When Jerome Felton arrived in Minnesota, he knew it was make or break time for his career. His first three seasons were spent with the struggling Detroit Lions and then he had brief stints with Carolina and Indianapolis. Felton knew that if he didn’t show the Vikings that he was the man to lead block for the team’s superstar running back then his tenure in the NFL might fall under the “not for long” category.
In training camp, Felton turned himself into a missile. Day after day he slammed into linebackers so hard that he couldn’t move his neck. If he was laying down flat on his back, he had to hold up his head with his hand or it would hurt like crazy. Felton remembered his running back’s coach in Detroit, legendary fullback Sam Gash, telling him to get a neck roll. At the time, he thought neck rolls were a pretty corny look — after all, Felton ran for 2,652 yards and 63 touchdowns in college at Furman. Even if he was a blocker in the NFL, he wasn’t trying to look like a human garbage truck. But he was in so much discomfort during that training camp of pain that he threw on the neck roll and went back to ramming defenders with his helmet.
“My job was: I have to run as fast as I possibly can and hit this guy like a missile with no regard to how much it’s going to hurt and you have to say f–k it,” Felton said over the phone this week. “This is going to suck, it’s going to hurt, just launch yourself.” Felton launched himself into the Pro Bowl. His running back had one of the greatest seasons of all time and in the season’s final game one of the best quarterbacks in history walked over to him and complimented his work on the season. He loved telling his friends about that.
