One of the NFL’s best it’s-never-too-late stories, Rashied Davis never played football in high school and took his first snap at West Los Angeles Community College. He moved on to a successful stint at San Jose State, though he was not always a starter. Davis, 27, caught on with the San Jose SaberCats of the Arena Football League and played three years before making the Bears as a reserve cornerback in 2005. This year he has moved to offense, which he prefers, as a receiver. He scored on a 15-yard pass Sunday.
Q. If you could meet one person in history, who would it be and what would you ask?
A. I would want to meet Martin Luther King. I would want to ask him how he dealt with all he did using non-violent protest. Everything these days is so violent. No one is going to sit back in non-violent protest, be beaten and still come back every day with the same morals and fight for the things he fought for. It’s more, if he hits me, I’m going to hit him back.
Q. Is that approach even realistic today?
A. You can live it, but it’s so hard and takes so much conviction. Seeing how I grew up [in a crime-ridden section of Los Angeles], it takes so much conviction to go out and fight for what you believe is right, take a beating and not fight back.
Q. What’s the biggest single difference in your life now that you’re in the NFL?
A. There were a lot of days when I couldn’t afford a pair of shoes. Even when I was in the Arena League, I sometimes couldn’t. You’d be out there working your butt off, and you felt like you were living check to check.
Q. What was the first thing you bought when you got your first NFL check?
A. I don’t know the exact first thing, but I know I wanted to buy my wife a new car. She had a ’93 Honda Accord she’d been driving since 1998 and had about 160,000 miles. It ran great, and we never had problems. We just sold it for about $2,000. And I’m still driving my 2001 Honda with 90,000 miles on it. The crazy thing is, we bought my wife the new car, a nice Mercedes-Benz, and that has broken down more in a year than her Honda did in all the time she had it.
