My phone beeped early in the morning with a message from Cam Heyward.
“Hey Mark, I know it’s early, but you want to do this now.”
I reached out to Heyward last week to see if he would talk some football. He’s one of the best guys I’ve covered during my 17 years on the Steelers, and we should be in the midst of some real football practice on the South Side this week. Also, I hadn’t talked to him since the Pro Bowl, and he always gives real, honest answers to challenging questions.
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So early one morning this week, Heyward found himself watching his youngest two kids (Chloe, 2, and 9-month-old Caia) while his wife and their oldest (Callen, 4) were out of the house. That’s when he called me.
“Watching these two is like a vacation,” Heyward said. “My boy … well, he gets everything riled up.”
So, for the next 30 minutes and with two youngsters watching a movie, we talked football and more, from his family to going back to work in a pandemic to the state of the team to how the racial tension in the country has forced he and his wife to have some conversations that they never had before.
Here is that conversation:
Football players are creatures of habit. How have you been able to balance getting ready for the season with helping care for three locked-down kids during this pandemic?
Making a plan that has ever been adjusting. Props to my wife and my family making those adjustments with me. The first couple of weeks were awfully hard. The kids were definitely seeing more of me, but we were learning. I have a 4-year-old, 2-year-old and a 9-month-old and they require attention, obviously. I have to be a dad and I have to be a teammate. I have to make sure I do my part.
I am sure all of us have been there over the past three months, but we aren’t professional athletes. Have there been times where you have to work out, you have to be on a zoom call or you have to do something football-related where you had to pull yourself away from the family?
My downtime is when I work out. I have meetings and I am running. Finding different avenues of getting done what I have to get done has been challenging. The kids go to bed around 8. You just have to be a little more disciplined during this time.
Have you made it back to the South Side facility or do you plan to when it opens?
We aren’t even allowed back unless you are rehabbing. I am just going to my weight room and getting ready in there. I am just trying to make sure when we do go back that I don’t miss a beat.
Do you have any reservations about going back to the facility or going to training camp when they give you the green light?
I hope the NFL and the Pittsburgh Steelers put us in the healthiest situation possible. I don’t know if we will have fans or not but, I just hope our livelihoods are not put in jeopardy just so we can make a quick buck and our lives are in danger. It is OK to have the Zoom calls and have different ways to get the meeting going and providing workouts for the guys that need them to get going. When we do come back, I don’t expect our level of safety and health to be jeopardized at all. There has to be a plan in place to satisfy everybody. I’d rather be really safe than not safe at all. I understand that football is a contact sport where guys are going be locked up and tangled, but we have to make sure whether it is the acclimation periods or preventing outside sources … we have to know beforehand who is exposed and how they were exposed. Those are things we have to think about going forward.
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Do you anticipate players either on your team or some around the league not feeling comfortable playing, regardless of the safety precautions?
The owners have to anticipate that. There are too many outside factors for guys to not think about that. We all have families and we all have people who we love and maybe some have older people living with us so we just don’t know everybody’s situation. To each his own. Those are decisions that each player has to make. Testing is very big going forward. If we aren’t testing properly and we aren’t testing adequately, we are going to be in for a rude awakening and back in the same situation if we don’t nip these things in the bud.
With the NFLPA, how much of a say do you have in that? If the testing isn’t where you think it needs to be, will you just say no or it has to be improved before we come back?
They have to. I understand that the economy is suffering and people are losing or have lost jobs, but we have to make sure that the NFLPA fights for the players. We talk about the safety of the game when we talk about the head. We have to take the next steps and be consistent if we every move forward because this thing isn’t going anywhere. We don’t have a vaccine. We will get to see a better picture when the NBA, NHL and baseball come back. They are like guinea pigs for us where we can observe what they are doing right and some of the mistakes they might make.
Are you happy with what the league has presented with you so far in terms of coming back safely or does it have to get better?
There is room for growth. Nothing has been decided. We are still taking in information. We have some time. I don’t think we will be getting together until training camp. The cutoff date is June 26 for anything like a real OTA or minicamp. I don’t think that’s going to happen. They’re going to have to be adjusted, and there are a lot of moving parts that go along with that, whether it is travel or people coming in and out. We share our facility with Pitt, so I don’t even know if we will be allowed to be there because I think that’s considered one business. We are going to have to find a way to be smart about this and smart for our players. I don’t want anybody to get this virus. If we want to play football this bad, guys are going to have to make sacrifices to accomplish it.
As for the football aspect of this virus and what you have been able to do, being a 10-year veteran, do you get anything out of these virtual OTAs, or is that more geared toward the younger guys?
It’s a lot more for the younger guys. Sometimes those meetings are just a refresher. I still like to participate in all of them just to understand what’s going on. We do break down tape in those meetings as well. We go back and look at past game films and see where we came up short and where we can get better. It is awfully tough when you don’t have those physical reps, especially with the younger guys. It’s one thing to see it on paper, but when guns are blazing and you are flying around is when you need to be executing at a higher level.
How do these virtual meetings break down? How long does it go?
We do four times a week for two hours.
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Oh, that’s not bad.
Yeah, not bad at all.
Your defense is pretty much intact this year, but you did lose Javon Hargrave. How much of a loss will he be?
