Source: Gwinnett Daily Post
ATLANTA — Joe Anoai never told his mother the full story behind his desire to take up football.
The 7-year-old had just watched his best friend, Henry, strap on a helmet and run headfirst into a wall.
And if Henry did it, Joe wanted to, too.
So, he ran home, burst through the kitchen door, pointed down the street of his Pensacola, Fla., neighborhood toward Henry’s house, caught his breath and stammered: “Oh . . . mom . . . I want . . . to play . . . football.”
He left out the part about head-butting walls. And for a good reason.
His mother, Lisa Anoai was — and still is — “very cautious and paranoid about her kids.”
Even today she watches her son play for Georgia Tech with her hands glued to her face, peering through her fingers at him.
“I enjoy going to the football games, but I am always real tense and worried,” she said. “I pray a lot. I always say a special prayer before the game and put it in God’s hands. I tell Him, ‘God, he’s in your hands, let me enjoy it.’”
Fourteen years ago, football sounded like a good idea to her. At least it wasn’t wrestling, the sport she married into. Her husband, Leati Anoai, wrestled professionally in the WWF as “Sika” of the “Wild Samoans” tag team. He partnered with his brother Afa.
Wrestling’s dangers never bothered Lisa during the Wild Samoans’ heyday. But once her boys started hanging out at the gym with their father, wrestling lost its appeal.
One son, Matt, eventually followed his dad into the sport. He wrestled as “Rosey” in the WWE and currently wrestles professionally in Japan.
“Now that I can barely watch,” Lisa said. “I see him climb up to the top rope and I’m like ‘Please, don’t do it.’ Or he gets thrown over the ropes and out of the ring and I just know his head is broken open, his arm is broken, he’s hurt somehow. It’s hard.”
Football kept Joe, her younger son, out of the ring. So did basketball and baseball. Lisa gladly drove Joe around to practices throughout his childhood because of it.
She even enjoyed watching him play football in the early years, although she knew nothing about the sport. She had no clue about the brief periods of controlled violence awaiting Joe in the high school and college levels.
“The kids were pretty much watched over at the ballpark,” Lisa said. “Nobody hurt each other and you didn’t see injuries. They just didn’t hit that hard.”
Actually, Joe did much of the hard hitting in the pee-wee ranks. He was bigger than the other kids, often forced to cut weight — wrestling-style — before the pregame weigh-ins.
He would run laps around the field in a trash bag, with holes cut out for his head and arms.
“I’d sweat off enough water to make weight, and right after weigh-in I’d have McDonald’s waiting on me,” Joe says. “I’m sitting on the sidelines having breakfast while everybody else is stretching. The big breakfast, a couple of hash browns and a glass of O.J.”
Anoai played running back and scored 19 touchdowns that first season. Hooked on the game, he never wrestled, aside from fooling around with his brother and father.
But those wrestling roots influenced his football development. He gave up tailback in junior high school in favor of defense, where he could deliver punishment rather than take it. He started at linebacker only to move to defensive end in high school.
And as Lisa says, the hitting — and her stress level — “got worse.”
Watching Joe play defensive tackle today, a position where he regularly takes on 300-pound linemen and running backs who barrel into him like battering rams, can be too much for his mom.
She focuses only on her son, assigning another member of the family to watch each play and fill her in on the outcome between snaps. She will watch the Georgia Tech offense — when she’s not praying for Joe’s safety.
And Joe does his part. Just like when he was 7, he hides information from mom. He downplays injuries. He shakes off a limp or ditches an ice pack when going to meet with his family after the game.
“She still knows when I’m healthy and when I’m not,” Joe said. “But I figure the less she knows, the better.”
