Nobody really thinks about having kids at 21. But former tight end Jeremy Shockey, who later won two Super Bowls, was extra cautious about this from the get-go.
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“I didn’t have a girlfriend when I played New York,” Jeremy Shockey said on the Club Shay Shay podcast. “I didn’t have anything. No kids, nothing. Like, you know, I got a vasectomy at a young age. … I always thought in my mind how this person plays the same position as me, he’s got more catches than me. How’s he married? He’s got three kids. How’s he juggling everything? Like I could never, I can’t do that.”
“So if I’m dating a girl here, I don’t need any of this, you know? I need to just be like a horse with blinders,” Shockey added, recalling a conversation he had with his mother.
For Shockey, football demanded everything he had, and he was not willing to let anything pull his attention away from it, noting that he wanted “no distractions.”
He painted a picture of what his routine actually looked like during those years.
“When I get home from work, I want to recover. I would sit in my hyperbaric chamber, get acupuncture, go to sleep, wake up, and do it again,” he said.
It is the kind of grind that leaves little room for much else. On the field, that single-minded approach paid off.
Shockey won the inaugural Diet Pepsi NFL Rookie of the Year award, made the Pro Bowl in four of his first five seasons, and helped anchor the Giants’ passing game for six years before later stops in New Orleans and Carolina.
Across his 10-year career, he hauled in 547 catches for 6,143 yards and 37 touchdowns, with his best season coming in 2005 when he posted 891 yards and 65 receptions. He won one Super Bowl with the Giants and one with the Saints.
Looking back now, Shockey does not regret the choice he made at 21. It was simply part of the price he was willing to pay to chase everything he eventually won.