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6:10

As part of a series called My Big Break, All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

All football players know they’re one big hit away from the end of their career. Delvin Breaux was a high school senior with a scholarship on the line when he took one of those hits. It broke his neck.

But, nine years later, he has become one of the NFL’s top young defenders with the New Orleans Saints.

How did he manage such a feat? Well, Breaux says it’s a long story — one that began when he started playing football at age 4.

“Every day I used to wake up, I used to be like, ‘Hey, man, I’m gonna be in the NFL one day,’ ” he says. “You know, just watching the guys play on TV. It was just something that I always dreamed of.”

In high school, college coaches came in to recruit for schools all over the country — UCLA, USC, Virginia Tech, Virginia, Ohio State, Michigan. But Breaux says LSU — his “hometown team” — was the only school he wanted to attend.

Before he even got there, his life changed.

“The day I got seriously injured was Oct. 27, 2006,” Breaux recalls. “I shot down the left side of the field, just went in there and made the tackle. And next thing you know I was on the ground and everything just went dark.

“I couldn’t move or nothing, then I heard my teammates: ‘D Breaux, get up! We need you, man, get up!’ ” he says. “And I’m like, ‘I would but I can’t move.’ Then two or three seconds after I say that, a bright, white light just … appeared!”

He was able to open his eyes and stand up. Breaux started walking back to the sideline, getting ready to go back in.

“That’s when the sharp pain came and shot up the back of my neck. And I went to the sideline and told my dad that my neck’s hurting, and he was like, ‘Take some ibuprofen.’ And I couldn’t swallow the pills because my disc slipped out my esophagus.”

It turned out he had broken his C4, C5 and C6 vertebrae. Doctors put in screws, pins and rods to secure his neck, and there’s a scar in the front part of his esophagus where doctors put a plate in.

After that, the college teams stopped calling with offers.

“I was just so frustrated,” Breaux says. “I was like, ‘Man, my career’s over with. Can’t play ball no more, can’t pursue my dream. What am I gonna do next?’ And that’s all I kept thinking while I was in the hospital for that month.”

Luckily, he had committed early to play for LSU. The school kept him on scholarship, even though he was injured. But LSU would never clear him to play.

He ended up getting cleared by his own doctors, though.

“I went back home and told my wife, ‘Baby, I’m cleared to play football again.’ She said, ‘No, you’re lying.’ And I was like, ‘No, baby, look at the papers!’ Everything was cleared and there was no restrictions,” Breaux says. “And she was like, ‘Alright, well get your butt back on out there. It’s time to go play!’ “

In 2012 — for the first time in six years — he was back playing football, with the semipro Louisiana Bayou Vipers.

He didn’t know what to expect after being out of it for so long.

“Am I gonna be rusty? Am I gonna be great?” he wondered.

Breaux remembers it all coming down to one play.

“I think it was like the second play of the game. They ran the ball and they came my way. And I’m sitting up there like, ‘Man, I’ve got to make this tackle. They’re coming right to me. I’ve got to make this tackle. Please!’ And I went in and I made the tackle, and I jumped up and I’m like, ‘Man, I’m not dead. I’m not dead.’ “

His confidence regained, Breaux quickly started playing better. “I started ballin’ out,” he says. “I had an interception, I had two more tackles. I just started enjoying it. This is it — I’m back playing football again, I’m doing what I love, and now it’s time to get to the NFL.”

It wasn’t straight to the NFL, though. His next step was playing with the New Orleans VooDoo, an arena football team. After several months, he was recruited by the Hamilton Tiger Cats in Ontario, part of the Canadian Football League.

“My big break came after my CFL season. Recruiting felt like college all over again,” Breaux says. “I had a lot of teams wanting me — I would say 28 of the 32 NFL teams they had, I had workouts. Ended up signing with the Saints. I went through the physical process, and they were like, ‘You’re good to go!’ I’ve been pumped ever since.”

Despite the difficulties along the way, he never considered giving up football. People even told him to quit. But “that did nothing but add fuel to the fire,” Breaux says. “It made me want to go hard and work out extra hard. I was trying to show people that I’m not out of it, I’m still in it.

“My motivation and dedication and determination just wouldn’t let me quit,” he says. “It was always: Let’s do one more rep, let’s do one more set, you can make it, you’re gonna make it, just continue to keep believing.”

