Coy Wire leads Atlanta Falcons teammates in saying thanks to soldiers

July 4, 2:57 PMAtlanta Falcons ExaminerDaniel Cox

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Coy Wire, Photo courtesy of Atlanta Falcons and Kyla Clark

If you were writing a book about football the protagonist's name would be Coy Wire. 

Say it out loud.

The name implies a toughness, an intelligence that every football player should have.

By definition coy means reserved, almost shy. But combine it with wire and the name suggests sneakily effective, a quiet professional resigned to give great effort at all times.

The Atlanta Falcons' Coy Wire lives up to the connotations, and then some.

A Stanford graduate whose versatility is his greatest weapon, Wire is the only player in Cardinal history to lead the team in both rushing and tackles, accomplishing the first in 1998 and the latter in 2000.

But as complicated as his roles on the football field are, he lives his life with a simple peace.

Trained in martial arts and deeply spiritual, Wire studied religion and philosophy while in college, furthering preparing him for a life of football and beyond.

"I was always big into the power of the mind and consciousness and awareness," Wire told Steve Wyche, then of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, during training camp last season after he joined the Falcons as a free agent, following seven seasons with the Buffalo Bills.

That kind of mind power has been helpful during his NFL career. He's experienced a position switch (safety to linebacker) and constantly battled for starter status, along the way becaming known around the league for his special teams play.

It also gave him the courage to not only witness teammate Kevin Everett fracture his spine in a game in 2007, but then face his own spinal injury that same season.

In the middle of the season, a lifetime of collisions took their toll as Wire began to experience numbness in his hands and fingers. His season ended when surgery was required to fuse vertebra in his neck back together. But his deep faith told him that not only was his career not over, but perhaps there were still greater things ahead.

"I knew everything was going to be fine," Wire told Wyche. "I believe I was meant to play this game a few more years and I had confidence that things were done well. I didn't want to ponder the negative. I just wanted to stay positive and move forward."

And perhaps one of those great things happened recently when Wire and 10 teammates visited Fort Benning, Georgia.

On June 8th, Wire, his teammates, and members of the Atlanta Falcons staff boarded Blackhawk helicopters bound for the military base in southwest Georgia. They were there to visit with the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, a group affectionately known as the "Sledgehammer Brigade," a historic unit with service in World Wars I and II and known as the first unit to enter Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.

During the visit, Wire was turned to to provide a message of inspiration and triumph to the soldiers. It's a role the 30-year-old linebacker embraced.

While with the Bills, struggling through difficult seasons, Wire was often the player local media viewed as the mouthpiece for the team. His words were always positive in nature and biblical in context.

He never hesitated to take control of the locker room and share his beliefs, in an effort to motivate and inspire.

One such moment was following a heartbreaking one-point loss to the Dallas Cowboys in October 2007. Heads hung in the locker room and Wire seized the moment to share a passage from James 1.

''It talks about being joyful when adversity comes your way, because it gives you the chance to persevere and to grow and then you're ready for anything,'' Wire told The New York Times in November 2007. ''The strongest steel is burned in the hottest coals. We've been burned a lot this year. It's really refined us as a team. We didn't allow the weaker nature to invade our minds.''

The same lesson of steel and coals is what he brought to the local soldiers in June, believing that they were about to embark on journeys that would bring adversity and how they endured those things would prepare them for the remainder of their lives. He told them the outcomes of those journeys would not only make them stronger, but refine them and make them more capable of everything they may encounter throughout their lives.

"In life it's not what happens to us, it's how we go through that adversity that determines how we come out of it in the end," Wire said.

He spoke with a passion about attitude, believing that it's one of the few things in our lives over which we have power.

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