Edgerrin James’ long journey ends right: The street never left him. It led him to Canton | Opinion
Wait until they see what’s driving down Main Street under the shady canopy of red maples and buckeye trees.
Canton has never seen anything quite like this. Neither has the city’s Pro Football Hall of Fame. Canton, in northeast Ohio, has a population that wouldn’t fill most NFL stadiums. It is on the edge of the state’s large Amish community with its horse-drawn buggies.
Smalltown USA and staid tradition, meet Edgerrin James.
He will be driving from Miami to the mountaintop of his sport in a custom-made, tricked-out, vintage 1975 ragtop Chevrolet Caprice. It has crazy-big 28-inch wire wheels. With gold interior. The body paint is flat black, with the Hall of Fame’s logo and artwork all across it in gold.
The sound system has enough bass to rattle teacups off kitchen shelves as it drips by.
They made “Edge” wait six years past his first eligibility to invite him to town. He’s going in style.
Well, that was the plan, anyway. ”It’ll be up there if everything goes right,” he told us.
Everything went right. He had the car shipped up while he flew in a private jet. He isn’t showing off. He’s being him. He hopes to get as many other Hall of Famers as possible to autograph his ride and then auction it off. He is a businessman now, after all. He just isn’t one who cares to be fake and sanitize the street off himself in order to be that. It was the same during his 11-year NFL career, and at the University of Miami before that, and growing up in tough Immokalee before that.
“When you look at the core of me, this is what it is,” he tells us, on the eve of his Saturday enshrinement. “If not, then it’s, ‘Who are you?’”
He has a book coming out in October. He titled it: “From Gold Teeth to Gold Jacket: My Life In Football and Business.” Perfect. He has never run away from his true self. Not when a teacher in speech class told him to enunciate more clearly. Not when the gold teeth and Rasta dreads as a No. 1 draft pick for the Indianapolis Colts were costing him endorsement money.
You cannot appreciate what Edge has attained — the pinnacle of football, where that gold jacket fits like immortality — unless you appreciate what he survived to get there.
James, describing his childhood in Immokalee, a small agricultural town full of migrant workers 90 minutes northwest of Miami, to ESPN The Magazine in 2000, very early in his pro career:
“You ever seen someone smoke crack? Where I’m from, I considered it entertainment. Me and my friends would beg for change, pool our money and buy crackheads their $5 hits — but only if they smoked right in front of us. Real fast, they’d go into this zone., acting all crazy. We’d sit on that corner and laugh all day, man. I was 10.”
At that time, big for his age, Edgerrin was playing football against guys two, three years older.
“Always played with the older people, and hung with the older people,” he says. “I was a man by middle school.”
He spent summers in the watermelon fields, earning 20 bucks for a truckload. His mother cooked in a school cafeteria until James had the sudden money to buy her way out. His father wasn’t around. He had aunts and uncles addicted to crack. Another uncle sold drugs and went to jail.
He knew addiction might be in his genes so swore to never go there.
“Don’t like things I can’t control,” he says now, at 43.
His childhood was normal to James. His world was small then.
“You don’t realize what it was like until you remove yourself and compare it to other situations,” he says now. “You can let the elements take over, or you can take control of the elements. I had the discipline and the desire to want more. Once you realize it’s possible —-- that’s all you need to know.”
That attitude made it possible. Mostly, football did. He had a gift that he spun into gold.
James was a Parade All-American at Immokalee High, where’s a living legend of sorts. He built a youth recreation center in the small town.
He left UM as the Canes’ second all-time rusher, after Ottis Anderson. His last game in the Orange Bowl, he scored the touchdown that beat No. 3 UCLA. He’s in The U’s sports hall of fame.
Then he found the map to Canton. As the fourth overall pick of the Colts, whose owner, Jim Irsay, will present James on Saturday. Peyton Manning and Edge and fellow ex-Cane Reggie Wayne helped make Indy football matter. The Colts waived him in a business move one season before they finally won a Super Bowl.
Irsay gave him a Super Bowl ring, anyway. Respect.
James would rush for 12,246 career yards, 13th all time, and is still the Colts’ all-time leader. He caught passes for 3,364 more yards. He scored 91 TDs in seven years with the Colts, three in Arizona and the last, in 2009, with Seattle.
James becomes the ninth former Hurricanes player inducted, and the first running back.
What does the Pro Football Hall of Fame mean to the kid from Immokalee?
“It means everything I did, it mattered in football. I got to the height of the high. I maxed football out. You can’t go higher.”
That same year he retired, in ‘09, his longtime girlfriend, Andia Wilson, mother of four of his six children, would succumb to leukemia. One child, Eden James, a running back in the Class of ‘22 at Port St. Lucie High, has drawn interest from Miami. Another child, Emani James, she’s studying to be a plastic surgeon.
Nowadays James has interests in business, as it suggests in the subtitle of his pending book, although pinning him down for details is as tough as pinning him down with a clean tackle in his prime.
“I’m into nightlife. I deal with the clubs,” he says. “I have my hands in some of everything. I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t do physical. I’m a master delegator.”
A few years ago James opened and owns ONE Gentlemens Club, a dance and night club in Miami. If you called it a strip club, you would not technically be wrong.
There is a photo of James at the club alongside one of his running mates, the legendary Miami rapper Trick Daddy out of Liberty City.
No, the street never did leave Edgerrin James.
It led him to Canton, Ohio, paved in gold.
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 11:10 AM.