3:56

Law enforcement experts say this year’s Super Bowl is one of the most guarded public events in recent history. But you won’t hear that from federal or local officials. They are very tight-lipped about security.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

San Francisco is, of course, the official host city for the Super Bowl on Sunday. But the game itself between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos will be played 45 miles away. It’ll be in the Silicon Valley city of Santa Clara. NPR’s Richard Gonzales reports that distance has made security for the game even more complicated than usual.

RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: I’m standing near the foot of Market Street in downtown San Francisco at the entrance of Super Bowl City. It’s an enclosed venue occupying several blocks. It’s free to the public, and inside there’s music, food, drink, commercial displays and interactive games for all ages. There’s hundreds of people standing in line, waiting to go through a metal detector to get inside. And outside there’s police standing by, carrying high-powered rifles.

RICH ALONZO: Oh, that’s good security. I love that.

GONZALES: Rich Alonzo, a retired public transit manager, and his wife, Mary Jo, are standing in line.

R. ALONZO: I hate to say we have to live like this.

MARY JO ALONZO: So they had snipers up there, too, right?

R. ALONZO: Somewhere, yeah.

GONZALES: But security is about more than officers with guns. An estimated 1 million people will descend on the San Francisco Bay area to be part of the Super Bowl festivities. The plan to protect them started more than two years ago. And today, the security hub is many miles to the south. Inside a nondescript building in Silicon Valley, six miles from where the Super Bowl will be played, there’s a large cafeteria room with the window shades drawn closed. The room is crammed full of computers, screens large and small, phones, miles of wires and cables – all of the tools of a pop-up, high-tech war room for more than two dozen federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, working 24/7. Security is so tight that I was allowed to see the room, but I wasn’t permitted to record any sound in the FBI’s information operation center. John Lightfoot is the assistant special agent in charge for San Francisco. His description of the room is pretty technical.

JOHN LIGHTFOOT: This center has multiple high-speed, low-drag, redundant communications capabilities, where we take in information and spit it back out.

GONZALES: Lightfoot is talking about collecting and sharing everything from officer field reports and 911 calls to traffic and weather alerts, camera images and radiological sensors posted around the region, not to mention social media. Part of the job of processing all of that information comes to Bryan Ware. He’s the chief technology officer for a Virginia-based company called Haystax Technologies. He’s worked on six other Super Bowls. Ware says, compared with last year’s game in Glendale, Ariz., this one is more logistically challenging, partly because the game will be played 45 miles away from where tens of thousands of fans will be lodging in San Francisco.

BRYAN WARE: You know, you can’t get hardly anywhere in the Bay are without going through two hours’ worth of traffic.

GONZALES: Ware says one of the main challenges is coordinating information between different law enforcement agencies with different chains of command throughout the region.

WARE: All those kinds of things need to be enabled much more by technology because you don’t have the benefit of kind of close geography.

GONZALES: Even with all the sexy hardware, security officials stressed the need for human intelligence. That’s why their mantra to the public all week has been see something, say something. FBI Special Agent John Lightfoot says it isn’t the threat of a foreign terrorist attack that keeps him up at night. Something else worries him.

LIGHTFOOT: There’s that one person out there who decides they want to do something, and we miss it for whatever reason – the public hasn’t shared it with us or just not appeared on our radar screen. The lone offender keeps me up.

GONZALES: So far, there are no credible threats against the Super Bowl, and security officials have been noticeably tight-lipped. As one big-event security specialist puts it, plans known are plans defeated. Richard Gonzales, NPR News, San Francisco.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:48

I’m from a football family. The guys all play, including my dad, my brother, my uncle and me. I was even named after a former 49ers player, Garrison Hearst.

My parents were at every game I played. From the field, if I looked toward sidelines, they’d be there, either cheering or taking pictures. My mom took lots of videos on her iPhone from the bleachers at one of my games.

Last summer, I started thinking about quitting. My grades were slipping. And I felt like I was making big sacrifices for a sport that I couldn’t see myself playing beyond high school. What’s all of this time and energy for? I dreaded bringing it up to my parents, but they surprised me.

“Privately, I was just stressed out. Football was not fun anymore,” said my dad, Jed Pennington.

“Every Friday night, like, there was the games, and you guys would go out and hang out with your friends,” he continued. “And then mom and I would go out and have dinner. And part of that dinner was just a sigh of relief that there wasn’t an injury that night.”

