Long before he was sacking quarterbacks, Tamba Hali was facing bigger challenges. Learn about his life in this second book in a middle grade nonfiction series about the childhoods of your favorite athletes. Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Tamba Hali’s story seems almost unbelievable. He and his seven siblings fled war-torn Liberia to the Ivory Coast during his youth and later joined their father, a chemistry and physics professor, in New Jersey. There Tamba played both basketball and soccer, but he didn’t discover football until a coach finally persuaded him to try out in high school. And the rest, as they say, was history. Tamba discovered that he had a real talent for it, landing him an athletic scholarship to Pennsylvania State University and a coveted spot on their football team. Tamba went on to play in the NFL and finally brought his mother to the US from Liberia. His drive, dedication, and athletic ability are inspiring. David Seigerman is a veteran sports journalist whose writing career began in newspapers ( Newsday , The Jackson Sun ) and moved on to magazines ( College Sports Magazine ). In 1996, he moved from print to broadcast media, becoming a field producer for CNN/SI and later the managing editor at College Sports Television. Since 2003, he has been a freelance writer and producer, and in late 2016, he cofounded HowFarWouldYouGo.org. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his family. Tamba Hali CHAPTER 1 WELCOME TO THE RED SEA In the bright sunshine of a beautiful autumn Sunday, the red helmets of the Kansas City Chiefs glistened like candy apples. It was eighty-two degrees at midday, almost as if summer had packed its bags but decided not to leave when fall officially arrived a week and a day earlier. It was a perfect day for football. As usual, the stands at Arrowhead Stadium were packed. From the blimp shot high above the stadium, the scene, with fans dressed in home team red and white, looked like a giant candy dish overflowing with peppermints. It was a typical Chiefs crowd: large, lively, and loud. Kansas City loud is different from the kind of loud you hear in most football stadiums. Once, in 1990, Denver’s Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway found himself pinned back to his own goal line, and the Chiefs fans were loving it, cheering so loudly that Elway couldn’t hear himself shouting instructions at the line of scrimmage. Twice he was forced to turn to the officials for help, unable to get the ball snapped to start the play. The referee actually had to address the crowd, like a parent scolding a teenager to turn that music down or else! He warned that another noise-related interruption would result in a delay of game penalty against the Chiefs. That was no one-time incident. Kansas City is known for its unique brands of jazz and barbecue, and sometimes it is referred to as the City of Fountains; in football circles, though, it’s known more for its shoutin’. In 2014, the Chiefs invited a representative from Guinness World Records to a Monday Night Football game against New England. The fans were planning to reset a record that had long belonged to them before being stolen by the Seattle Seahawks—the Loudest Crowd Roar at a Sports Stadium. Sure enough, during a play stoppage, the Chiefs faithful reclaimed their title, cheering at an ear-splitting 142.2 decibels (a scientific measure of volume). By comparison, if you were fifty feet away from a military jet taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, that would only register at about 130 decibels—as loud as a two-hundred-person marching band. Chiefs fans were louder than that. Any louder and your eyesight could go blurry, because your eyeballs would vibrate from the sound waves. Seriously. Kansas City fans are loud and proud. But when they flocked to Arrowhead on October 1, 2006, they hadn’t had much to cheer about recently. Sure, sports fans on the other side of the state were pretty happy. The St. Louis Cardinals used a three-run rally the day before to beat the Milwaukee Brewers. One more win and the Cards would clinch the National League Central Division and qualify for the playoffs (which, by the way, they did . . . on their way to winning the World Series that year). Back in Kansas City, though, the only things looking rosy were the Chiefs jerseys. Their own baseball team, the Royals, was lousy, stumbling to another last place finish and finishing off the worst three-year stretch in their history. Since the start of September, football season had no competition in the sports pages or the hearts of Kansas City fans. Things were supposed to be better for the Chiefs, but so far they were not. Kansas City entered the 2006 season with a new head coach. Dick Vermeil had retired back on New Year’s Day after failing to reach the playoffs the year before, despite a 10–6 record. He had been replaced by Herman Edwards, the former New York Jets coach, who had been a Chiefs assistant coach ten years earlier. Edw