It’s going to be tough. Hargrave is a great player. He is a player who can play multiple positions and wasn’t just a nose tackle. It’s up to the group to step up. This isn’t a one-man show. We have a guy like Dan McCullers who I think he is in his seventh year and this is his time. He either becomes our full-time nose tackle and we can supplement around him because we have guys like Chris Wormley, Isaiah Buggs and Tyson Alualu, who can play multiple positions. We can supplement him with other guys, or does Dan trickle back? That’s what we have to find out at and we won’t find out until training camp. When you look at Tyson and Dan, those are two big pieces for us. They are guys who have been in our system for a while now and Tyson has played nose before. We dressed only four or five guys before so we have the flexibility. I have confidence in those guys. I know they are working their tails off right now. We just have to make sure everybody is ready when we get back at it.
How is Stephon Tuitt doing? He’s not a guy who is going to post his workouts on Instagram to let everybody know how far along he is in his rehab.
I think Tuitt is going to be ready. He had to get his pec right and get through the rehab, but he was progressing nicely this offseason before the COVID shut it down. We all went to Dallas and trained together, and he has come a long way. Tuitt wants to get back to the group, and the group needs him.
So what were your thoughts when you saw Ben Roethlisberger’s video of him throwing the ball at that high school. Were you aware that he was as far as long as he appeared to be?
I didn’t know at what level he was with his rehab. He has been doing rehab and improving consistently. It was nice to see him out there and throwing like he was, especially during these times when you can’t see how much a guy is improving. I know he was having a lot of discomfort in that arm so getting that surgery relieved a lot of things.
When you look back at last year when it came to your defense, you knew going into a game that if you gave up more than 17 points, you likely would have a tough time winning. Looking back, how difficult was knowing that one mistake could cost you the game?
We got to a point where we had to score or keep them off the board. We are not a group that says this is going to be difficult. We are a group that says this is possible so we have to make it happen. We accepted the cards we were dealt with and understood that we couldn’t surrender a lot and we had to come out of the gates flying because we didn’t have that luxury of having all of our pieces. I know losing Ben was tough, but we also lost JuJu (Smith-Schuster) for some of the year, James and lost (Maurkice) Pouncey a little bit due to the suspension. Ramon (Foster) was dealing with injuries, too, so we had a lot of things on the offensive side of the ball that wasn’t ideal. We had to accept it, move on and see if we could change the outcomes.
Is that a mentality you can use again this year even though you might not need to be so extreme with not allowing teams to score to win?
Now that we know it is possible, I have challenged the group to do even more. Have that sense of urgency of not allowing ourselves to get into holes and think the offense is just going to carry us. We can be the determining factor to get the ball to the offense more. If Ben doesn’t have to go 80 and he can start at the 40 going in, we can all agree that we are going to get seven more times than not. That’s going to be the challenge of the group and it’s my job to push them. We have done it before so why not do it again?
With protests that are going on in this country, we have seen more and more athletes speak out about racism and social injustice. We also have seen some say that pro athletes should, for a lack of better terms, stick to sports. Why do you choose to use your platform to speak up?
We are all citizens of this country and to just say guys should be quiet is foolish. We all have things that we care about and we all have different stories, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to live your life in this country. We have the opportunity to use our platform about things we care about. I don’t think my job should determine how much I speak. Everybody has a social media account. If you want to listen, you listen. If you want to partake then you partake. That’s the choice you have. These past couple of weeks have been a real eye-opener for a lot of people, giving people their platforms to speak. I just appreciate that. As a country, we are learning more and more. If we are having uncomfortable conversations then that’s good.
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Have you ever encountered you being a victim of racism or social injustice yourself growing up where maybe you weren’t sure what it was at the time, but looking back on it you realize that something wrong happened?
As a black man, I have experienced things that not everybody experiences. Just because I am a football player doesn’t change the color of my skin. It doesn’t have to be a cop, but we all have had our experiences. I was fortunate enough to have my dad play sports my entire life, but we all come from different walks of life. I know we play a game we love and get paid very well in doing it, but that doesn’t change our experiences. I have had a lot of teammates who came from different economic systems that might be looked at as a rags-to-riches story. It doesn’t change how they grew up and how they interacted with racism and discrimination. Just because we have a spotlight on us now doesn’t deter how we have been treated in the past. I always try to judge people off of their character and my interactions with them. I don’t have those preconceived notions of how somebody looks. I am black, but my grandmother is white. My wife is white. We are having more and more conversations about race. One thing that has been good for us is yes, our country is hurting and we experiencing racism at a high level, but I am having talks with my wife about my children because they are mixed and they are going to be dealing with things in the future that she may not have always understood. We are growing as a family because of this.
Does it make you mad, angry, sad? What emotions are you dealing with when you see what’s happening?
I was just hearing about when my grandmother used to protest with her mother. She was a baby at the time and she was in a stroller. My grandmother met my mom’s dad protesting. I have (grandparents) who both were teachers in the City of Pittsburgh and very diverse. My grandfather was on the school board for Pittsburgh and always giving back to the community. Seeing us taking steps back, still dealing with the same racism, is disheartening.
Has Mike Tomlin addressed the team as a whole about the protests?
Coach Tomlin is still trying to work through it and still trying to make his views, but I can’t speak for him. He is his own man and everybody reacts differently. We can all agree that we are all hurt by what’s going on.
(Photo: George Gojkovich / Getty Images)
