Willie Colon hates the Pats

[faba]

New to Jets, Willie Colon hates the Patriots

Posted by Darin Gantt on October 16, 2013, 6:41 AM EDT

Reuters

When Willie Colon was a Steeler, his battles with the Ravens were heated, but professional.

It appears his feelings toward his newest rivals have grown more personal.

The Jets right guard said he had “a lot of different reasons,” for his new distaste for the Patriots, compared to what he knew before.

“It’s weird,” Colon told Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News of his days in the AFC Central. “I hated them [the Ravens], but I loved them at the same time, because they’re a team that forced you to give them your best.”

As for the Patriots?

“I just hate them,” Colon said.

Of course, there are financial reasons, as well, as he was ejected and fined about $34,000 after his late-game fight with the Patriots’ sideline during a 13-10 loss.

“I don’t like them,” Colon said. “But at the same time you got to respect what they’ve done as an organization. Winning Super Bowls. They’ve built a tradition there where they get it done. No matter what you feel about them personally, you got to respect that they win.”

No matter how much you hate them, apparently.

 

 

[jay_psg]

He should limit penalties!!

[PatriotReign37]

Rex found himself a new puppet.

[kay_gee]

Rex found himself a new puppet.

or maybe he recognizes the Patriots are scum.

[Pac]

Read a good article on him the other day...  I lived the first year of my life right around the corner from where he grew up and often visited relatives in that area through my late teens.  Not exactly what you'd call a pleasant community.

 

Jets right guard Willie Colon, shaped by South Bronx upbringing, boasts tenacious style, bold personality

 

By Darryl Slater/The Star-Ledger

 

Uncle Mario walked through the door with a softball-sized knot on his head. Six drug dealers had just jumped him as he approached one of the 14-story apartment buildings in the Melrose Houses, the South Bronx project where Mario’s brother Willie Colon Sr. lived with his family.

 

Willie heard the news before he arrived home from his job as a hospital kitchen supervisor. Mario was on the couch, ice pack on his head. Willie stormed into the apartment and heard his brother’s explanation. Willie removed his own shirt, grabbed a milk crate and baseball bat, and left the apartment.

 

“Stay here with your mother,” he told his 15-year-old son, William. “I’ll be back soon.”

Willie was not a violent man, but pride and passion ran strong in him. William, scared but curious, looked out the fifth-floor window. He marveled as he watched his shirtless father sit on the milk crate, wield the bat and shout threats at the Hispanic drug dealers in Spanish. Upstairs, William waited to hear gunfire. He never did.

 

Two of Willie’s neighborhood acquaintances saw the confrontation and stood behind Willie in support. Intimidated, the drug dealers apologized to Willie. He returned to his apartment, took a shower, gave Mario some change and sent him home.

 

“It was that moment that I was like: This is how you protect your brother,” William recalled. “This is what it means. It’s in my nature that if you want something, I’m not going to back down, because when I was growing up, I couldn’t back down.”

 

William is only still William to those who know him from back on 156th Street. To everybody else, he is Willie Colon, the Jets’ right guard, a Super Bowl champion with Pittsburgh, a multi-millionaire who lives in upscale Verona, now in his eighth season in the NFL, and first with the Jets – by way of Hofstra and everything and everyone in the Melrose Houses who shaped his tenacious playing style and bold personality.

 

On Sunday, the Jets host Pittsburgh, the city where Colon made his name. But really, the South Bronx made Colon, who immediately became a prominent, vocal presence in the Jets’ locker room, with reporters and teammates alike.

 

When center Nick Mangold was involved in a skirmish near the end of the Week 2 loss at New England, Colon rushed so intensely to defend him that Colon was ejected for making contact with an official. During training camp, rookie defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson practiced against Colon’s violent blocking style and learned “he’s got a mean-ass punch – sometimes in the throat, sometimes the face mask, sometimes the chest.”

 

The line’s two other veterans, Mangold and left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson, are calmer than Colon, who provides a good “off-set” to their personalities, Mangold said. Colon’s authoritative candor has already made him one of the locker room’s most publicly visible players.

 

“You don’t always hear a voice from the offensive line, like you would hear from the defense,” Ferguson said. “Willie’s our guy.”

