Aaron Maybin celebrates a sack with the Jets. The former first-round pick hasn't had much to celebrate on the field... or off it.
The self-portrait hangs in a Baltimore condominium, a blend of sharp and faded colors that reveal the artist’s pain.
The man on the canvas is crying behind a smiling mask. His eyes are closed. Footprints of his dead son are in the upper right hand corner.
“There were a lot of things I was struggling with while I was painting that,” Aaron Maybin says in a quiet moment.
He titled the piece “David’s Tears” to pay tribute to the son he never knew, the baby who was stillborn two summers ago.
“I’m still not over it,” says Maybin. “When you lose a child, there’s not really anything that can explain how that feels.”
Long before Maybin started to piece together his derailed career as the Jets’ relentless outside linebacker, he turned to painting, drawing and writing poetry to push through the tragedies in his life.
When his mother, Connie, died due to complications giving birth to his sister, 6-year-old Aaron turned to the arts to escape.
Michael Maybin bought reams of paper in bulk from a local warehouse in Baltimore to help settle down his rambunctious son. The arts helped his little boy focus . When an idea exploded in his mind, he rushed for his crayons, pens, pastels or brushes. He bent pieces of aluminum foil into shapes of animals.
When Michael remarried, his wife Violette, an artist, sat down with her stepson and cut out pictures to create a collage of Aaron and Connie.
“Whenever he felt sad or down,” Violette says, “he could always look at those pictures and remember happy times.”
For as long as he can remember, Maybin wanted to play in the NFL, but the arts provided another outlet. He won a competition at age 11 that allowed him to paint a 40 x 50 mural on the side of a Habitat for Humanity building in downtown Baltimore. He found inspiration in his successes and struggles. He used oil paints, acrylics and pastels.
Art gave him direction when the football world labeled him a failure. Maybin, a first-round pick by the Buffalo Bills in the 2009 draft (No. 11), spent his offseason nights in his Baltimore condo pouring his emotions onto a canvas or a notepad.
“He would sit in a room and draw and not say a word,” says Bills defensive lineman Kellen Heard, who lived with Maybin for a few months last year.
A paint brush and pen helped him cope with the conflicting emotions surrounding the birth of his daughter, Tacori, and the death of her twin brother, David, last year. He learned through art, his first love, to find his way as his parents, both pastors, prayed for him.
He placed his fate in his Christian faith.
“It was a test to see if I was going to give up or not,” Maybin, 23, says. “I’m still swinging. I’m still fighting. I’m still here.”
A slip of the tongue spawned a phenomenon in Happy Valley.
When Penn State coach Joe Paterno inadvertently called his defensive end “Mayhem” at practice, the legend was born. Students packed Beaver Stadium in State College with signs that read “Maybin’s Mayhem.” There was a buzz up and down College Avenue on fall Saturday afternoons.
“He had a chip on his shoulder, because he was undersized and came from a small school,” says Penn State defensive line coach Larry Johnson. “Here he was at a big program. People wondered, ‘Can he survive?’ He did more than survive.”
After redshirting as a freshman and playing sparingly as a sophomore, Maybin came alive as a 4-3 defensive end when one of Penn State’s starters was suspended in 2008.
It turned out to be an opportunity of a lifetime.
Maybin finished with 12 sacks and 20 tackles for losses in 10 starts en route to earning All-America honors.
Michael, who attended Penn State and bled blue and white, was beaming. His son, a double major in communications and integrative arts, had positioned himself for a future in the NFL and decided to enter the draft after his junior year.
“It was a special season,” Johnson says. “It really was magical.”
The Bills scouts seemingly brushed off Maybin’s 6-4, 230-pound frame - he bulked up to 250 pounds before the draft - and targeted him with the No. 11 pick. A few months after Buffalo drafted him, Maybin signed a five-year, $25 million contract with $14 million guaranteed. The Bills hoped Maybin would breath life into an anemic pass rush.
At the press conference announcing his signing, Maybin unveiled a new haircut with two numbers carved into his right side: His No. 58, along with Bills legend Bruce Smith’s No. 78. On the left side was the team’s running buffalo logo.
Maybin’s Mayhem was about to take over Western New York.
Only something went terribly wrong.
“It’s quite possible that Maybin is the worst player in the NFL.” - Buffalo News, Oct. 28, 2010
Nothing made sense.
A year after Maybin was a college phenom, he became an NFL afterthought. The Bills’ defensive end didn’t record a sack in 16 games as a rookie, fueling mounting negativity from fans.
Although Maybin’s work ethic was never questioned, the prevailing thought in Buffalo was that he was simply too undersized to play his position. A front office and coaching change during his rookie season exacerbated the situation.
His professional struggles faded to the background when personal tragedy struck in July 2010. His girlfriend at the time delivered twins, but the boy, David, didn’t survive.
“There’s been so many experiences that we’ve had to go through,” Michael Maybin says. “I can’t tell you how we got up the next day and kept on living. I know that there was a lot of prayer.”
The baby daughter, Tacori, changed her father forever.
Violette saw a newfound maturity from her son that bubbled to the surface. Suddenly, the football player was worried about things like his daughter’s toothache. The baby girl resembled her father in every way. She helped prioritize his life. She grounded him and eased the pain of David’s death.
She helped turn Aaron Maybin into a different man.
“I went through some tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough times,” Maybin says. “But one of the things that I learned from that - especially when I lost my son - is that no matter what’s going on in life, no matter who wrote something bad about you, who’s not satisfied, none of that matters in the grand scheme of things. When I come home, my daughter doesn’t know any of that. She hasn’t read any of those articles. She hasn’t listened to anybody say anything negative. She hasn’t watched me play. All she cares about is that Daddy’s home. She’s got the most elated look on her face.
“She’s just the best thing in my life,” he adds softy. “The best thing I’ve done with my life is my daughter.”
Tacori’s arrival helped soften Maybin’s growing frustrations during his second season in Buffalo. He was marginalized by a new coaching staff that didn’t draft him and didn’t believe in him. The final indignity came during a five-week stretch when the Bills deactivated him.
“They didn’t even use him,” says former Pro Bowler and fellow Penn State linebacker LaVar Arrington, who has been Maybin’s mentor through the years. “People got so much into his size and his weight. They forgot that this is the same guy that was running around those same bigger guys in college. Let the man get out there and find his way. If he gets his ass kicked and he can’t do it, then you throw him out.”
Maybin’s art helped him deal with his frustration. He sketched an image of himself letting out a primal scream entitled “They Said” decorated with all the words that trailed him in Buffalo:
SELF CENTERED.
CRAZY.
JUST GIVE UP.
WASTE.
JERK.
BUST.
LOOSE CANNON.
DUMB.
WEAK.
BUM.
WORST in NFL.
The avalanche of criticism fueled him. The doubters inspired him.
“It was a frustrating experience, because I had high expectations of myself,” Maybin says. “I wasn’t receiving return on all the work that was being put in. There was something that they weren’t seeing that they felt that they needed to see. That’s not something that I waste any time trying to figure out now. Whatever it was, I left that in Buffalo.”
Heard cried when the Bills released Maybin on Aug. 15. He finished his career in Buffalo with 24 tackles in 27 career games. Maybin never started or registered a sack.
It was time to go.
“It was a bittersweet moment,” his agent and close friend Chafie Fields says. “He was upset for about five minutes.”
The Bills never wavered from their belief that he was too small.
“Somebody said that he didn’t fit the scheme,” Bills general manager Buddy Nix said after cutting Maybin. “But I don’t know what scheme he fits at that size.”
A man who had seen Maybin as a teenager in Baltimore years earlier disagreed.
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