The Hammer
Ken Hamlin, at the time the starting strong safety for the
Seattle Seahawks, felt dizzy after the hit. He sat on the turf, gathering his
wits, under the roar of thousands cheering his brutalization of Saints wide
receiver Donte Stallworth. When Hamlin’s thoughts came back together, his
consciousness had shifted, as if one or two neurons had been redirected, a
brain cell darkened. Stallworth’s helmet lay a few feet away from him, and for
a moment Hamlin thought Stallworth’s head was severed, lying in a pool of blood
under the glaring lights. Hamlin thought about what
he heard Junior Seau say, “If I can feel
some dizziness, I know that guy is feeling double that.” Hamlin got up with the
help of fellow defensive back Marcus Trufant, who yelled, “You knocked the shit
outta him, man” over the crowd. The Saints training staff came over to help the
cringing Stallworth to his feet. Hamlin went over to make sure his victim
still had his head. He wanted to say something to Stallworth, but he bit his
mouth guard instead. Their eyes met briefly as Stallworth staggered off the
field, a trainer under each arm. Stallworth’s pupils were swollen, nearly
filling his eyes.
The vicious hit was replayed that evening on Sportscenter.
It acted as an official proclamation of Hamlin’s stardom. The Seahawks coaches
fostered his dark passion for causing injury. They nicknamed him “The Hammer”
and the name was soon picked up by the Seattle media. A legend was born.
A nine-year-old boy named Clyde Donaldson and his friends
found a body in Seward Park with several gunshot wounds to the chest, his face
the same, they said, as the face they saw on the news. When they led Seattle’s
finest to the spot where they saw the body—a two mile hike uphill through thick
Seward Park forest—it was gone. All they found was some matted-down grass and
what could have been a blood spot, but it mixed in with the mud and disappeared.
The brutality Hamlin displayed on the field never bled into
his “real” life until one
wet fall night in Seattle.
After a home win early in the 2005 season—a year after his
hit on Donte Stallworth— Ken Hamlin and his girlfriend Laura Payton began their
departure from a downtown nightclub. Hamlin played well, and his bruises were
numb from the bath he took after the game. He tried to shoulder past a tall man
who seemed to intentionally block his path.
The man in his way was Troy Williamson, the co-owner of a
small local record label, Black Dahlia Records. He had lost a promising young
rap star who called himself Spaceman earlier that day. Williamson was convinced
that Spaceman’s gritty powerhouse song, “I Got That” would push his label into
the national spotlight. The song hadn’t been released yet, but Williamson knew
gold when he saw it. Whoever signed Spaceman would lead their label to
greatness. Williamson knew his window of opportunity had closed. Spaceman had
developed a powerful brand and a loyal following himself. He had leverage, and
Williamson couldn’t outbid his competitors. He knew it. Williamson had dreams
of being a rapper in his younger years, but slowly and painfully found himself
talentless, and the shadow of that failure never left him.
Williamson did what he always did when frustrated. He went
out to the club, drank as much as he could afford, and tried to cheat on his
wife. He enjoyed the sense of power he felt when he slept with another woman.
He had only been successful a few times, a bad percentage considering how often
he felt hopeless, powerless, and alone. He stood in the doorway, flanked by
security guards paying him no attention. He clutched his drink, trying to
finish it quickly before he went outside to smoke, but the vodka tonic soured
in his stomach. He checked his watch, as if waiting for an alarm clock to beep
at a specific time. He turned around to find Hamlin the athlete, the product,
the talent, the millionaire, attempting to push by him. He glared at Hamlin and
did not move.
Despite the sighting of the body in Seward
Park, no forensics team canvassed the
forest, and no detective came near the case. It was based on the word of a nine-year-old,
and if Hamlin was involved in any way, all the better the corpse went unseen in
the woods.
Beside Williamson stood his business partner Freddy Jones. Jones
kept peeking around Williamson, his system full of cocaine, flitting over one
shoulder, then the other, looking for an escape to the rain drops flaring orange
in the streetlights outside. His only sanctuary was the studio, where he
created the best beats in the city. The problem with Jones, as Williamson well
knew, was his drug problem would never leave him. He skipped opportunities so
he could get high and to be alone. The coke, the ecstasy, they gave him too
much time to avoid the studio altogether. Jones made the beat for Spaceman’s “I
Got That”—a genius, multilayered track that Williamson thought would make Black
Dahlia Records a new force on the national stage if he could sign Spaceman and
release the song. Jones normally avoided public spaces, but tonight Williamson
coaxed him downtown with the promise of a mound of coke. Williamson couldn’t
party alone tonight.
A man claiming to be Hamlin’s brother called several local
Seattle television stations saying that Hamlin was involved in the killing. The
police were unable to track him down. The call seemed to come from somewhere
utterly beyond police jurisdiction.
Hamlin and his posse, a few friends and local toughs
protecting and accepting charity from Hamlin and his girlfriend, Laura Payton,
tried to shoulder past Williamson without acknowledging him. They pushed Jones
to the curtained wall. He politely suppressed his annoyance and said, “Excuse
me.” But when they tried to move Williamson, he didn’t budge.