My parents had been so supportive at my games. It never crossed my mind that they were worried sick. My dad says the low point was watching my brother get a concussion on the field.

“That one was horrible, he wanted to play, and he thought he could play,” my dad recalls. “And that was a really hard argument to have with him, because this was his long-term well-being and health.”

Although football is dangerous, it’s still very important to my family. We watch games on the weekends and keep up with the latest roster changes. So far the controversy around football hasn’t stopped us from enjoying the sport.

I talked to my brother Michael, who was MVP and captain of our high school football team about his experience playing.

“Hell yeah, it’s dangerous, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun,” Michael said. “It’s just something that you have to do if you’re OK with taking the risk.”

I also asked him what he remembers about his concussion.

“I didn’t notice anything right away,” he recalled. “I finished the game, and I felt fine, just a little bit dizzy. But that night I felt like I was about to throw up so badly. And then the next day I took the practice SAT and I could barely remember how to write my name.”

My brother and I both decided to quit football. And we’re not the only ones.

If you look at the latest stats, there are almost 26,000 fewer high school football players today than there were in the 2008-2009 school year, according to figures from the National Federation of State High School Associations, or NFHS.

It was also 2009 when the NFL formally acknowledged the connection between football and the long-term effects of concussions.

Bob Colgate, the NFHS’ director of sports and sports medicine, won’t cite any one reason for why football participation is down.

“There may be knee injuries, ankle injuries, there may be arm injuries,” Colgate said. “I mean it is a contact sport, so the injuries that could evolve through the participation in that sport may be something that an individual does not want to look at.”

Sometimes I think back to my time on the field and I miss it. Football was such a big part of my life. But if I can find the satisfaction I got from football without taking the same risks, I’m going to do that instead.

It certainly pleases my dad.

“I’m very happy for our time as a football family,” he said. “But I’m also very relieved that it’s over.”

And with two years left of high school, I still have time to do something worthwhile other than football.

Garrison Pennington is a 17-year-old high school junior in Albany, Calif. This story was produced by Youth Radio.

5:19

The late quarterback Ken Stabler was an anti-establishment icon playing in the very pro-establishment NFL in the 1970s. Now he’s become an icon of a very different sort. Test results showed that Stabler suffered from C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head. NPR’s Kelly McEvers talks to Stabler’s long time partner, Kim Bush.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The late quarterback Ken Stabler was an antiestablishment icon playing in the very pro-establishment NFL. He was the face of the Oakland Raiders, which, in the 1970s, was the biggest collection of malcontents, scallywags and hell-raisers the league has ever seen before or since. He died last July of colon cancer, and today, The New York Times reports a study of his brain has shown that Stabler suffered from CTE. That’s the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head. Stabler’s longtime partner, Kim Bush, joins us now. Welcome to the show.

KIM BUSH: Hi, Kelly. Nice to be here with you.

MCEVERS: When did you notice that something wasn’t right?

BUSH: I really can go back, and around 2008, I started noticing that he would repeat himself and sometimes more often than others. And you know, it was pretty obvious anytime we joined a group of his fellow teammates or other NFL players at all different types of celebrity events that we went to – just, they were all beat up in some fashion or another, whether it was hips, knees, shoulder and then, occasionally, you know, the ones who had very significant head injury issues, like the great John Mackey.

We ran into him at a golf tournament years and years ago, and I remember late that night, Kenny and I talking, and he was talking about Mr. Mackey. And he said, you know, are you ready for that? And I just said, yeah, I’m ready. It’s – you know, hey, we may not go there; that may not be your fate, you know – so I guess maybe just hopeful it didn’t come knock on his door, but unfortunately, as we found out this week, it did.

MCEVERS: Do you think there’s any possibility that the brain disorder made him more private than he might have been before?

BUSH: Oh, definitely, definitely. Like I said, when I saw those changes in ’08 of the memory stuff, that’s also about the time that we started dialing back public appearances and events ’cause he was just, number one, plagued with horrible knees. He was also starting with headaches that were frequent. Some days they would be so intense he, you know, spent the day basically in silence because the TV just annoyed him or pots and pans when I was cooking. A lot of times, he would have to go to another room.

You know, he said that he always had, like, a really high-pitched E sound. Just E just all the time. And I noticed he started gritting his teeth. And I think his head rattled. I mean, I really think the inside of his head was just rumbling and rattling all the time. And he would, you know, scrunch up his eyes so tightly that I’m like, that will give you a headache within itself, you know? But it was a very consistent situation that we experienced the last five or six years.

