He agreed to chat, however, in part because he knows he's talking to a kindred spirit. 'Nobody's life will ever be the same there. 'It pretty much brought back everything that happened to me,' Lacy says of Hurricane Harvey. The recent hurricane disaster scenes opened up some of those old wounds. It took years for him to sort through the impact of that upheaval. In part, that's because he stopped opening up to people when he was in high school, shortly after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his house in Gretna, Louisiana, upending his family's life and leaving him with no emotional anchor, no real place to call home. It's uncomfortable for Lacy to delve into all this, to put his struggle into any kind of context that feels relatable. It's just more the negative things that are going to come.' 'Because it's like, if you don't make it, what happens? Clearly you don't get the money, but whatever. 'I hate that it has to be public,' Lacy says. Even his agency tweeted it out when he passed the first two weigh-ins, despite the fact that its client was hardly thrilled to share the news. But the first time he weighed in, he remembers the result getting out within 20 minutes. He assumed the weigh-ins would stay private, between the team doctors and Seahawks coaches. Instead, the monthly ritual of turning his weight into a public spectacle began to feel a bit like a public shaming. He stood to make $55,000 every time he hit a weight goal, but at some point he started to feel indifferent about the money. When Lacy left the Packers in free agency and signed with Seattle, agreeing to periodic weigh-ins as part of a one-year contract laden with incentives, his fight to shed the pounds he'd put on after ankle surgery became something of a recurring national joke. I wish I could understand what they get out of it.'

It kept showing up in his feed, an endless cycle of snark, rebooted each day. He chuckled at first, but the collage also stung. 'There is no way around it, I love sesame chicken and shrimp fried rice so much. 'I always called it China food,' Lacy, 27, says with a grin. They screenshotted every tweet and made a collage that quickly went viral. Someone searched through his Twitter account and noticed that back in college he had an affinity for Chinese food, and he loved tweeting about it. In the meantime, people photoshopped pictures of Lacy's stomach to make it seem like he had a Santa Claus physique. If anything, they multiplied.Īnd while he lost weight - albeit slowly - getting down to where he wanted (around 240 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame) and keeping it off was a miserable slog during his Packers years. Can a 17-year-old Korean girl change that?Įxcept they didn't fade. Thompson: Inside the Indians' clubhouse during their historic streakįleming: Astros' fight to bring hope to Houston

If he worked hard, got back in shape through yoga and P90X, maybe then the jokes would fade. Responding would only give his tormentors a smirk of satisfaction, knowing they'd wounded him. When the internet turns one of your most personal flaws into a meme, how the hell do you possibly escape it?Įver since his weight became a public topic during his four years in Green Bay - which included two 1,100-yard seasons - Lacy had read those kinds of comments and brooded in silence, convinced he couldn't win. 'Like I could tweet, 'Today is a beautiful day!' and someone would be like, 'Oh yeah? You fat.' I sit there and wonder: 'What do you get out of that?'' 'I could pull up my Twitter right now and there would be a fat comment in there somewhere,' he says. Social media has done wonders in recent years to bridge the gap between fans and professional athletes, but increased intimacy comes with drawbacks, and nobody understands that better than Eddie Lacy. There is a good chance, each of us concedes, that this interview will just give his trolls a fresh batch of ammunition. Lacy had to think long and hard before agreeing to meet up and talk like this. As Lacy speaks in an affable baritone, he holds the towel gently in his thick hands, occasionally massaging it like he wants assurance it's still there.Įventually he explains that he gets nervous when he does interviews, and he sweats when he gets nervous. We find an empty bench, near the playground, and take a seat. It's a small towel, tan and about the size of a dishrag. When new Seahawks running back Eddie Lacy climbs out of his Corvette and waves to me in a park near his condo, I notice he's brought a towel. It's 75 degrees and beautiful in Renton, Washington. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Oct.

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