Chris Long, William Hayes go undercover to experience homelessness

Posted by Mike Florio on June 1, 2015, 9:01 AM EDT
Getty Images

The Rams defensive line has been donating $1,000 for each sack to a local homeless shelter. Two Rams defensive linemen decided that wasn’t enough.

Chris Long and William Hayes (pictured) chose to become homeless for a day (and a night), in order to better understand what the homeless experience. Hayes came up with the idea, and Long decided Hayes wasn’t going to do it alone.

The project resulted in an feature on ESPN’s SportsCenter and companion item posted at ESPN.com.

“We don’t understand,” Long said. “We weren’t hoping to understand. We were just hoping to gain a little perspective and put kind of a feeling with the cause that we had been [donating to] from a distance the last couple of years.”

As explained by Elizabeth Merrill of ESPN.com, Hayes didn’t want cameras present for the project, because Hayes didn’t want to create the impression that Hayes and Long were looking for positive publicity. Eventually, Hayes relented in order to help raise awareness to the problem.

It’s good they did. Take a few minutes to see the end result, either on ESPN or at ESPN.com.

Permalink 15 Comments Feed for comments Back to top

15 responses to “Chris Long, William Hayes go undercover to experience homelessness”

  1. This is awesome. The more I find about out Chris and Kyle Long, the more it’s clear that Howie raised his boys right.

    As for the Rams, they seem to be doing all the right things this offseason. They’re my favorite to break the playoff drought in the NFC.

  2. They mean well. And their willingness to engage the community is great. I really do hope someone finds a way to keep the Rams in STL.

    But this is the “Gentleman’s Agreement” approach to understanding a social problem. You don’t really learn a thing from it because the next day, it’s not your problem. What you learn is just the broadest of outlines.

  6. Nice to see NFL players doing good in light of all the negative things players have been charged with recently

  8. It’s kinda poetic that the aforementioned players going undercover to experience homelessness play for the Rams…a franchise that’s basically homeless until they complete the move back to Los Angeles.

  9. We need more stories like this. The majority of NFL players are decent people that help the community in many ways most of us fans never hear of. Thanks Pft

  10. sdelmonte says:
    Jun 1, 2015 9:25 AM

    They mean well. And their willingness to engage the community is great. I really do hope someone finds a way to keep the Rams in STL.

    But this is the “Gentleman’s Agreement” approach to understanding a social problem. You don’t really learn a thing from it because the next day, it’s not your problem. What you learn is just the broadest of outlines.

    —–

    To be fair, it seems from the quote in the article that Chris Long actually acknowledges this viewpoint and doesn’t disagree with it – certainly, I had the same misgivings when I first saw the headline, but full credit to both Hayes and Long for not just getting out there, but not being under any illusions that one night of sleeping rough by choice is the same as having to do it indefinitely.

    In short, they’re a couple of class acts in a league where you don’t hear enough about the class acts.

  11. Homelessness is usually linked to two conditions — mental illness and/or poverty. Both conditions can be alleviated by spending more on treatment and counseling (in the case of mental illness) and education, welfare, job-training, etc. (for the poor).

    A strong majority of Americans are in favor of more spending on social programs to assist/better the mentally ill, the poor, education, health care, etc.. It’s true — poll after poll and study after study have consistently shown that.

    The problem is that the corporate class has effected a coup d’état of power in America. So, politicians are completely disinterested in the needs of the 99% and only serve the interests of the greedy and power-hungry 1%.

    Only a ground-swell of grass-roots support and/or revolution will change that.

  12. I was lucky enough to catch this on ESPN yesterday and it was really eye opening. Hats off to Long, Hayes and ESPN for bringing attention to a sad and sobering topic of homeless people in America.

    Long in specific seems to have a real grasp of the homeless situation in saying that every case is different and multi-layered. Everyone has a different story.

    These are the kinds of athletes that need to be exposed to our youth. It was such a breath of fresh air to see this instead of watching Adrian Peterson huff and puff about Minnesota not being fair to him and guaranteeing his salary or Shembo abusing a dog.

  13. During this little experiment, did they find any time to advise the Cleveland Browns on draft strategy?

  14. Hey, waking up on a park bench after an all night bender is not social work.

    At least that’s what the judge said.

  15. Nothing will change, like always the attention goes to the players and how good and saintly they are and nobody really will think twice about the homeless that need the help. The greatest and richest country in the world cant take care of their homeless, veterans, elderly nor protect their kids. Something is really wrong with the system when banks can steal billions and not spend one day in jail but get a billionaire bailout from the government and yet there’s no money for education or infrastructure.

    By the way is a good thing what these two guys did my comment is not a criticism on them but to society and the government in general.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to leave a comment. Not a member? Register now!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.