To make it as a professional athlete, you have to be determined, self-motivated, and incredibly disciplined. Some might even go as far to say that it helps to have a chip on your shoulder.
Usually that’s a figure of speech, meaning that you play and work harder than anyone else because you’ve been disrespected or undervalued in the past. However, a professional football player who just signed onto the Pittsburgh Steelers practice squad takes it a little bit more literally…
Anthony Brown, a corner back that just recently joined the Steelers practice squad, has been carrying himself with that “angry, under appreciated energy” for quite some time. If you needed to put a date on it, one could say that the attitude he plays with started right after the 2016 NFL Draft, when he literally got a tattoo of a chip on his right shoulder.
I don’t mean to recklessly speculate on the matter, but from what I can tell, Brown decided to go with a Ruffle chip. Personally, I would have gone with a Baked Lays, or maybe even a Pringle, but I understand why he went with a Ruffle.
He also paired his chip of choice with the number 189, which is the spot he was drafted at after a pretty successful college career at Purdue.
Brown initially posted a picture of his “chip tattoo” on Instagram back in 2017, but he went back and deleted it a couple of days after. When it was still up, the caption on the post read:
“Been playing with a chip on my shoulder all my life.”
And now, the infamous tattoo has resurfaced.
That literal and figurate chip on his shoulder has led to a pretty respectable NFL career so far for Anthony Brown. He’s played all of his pro-football snaps with the Dallas Cowboys, and has made appearances in 94 games and racked up 324 tackles and 9 interceptions.
A person might read that and ask “well why is he signing onto a practice squad?” Well, unfortunately for Brown, he tore is achilles in Week 13 of last season, and has since been rehabbing and recovering. Many teams have written the now veteran cornerback off, that is until he got a call from Pittsburgh.
With Brown recovering from an injury, and a serious one at that, it’s a good thing he’s got a chip on his shoulder…
