Charles Woodson

This article is taken from www.espnmilwaukee.com.

Tuesdays With Wilde: Charles Woodson

Every Tuesday, we’ll sit down with one of the Packers players, coaches or administrators and spend some time getting a small glimpse into their lives away from football. This week, it’s veteran cornerback Charles Woodson, who, let’s be honest, needs no introduction.

I never say never. I said I’d never play in Green Bay, but I’m here. So I’ll never say never again. I’m just trying to be a good teammate. I’m trying to do my job on the field the best I can and that’s really what can be expected of me, so that’s what I’ll continue to do.

The Super Bowl is the only reason why I play. Well, I get paid well, let me take that back. I’ll take that back. I do play to get paid. But I’ve made a lot of money in this league. And at this point, the only thing left for me, really, as a player is to win the championship. And being close and being there and not winning is just not enough. I want to be a part of a great team and to be a part of a great team, you’ve got to win the whole thing. That’s the only way you secure the fact that people will talk about your team for years to come. There’s no question there’s a little desperation there as far as a championship is concerned.

I’ve learned that you can’t please everybody. I think all of us try to a certain extent, but you always seem to get burned somehow, trying to help somebody or do something for somebody. A lot of times, you don’t even get a thank-you, and whatever you do, it’s not enough. You figure out real early that you can’t please everybody.

The one thing you can’t do in the NFL is take being in the NFL for granted. Anything can happen, as far as injury, you may fall out of favor with an organization – anything. Just being here, being in the NFL, you can’t take it for granted. I’ve never taken it for granted. I think the way I play speaks to how I feel about the game. I’ve never taken for granted being here.

I drive a Lincoln MKS. The payments are low.

I’m a Young & the Restless guy. I like CSI, too – Miami and New York. House, too. I TiVo Young & the Restless and I check it out whenever I can. In college, I was big on Days of our Lives. Then I kind of fell off of that one with the whole demon possession thing years ago. I always kind of watched Young & the Restless, but I became a bigger fan once I got out of college. Right now, Victor seems like he’s on his death bed.

My iPod has anything Jay-Z has done and a lot of R&B. I’m into a lot of Carl Thomas, Avant, Mary J. Blige, Jill Scott.

My favorite movies are Life, with Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy, Deep Cover with Laurence Fisburne, and Casablanca. I just recently watched that one about a year, year and a half ago. Great movie. Classic.

I had a roofing job in high school, and I knew I didn’t want to do that. I knew early on that I did not want to do that. That was a tough job.

I’m not always reading, but I do read. The last thing I read was Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton. I just ordered Dr. Cornel West’s memoir. I just ordered that. I think that if I could just sit around him and listen to him talk, I would do that in a second.

I’ve got no time for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, any of that stuff.

I have an iPhone, but I don’t talk a whole lot on it. More texting. The app I probably use the most is the Check Please app, where you calculate the tip. I use that all the time.

My Heisman Trophy is at my mom’s house in Florida. It still means a lot to me. It symbolizes when you win. When you win, everybody gets rewarded. If you’re in the NFL, everybody gets paid. We won a lot of games that year, won a championship, and the Heisman Trophy was just the icing.

Fans don’t know how much I really want to win a Super Bowl. Because that’s your one chance to really say you were great. If you don’t win one, a lot of people question whether a guy was great or not, for real, whatever. But as far as being part of a great team, that’s the only way years from now that you know that your name and your team are solidified in history.

I love making wine. I’ve gotten a chance to meet a lot of interesting people, traveling around, talking about it and just letting people know my passion for it. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m proud of it, because it’s like anything – it’s taken a lot. A lot has gone into it. And it’s just now coming to fruition. But years of planning have gone into it.

My favorite moment as a Packer hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t had that moment yet. I think that’s to come.

One thing on my bucket list is 40 interceptions. I’ve got a chance at that. I’ve got 39. There was a time in Oakland when I never thought I’d get there. But it was always a number in my head, where I thought, ‘Man, if I can just get to 40.’ So, we’ll see how that goes.

My best quality can also be my worst quality. They’re one in the same, kind of. I think a lot of times, maybe I’m a little too forward in how I handle things or how I handle people. I think that’s good, in the respect that they know where I’m coming from, but bad in that not everybody can handle it.

The best thing about being a dad is the fact that no matter what goes on here, on the field, wherever, when I go home, all else is secondary. That one moment when he looks at you and smiles, it’s, ‘This is what life is all about.’

My mom is an amazing woman. There’s not one specific thing she said that stands out, but my mom worked hard. Growing up, I always remember, she worked two jobs – three if she had to. Later on, she got a job where she was working 14-hour days, all week. And she never complained about it. I complain a lot about s—t around here, but I always get my work done, whatever I’ve got to do. It didn’t matter to her. Whatever she had to do to make sure my brother, myself and my sister were taken care of, whatever we needed or had to have, she went about her business and made it happen. If she had it to give, she was going to give it.

As a kid, I wasn’t all that different than I am now. I was always very smart, I was always the type where you couldn’t just tell me to do something. There had to be a reason. You had to tell me why I was doing it, and it had to make sense to me. That hasn’t changed – at all. I was always that way.

I always pray before I go to bed. I think as I’ve gotten older, I think you question it a little more. Growing up, I knew one way, I knew one thing, and that was it. So I never varied from it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve questioned things a little more, I’ve read into things a little more, asked more questions. I definitely believe in a higher power, there’s no question about that. How we all got here and that whole thing, those are the things I think about now more than I ever have.

Oakland is a distant memory. My time there definitely shaped me. I loved my time there. I never thought I’d leave. I thought I’d be an Oakland Raider forever. But it just seems so long ago since I’ve been there, since I’ve put on the silver and black. I rarely, rarely, rarely think about it now. I think about it now and then when I’m talking to Willie Brown, or if I’m texting with Nnamdi Asomugha, I think about it, but it seems like so long ago.

I should own stock in the Republic Chophouse, I’m over there so much. It’s right downtown, and I live right there. So I walk over twice, three times a week.

My favorite NFL city to play in is Kansas City. Not as far as sightseeing or anything like that, but the toughest games, the most fun was playing the Chiefs. It was always a great place to play football. The atmosphere, from the end of the national anthem where they go, ‘Go Chiefs!’, that was pretty special.

Al Harris is my closest friend on the team. Other than my fiancée, my cousin James is my closest friend outside of football. We have some business interests together, we lived together when I first got to the NFL.

To me, the key to success is understanding that you can’t do it yourself. You’re going to need somebody at some point. Not that I had to learn that, but I had to realize it. I think a lot of times, we like to think we did things all on our own, but when you look back at things, you realize you didn’t.

I’m not one of those guys who believes everything you tell me.

If I was an actor, I couldn’t have asked for a better script than ending up here in Green Bay.

This is a Buddha quote: Not even death should be feared by the man who lives his life wisely.