If you’ll indulge me, here’s a quick personal story:
On Oct. 13, 2020, I was about three months into a new relationship. It’s a Tuesday evening. I’m living alone in Oxford, Mississippi, quarantined in my apartment for what felt like the 4,000th-straight day. I’ve got Titans-Bills on the TV, a strange midweek treat to break up the monotony of Month 7 of lockdowns. And my girlfriend calls me. She’s had a rough day. She needs to vent. Call me Frasier Crane, because I’m listening.
Or at least I think I’m listening.
Here is No. 17 among The Tennessean’s best moments from the Tennessee Titans.
Because I look up at the TV and Titans RB Derrick Henry has just absolutely obliterated Bills cornerback Josh Norman. Henry has just flung Norman like he was flicking a booger. It was the kind of stiff arm that made me sad because I knew ancient Greek poets never got to experience this dazzling beauty.
Norman was perpendicular to the ground one second, then parallel the next, then on it the third. Henry didn’t just take Norman’s lunch money. He took it, invested it in a high-yield account, cashed out and then used his dividends to buy the cafeteria to rewrite the rules so that Norman would never be allowed to eat lunch again.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to high-five something. I wanted to find a mountaintop, or at the very least a tall hill, where I could primally yell so loudly that I scared all the birds out of their trees and forced them to fly away in unison.
But I was on the phone. And my girlfriend had a hard day. So I used all my experience gleaned from 10 years in press boxes and stifled all my sports-fan urges and kept that stiff-upper-lip to make it seem like I was listening.
The play, famously, didn’t count. Offsetting penalties erased it from the record books. But we all know what we saw. On a random Tuesday in 2020, Henry landed the stiff arm to which all other stiff arms in NFL history will forever be compared. The still of Norman, hanging in the air, roughly knee high as Henry looks poised to plow through him a second time, is as intimidating of an image as any that exists. It’s cool. It’s bad. It’s a moment that deserves the kind of scream I couldn’t give it.
But good news: That woman and I are happily married now. Still kinda regret not finding that mountaintop, though.
Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.