Michael Sinclair: The Sackman -- `It's Not About Me' -- His Relationships And Faith Allow His Passion To Reach Far Afield

KIRKLAND - The Sackman makes his living tearing through NFL defenses, knocking quarterbacks to the ground. This work has earned him two Pro Bowl jerseys that hang in his family room. It also has bought him a television as big as a scoreboard, speakers as tall as teenagers and a house with a porch so enormous you can see Lake Washington, the Space Needle, the Olympic Mountains and darn near the whole rest of the world.

But as he settles down in a couch under the framed Pro Bowl jerseys, Michael Sinclair bobs his head and smiles faintly.

"It's not about me," he says.

The Sackman says this a lot. It's not about him: the sacks, the Seahawk media guide covers, the sudden acclaim as one of the best defensive ends in the NFL. Nope. None of it is about him.

Can't be. Not anymore.

"I had that `I' complex," he says, his voice rising. "If it didn't cater to me or revolve around me, guess who was unhappy? Me. And it wasn't just on the field, it was in my relationship with my wife. If it didn't center around Michael Sinclair, I had a hard time with it."

He says he doesn't like to let the public into his world. But the door is wide open and he is inviting you in. For five years, the NFL couldn't have cared less about Michael Sinclair. You had to be a desperate football junkie to have even heard the name. These days, the league wants to know something more every day. Offenses design ways to contain him. In the last 2 1/2 years, only Carolina's Kevin Greene has more NFL sacks than Sinclair's 34.

Yet this is not a simple story of a player working hard, lifting weights and watching film to finally become a star at age 30. No, when Sinclair opens the door to his life, he tells you everything - letting it flow raw and unfiltered - even the things you might not want to know.

You see, he is going to be a preacher. Someday, he is going to stand before a church with his big voice booming and sing about the beauty of God. Someday, he is going to tell his story over and over. How he thought, as a young player, he had been reborn as a Christian only to discover he really didn't know what that meant.

And how it wasn't until he met a pastor named Norm Willis who taught him the words "it isn't about me" that he finally understood he had not truly committed to the life he said he lived. Only then, when his spiritual side was in order, when he dedicated himself more than ever to his family - did his football come around. This is what he believes.

It was just before the 1995 season. Willis prayed, Sinclair believed and the injuries stopped. This couldn't be a coincidence could it? All of a sudden there wasn't pain anymore. He played better and better. And he has been unstoppable since.

"God has a sense of humor, doesn't he?" Sinclair asks rhetorically and then laughs. It sounds like a sonic wave crashing throughout the room.

Norm Willis is a man with a soft, steady voice, a peaceful brook to Sinclair's roaring river of words. The mentor picks his phrases carefully when talking about the Sackman. They are great friends, yes. Closer than he is with most of the people who come to his Christ Church in Kirkland. But there is something else he sees in the Sackman - an energy, a passion. Something he won't let go. Something he wants to mold.

Michael Sinclair is going to be one of the next men to take Christ Church's message to the world. One already has taken it to Kenya. Another has established a missionary in Costa Rica. Someday, the Sackman is going to have his congregation and he can say the same thing Willis says now over the telephone.

"We have a tendency to compartmentalize our lives," Willis says. "We have our business life, our recreational life, our religious life. Jesus' desire is to have a relationship in everyone's life. Once it gripped Michael that Christianity is something you are, not something you do - it seeped into his play. He wasn't compartmentalizing his life anymore. His life has become a unified expression, whether it's his playing, his husbanding, his parenting or whatever."

Norm Willis, the Sackman says, is the man who changed his life and made his career.

Michael Sinclair once wouldn't sign an autograph. Not because he was eating, not because his arms were filled and he couldn't reach down, but because the person didn't know who he was.

"I know you're one of the Seahawks," they kept saying "but I don't know which one." Since they didn't know, he wouldn't sign.

The thing that bothers him about the incident is that he was already a born-again Christian. The conversion came early in his professional career, at the urging of his wife, Betty, and the family of a former teammate. Yet, there he was, consumed with himself.

"You know some people can talk a good game, but once I started to walk as I talk, I had some success. That's what keeps you humble. You say, `I'm a football player,' and people say, `Oh, really? How come you don't play in the games?' It was the same thing with being a Christian. You say, `I'm a Christian,' and people say, `Oh, really? How come you don't act like one. Are you sleeping around?' "

He looks back and he sees a mass of tangled lines - his desire to become a star choking his marriage, twisting around an NFL lifestyle he wasn't sure he wanted to let go. When he looks into the past, he sees all this suffocating his career. He sees himself spraining an ankle, breaking a thumb, pulling a groin. He sees games missed and more games missed.

And then came the day he heard the words "It isn't about me." He looked and saw his wife and realized he had something more powerful than a game. He had a family. The moment he stopped caring about being a football star was the instant he became one.

Today, as he leans back and talks, two children run around the house in Kirkland - his son Johnnie, who is 2, and his daughter, Michaela, 4. He also has a 7-year-old son, Michael, from a previous relationship. Two teenagers also live with him, as well, a nephew of Betty's and another who is working with the church. The house is full of screaming voices. His teammates come over, they look around and they smile.

"It's as close to perfection as there is," says defensive tackle Riddick Parker.

