu opened up about his childhood and a number of other topics in a feature article in Men’s Journal by Paul Solotaroff (warning: link contains NSFW language).

Mathieu, 24, revealed the tremendous amount of loss he’s suffered throughout his life:

He walks me through the liturgy of his dead. The first cross is for his grandpa Lorenzo, who took in Mathieu when his mom abandoned him at birth. “The heroin got him, though he died of heart failure.” Beside Grandpa is Uncle Donell, dead of AIDS, “from dirty needles.” Beside Donell is Uncle Keith, “murdered in the street while holding his baby son in his hands.” Next to him is Aunt Trina, who “died on Thanksgiving, when some jackass ran a red light.” Next to Trina is Uncle Andre, murdered late at night over a projects squabble. The names run together in a blur of urban carnage, their blood tide turned to cruciform squibs of ink. “How?” I ask him. “How are you still here when all these people are gone?”

“I’m a warrior,” he says after some reflection. “I’ve lived through a lot — and it couldn’t kill me.”

Things weren’t any easier with his birth parents:

It started at birth, when his mother dumped him on her parents and ran off  ”to chase dudes,” as he tartly puts it. Beginning at 22, Tyra Mathieu birthed five kids in seven years to two men she barely saw again. Tyrann was her second with Darrin Hayes, a kid off the streets who killed a man in cold blood when Mathieu was only two. “First time I met him, I was 10 years old,” says Mathieu. Hayes rarely wrote him or evinced the slightest interest until Mathieu became a star at Louisiana State University. As for Tyra — well, motherhood was never …

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