Former Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards, as we all know now, saved an elderly man’s life recently.

But what everybody missed is the fact that at some point since his playing days, he has saved his own life as well.

Edwards was a knucklehead when he played with the Browns from 2005 into the early part of 2009. That’s not really surprising, because when all of us were younger, we were knuckleheads, too, at some point. And when a young person gets a lot of money, as Edwards did when he was taken with the No. 3 toverall pick in the 2005 NFL Draft, it enables a person to take knuckleheadedness to a whole other level.

He wasn’t a bad young guy by any stretch of the imagination, but he just needed to work on the discipline and maturity and sense of responsibility and commitment needed to become not just a very talented football player, but a very good one. And to a great degree, he did that.

But the football part of your life goes only so far. What’s so
much more important — and what you carry with you for the rest of your life — is what kind of person you are, and Edwards, by virtue of what he did in saving an 80-year-old man who was about to be pummeled, probably to death, by a 20-year-old man in a YMCA in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, has proven that he has become a good person. 

And that’s the best takeaway from this incident, because if you really care about this world, that’s what you want to see, young people developing into quality people. Edwards has done just that.

“That’s what you do,” Edwards said in downplaying his actions. “People go to work out, they have a good time, they live 80 years and this isn’t how they expect for something to maybe take their life.”

Said Farmington Hills Police Chief Jeff King, “This is a horrific incident, but the selfless efforts made by Mr. Edwards embody the best in our society.”

Great job, Braylon Edwards, for changing your life and becoming a much better person than you were a football player, and you were a darn good football player.

Steve King