Urban Legends: The Hammer

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.