Where Are They Now: Percy Harvin

Percy Harvin is a failure. He’s an entitled, high-strung hothead whose coaches struggled to harness his game-breaking skills as a wide receiver and return man. He complained, fist-fought and prima donna’d his way out of the NFL by age 28.

Percy Harvin is a success. A child prodigy raised by a single mom, he flew past his peers in high school and at Florida, enjoyed a lucrative pro career and won championships at every level. He retired in 2017, citing various medical issues and his desire to be the dad he never had.

Both of these versions of Percy Harvin are cruising Gainesville, Fla., in a silver Bentley on a Tuesday in March. Sporting a woolly beard and thick braids woven close to his scalp, dressed in a royal-blue Gators sweat suit, his seat tilted back at an unsettlingly obtuse angle, the NFL’s 2009 Offensive Rookie of the Year addresses his passenger as “Bossman” as he unfurls his life story.

Right now he’s recounting how he moved out of an Orlando mansion last year and into a modest four-bedroom house in Gainesville, where he burst onto the national scene 11 years ago with BCS-champ Florida. It is also where his son, Jaden, was living with his mother. Jaden is five, one year younger than Percy was when he began playing peewee ball in Virginia Beach, flashing an aptitude for making tacklers miss that would lead to implausible touchdowns, off-field coddling, inter-personal blowups and, as Harvin puts it, “mental stresses that I can’t even put into words, Bossman.”

He says he did not miss playing football last fall, his first without the game since 1994. Did that surprise you?

“Bossman, this whole journey has been surprising. A lot of the stuff I struggled with, it just don’t affect me no more. That’s why I’m comfortable talking about it.” He hangs a right, bringing Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, the site of his rise to fame, into view. “I’m cool with you asking whatever you want. Failing a drug test. The fights. ’Cause it’s gonna help somebody.”

Percy Harvin starts with the painful stuff: the migraines he has endured since he was seven. “Take a hammer and beat it on the side of your head nonstop,” he says of the pain. “If you’re trying to relax, if someone’s trying to talk to you, that hammer is still going off. You’re trying to eat, still going off.” That pounding is linked, he says, to an anxiety disorder that has gripped him since he was a kid, which he didn’t even know he had until he broke in with the Vikings and started making regular visits to the Mayo Clinic. Kept confidential by the NFL’s medical protocols, and by his own protocols of manhood, the ailment caused Harvin to play most of his 79 NFL games on little or no sleep.

“The best way I can describe it is that I felt ‘out of body,’” he says of a typical episode. “My heart would be going, I’d be sweating, I felt like everybody in the room was looking at me. My speech was slurring. I didn’t wanna eat. I was gasping for air. You’re so worked up that it’s hard to spit words out.” Inspired by NBA stars Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, who have spoken out recently about their anxiety issues, Harvin wants to join them in saying, It’s O.K. to be not O.K.

Harvin realizes he’s known as much for his emotional blowups—a disciplinary suspension at Landstown High; the rumored choking of an assistant coach at Florida; a televised shouting match with his Vikings coach; altercations with at least two teammates—as he is for his big plays. While he doesn’t want his anxiety disorder to be an excuse for these missteps (and while the psychologists consulted by SI believe that anxiety and emotional outbursts aren’t usually related), Harvin says, “I just know everything would have been a lot easier if I had been patient with myself.” Considering all the sleepless nights and foodless days that filled his career, though, “most of what I did”—a 9.5-yards-per-carry average in college, 9,000-plus all-purpose yards in the NFL—“was off of just ... will.”