Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh continues to insist that his Thanksgiving stomp of Packers offensive lineman Evan Dietrich-Smith has been misunderstood and overanalyzed.
A lengthy profile of Suh in GQ addresses the stomp from the viewpoint of both Suh and his immediate family, and they all seem to agree that Suh did nothing wrong and got a raw deal from the media in the aftermath of the incident.
“If you slow down and analyze anything, it’s going to look worse in my opinion. It was not intentional. If it was intentional, it could have been a lot worse,” Suh says. “If I wanted to go out there to hurt somebody, I could hurt somebody. I don’t want any part of that. . . . I mean, if I wanted to hurt you, I’d go for your quarterback. Because me stopping your play is going to frustrate you more than me physically hurting you. Because I’m just that much better than you. That’s how I look at it. It’s like killing somebody with kindness.”
Suh often looks like he’s playing to kill somebody with something other than kindness, but his mom thinks her son is a gentle boy who has been misunderstood.
“On the TV they’re saying my son is angry,” Suh’s mom says. “They’re building it up that he’s an angry man. What does this child have to be angry about? This child is blessed. He has nothing to be angry about. So I don’t know where they’re getting that.”
For Suh’s part, he says the stomping incident is something he doesn’t think about anymore, although he knows people will continue to talk about it.
“For me personally? It’s over,” he says. “That’s something that happened in the 2011 season. Will it follow me? I think it will follow me because of the outside world. It won’t follow me because of me.”
Suh is only 25 years old and still has plenty of time to change the perceptions about him. But he’s right that the stomp will follow him. Intentional or not, that’s the moment that has defined his career.