MCEVERS: He has two grandsons. They’re both 17. They both play high school football. Was he concerned about them playing the sport?

BUSH: Oh, he was. He was definitely, you know – I think he – one particular year, one of the boys had said that he didn’t think he wanted to play, and Kenny was like, that’s great; that’s great. Just work on your studied. Just – you know, that’s OK. You don’t have to play football. I mean, he was very supportive of Justin not playing.

MCEVERS: Ken Stabler is one of a growing number of professional football players who we now know had this disease. What do you think the NFL should do about this?

BUSH: Well, I mean, obviously, this science – it has to be used to make improvements, and you know, I don’t think you can build a supersonic helmet that is going to fix this problem. I personally think there’s going to have to be changes to the game in terms of contact. And you know, we’ve seen some changes already with how they’re allowing players to hit, and if a player’s helmet comes off, they have to sit out. But there has to be more, and I think more importantly than even at the pro level, we have to look at youth sports and education and training coaches and – is it really necessary for these kids to play contact? It’s going to take modifications to the game is my belief.

MCEVERS: There are a growing number of survivors of players, children of players and family members of players who had CTE and who died. Have you reached out to any of them? Are you in touch with any of them?

BUSH: I have not yet because we really, honestly, have been waiting for all of the final results to come, which just came this week. And now that we’re all headed into San Francisco for Super Bowl 50 and hopefully his induction into the Hall of Fame, I’ll be seeing a lot of people and meeting a lot of these families. But I can tell you already that I am very committed to working with the Concussion Legacy Foundation. You just can’t sit back with this kind of knowledge and not act. You just can’t. We must invoke change and progress.

MCEVERS: That’s Kim Bush, longtime partner of quarterback Ken Stabler. Thank you so much for your time today.

BUSH: Thank you, Kelly.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

4:04

John Scott is the most unlikely NHL All Star. NPR’s Kelly McEvers talks to Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo! Sports about how the enforcer scored two goals and was an MVP at Sunday night’s All-Star Game.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

All right, now for a story of a goon-made-good. Stay with me, here. NHL defenseman John Scott is an enforcer. And in hockey, the term for enforcer is goon. Goons aren’t paid to score goals. They’re paid to fight. So goons are unlikely heroes. But John Scott is a favorite of fans. They voted him into this year’s All-Star game much to the dismay of the NHL. And to the delight of hockey fans everywhere, Scott scored two goals in last night’s All-Star game and is now the most unlikely All-Star game MVP ever. Joining me on the line to talk about this is Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo Sports. Welcome.

GREG WYSHYNSKI: Great to be here. Thanks.

MCEVERS: All right, so how often do goons like John Scott actually make the All-Star game?

WYSHYNSKI: That would be never.

(LAUGHTER)

MCEVERS: OK.

WYSHYNSKI: They’re hardly ever – there have been a few through the years. Chris Nilan, who was an infamous fighter in the 1980s and ’90s was the in to an All-Star team at one point. But for the most part, these are players that are on the outside looking in while the skilled players in the National Hockey League do their thing in the All-Star game unless, of course, you’re the NHL and you open up the fan voting to allow any player to be elected to the All-Star game, which, in their tomfoolery, they did. And a chaotic group of miscreants and NHL fans on Reddit and social media pushed John Scott to the top of the popular vote. He had more votes than Alex Ovechkin, Patrick Kane, Jaromir Jagror and other stars, and he was an All-Star captain.

MCEVERS: I mean, I said that, you know, he was voted in to the dismay of the NHL. Explain how the league dealt with this and reacted to it.

WYSHYNSKI: Poorly would be the word I’d use.

MCEVERS: (Laughter) OK.

WYSHYNSKI: They – for the first time in my career as a sport’s writer, an All-Star vote was held where they didn’t reveal any of the vote totals during the voting, which is something, like, they like to crow about. They didn’t reveal the vote totals during the voting. They didn’t reveal the vote totals after the voting. Once this unlikely candidate led all voting, they didn’t do any kind of feature story on him or anything else.

But it goes beyond that. John Scott revealed in an article in The Players’ Tribune a few days before the All-Star game that the NHL actually was discouraging him taking this spot in their All-Star game. Somebody from the NHL actually said to John Scott, what will your daughters think if you take this spot in the All-Star game over somebody who is more deserving? And that was his breaking point. That was the moment in which John Scott decided, I’m going to go to this game because no one is going to try to…

MCEVERS: Tell me what to do.