 

---

 

When the crack epidemic gripped the South Bronx in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Colon learned to protect himself and his brother, Antonio, in even the most routine moments. Colon’s building had an A and B staircase. The A staircase was mostly safe. From the B staircase, Colon heard screaming, muggings, crack-heads arguing, dealers scurrying. He and Antonio, a year his junior, always took the trash to the building’s incinerator together because it was near the B staircase.

Colon was about 13 when he watched a murder. On a summer afternoon, he and Antonio walked into a corner store, heard gunshots outside and dove behind a chips shelf. The gunfire stopped, so they ran for their apartment. The shooting resumed. They crawled into the bushes for cover, hearing bullets ricocheting off cars, whizzing over their heads. They scrambled upstairs. Colon looked out his window and saw a man sprawled on a bench, bleeding to death, his wife or girlfriend screaming for somebody to come help. Nobody did.

 

Though Colon never came closer to bullets than that, the war on drugs pushed toward his apartment. His mother sent Antonio to the store one day. Antonio stepped into the hallway and saw a SWAT team in front of his neighbor’s door. The lead officer put a finger to his lips, signaling Antonio to be quiet. Antonio slipped back into his apartment. Two seconds later – boom! – the SWAT team knocked down the neighbor’s door.

 

While these moments steeled Colon against adversity, they didn’t jade his outgoing spirit, which his family nurtured in the two-bedroom apartment. As a baby, he shared a small room with Antonio and their sister, Joy, who is 13 years older than Colon. When Colon awoke in the middle of the night, Joy cradled him in her bed until he fell asleep, and then returned him to his crib. Years later, that room saw Colon and Antonio trying out a Christmas present, boxing gloves, and Colon accidentally cold-cocking Antonio when Antonio was distracted. Colon looked terrified.

 

“Don’t tell Mom,” he told Antonio.

---

 

Colon’s mother, Jean Davis, was 2 years old in 1952 when she moved into the freshly constructed Melrose Houses. She has lived in the same fifth-floor apartment ever since. Though she stopped working as a hospital drug counselor after being diagnosed with lupus in 1989, she labored constantly at keeping her children busy and out of trouble.

 

She and Willie Sr. stretched their incomes so the kids could attend Catholic schools. She established basketball tournaments in the winter and summer, bringing in teams of local players. She enrolled her boys in the Navy Sea Cadets program, similar to Junior ROTC, so their Friday nights were occupied. (Colon liked going only to flirt with girls in the program.) Davis strived to expand her children’s worldviews and took them to museums.

 

“We were taught to look beyond just living in the projects,” said Colon’s sister, now Joy Smith-Jones.

Though Davis’s body aches from lupus meant Joy had to often watch the boys, Davis was a regular at Cardinal Hayes High School football and basketball games.

 

“I don’t pat myself on the back, because I feel, as a parent, those are the things you do,” Davis said.

That her son ascended from the Bronx to an NFL career is no small achievement. Colon is one of just three NFL players ever who were born in the borough, went to high school there and played at least eight NFL seasons, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com.

 

“A kid in his position, growing up where we grew up, isn't supposed to be in the league thriving the way he is,” said Antonio. “Growing up in that neighborhood, it was great and taught us a lot, but it also made you get your (stuff) together.”

 

Colon has accomplished enough that he could move Davis out of the projects, where her building has a balky elevator. The Melrose Houses have improved since the early 1990s, but recently, Joy brought her mom home from dinner and they heard gunfire as they pulled up. On the side of Melrose Houses buildings, metal signs read: “NYPD SECURITY CAMERA IN AREA.”

 

Yet Davis refuses all of Colon’s offers for a new home. She is still happy on 156th Street, sharing the apartment with her twin sister, Joan, and being near friends. Davis said Colon already gave her what she wanted: him staying out of a police cruiser and in school.

 

“That’s my reward,” she said, sitting on the couch in the only living room she has ever known. “I don’t live through Willie’s money. I live through my own. This is my home.”

 

---

 

Davis believes Colon inherited her generous nature. When he was in Pittsburgh, he let Antonio and one of their friends from home, Amir Brown, live with him. Living rent-free enabled Brown to take solo vacations to Holland, Belgium and Germany that he always dreamed about.

 

The bold part of Colon came from his father, whose parents moved to the Bronx from Puerto Rico. Willie Sr., a 6-3 former semi-professional basketball player, hung a Puerto Rican flag in the back of his van. Its license plate read: MORENO. That was his nickname, because of his dark complexion. He always wore gold chains, even when he sat in his underwear in the apartment with Colon, watching Knicks games and discussing life. On summer trips to Orchard Beach, Willie Sr. donned high-top sneakers, white socks and a Speedo.

