[h1]Bryant McKinnie: a gentle, partying giant[/h1] [h3]By DAN LE BATARD[/h3][h3]
[email protected][/h3]
It is 3 a.m., and I'm standing outside the W hotel on South Beach with a couple of Super cartoons.
To my right, there is a giant partyer. Literally, a giant. He issix-foot-eight, 355 pounds. I can make the argument he is the biggestand most infamous partyer in our celeb-soaked town this week --certainly the most infamous one in this section of the newspaper. It ishard for someone this large to vanish, but Bryant McKinnie somehowmanaged it as the only guy dismissed from this year's Pro Bowl becausehe kept missing obligations without officials knowing how or where tofind him. He says, hurt and a little sad, that it was all a terriblemisunderstanding.
To my left, there is LIL' Kim. She is veryLIL. Four-foot-nine. I don't think there is a smaller celebrity sexsymbol in the world unless you count the font that Prince uses as hisactual symbol. LIL' Kim is the size of something McKinnie might tattooon his arm, only with more cartoonish breasts. It is impossible toarticulate the amount of effort that had to go into squeezing her intoall her sparkles and makeup and a dress that appears to be made ofaluminum -- rapper in a wrapper, must have taken 10 people 10 hours towrap her.
McKinnie and LIL' Kim are starting theirevening now at 3 a.m. -- going to P. Diddy's party at Cameo nightclub,or did that go without saying? -- and yet I'm somehow disappointed,even though they've invited me along to partake in what will be, bynight's end, 36 bottles of champagne.
But I was really hoping for a bus full of strippers.
(There's a life lesson in there somewhere, kids, about reducing your expectations so you reduce your disappointment.)
Allow me to explain: McKinnie, the Minnesota Vikings offensive tackle,is a man of substantive appetites. It is hard to articulate howimpossibly thick he is in person. He has size 18 feet. His hands are soenormous that, when he closes one, you can no longer see any part ofhis Blackberry in it. He's Shaq thick. He didn't allow a sack hisentire college career at the University of Miami, not even in practice.I thought it'd be funny and colorful and real to drink a bunch ofalcohol with him and write about it for you. Document Super excess. Orperhaps you would have preferred a break down of the zone the Saintsdefensive coordinator plans to use in the second quarter Sunday?
McKinnie, like a lot of athletes, doesn't have much interest in themedia, especially not now. We are flies around an elephant's tail inthe best of circumstances, but we'll climb uncomfortably into yourprivate regions when the scent of scandal appears. So he probablywasn't going to be OK with a writer chronicling him throwing dollarbills in the air at South Florida's most crazed strip club this week,especially not when NFL employers are a lot more dedicated to sellingyou polished corporate image than anything that resembles the sexy andviolent truth about this game and this week.
Cute Peyton Manningcommercials are easier to digest than the totality of someone asthree-dimensional as McKinnie, which is convenient enough but also thereason that the gluttony of Tiger Woods ends up surprising America. AsJoumanna Kidd, scorned ex-wife of NBA star Jason Kidd, said afterfinding her husband's secret prepaid cellphone with dozens of secretfemale names: Sometimes success takes men to places where theircharacter can't keep up.
Making matters more difficult, aboutthe only time someone as anonymous as an offensive lineman can evermake national news is the way McKinnie has -- negatively. That'll makea man hate us very quickly, or at the very least distrust us, and withgood reason. McKinnie has made national headlines three times -- withthis Pro Bowl incident, with a sex scandal on a boat that involvedactual Vikings and with a four-game suspension after a bar fightdescribed thusly by one newspaper:
``McKinnie went to anotherclub across the street, but returned to Club Space at 6:30 a.m., whenhe struck the bouncer in the face before hitting him in the back of thehead with an isle pole. Police responding to a report of the fightarrived to see McKinnie screaming obscenities and throwing punches atthe bouncer. Police ordered McKinnie to stop beating the man, butMcKinnie refused to comply. McKinnie then made a failed attempt atescaping on a charter bus.''