WYSHYNSKI: …Tell me that my family’s ashamed of me.

MCEVERS: Wow. And so here we have this newly minted All-Star MVP, and now he’s actually going to be playing in the minor leagues for the St John’s Ice Caps in Newfoundland. What happened there?

WYSHYNSKI: He was playing with the Arizona Coyotes. In Scott’s theory, he was traded out of spite after refusing to step down from his All-Star game spot. The Montreal Canadiens team to which he was traded to put him in the American Hockey League. And the theory was, being that he wasn’t in the NHL anymore, he wouldn’t be in the NHL All-Star game. But the league said, you’re more than welcome to come. So not only was there an enforcer in the NHL All-Star game. There was a guy who was not even in the NHL anymore in the NHL All-Star game.

MCEVERS: And I got to ask, like, why would the NHL not want somebody to play in the All-Star game who the fans had voted?

WYSHYNSKI: Because it wasn’t planned, and they don’t roll with the punches very well, this league. But the beautiful irony of this whole thing is, none of this happens – none of this cult heroism and folk heroism and fans chanting MVP when John Scott touched the puck in the All-Star game happens if there isn’t a villain. And the NHL coming so hard down on this guy and trying to subvert the popular vote and trying to find ways around him being in the game created this environment where what was the class-clown-becoming-student-council-president all of a sudden becomes, like, the Joan of Arc of the All-Star game with all of the fans rallying around him and chanting his name all game.

MCEVERS: That’s Greg Wyshynski. He writes the Puck Daddy blog for Yahoo Sports. Thanks so much.

WYSHYNSKI: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

10:22

Blogger and writer Kara Brown, radio host Farajii Muhammad and The Root’s Danielle Belton talk about the new film The Birth of a Nation, Cam Newton, and Beyonce and Chris Martin’s new music video.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now it’s time for our trip to the Barbershop. That’s where we gather a group of interesting folks to talk about what’s in the news and what’s on our minds. Sitting in the chairs for a shapeup this weekend are Kara Brown. She’s a blogger and writer and joins us from NPR’s Culver City studios at NPR West. Hi, Kara.

KARA BROWN: Hi.

MARTIN: And here with me in Washington, D.C., Farajii Muhammad. He’s the host of the radio show Listen Up! in Baltimore. Welcome back, Farajii.

FARAJII MUHAMMAD, BYLINE: Thank you.

MARTIN: Also with us, Danielle Belton, an editor at The Root. Good to have you back, too, Danielle.

DANIELLE BELTON: It’s always good to be here.

MARTIN: And especially because after the storm, we all have cabin fever, right?

(LAUGHTER)

BELTON: I got me out of the house.

MARTIN: Got out of the house, thank you. All right, so big news out of the Sundance Film Festival this week – the film “The Birth Of A Nation” – we’re not talking about that old 1951 that glorified the KKK. This is a new movie by the actor and the filmmaker Nate Parker. It’s about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion. The film made history this week for being the biggest Sundance deal of all time. It was sold to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million. Now, most of us aren’t going to be able to see it for many months. But just that dollar figure has gotten a lot of people anticipating the release. And Kara, you know I’m going to start with you…

BROWN: Yeah (laughter).

MARTIN: …Because you wrote this use for Jezebel that got a lot of people talking.

BROWN: Yeah.

MARTIN: And the title is “I’m So Damn Tired Of Slave Movies.”

BROWN: Yeah.

MARTIN: So why, and does that mean you’re not going to see it?

BROWN: No, I am definitely going to see “The Birth Of A Nation.” And, you know, I want to preface, I’m really happy for Nate Parker. I’m really glad that this film is getting made and that it’s getting the attention that I’m sure it deserves. The thing that I find just sort of exhausting is that almost every time you have a film with mostly black people that’s lauded sort of by a more general – i.e. white – audience, it oftentimes is a movie about slavery or the civil rights movement. And so it’s not that I don’t want those films to be made, but I do think that there’s a problem when those are the types of films with black people that are considered, quote, unquote “important” or “good.” And, you know, I’m very excited for this film, but I would also be happy with perhaps giving other stories a chance to shine and to get the audiences that this film I’m sure we’ll get.