 

“He thought he was the coolest thing walking,” Colon said. “My father was not a clean-shaven man. He was an extremely hairy man.”

 

His eldest son was nearly as unabashed. At high school, Colon hid teammates’ towels while they showered, so they had to walk nude past an often-open door, exposing them to the path faculty took to the parking lot. On the way to school, Colon once split his uniform pants and coat while sliding across a car hood in a blizzard. At Hofstra, he tossed a blitzing safety to the ground, kicked the kid and chased another block downfield. In Pittsburgh, he rented a party busy for Cinco de Mayo and filled it with 20 friends, sombreros and a keg. After another night out, Brown dozed off in the back seat of the car. Colon left him there as a joke. Brown woke up to daylight.

“I had drool on me and everything,” he said.

 

---

 

Colon loved laughing at his dad’s quirks. More than anything, he “idolized” Willie Sr.’s work ethic and the respect he received from everyone in their neighborhood. But Colon always knew Willie Sr. was a flawed man. Colon said his dad was incarcerated for selling drugs before he was born, and that he kept a mistress since his sons were young. The affair produced two other sons.

 

Colon’s parents, who married in 1981, never divorced, though Colon said his mom knew of the affair. He said she wanted to have a male authority figure in the home, so she kept the marriage together. But Colon couldn’t deal with his dad having a “second family,” and he grew apart from Willie Sr. in college. Their stalemate continued even as Willie Sr., a non-smoker, dealt with a lung condition. The stubborn pride they shared kept them from mending the relationship.

 

“I kind of had (the attitude of): If it was (expletive) me, then it was (expletive) you, too,” Colon said. “But we both treated it like that.”

 

In February 2008, Colon’s aunt called him home. His father, 54, had turned for the worse. Colon, who is single and has no children, arrived from Pittsburgh. He hadn’t seen Willie Sr. for a year or two. Colon walked into the hospital room and looked at Willie Sr., comatose, tubes attached to him. Colon’s mother was there with his aunt. So were his father’s mistress and her two sons.

 

“There’s nothing cordial about this at all,” Colon said.

 

Colon’s mom listened to the doctor and left the choice up to Colon. He would have to decide whether to remove his father from life support. After he went through with it, Colon leaned over and held his dad – the man he still refers to as “my everything” – in his massive arms.

 

“I could just feel his life just slip away,” Colon said.

 

Even now, when Colon is driving alone or Father’s Day rolls around, he replays the moment and asks himself what he would’ve said to Willie Sr. if he had just two more minutes.

“I would have just told him I loved him, I’m sorry for being bull-headed,” Colon said. “Every day, there’s times I think about that. Why was I so prideful? Why couldn’t I just pick up the phone one day and tell my dad I love him and sorry that we’re going through this, let’s talk about this? Looking back at it, who won at the end of the day? Neither of us. I lost a father and now I wear this anger and regret that maybe before he left, we could have left on peaceful terms.”

 

Colon’s final moments watching his dad also piqued one last curiosity, one last admiring hope. At one point, Willie Sr., still in a coma, seemed to look back at his son and slightly smirk.

“And I always wonder,” Colon said. “Did he recognize me?”

[Lizard King]

If I could venture a guess, the Patriots are used to showing up and talking all game to the Jets like they are second class. I don't think Colon is used to that.

[PatriotReign37]

or maybe he recognizes the Patriots are scum.

 

A sore vag will do that.

[kay_gee]

A sore vag will do that.

you would know.

[JiFtheOracle]

Who doesnt hate the Pats? 

[dbatesman]

so much swagger you guys

[HessStation]

He should limit penalties!!

It's what drove him out of Pittsburgh. I think it was a lot worse there...so far.

[Integrity28]

south Bronx, south south Bronx

[Integrity28]

so much swagger you guys

 

Willie Colon should be a vampire for Halloween, then we could call him Count Swaggggggula!!! OH NO HE DI-INT!!!! 

[PatriotReign37]

you would know.

Willie will hate the Jets too before its over.

[PatriotReign37]

Who doesnt hate the Pats? 

Sanchez

[Jolot]

Brady and Belichick don't hate the Jets?....this is a non story.

[JerryK]

Brady and Belichick don't hate the Jets?....this is a non story.

Actually Brady loves the colon.