In June, brothers Hamza and Husain Abdullah opted to pause their careers to make a pilgrimage to Mecca during the 2012 NFL season, as part of their Islamic faith.
Tonight’s edition of Rock Center with Brian Williams takes a closer look at their life, and the path that led them away from pro football.
“We’ve been playing football since we were 8 years old,” Husain Abdullah told Mary Carillo, “from Pop Warner to high school, and to college, and into the NFL. And although we’re knocking down all these barriers, doing things that people said you can’t do, all of a sudden, it was like there’s more to life than this. There’s more. And we had to go for it.”
They did. And you can go for it by changing the channel to NBC at the top of the hour. Especially since tonight’s game has quickly assumed the smell of the stuff that hit the Saints’ buses last night.