Dexter Manley's incredible story: 'I broke down and started crying … how did I get through school when I couldn't read?'

Ebony, Oct, 1989 by Laura B. Randolph

Dexter Manley's Incredible Story

THESE have not been easy times for Dexter Manley.

Five months ago, the All-Pro defensive end went before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education to tell his deepest, most heavily guarded secret. Shaking visibly, the 1988 Super Bowl Champion Washington Redskin fought to keep his composure and, barely a minute into his prepared statement, almost broke down. For one long, agonizing, seemingly endless moment, Manley sat frozen, locked in combat--with himself.

He didn't think he could bring himself to do it. To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. How could he? After all, he's spent a lifetime hiding it, not just from his fans, but from everyone close to him--his wife, his mother, his own children. And now every fan in the stands, every stranger watching on television, everyone would know.

As the Senate committee waited, Manley thought about all the young kids who looked up to him, idolized him--kids just like him whom, if he could somehow find the courage, he might help. Wiping his brow and saying a silent prayer, Manley pushed aside his prepared statement and did the gutsiest thing he had ever done. As the television cameras rolled, he confessed his shocking secret: He was 30 years old and until recently he could not read or write.

The arresting sight of Dexter Manley crying, coupled with his startling revelation, shocked millions. Dexter Manley illiterate? No way. Listen to the man talk. Throughout the NFL his mouth was legendary. Before and after games, reporters stood in line for one of Manley's lyrical quotes. But the football star had been playing it by ear.

This Manley song and dance, Dexter talking trash and Dexter backing it up; all of the macho antics, both on and off the field, had effectively deceived the press, the fans and the team since Manley was drafted by the Redskins in 1981. But it all had been a form of self-protection, a brilliant smokescreen he'd constructed to keep the public from discovering his secret, from learning just how vulnerable he was.

A lifetime of pain and frustration began to surface in Manley's Senate testimony. Fooling people had never been easy for him. As a second-grader in his hometown of Houston, because of an undiagnosed learning disability, he received 19 failing marks, and school officials insisted he repeat the grade. He was teased mercilessly by his schoolmates, who taunted him with shouts of "stupid" and "big dummy." Humiliated, the first day of school, he slammed his teacher into the blackboard. "I was frustrated because I didn't want to be there," recalls Dexter of the incident. "I was so embarrassed because even at that young age I knew what that class stood for."

So, by becoming a disciplinary problem, he diverted attention from his real problem. The Houston public school system had neither the money nor the resources to diagnose Manley's problem (he has poor auditory memory) and he was shuttled from class to class, passed from grade to grade even though he never learned to read above the second-grade level.

He became a genius at concealing his secret. When his Sunday School teacher began requiring her pupils to stand up and read a Bible verse each week, Manley didn't wait for a miracle. He resorted to a little devilment. "The first time she called on me," recalls Manley today, "I said I couldn't do it because I'd forgotten my glasses. After that, I just didn't go back." Each week he would hide out until Sunday School was over before going home.

The older he got, the more complex the game became. In high school and later at Oklahoma State University, he used the same tactic. He always--always--went to class, made himself known to his teachers and banked on their sympathy. "I had to," says Dexter. "And I think to a degree they knew my problem. You don't score 6 on the ACT test and get admitted to college. They were asking me to do something I just had no capability of doing. But, I would always go to class. I would sit in the middle of the class or on the front row and try to get sympathy because I gave a tremendous amount of effort. I always made myself known, always befriended the teachers."

It didn't hurt, of course, that he was one of the best football players the team had ever seen and that everyone knew that he had to remain eligible academically to play football. Nonetheless, it was football, says Dexter, that kept him out of trouble. "If I hadn't had it [football], I don't know what would have happened to me. People like me are either dead, in jail or insane because when you can't read you have no knowledge of anything. So what do you do? You're frustrated and thenext thing you know you turn to drinking and drugging or stealing and robbing."

After he married his wife Glinda in 1984, he would ask her to read him the myriad of articles that appeared on him in the press. "I'd say, 'Honey, I'm tired tonight. Why don't you read me that article in the Washington Post.' She would say, 'Dexter, you're going to have to stop being so lazy.'"