That last sentence is my favorite.
I wanted on that bus.
The Super Bowl is an insanity of excess. Keep in mind, I was once withRicky Williams when the night got so out of control that he woke up at6 p.m. the next night at the home of Eric Clapton and stumbled into thekitchen to find breakfast-dinner being made by a group of people thatincluded Dennis Rodman and a transvestite. So what might I find in theswirl around this giant's party? Or ``The Big Mac Experience,'' asMcKinnie likes to call it.
I called Luther Campbell, thegodfather of hip-hop in South Florida. Quietly -- or maybe not soquietly, given that his explicit rap lyrics made it all the way to theSupreme Court -- Campbell has more power over former UM players thananybody in this city. He does extraordinary work with inner-city kidsthrough football, and he helps these Miami kids before a lot of otherpeople start loving them, so most of them will do just about anythingfor him.
(Ridiculous aside: Campbell likes me for some reason.Don't ask me why. I was actually at his wedding. Sat at a table with DJJazzy Jeff and Slick Rick. It was the single whitest moment of my life.)
``You want to get on the love bus?'' Campbell laughed. ``That bus is too wild for even me!''
Campbell worries about McKinnie. Wants him around fewer leeches.Doesn't like that he'll blow $20,000 a night on fun, as he will laterthis evening when he buys 36 bottles of champagne at Cameo but loseshis bottle war to New York Jet Braylon Edwards, who buys 51. It is aninteresting thing to hear, the rap star as a mature older figure,especially when Campbell is the guy who patiently explained to me forthe first time that ``making it rain'' was throwing dollar bills in theair around naked strippers.
``You aren't going to make it rainwith McKinnie!'' Campbell howled. ``You aren't going to make itthunderstorm! You are going to make it tsunami!''
Campbell hung up. I got a text a few minutes later from McKinnie.
``We'll meet later,'' it read.
It wasn't going to be that easy, of course. ``Later'' is kind ofopen-ended. The guy was dismissed from the Pro Bowl, for the love ofGod. He probably wasn't just going to responsibly drive to my house inhis Love Bus. We must have texted 20 times over two days until I wasfinally informed by him that a convoy of SUVs was headed my way. Andthen I still couldn't find him for a few hours, until I walked into thebar of the W hotel and saw a mountain wearing a sweater. I reached upand slapped him on the back/shoulder, assuming a camaraderie from texttalk that clearly wasn't there. He did not turn around. Nor was hereally expecting me, evidently. Nor had he thought about me sinceagreeing to see me a few hours ago, it would appear. It was anunbelievably wide and strong back, a fact that dawned on me rathersuddenly (a primitive animal instinct, something between fear andterror) when his posse just stared at me after what I had done, anotherclown trying to make his way into their circle of pretty women and funby . . . hitting their giant in the back? I tapped McKinnie on the backagain, more gently this time, and awkwardly tried to introduce myselfabove the music like the dork that I am.
He just stared at me.He let me ramble about what I wanted to write -- the life of a star andhis mobile party. I stammered for a good three minutes because McKinniehad a totally blank look on his face. Evidently, Campbell hadn't toldhim what I wanted to do, just that I wanted to talk. I could feel mytoes curling into the carpet through my shoes as I explained, yeah, um,bottles and models and. . . . I could feel my face going warm and, themore I noticed that, the harder it was to keep the sweat from formingon my temples. McKinnie is used to being approached for interviews inthe locker room, not when he has a drink in his hand and is surroundedby party people. He didn't say a word.
I don't know whether itwas the volume of the music or my general awkwardness or just how manypeople a day approach a millionaire with needs, but McKinnieinexplicably understood that what I wanted to do was . . . sell himreal estate.
Seriously.
He thought I was trying to sell him a plot of land.
I, ladies and gentlemen, am allegedly a professional communicator.
``Sorry,'' he said. ``I thought you were somebody else continuing a different conversation I had today.''