A young couple said they saw a man covered in blood
wandering through Seward Park. They were on a trail heading into a clearing and
they heard him singing a song they had never heard before. They glimpsed him
through the foliage standing hunched over holding his midsection, staring at
them, dripping blood. When they tried to approach him, he disappeared.
Among Hamlin’s posse was Joseph Peters, a childhood friend.
Peters flew to Seattle from Memphis a few days before the Seahawks played the
Saints to see Hamlin play in the NFL for the first time. Hamlin and Peters were
inseparable after a bizarre and terrifying incident when they were fifteen.
They drove around drinking beer one muggy Memphis afternoon when Peters stopped
his mindless coasting to pick up a kid Hamlin didn’t recognize. The kid gave
them a few directions, then pulled a Glock from his hoodie kangaroo pocket and
fired three rounds at a pedestrian. Hamlin didn’t remember where the pedestrian
was hit, only the sound the nameless pedestrian made when he fell hard on the
pavement, and the shooter’s laughter.
Hamlin’s brutal hit on Stallworth had reminded him of that
day. He often thought about Peters’ friend when he was on the field. The memory
generated anger in him, a pitiless fury that led him to his victims, the
opposing players thinking they can score on him and make him a fool.
Williamson turned on Hamlin and told him to stop pushing.
Hamlin repeated his wish to be excused, a familiar feeling of professionalized
anger rising in his liver, an anger that his old college coach at Arkansas told
him to nurture if he wanted to succeed in the NFL. An emotion he normally kept
entirely contained in the thick white lines around the football field.
Tempers often flare up so quickly that those involved can’t
recall all the escalations that lead to violence. The old anger Hamlin buried
in his teenage years and now harnessed, returned uncontrolled. It felt like a
new drug shooting through him. Hamlin punched Williamson in the nose. The crowd
of smokers cleared a path across the sidewalk to the street. Jones, who had
somehow held off Hamlin’s crew, saw Williamson stagger back from Hamlin’s
punch, his hand clasped to his broken nose. Full of coke, energy, and strength,
Jones picked up a ‘no parking’ sign standing loosely on the sidewalk and bashed
Hamlin’s skull with it. The first blow knocked Hamlin off of his feet, and the
second made an awful crunching sound.
Jones and Williamson escaped while Peters and the rest of
Hamlin’s entourage crowded around the unconscious fallen star. Hamlin bled out
of his ears on the pavement. That is what Payton recalls most vividly, the
blood leaking out of Hamlin’s ears into a widening, rain-divoted puddle.
Minutes later howling police cars arrived with an ambulance in tow. Hamlin’s
injuries were severe: a cracked skull, bruised brain tissue, a small blood
clot, and a fractured hand from punching Williamson. He was in critical
condition for three days.
An eyewitness told Seattle Police that she saw three men
pull up to the Black Dahlia Records studio late one night. Two of them went in
and came out supporting Freddy Jones between them. Jones appeared to be
unconscious, according to the witness. When shown mugshots the witness
recognized Joseph Peters. When the police suggested that she testify in trial,
she refused and disappeared.
Hamlin sat out the Seahawks’ first Super Bowl appearance
after the altercation. His replacement, Marquand Manuel, was injured in Super
Bowl XL, forcing inexperienced practice squad safety Etric Pruitt into the
game. The Seahawks lost to the Steelers 21-10.
Hamlin walked out of Harborview hospital into the arms of
his girlfriend Payton and his mother, who had flown to Seattle from Memphis to
wait by her son.
Hamlin’s mother could tell he had changed after the head
trauma, as if some wiring had been torn and frayed. He was quieter. The pent-up
anger Hamlin used on the field seemed to lurk just under the surface of his
eyes. He was unconscious for twenty-eight hours, and no one knows, not even
Hamlin, what his mind was up to in its emergency state.
The first thing Peters noticed was the tapping. Hamlin
would tap on his food tray. One fingernail against the hard plastic. Hamlin
didn’t appear to notice, the finger seemed to tap on its own, as if trying
desperately to send a message in Morse Code. He wouldn’t talk about the night
in the club to his mother, whenever she asked she only got his eyes, which seemed
to hide embers of violence behind their dark brown irises.
Peters listened to Hamlin’s muttering when his mother went
to the hotel to sleep. Hamlin stared intently at Peters as he spoke. He kept
saying things like “disrespected me”. Peters listened.
Spaceman eventually signed with Black Dahlia Records. “I
Got That” was never released. Jones’ body was never found, and Hamlin never
spoke about the incident at the club again, nor would he say what he told
Peters at the hospital.
Hikers sometimes are lost in Seward Park, especially in
winter when darkness falls around four in the afternoon. They all find their
way out eventually, but some say they can hear someone rapping an unfamiliar
song in the forest at night. Otherwise the dead man in Seward Park keeps to
himself.
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