INDIANAPOLIS -- Colts receiver Parris Campbell was watching Monday Night Football with his wife in his suburban home when Bills safety Damar Hamlin took a hit that made his body fall limp. Out came the ambulance as players took a knee and burst into tears.
Campbell turned to his wife, Taylor, and together they said a prayer:
“Any time you see something like that, you think about yourself,” Campbell said. “We all play the same game Damar does. I think about his family. You think about your own family. You really think about what this game really is and the risks that you go through.”
Hamlin's fall froze the NFL community in its tracks. They clung to news about his state, from the CPR to the ambulance ride to the moment Thursday when he opened his eyes again. In the meantime, the world got to learn about the risks the players accept to provide entertainment, a conversation Campbell has with himself all the time.
Campbell believes something bigger is happening here. He sees it in the way the world froze, how it turned to $7 million in donations to Hamlin's toy drive in just a few days.
“When something like this happens and it really shakes the whole world, it’s really just a time for the world to shift," Campbell said. "Whatever anyone’s focused on that doesn’t matter. And it just shifts and allows us to come together.
"You pray and you wish traumatic things won’t happen, but when they do, you can really see a nation come together under one cause.”
Hamlin's fall just happened to come in the final week of the regular season for teams like the Colts, who aren't headed to the playoffs. It's a forced reflection of the journeys to get here, what they risked along the way.
Campbell has plenty to reflect on. After all, Sunday will be his 17th game of the season. It's a 17th game back from the pain and the loneliness and the questions and the doubt, to a place he promised himself he'd go.
Don't tell him this isn't important.
"When we talk about rolling over, that’s something that I don’t think is appropriate," he said. "We don’t take that lightly.”
Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Parris Campbell is tied for the team lead with three touchdowns and ranks second in catches and yards.
Campbell has ridden the waves this year, his first healthy season in the NFL and the worst for the Colts in a decade, with the help of a growing family.
He has a wife, Taylor, who he met at Ohio State. He has a 4-year-old son named Kai who dresses up in a Colts jersey and wants to mimic his every play. He has a daughter named Skylar who was born in the spring.
Around the time she entered the world, Campbell launched a YouTube docuseries called “Kickin’ It With the Campbells,” which told about his rehab from knee and foot surgeries through the lens of the family that kept him bright.
“My injuries are some of the darkest times in my life,” Campbell said.
Said Zack Swartz, the docuseries director: "There were layers to his story. I think a lot of times athletes talk about adversity and a lot of athletes go through that, but I really thought that Parris had a legitimate story to tell.”
The docuseries had Campbell sitting down and reliving his path to now. The show begins with him watching the video from draft night, back when a kid who’d just welcomed a son into the world saw his family explode around him as the Colts took him in the second round.
By the end of the video, the tears are flowing without control, and he’s wiping them with the backs of his hand.
“It was just so much that was pent up inside of me,” Campbell said. “When you’re cooped up and you don’t let it all out, you think it’s good for you at the time, but in reality, so much stuff gets built up. You feel like your back is against the wall and you get suffocated by that stuff.
“It ended up being this therapeutic session for me.”
Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Parris Campbell only played 15 games in his first three seasons before making it to 17 in his contract year.
Those conversations, plus a strong faith, pushed him through the speed training at an Exxos Center in Arizona, where he was determined to return a surgically-repaired foot to 4.3 levels. He was training out there when he received news that his college quarterback, Dwayne Haskins, had died while training in Florida.
This spring pulled out all the raw emotions Campbell had left and put them on display for him and the world to see. It made his injuries an ongoing dialogue, a group wellness check on his state of mind.
“The big thing is confidence,” Campbell said. “You can’t think, ‘Oh, this is going to happen again. It’s going to happen again.’ You cannot think that. You cannot fall into that trap.”
But that’s what fans filled his Twitter and Instagram with at times, so confident that the player who had managed just 15 games in three seasons was always going to break.
So, he chose to speak this into existence: He said his goal was to play all 17 games.
He started by stacking those days in the spring, one after another, without any injuries flaring up. He never missed a day of training camp, and by the first week he'd found a little something with Ryan out of the slot.
The games arrived, and he began to cut on that knee a little harder, get to his landmarks a little faster. The Colts began to find him the ball. He’s up to 57 catches for 581 yards and three touchdowns, trailing only Michael Pittman Jr. in any of those categories. He's more that doubled his career production in a single year.
On a team with mounting injuries, Campbell has become a symbol of rehabbing back to strength. When rookie tight end Drew Ogletree fell to the grass with a torn ACL in training camp, the player kneeling closest to him was Campbell.
"It made me feel like I was a part of his family,” Ogletree said. “Seeing him gives me hope that I can still come back and be the player that I was."
Campbell’s best has come in a season of Colts’ worst. They are 4-11-1 with the worst offense in the NFL. They have fired a coach he grew close with in Frank Reich and benched a quarterback he dreamed big dreams with in Matt Ryan.
And yet...
“Man, I’m having a blast,” Campbell said. "This is what I signed up for. This is what I’ve dreamed of doing.
“When it was some of the stuff I was dealing with – broken bones, taking a hit to the knee, brute force – that’s really something I couldn’t control. I think I was catching some unlucky breaks. But it is what it is. It’s a part of my journey and a part of my story. But the way I prepare and the way I take care of myself, I knew the root would show eventually.”
The losses sting, and he's fighting the urge to bring those home to his wife. He's not used to it after losing six games in five years at Ohio State. His Colts are on a six-game losing streak now.
Sunday against the Texans will be another chance for his son to arrive in a No. 1 Colts jersey and for his dad to prove that he belongs. That this year didn't break everyone, and it couldn't break him.
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01-06-2023, 03:36 PM
How Parris Campbell fulfilled a 17-game promise to himself
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