And not the way he has smothered, upended and bulldozed his way to 922 career tackles with the Green Bay Packers, 394 tackles as an All American linebacker at Ohio State and 583 tackles as a two-time All-State defender as Centerville High School.
No, A.J. Hawk, now a veteran linebacker with the Cincinnati Bengals and a budding media type – “Isn’t anyone a media member if they have a phone?” he grinned – wants to tackle The Hit King on the popular podcast he now has.
On his TheHawkCast.com – which can be found on both iTunes and YouTube – Hawk has done nearly three dozen lengthy interviews with a wide variety of people from rocker Brett Michaels and golfer John Daly to film director Billy Corben (Cocaine Cowboys,) actor Brian Baumgartner (The Office) wrestler Bill Goldberg and Robert O’Neill, the member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 who claims to have shot Osama bin Laden .
“My brother (Ryan) has (a podcast) too and he’s’ doing really well with it,” Hawk said. “Someone once told him the way to talk to your heroes is to interview them.
“I’m not saying every person I talk to is my hero, but they all are interesting to me in some way.”
But Hawk has no qualifier when it comes to Rose:
“I have a bunch of guys I’d like to interview, but Pete Rose is No. 1. I’d love to have him on there. He’s been my idol since I was a tiny, little kid. Oh man, Pete Rose would be the pinnacle of a guest! To me he’s as big as it gets. That’s the man!”
When Hawk talks like that, his Ohio roots show. And that’s happening more than ever these days.
After nine seasons with the Packers – he played in 142 of a possible 144 games, was captain of the Super Bowl XLV championship team, reigns as the franchise’s all-time leading tackler and was a fan favorite for his blue collar, give-no-quarter style of play – Hawk was released in late February this year.
The Packers may have thought he’d lost a step, but it had a lot to do with dumping the contract of a veteran player.
Yet, in less than two weeks the Bengals signed him to a two-year deal worth $3.25 million.
Able to play all three linebacker positions, Hawk adds depth to a position where there are some question marks, especially with injury-riddled Vontaze Burfict still recovering from microfracture surgery.
Just as importantly, Hawk becomes a stabilizing force in the Bengals locker room.
“Any time you can add a veteran guy like that who’s achieved what he has and done it the right way, you do it,” said veteran offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth, the team’s most prominent cornerstone. “Hawk is a guy that group can look up to. He can answer their questions and becomes the guy they truly can follow.”
Back home
When Hawk takes the field for Cincinnati’s preseason opener against the visiting New York Giants on August 14, it won’t be the first time he’s worn a Bengals uniform at an NFL game.
Growing up in Centerville, Hawk won the Punt, Pass & Kick Contest three times in a row at Bengals games’ at old Riverfront Stadium.
“He represented Cincinnati once at the national competition and when you do that, they give you a uniform to wear,” said Keith Hawk, A.J’s dad.
“I had a Tim Krumrie, No. 69 uniform,” Hawk recalled with a smile. “I think my parents still have that uniform at the house.”
“I know we certainly have a picture of him in it,” Keith recalled. “He went to a playoff game in San Diego for the nationals and we’ve got a photo of Ryan and him with (Buffalo quarterback) Jim Kelly on the field.”
That was one of the last times A.J. smiled that day.
“He could have won it all with his other numbers, but he shanked his kick,” Keith said with a bit of a chuckle. “After that, you couldn’t live with him the rest of the day.”
Hawk grew up a Bengals fan, went to some games at Riverfront, attended the team’s preseason camp once when it was at Georgetown College – “I just remember watching Boomer (Esiason) go from station to station,” – and got an up-close look of the team when it came to Centerville to hold a preseason workout.
“They would take over our locker room and everything – it was crazy,” Hawk said. “The whole town would come out and watch.”
By then, Hawk was beginning to make his own name on the football field, especially after three times registering 31 tackles in a game. He then was part of Ohio State’s national championship team as a freshman, would win All-Big Ten honors the following three years and as a senior won the Lombardi Award, which goes to the top defensive lineman or linebacker in college football.
The Packers made him the fifth overall pick in the 2005 draft, signed him to a six-year, $37.5 million contract and then got their money’s worth.
The lovefest went both ways and that’s why now Hawk has nothing but good things to say about his time in Green Bay:
“It was awesome, just an unbelievable place. That’s where Laura and I got married and where our kids were brought up.”
As Keith laughingly recalled: “His daughter, their first child, was born the day before a game in Green Bay. We all raced to the hospital because Laura was having the baby sooner than we planned.
