Ndamukong Suh Destroyed Soccer in Portland

Ndamukong Suh
By AARON MESH

OK, so that headline isn't totally fair.

But then the entire point of this Grantland essay, timed to Thursday's turkey-day football games, is that stories about Grant High School star-turned-Detroit Lions lineman Ndamukong Suh are always unfair.

Jordan Conn offers "a 13-step guide to trashing Ndamukong Suh"—in short, it's a profile organized around the cheap shots of other profiles.

Suh has been typecast as a dirty player ever since the 2011 Thanksgiving Day game when he stomped on a Green Bay Packer. The essay argues that's a disingenuous narrative.

And it contains some fun tidbits about Suh's formative Portland years, including how he wrecked soccer havoc as a (not-so-) small child:

At the risk of typifying exactly the kind of hatchet-job publications this article is deploring, it's strange that Conn doesn't mention the best piece of ammunition for a writer bent on demonizing Ndamukong.

That would be the conflicting accounts from Suh's car crash in Old Town in December 2011—when he slammed his 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle into a tree, light pole and Benson Bubbler water fountain outside Dante's.

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