First goal: All-District

Once, the Sackman didn't know anything about football. He was a junior in high school in Beaumont, Texas, and he went out for the team because he was tall and kind of fast. But he understood so little that he thought his pads went on the outside of his uniform pants. He fitted them in along his thighs, then when he stood up, the pads all fell to the floor. The first time he hit a blocking sled he broke his thumb.

Back then, his horizon stretched as far as one thing. All-District. If skinny Michael Sinclair - so weak and undersized that he never saw the ball in pickup basketball games - could make All-District in Beaumont, Texas, well, that would be about the best thing in the world.

"All I wanted to get out of football was All-District," he says. "That was the highest."

But somehow, the 6-foot-3, 180 pound weakling whose only previous experience with football was playing in the school band, became All-District. Then he found his way to Eastern New Mexico, a Division II university of little acclaim and after a couple of years, people started talking about getting a tryout with an NFL team.

The Seahawks, instead, made him their sixth-round choice in 1991. He showed up for camp wearing a pillbox haircut and driving a Ford Escort that was too small for his frame. He had to reach onto the roof of the car and pull himself out like a race-car driver. Now he has a house that stares down on half of Kirkland.

"I've always been a late bloomer," he says. "I think it comes basically from perseverance."

Perseverance has brought him to the top of the NFL at the age of 30. When the Seahawks cut him from the final roster his first season, vowing to bring him back the next day on the practice squad, he went home in tears.

It took four years filled with enough hope, doubt and injuries to finally break through. The 5 1/2 sacks he had in 1995 became 13 in 1996, 12 last year and now nine in just seven games.

His teammates shake their heads.

"My last year in Pittsburgh (1996), I was doing pretty well in sacks but I kept wondering, `Who is this Michael Sinclair whose name is right next to mine every week?' " linebacker Chad Brown says. "Then I saw him once on highlights and he wore No. 70! Real sackers wear numbers like 92, like Reggie White. But he's got some great moves.

"Much better moves than me," says Brown, who is considered one of the most athletic linebackers around. "What moves do I have? He's got tons of great moves."

Yes, he is good. Yes, he can take over a game, create chaos and make a quarterback run for his life. But none of it has come quickly. Nothing. Late bloomer on the field? Sinclair's kind of been a late bloomer at everything.

He grew up in Beaumont without a father, believing he knew what it would take to someday be a man. He saw them all, his role models; the men who prowled, the men who left their kids. This, he was convinced, was the way a man acted.

Yet there was always something about him that separated him from the others. Howard Clifton noticed. The guidance counselor at Charlton-Pollard High walked up to him one day and said, "Can I make a deposit in your life?"

"The way that child was brought up, he had every opportunity to go south," Clifton says. "He had the opportunity without a doubt. But he didn't, by virtue of his own perseverance."

People kept seeing things in him. Betty saw enough after one of Eastern New Mexico's games in Texas to want to date him. The Seahawks saw enough to keep him around year after year even when he wasn't playing.

And then three years ago, when Norm Willis came to the team's complex to run a Bible study at the invitation of the strength coach at the time, he saw something big in Sinclair as well.

These are the people Sinclair talks about now. These are the people who played a role in who he is today.

"I didn't know what it was to be a man," he says. "All I gave my wife was what I thought she wanted or what I thought other people thought. It wasn't until I made a real commitment to her that I was able to give her what she needed. It's not even about accepting Christ, it's about character. It's when I see holes and emptiness in my own life."

It's why he invited teammate James McKnight to live in his home last year, while McKnight was preparing to get married. McKnight could have lived elsewhere, but Sinclair wanted the camaraderie, the friendship. He wanted someone to touch the way others had touched him.

And McKnight smiles when he talks about his best friend on the team. "It's not the McKnights or the Sinclairs," he says. "It's just one family."

But there came another test, a chance for Sinclair to see if he truly lived the way he said he believed. It came this offseason after watching other defensive linemen, lesser defensive linemen, make more than the $1.1 million he earned from the Seahawks. Suddenly, he was filled with jealousy. He deserved more. He had been to two straight Pro Bowls, hadn't he?

So he sent word through his agent that he was going to hold out. He thought he might want to be traded.

"All of a sudden people started coming up to me and saying, `I thought you were a Christian,' " he says. "I was wrong. Self-centered would say, `Yes, you're right.' But God-centered says, `You know what? You're wrong.' There are grandkids who are not even born yet who are involved. How are you going to lecture them? How are you going to say it with something behind it? I said, `I know I'm wrong.' I needed forgiveness."

Sinclair backed off his demand a week later.

He sighs. No, it's not about him.

"You know what it's about?" the Sackman turning preacher says. "It's about relationships. When I'm on my deathbed, don't bring me five Super Bowl rings and say, `See what you did?' I say, `Show me my grandchildren. Where's James McKnight? Show me the relationships I built. Tell them Big Mike is sick.' Yes, that's what it is. Relationships."

He is smiling now. Betty is talking about their conversion and how she believes it has saved their marriage. But her husband has stopped listening. He is looking up at the ceiling, eyes focusing on nothing and there is a delightful glaze on his face. He is nodding.

"Yes, that's what it's about," he says. "Relationships.

"Relationships."