They instilled these attributes directly into my mind and into my personality using the helmet of knowledge. Anything these animals could do, I could do, only better, because I was “the Rhino“, unstoppable and undefeatable. I could ANYTHING, ANYTHING they asked me to do, I could do, because the perfect killing machine was “THE Rhino“. And for some reason, I was very proud of this fact.
I remember riding in a car on a very lonely road. There are fields and groups of trees on both sides of the road, it is night and there are no other cars or people to be seen anywhere. The car stops and they tell me to get out and start jogging. As I began to run I remember the headlights coming up from behind me and the sound of the engine suddenly bursting forward with power, as I hear the car coming to run me over. And then the “rush” would kick in again. That feeling of running for your life.
When your heart starts to pound and the adrenaline starts to flow. When the instinct takes over and you don’t look back, you get tunnel vision, and all you think about is faster, faster, faster. I don’t know how fast I was running but I remember them yelling from the car “Run Rhino, Run like a cheetah” and afterwords I hear their jokes about how they should put me in the Olympics and bet money on me because what I was doing was not “Humanly impossible“.
Again I don’t know how fast I was running when they were running me down with the car, but when I was back on the sixth-grade soccer team at 12 years old the key to my success was my speed. When the coaches videotaped the games (with a Beta camcorder) they told me, and I saw that I had a 6-yard stride at 12 years old. Then as a senior in high school watching film I had over a 9-yard stride.
When I tested in football BOTH senior year in high school and freshman year in college when I ran the 40-yard dash BOTH times the coaches made me run it again because the times must be wrong. Something must be wrong because that’s not right they would say, that’s not possible. In high school, the coach thought I was cheating and only running 35 yards and he made me run it 5 times. Even as the other kids ran in between my runs when I got to the line and ran my time he would run back and accuse me of cheating and running from the wrong line.
Even with the other kids swearing that I wasn’t cheating he called the whole team a bunch of liars. Finally on my sixth run, and after I had “felt” my self getting slower (given up mentally and after the most important thing in the world to you, the football coaches approval, tells you enough times that you cannot do something you finally begin to believe it), he gave me a time of 4.85.
A time which he was satisfied that I could run and that was the time he gave me (he was a real ass-hole). This was the first day of football camp senior year in high school. Coach Doug Parcells (who is the younger brother of Bill Parcells who is currently the head coach of the New York Jets) had taken a physical education teaching position at a Ramsey elementary school and then was also going to coach the offensive and defensive line for the Ramsey high school football team (this was in 1987).
As he arrived as a new coach going into my senior year in high school during the summer weight lifting workouts he was amazed at my strength. In the fall as camp ended and the season began and repeatedly asked coach Hyman (he was the ass-hole who had benched me and tried to throw me off the team for telling him “don’t worry coach, everything would be all right between you and your wife.” This was when he was being an ass-hole to everyone in the school two years earlier, and called the whole team a bunch of liars refusing to believe my 40 times, and wouldn’t even tell me the times I was running, he would just call me a cheater and tell me to run it again and when the steroid trial came he was there and never said a word in my defense).
Why isn’t Andy a captain? Parcells asked. He’s pound for pound the best blocker I’ve ever coached, and he’s the best defensive player I’ve ever seen. And the smugness of Hyman finally aired its ugly head. Parcells tried to tell Hyman that he recognized that I had a certain mental condition (of course the name escapes me). Where when some kids growing up have such superior abilities to all the other kids in a given area whether it be sports, mathematics, or musical talent.
These kids have such natural abilities that for some reason they can literally “blow anyone else away at will” but they don’t because they want to be liked by everyone else. They want to “fit in” and be like everyone else. They want to have friends, and not have everyone jealous of what they can do. So they unconsciously don’t do their best, they can do much if better if they really wanted to, but they don’t.
He recognized this in me almost instantly when everyone else for years would give me the cold shoulder from Hyman’s verbal slander over the years. It’s funny because when coach Parcells was talking to the Penn State Football staff about my football abilities he also said to them “You have to be very careful what you say when you are around Andy because anything you tell him to do he literally will do to the letter and I mean to the letter, and if you give him some kind of unsolvable problem, days later he will come back and blow your mind with some kind of a solution, so you just have to be careful what you say when you’re around him.
“The same thing happened in college, when I ran my first 40 at Rochester, as I crossed the line the coach said “run it again Pero, because you sure as hell didn’t run that time” AND AGAIN THEY MADE ME RUN MY 40, FOUR TIMES BEFORE GIVING ME A TIME 4.89