Joe Posnanski
Publication: SportsWorld / NBC Sports
Date: November 24, 2014
SAN ANTONIO – The greatest fantasy football player of them all wakes up in the middle of the night. He has lost all feeling in his arms; he can’t move them. He lies on his bed, stares at the ceiling and patiently waits for feeling to come back.
Priest Holmes talks to himself while he waits. Talks to himself. “Come on arms,” he whispers to his arms. “I’m bigger than this injury,” he says to his mind. “I’m stronger than what’s happening to me,” he says to his body. When the feeling comes back, it comes slowly, a few centimeters of life prickling at a time, and once all feeling returns he gingerly gets out of bed. There is no more sleeping this night.
Understand: This is not one specific night. This is every night, every single night since the day he retired from the NFL five years ago. The doctors don’t know exactly what to do. This doesn’t seem to be one injury, one damaged nerve, but the product of a lifetime of runs and falls and crashes. When you ask Priest Holmes about a full night’s sleep, he shrugs like you are asking about vaudeville or childhood or something else that is gone and is not coming back. He never gets a full night’s sleep. He never expects to get one again.
Housewives wrote thank you notes to him. Office workers built desk shrines to him. People around America would spend more time in the fall thinking about Priest Holmes than they would about their families. They named their fantasy teams after him – “Holmes Wreckers” and “Judas Priests” and “The High Priest of Touchdowns” – and they moved their lineups around him and they spent their Sundays shrugging when opponents took a big lead because nothing mattered, nothing at all, until Priest Holmes stepped on the field and began his weekly fantasy football scoring spree.
“I met a couple of guys, they were out in Vegas, and they told me that they had won $250,000 in fantasy football because of me,” Holmes says. “I was like, ‘Really?’ I didn’t realize fantasy football was that big. But the height of my career, I think that was the time when fantasy football exploded. I’d hear from so many people, they didn’t even know me, they would just get me by happenstance and then win their leagues and they would thank me. … I didn’t get into it myself, but I guess it made me a household name.”
In 2001, after joining the Kansas City Chiefs, Priest Holmes led the NFL in rushing. Fantasy points galore. In 2002, before he got hurt, he was on his way to the greatest season an NFL running has ever had. More points. In 2003, he broke the NFL record for touchdowns. In 2004, he was on pace to break his own record before suffering an injury that more or less ended it all. It was just three and a half years.
