Terry Crews had an art scholarship to Western Michigan before he ever had a football one, and that order alone should wreck the version of this guy sitting in your head. He wasn’t a jock who picked up a paintbrush later for fun.
The paintbrush came first.
According to Wikipedia, Crews spent a summer at Interlochen Arts Academy before college, then enrolled at Western Michigan on an art scholarship. He didn’t even try out for football until after his freshman year was already in the books. The athletic scholarship came second, and only because he walked on and earned it.
That order is exactly why this thread keeps going viral. We’ve decided pro athletes only get to be one thing, and Crews spent an entire career quietly proving that’s a lazy way to look at a locker room.
https://twitter.com/MegaMaxing/status/2101609332227924072
None of this is a secret. It just never sticks, because it’s simpler to remember the actor than the guy who used to sketch criminal trials for a living.
Crews’ first real job in the arts was sketching a murder trial in a Flint, Michigan courtroom for local TV station WJRT, according to wrkr.com. Picture that for a second: a future NFL player getting paid to sit in a courtroom and draw a homicide case while a judge stares him down.
That’s a trade, not a hobby.
And the trade didn’t retire once the pads went on. Crews spent parts of his NFL career selling portraits to his own teammates for around five grand a commission, which lands closer to eleven grand in today’s money. By his own account, that income sometimes carried his family further than his football check did.
Which tracks, because the football check wasn’t much. During a practice squad stretch with the Packers, Crews was reportedly making as little as $150 a week, per Black Enterprise. A hundred and fifty dollars a week, in the NFL, while he was also licensing a line of lithographs through a fine art publisher on the side.
The art career didn’t wait for the football career to end. It ran alongside it the whole time, quietly covering bills the shoulder pads couldn’t.
Sure, plenty of guys have had offseason jobs. That’s nothing new in a league that cuts half its rosters every summer. What’s different is that Crews wasn’t just picking up shifts to survive between OTAs, he had a trained skill that his own teammates were willing to pay real money for, and he was doing it during the season, not after it.
It’s the same lazy flattening every time people lose it over an athlete showing up somewhere you’d never expect, like a Guggenheim art event. We assume the jersey is the whole story, so anything outside it gets treated like a shock instead of just another fact about a whole person. Crews spent an entire career quietly disproving that.
An athlete’s other life stealing the spotlight from the game itself isn’t new, either. Look at Travis Kelce’s entire training camp turning into a wedding story instead of a football one. Crews just got there a couple decades early, trading a stadium tour for a courtroom and a sketchpad.
The only scholarship offer my art ever got me was a note from my Rutgers econ professor asking me to stop doodling plays in the margins.
Hollywood is somehow the least interesting chapter of this man’s life.