Truth is, I probably would have had better luck selling him Evergladesswampland than selling him my idea. Hell no, he wasn't going to go toKing of Diamonds strip club with me, so I could write about it forSouth Florida, his employer and the NFL to read, even though it is alllegal and real and King of Diamonds has hosted more Pro Bowlers thisweek than the game itself. Once McKinnie heard Campbell's name, whichhe evidently didn't the first two times I said it, he thawed.
But he was more curious about what my younger brother was doing. Mybrother is an artist who goes by LEBO. He is a lot more interestingthan I am. Cooler, too. I had invited him to trail me this week and addillustrations to my words, so he was sketching nearby. McKinnie grabbedhis sketchbook and, page by page, very slowly amid this swirl ofchatter and music and sexy, considered each sketch. He did this forseveral minutes. It was pretty obvious he was more interested in mybrother's prism, innocent and new, than what he had to assume, givenhis public scars, was my clichéd media desire to detail +%%# andscandal.
My brother knows next to nothing about sports. So hekept asking what I thought were the dumbest questions. But McKinnie wasfar more engaged by them than he was by anything I was saying. So, ifhe had to be any kind of animal, he would be a bear. And, if he hadn'tbeen born so giant, he probably would have gone into music.
Mybrother asked if he was a linebacker, but McKinnie patiently explainedhis job as left tackle thusly: ``I'm the bodyguard, and everyone istrying to assassinate my president. The quarterback has four other guyson the security detail. Five security guards. I'm kind of the boss ofthe security guards. I protect the spot my president can't see.''
He protects Brett Favre, I said.
My brother shrugged. The name didn't mean anything to him. McKinnie laughed.
``The guy from the Levi's commercials?'' McKinnie helpfully added.
That didn't help.
It had to be funny to McKinnie, given the sports media's myopicobsession with Favre this year, that this guy drawing about the SuperBowl didn't know Favre. And encouraging. Maybe people outside thissmall, narcissistic world of sports hadn't heard about his public shame.
McKinnie said he wanted to play in the Pro Bowl, his first, especiallysince it was in Miami. But the pain wouldn't let him, and he backed outthe wrong way. He just told his agent at 9 p.m. one night andconsidered the matter done and blew off all the responsibilities of thenext day, figuring his agent would contact the proper parties. It's notlike he just went drinking for days, he said. He wanted to explain itall through Twitter, without the media running it through its ownfilter, but the Vikings asked him to please stay the heck off thatcontraption since he'd been tweeting about going from party to partywhile his Pro Bowl responsibilities were being blown off.
``People question me by saying that, if I was in so much pain, Ishouldn't be going out,'' McKinnie said. ``Come on. Standing here andhaving a drink isn't the same as trying to block someone who is 300pounds. You would have thought I committed a crime. I had to turn theTV off. It was a long season, and I'm hurt. I've broken my hands andplayed. I've vomited on the sidelines and played. I've dislocated myfingers and played. I'm hurt.''
He looked down at his size 18s.
``When these hurt, I'm in trouble,'' he said. ``And they hurt. I wasfine for a few days, but just because of the Toradol. Then it woreoff.''
Toradol?
``Anything that ails you, it takesthe pain away,'' he said. ``Some guys take a shot every week; shot inthe butt, burns for 10 seconds. I usually don't do it because you haveto sign a release for the side effects, but we were a game away fromthe Super Bowl.''
McKinnie seems docile when he's not playing.Gentle, even. He speaks very quietly. He was in the band in highschool. And now here comes his party partner for the night, this tinylittle thing with the big personality, wearing so much perfume you cansmell her from another ZIP code.
``He's one of the best guys Iknow,'' LIL Kim says of McKinnie. ``Honest, sincere. He has hispriorities right. Big heart. Nice guy. Likes to take care of hisfriends and make sure they have a good time.''
She stops for some reason. She knows how glossy and superficial and incomplete entertainment is.
``I could be wrong,'' she says. ``Who knows what is really is someone else's brain?''
King of Diamonds
