Washington Redskins RB Derrius Guice has everything to prove

“There’s an area down in Baton Rouge they call The Bottom. Very few young men come out of The Bottom.”

A person’s destiny is predicated on choice. And while where they start isn’t up to them, it can have a profound impact on the resolution.

Derrius Guice was born into The Bottom. Born in free fall. His parents did all that they could to provide for him, but their options were limited. As Guice explained in his edition of Hyundai’s “Rolling with the Rookies” video segment, desperate measures qualified as normalcy under the circumstances.

"[Starting out the day], we’d be like ‘man, we hungry’. We’d start looking for food. Throughout the day, we’d be starving. We would take turns going into stores and stealing food."

It was not malpractice out of desire, but malpractice out of necessity. Nevertheless, from an early age, Guice saw glimpses of a way out, flashes of hope sparked by the comments of his father, who had remarked to a young Guice that he had the strength and speed to be a football player.

At the time, it was a simple, healthy father-son exchange. But when Guice’s father was shot dead in a Denny’s, and when that death resonated, something clicked in Guice’s mind, and he became the football player that his father always saw.

He spent hours on end at the football field beside the freeway, sometimes even entire days beneath the expanse of the open sky, shuffling his feet in the crab grass as his friend tossed him a football. Maybe, on one occasion, he imagined a play inside his head. In the empty field ahead, a behemoth line of blockers, staving off a relentless defensive attack. And he would charge through the gap. Decisive. No mercy. Strength and speed. Anger.

And when he blew by the invisible front, maybe he juked the linebacker out of his shoes with a jump cut, kicking up dirt and sod from the ground below. Maybe he spun around the cornerback in pursuit. They wrapped their arms around his ankles, but he kept stepping forward. He kept his legs moving. Soon, they were gone. One man to beat, in open space. He could make him miss, but he still had a bit of anger left. He lowered his shoulder. Pads clapping, sweat spewing, and the defender was on his back. Guice was in the end zone. The roar of the crowd hit a thunderous apex, and the boy from Baton Rouge looked back.

The noise was gone. There was no opposing team. Just his friends, now dots in the distance. The sky was darkening. Far beyond the field, at the edge of the adjacent block, the street lights were glowing. An eruption of laughter broke out somewhere amongst the buildings, as the night life began to rise. The stars hovered above, seemingly unattainable. It was time to go home.

But Guice didn’t want to go home. He wanted to play football.