Wheelers' Russell leaving troubled past behind
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By Eric Page | Thursday, June 05, 2008 |
Steamwheelers defensive lineman Hammond Russell, the youngest of 18 children, escaped the streets of Columbus, Ohio, to pursue a career in professional football. "I'd be dead or in jail if it weren't for football," he said. Buy this Photo
Where to begin?
Hammond Russell is the youngest of 18 children, born into a life of drugs and crime and neglect.
His father was murdered shortly after Hammond’s birth, shot nine times in a drug deal gone wrong. When he was less than a year old, his mother, a heroin addict, left him wrapped in a blanket, lying in a snow bank at the scene of his father’s death.
He grew up on the streets, learned how to survive on the streets, learned how to be a man of the streets. He fell in step with the rest of his family, including an uncle who was the ring leader of the Short North Posse, a notorious drug-running gang on the north side of Columbus, Ohio.
Russell has seen and lived things unimaginable to most — so many of his friends and family members died young, so many others were sent away to prison.
He might have been one of them.
“I’d be dead or in jail. If it weren’t for football, that’s where I was at,” said Russell, a 27-year-old rookie defensive lineman for the Quad-City Steamwheelers. “There ain’t no two ways around it. I was either dead or in jail without football.”
On the streets
Russell’s mother, Basthi, had her first child at age 12. The oldest has a unique father, as does Russell. The 16 between are full-blooded siblings.
His mother spent two years in jail for abandoning him in the snow bank that night. She said she didn’t remember what happened. It didn’t matter. She was sent away, and the children were split up. Some, including Hammond, lived with an aunt, others with their grandmother, others already were out on the streets.
Russell’s siblings blamed his father, Hammond Jr., for their mother’s demise, and they took it out on Russell. He was tortured and beat up, ridiculed and made to feel like he was no good. When he was 12, he ran away.
He and a brother lived on the streets of Columbus for the better part of two years. They hustled, stole cars and ran drugs, whatever it took to survive.
Russell was caught joyriding in a stolen car when he was 12. He spent 30 days in jail. He was busted a half-dozen more times before he was 14.
He was caught up in the life, and the life was catching up with him. He never expected to make it out.
“I had my daughter when I was 14,” Russell said. “The only reason why I had my daughter was because I was out on the streets and it was so tough I felt like my days was gettin’ numbered. I wanted to leave something here before somebody killed me. I wanted to have something here on this earth, something of my blood, before somebody killed me.”
Lost opportunity
Though Russell lived on the streets those two years, he still went to school. He moved in with his grandmother, Nettie Johnson, who lived across the street from Marian-Franklin High, and when he was a freshman, football coach Pete Ferguson took interest.
Ferguson got Russell hooked up with a man named Fred King, Johnson’s neighbor, who took Russell under his wing and became a steady presence in his life. He got him involved in AAU sports and gave him positive reinforcement for his achievements on the playing field and in the classroom.
“He was like a guardian angel for me,” Russell said. “I was out in the street hustling, and he stepped in and cut out a lot of the street stuff. He kept me busy so the streets couldn’t swallow me up.”
On the field, Russell developed into a star, playing tight end and defensive tackle for Ferguson’s Red Devils.
“He was an absolute animal,” Ferguson said. “He was 6-foot-2, probably 270 pounds when he was in high school, and he ran like a 4.6 40. He was just an outstanding athlete. He could dunk a basketball, was a heavyweight wrestler, just manhandled people. He didn’t have a whole lot of technique, just natural, God-given strength and ability.”
Russell attracted attention from college recruiters from schools all around the country, including Ohio State. But he hadn’t left his street life totally behind, and it cost him a chance at the big time.
His junior year, he pulled a gun on a student from another school and was arrested. Shortly thereafter, Ohio State coach John Cooper withdrew interest along with a number of other top schools.
Turning the corner
In the spring of 1998, Russell graduated from high school, no small feat in a family of 18 that saw only three receive diplomas. And by earning a football scholarship to Eastern Michigan University, he became the first in his family to go to college.
At Eastern, he played four years on the defensive line. He wasn’t a star, but he stuck.
Still, it was hard to escape his roots.
“I never wanted him to go back home on weekends. I wanted him to stay at Eastern the whole time,” Ferguson said. “Every time he came home on weekends or in the summer, he would gradually fall back into it. It was a never-ending process.”
Russell made it, though, graduating with a bechelor’s degree in child development in the spring of 2002.
