Photograph by Tuan Lee
CLICK HERE FOR BEHIND-THE-SCENES IMAGES FROM OUR PHOTO SHOOT WITH STEVEN JACKSON.
Growing up in Las Vegas, a city where winning was everything, Steven Jackson idolized Walter Payton. He watched games with his father, Steve, a pit boss at Caesar’s Palace, and chose No. 34—the same number as Sweetness—when it came time for peewee and college football. (He later chose No. 39 because no other NFL running back had that number, and as he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “I’m trying to set myself apart.”)
Today, Jackson takes some solace in his boyhood idol’s career. “A lot of people don’t know this, but Walter Payton went through some very lean years in his career as well,” he says. Despite racking up more than 1,000 yards per season from 1976 to 1986 (the only exception being 1982, during a players’ strike), Payton didn’t win a Super Bowl until the 1985 season, in the golden years of his career.
“I kind of use him as my hope and inspiration,” says Jackson. “Someone else has been through what I’m going through.”
Similar to Payton, Jackson has rushed for 1,000-plus yards per season for seven consecutive seasons—yet his team’s managed to win only 15 games in five years, the worst five-year stretch in the history of the NFL. At the same time, he’s experienced a revolving door of head coaches, the latest being Jeff Fisher. “That’s difficult, going through so many coaches,” he says. “This is No. 6—counting interim head coaches—for me.”
Of course, a lot’s changed over that span.
When the Rams drafted Jackson in 2004, following his junior year at Oregon State University, he found himself sitting the bench behind future Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk. “It was tough at the time, because egotistically, you feel like you can play right away,” he says. “But there’s so much more than the physical that goes into it, that I needed that year to be an understudy.” Voicing his frustrations at the time, he earned a reputation as a brash, outspoken player—one who garnered more headlines several years later, when he criticized Rams fans for not supporting the team. (When the Rams retired Faulk’s jersey in 2007 and a reporter asked whether the same might happen for Jackson one day, he replied, “I’ve got to shut up for that to happen.”) Today, he summarizes his approach to the press succinctly: “Everything in your mind doesn’t need to be said.”
Jackson’s breakthrough year came in 2006, when he led the NFL in yards from scrimmage and was named to the Pro Bowl. Suddenly, the Rams running back with flowing dreads and a sleek visor was on magazine covers, on billboards, in Nike commercials. Two years later, he became the highest-paid running back in the NFL when he signed a six-year contract for up to $49.3 million. “It happened so fast that I was really caught in trying to prove myself—that I was worthy of the attention—more so than enjoying it,” he says.
He captured his grueling weekly routine in the three-part Web documentary A Week in the Life With Steven Jackson. Throughout the week, he works out at Kirkwood’s Central Institute for Human Performance, where Dr. Clayton Skaggs prescribes a combination of performance training and alternative medicine. After Sunday’s game, Jackson buys 20 bags of ice from a local convenience store and recovers at home in a specially constructed recovery room with an ice bath, hot bath, and hyperbaric tent.
It’s not until the off-season—when Jackson travels the world, from the Sydney Opera House in Australia to Machu Picchu’s ruins—that he’s truly able to unwind. He spends his spare time reading, his favorite recent book being Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Steve Jobs. “With a lot of great people in history, we believe they have a plan, and it works out from A to Z how they anticipated,” Jackson says of the book. “That’s the furthest thing from the truth. They all have twists and turns in their lives. They all go through drama. They all question themselves, and somehow persevere.”
This observation seems fitting as Jackson contemplates the Rams’ next season: “I’m not quite sure how I’ll be used on this team, but I hope to be a major contributor, over the next few years, to the success that I think will come our way.”
And what about his own future, how he’ll be remembered? “I do contemplate what my legacy will be when I hang up my cleats,” Jackson says, adding that he hopes to one day direct a documentary about the transition from the NFL to retirement.
He comes back to Payton: “It is still possible to prevail.”