MARTIN: But OK, let me just push on this for just a second, Kara, because, you know, you make the point that part of it is so disturbing. Why is it that what – you know, an important film has to be kind of founded on black people being brutalized.

BROWN: Yeah.

MARTIN: Isn’t that kind of what a serious film is?

BROWN: I don’t think so. And I think when you look at the breadth of movies with white people, they don’t all fall in that category. Jennifer Lawrence won for “Silver Linings Playbook,” which is about two people ballroom dancing. Generally, white people get a wider representation of who they are and their lives and things that they’re interested in and things that they’ve gone through than black people do on film, in particular with these films that sort of go down in film canon as being important movies.

MARTIN: Let’s hear from some other folks on this. Danielle, what do you think about this? Because I was thinking about this, have there really been that many slave movies?

BELTON: Well, I don’t think there actually has been that many. I mean, if you’re talking about it just in recent years, you have “Django Unchained,” which was like a complete fantasy. You know, it was like a Western. It was a cartoon, practically. And then you had “12 Years A Slave,” which was very serious. I think the real issue is – is that there are just so few black movies that come out. I mean, there’s more Tyler Perry movies than slavery movies, and people get equally sick of those because there just isn’t enough variety. There isn’t just enough wide a scope of black films looking at every different facet of black life in the same way you see films about white life.

MARTIN: Are you going to go?

BELTON: Oh, I’m totally going to go see it.

MARTIN: Yeah? Farajii, what do you think?

MUHAMMAD: Definitely going to go see it. But here’s the thing – you know, I feel like some of these movies – you know, I understand that there is this kind of, like, exhausting feel with it. But these movies are necessary because they continue to keep the conversation out there, especially a movie about Nat Turner, I mean, who was a rebellion leader. You know, when you have a black man producing…

MARTIN: And vilified – vilified throughout history…

MUHAMMAD: Exactly. So that’s going to really change the conversation for a lot of black children I think and certainly for black people because one of the things is that our context of race is slowly diminishing. We – you know, the Black Lives Matter movement and all of the things that we see with social justice, it seems as if that this is still – race in America is still something that we want to kind of whitewash away. And when I think of, like, “Birth Of A Nation,” I mean, juxtapose that to, you know, there’s this larger cry for confederate statues and all of these other symbols of what has happened in America in the past to be removed. And – you know, and if it’s not present, if it’s not in your face, it’s going to be forgotten.

MARTIN: Can I ask you about Kara’s other point though in her piece, which I think was that, you know, there’s something traumatic about this, about having to experience this. And there’s this – it’s traumatic for the actors. It’s traumatic for the audience. And does it really – does it really actually accomplish, Farajii, what you’re suggesting that it does, which is helping really people understand this and put it in its proper context?

MUHAMMAD: I think so. I mean, I think that if it’s not traumatic – you know, what made “12 Years A Slave” such a major film was the fact that it was brutal. It was traumatic. It was in your face, and it constantly showed that look, these things truly happened. And I think – you know, I saw – I read Kara’s piece, and I enjoyed it. And I feel, like, you know, I understand, but at the end of the day, we need to constantly put pieces out like this. And it’s going to be very important to see – or at it’s going to be interesting to see how Nate Parker’s take on it is going to be.

MARTIN: All right, hang on, wait to see when it comes out, maybe we’ll revisit this and see whether people feel differently…

MUHAMMAD: Definitely.

MARTIN: …Once people have a chance to see the movie. So Kara, thanks for writing that piece and kind of raising this issue, but let’s move on. The next week – next weekend is the Super Bowl, the matchup this year between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers. But it turns out that there are people having feelings about Panthers quarterback Cam Newton. You might remember that earlier this year, there was this mom who wrote this open letter complaining about his…

BELTON: She was so scandalized.

MARTIN: …Touchdown dance.

MUHAMMAD: Oh, my God, come on.

MARTIN: And it turns out – it seems like – you know, his personality seems to rub some people the wrong way. And he is suggesting that this is because he’s an African-American quarterback. Now, he’s certainly not the first. He’s – what? – the sixth…

MUHAMMAD: The sixth in NFL history.

MARTIN: But what do you think about that, Farajii?

MUHAMMAD: I think that, you know, when the game came down to the Panthers and the Broncos, I automatically knew it was going to be, like, old-school versus new school.

MARTIN: So you don’t think this is race?