One of the lucky ones
According to court records, the Short North Posse was formed in 1990 by a group of cocaine dealers who wanted to protect their turf just north of downtown Columbus. SNP offered protection to its members and prevented outsiders from dealing in the area. It’s estimated they made more than $40 million in a five-year period before being disbanded.
By then, Russell’s uncle, Derrick Russell, was the leader of SNP, and all the males in his family were caught up in the gang. Derrick Russell was one of 41 defendants named in a 185-count indictment that brought down the Short North Posse in March 1995.
That was when Hammond was a freshman in high school, and he was one of the lucky ones.
His brothers have not been so lucky. All nine have done time — one served 15 years for stabbing someone in a gang fight, another nine years for a drug-related offense, another still is serving a 30-year sentence for murder.
One of his brothers was paralyzed by a stab wound and another murdered — shot in the face after his release from prison last year.
These are the demons that haunt Russell’s past, the demons he hopes to exorcise in the future.
Standing by mom
Russell left Eastern Michigan six credits shy of a master’s degree in criminal justice. He had been injured in his final season, and, without football to look forward to, he lost interest in school. Plus, he said, some friends at school had gotten in trouble with the law, and he didn’t want to return and get mixed up in it.
His mother, who continues to struggle with drug addiction, was arrested shortly after Russell returned to Columbus. She still is in jail.
Despite everything, Russell stands by his mother — the woman who left him to freeze in the snow as a baby, the woman for whom he and Ferguson spent 4½ hours searching the day of his final high school game so she could walk across the field and be recognized. They found her at a crack house, and that was the only time she saw her son play.
“That’s my mom,” he said. “I love her to death. That happened then. This is now. No matter what my mom does, that’s my mom. I love my mom. You only get one.”
Giving back
Steamwheelers assistant Montra Edwards found Russell at the Columbus Destroyers combine this spring. Russell weighed 390 pounds, but he still ran a 5.2 40.
With a lot of help from Edwards, Russell has trimmed from 390 to 330. The plan is to give football a few more years and see where he ends up.
“If I haven’t made it to the NFL by the time I’m 31, that’s enough,” Russell said. “I should have been there. I just lost focus. I didn’t have my priorities in line.”
He’s 27 now. He has four children — Kadeazana, 12, Hammond IV, 5, Imarianah, 4, and Gabriel, 3. They and his longtime girlfriend, Natasha, the mother of his youngest three children, are here with him in the Quad-Cities for the summer. An engagement, Russell says, is in the works.
“He has always had his children near him,” Ferguson said. “He might not have two nickels to rub together sometimes, but he has always had his children with him, and he’s always talking about them. He likes children. He’d be really good working with young kids.”
That’s what he wants to do. After his legs tire and his playing days are done, Russell plans to finish his master’s and pursue a career as a juvenile delinquent probation officer.
His life experiences figure to serve him well.
“I had a probation officer when I was 8, and the probation officer didn’t understand what I was going through,” Russell said. “Everybody thought I was ADHD or retarded or whatever, but I was just a kid and wasn’t understood — didn’t nobody understand me. And then they gave me this probation officer, and the only thing he wanted to do was put me in jail.
“I was in all the ‘scared straight’ programs, but you can only scare a kid so much until he ain’t scared of nothin’.”
Russell sees those fearless kids now as a Pop Warner football coach back in Columbus. For the past three years he has coached 13- to 15-year-olds who are treading the same rough streets he walked as a child.
He wants to rescue them, to lead them out of the darkness.
“I’ve got the baddest kids — they’re out there trying to sell drugs, out there shooting people,” Russell said. “I try to give them a chance, because somebody gave me a chance. If it wasn’t for Coach Ferguson, if it wasn’t for Mr. King … it had to come from an outside source, because most of my people were sent up or dead by the age of 18.
“The grass is really greener on the other side, and I’ve gotten to see both sides. I didn’t have any family support. My family washed their hands of me — I was the black sheep of the family, but I understand. I don’t hold no grudges. I’m just real family oriented now. It is what it is. If I had it to do all over again, there ain’t nothin’ I would change.”
Russell file
Height: 6-foot-2
Weight: 330 pounds
Position: Defensive line
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
College: Eastern Michigan, 1998-2002
Professional experience: Played two games for the Sioux City Bandits (NIFL) in 2007 and the rest of the season with the Summit County Rumble (CIFL)
2008 statistics: 6.5 tackles, 2.5 for a loss
Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com.
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