“But as soon as we got there, A.J. says ‘Wait, I’ve got to change my shirt!’ He put on a Beatles shirt and I’m looking at him like, ‘What’s going on?’ That’s when he said the baby’s name was going to be Lennon, after John Lennon.”
Three years later, in January of 2013, Laura gave birth to the son they called Hendrix, after Jimi Hendrix.
You may wonder how Hawk could relate to a guitarist who died some 13 ½ years before he was born.
“I was a disc jockey in college and I was always a bit of a music guy,” Keith said. “And more than most people his age, A.J. seemed to have an appreciation of music from older times.”
Hawk agreed: “I was a Jimi Hendrix fan in middle school. Back then my dad gave me an old school vinyl album of him and you know what? We found it again and now we’ve put it up in our son’s room.
“We googled a picture of Hendrix’s autograph and then I had my dad copy it. He signed the album something like ‘Stay Free! Jimi Hendrix.’ People see it and believe it. And I go, ‘Yeah ,my son got Jimi’s autograph in 1965.’”
As Keith put it: “Well, Hendrix isn’t gonna know.”
Now Laura is expecting again and though the couple doesn’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, they do have a name picked out, Keith said:
“I know it, but I won’t tell. I can say it’s another musician.”
New look, new team
Going back to his freshman days at OSU, Hawk has been known for that long, flowing hair that spilled out of the back of his helmet or went flying everywhere when his helmet would regularly get knocked off during violent collisions.
His other trademark was his battered nose with an ever-present scar on the bridge that made him resemble a battered pug.
As he stood at his locker in the Bengals dressing room, you saw the scar tissue – the size of your pinky fingernail – on the top of his beak.
“I’ve had it since I was a little kid,” he said. “Honestly, though, it began with chicken pox where I picked off the scab. After that, I had a long history of wearing my helmet too loose and it would blast into my nose repeatedly.
“But it doesn’t bleed really. You could probably hit it with a hammer and it wouldn’t do anything. It’s just calcified whatever.”
As for the long hair, it’s all shorn. It’s now short on the sides and combed back on top. It doesn’t reach his collar.
So this is his grown up look?
“Hey, I’m 31 and when I was 15, I looked at someone my age now like they were 100,” he grinned.
The other thing that’s different with Hawk is his public personality.
“I’ve never seen anybody who was so outwardly quiet and shy in public when he was a 17 who turned into a guy who now you can’t shut up,” Keith laughed. “He’s the most outgoing guy I know. He’s really changed.”
Some of that has to do with those podcasts. After his playing career he said he would like to be a color commentator on TV.
Besides meeting interesting people, Hawk said he wanted to do his podcasts “to get some quasi on-camera experience doing interviews, rather than just being the guy getting interviewed.”
Asked his best interview subject so far, he thought for a while and finally settled on Christopher Cassidy: “He was 10 years a Navy SEAL and now he’s been an astronaut 10 years. He’s been on two missions and outside the space shuttle multiple times. He just blew my mind.”
He said he mostly tries to avoid other athletes.
“To tell the truth, they’re usually terrible to talk to,” he said with a grin. “I don’t want to sit there listening to clichés about one day at a time….Maybe now I’m too close to sports and when I’m done with the game I’ll have on more athletes.”
Yet, his most viewed podcast did involve an athlete: Himself.
“When he left the Packers, his brother Ryan interviewed him for the podcast and A.J. was real respectful of Green Bay,” Keith said. “He had over 100,000 people watch that.
“He still has good contact with a lot of his old teammates. Three weeks ago he stayed with Aaron (quarterback Aaron Rodgers) at the Lake Tahoe tournament.
“He loved the whole Green Bay experience – his teammates and coaches and the fans. And, of course, Lambeau Field. To me it’s like the NFL’s version of going to Gettysburg.”
When A.J. got drafted, Keith and wife Judy bought a small house a half-mile from Lambeau Field.
“I’d come up there for training camp and we’d be there for every game,” Keith said. “But there was also some strategy to it. A.J. and Laura were just newlyweds and we didn’t want to have all our crazy friends and family descending on their house, We wanted AJ to be able to do is job, so we’d have them all come to our place. And it was great. People, mostly from here in Ohio, visited all the time and we had a lot of fun.
“One thing we’d always do before we left for a game was make a human pyramid and take a picture of it.
“And we had something called a Victory Shot – alcoholic or non-alcoholic depending on who it was – and we’d give this little toast I heard Clay Matthews Sr. say once. Without the expletive, here’s how it went: ‘Play healthy, play great, win the
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