MUHAMMAD: Now, this is race because this is, like, the “King Kong” effect. They’re creating this view of Cam Newton as they see this big scary black creature that’s going to just demolish or take advantage of this humble meek Peyton Manning. You know, retired player Brian Urlacher said that Cam Newton needed to be a little bit more humble like Peyton. Man, shut up, get out of here. Be for real. Like, this is football. It’s bold. It’s in your face. It’s loud.

MARTIN: I sure hope we can get Farajii to come out of his shell some day…

BELTON: I know…

MARTIN: …Tell us how he really feels. I just – I just feel like if we could just loosen him up a little bit, it would be so helpful. Kara, do you want to weigh in on this? What do you think?

BROWN: Yeah. Well, you know, speaking of the Seahawks, I’m a Seahawks fan. I’m from Seattle, and it really reminds me of a few years ago with Richard Sherman, where…

MUHAMMAD: Right.

BROWN: …You had very similar criticism, very similar language that was leveled against him. And there was an interview with him recently, I think, where he was asked about Cam Newton. And he said something like this is a game. And I just thought…

MUHAMMAD: Thank you.

BROWN: …That was so perfect. This is a game. These are grown men playing a game. And to act like there’s some sort of gentlemanly decorum that is necessary at all times is just silly. Like, let him celebrate. He won a game.

MARTIN: I always think that’s so funny. Like, people are mad at him for dancing in the end zone. But it’s OK when you knock somebody unconscious – that’s, like, OK.

BELTON: Right.

BROWN: (Laughter).

MARTIN: Final thing I wanted to run by all of you is that speaking of the Super Bowl, if you’re not tuning in for the game, then you’ll surely tune in for the halftime show. And this year, it’s going to feature Coldplay and Beyonce. And this week, the duo released a music video called “Hymn For The Weekend.” I’ll just play a little bit of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “HYMN FOR THE WEEKEND”)

COLDPLAY FT. BEYONCE: (Singing) Put your wings on me, wings on me when I was so heavy. Soaring in symphony when I am low, low, low, low. I, oh I, oh I. got me feeling drunk and high. So high, so high…

MARTIN: OK, so what you can’t tell from our playing it for you is that the video is set in India, and it features Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, singing through lots of scenes – you know, he’s in a cab in Mumbai, he’s watching kids cannonball into the Ganges. He’s running through clouds of colored powder. And then Beyonce has a separate kind of location. She sings the hook, but she’s kind of dressed in this lavish Bollywood-inspired gown and headdress. And people were loving it. But then it seemed like there was this – as it percolated onto the Internet, there was this whole issue around cultural appropriation. And so I wanted to ask, you know, what you all think about that. Danielle, you want to start that one?

BELTON: Well, the thing that kind of kills me about the video, it hits, like, every note of, like, this is a video about India. Look, there’s color, there’s spirituality, look – you know, they hit all these, like, very stereotypical notes. The only thing that was missing was an elephant.

MARTIN: Kara, what do you think?

BROWN: Yeah, you know, I saw – definitely when I first that, I was like ooh, not a good look, Beyonce. That was definitely the first thing I thought. I would want to defer to someone who’s actually Indian. And I saw some people tweeting, some Indian women. And they were saying something similar, where they said, you know, this is definitely a conversation to be had about what Beyonce’s doing. They – a few of them that I saw said that they don’t feel the same impact as when they see maybe a white person doing it. So I would want to differ to that.

MARTIN: But why wouldn’t you just not watch it? You see, that’s the question I have.

MUHAMMAD: Because it’s Beyonce.

BROWN: It’s hard to not watch to a Beyonce…

MUHAMMAD: It’s Beyonce.

BROWN: How do you not watch a Beyonce video? Come on.

MARTIN: She’s the only thing watchable about that, as far as I’m concerned.

MUHAMMAD: Right, it’s visually appealing.

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s a beautiful video.

MUHAMMAD: The song is just not as strong.

BROWN: It’s Coldplay, so there’s, you know…

BELTON: The song’s kind of weak. She did all she could to help that song.

MUHAMMAD: Right, right.

BROWN: Yeah.

MARTIN: All right, well, I – you’ve given us a lot to think about. That’s all the time we have for the Barbershop this week with Farajii Muhammad, Kara Brown and Danielle Belton. Thank you all so much for joining us.

BROWN: Thank you.

BELTON: Oh, it’s no problem.

MUHAMMAD: Thank you.

BELTON: Thank you for having me.

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