CLEVELAND — It has long been said that behind every good man is a great woman, and new Cleveland Browns linebacker Sione Takitaki is a firm believer in that way of thinking because he lived it during his college days.
In the middle of his career, Takitaki was dismissed from Brigham Young University's football team, but after meeting his now-wife, Alyssa, everything changed for the Fontana, California native.
“I feel like for me I got really lucky,” Takitaki said. “I married a great girl. Saw her in church -- beautiful. She just has everything right. Always pushing me to do better, and I feel like before I was always making decisions on the fly and wasn’t really thinking.
“With a good girl by my side, she definitely has me thinking about every decision and things like that. I feel like we just fit. She is a great friend for me. She is going to be a great mom. Smart girl, really smart girl. I got really lucky. She is out of my league.”
It was during the 2016 season that Takitaki was out of school, off the team and looking for work.
However, rather than further the issues that plagued him early in his career, Takitaki settled down with Alyssa and got a job working construction, where he poured cement foundations for basements, installed glass and block wall.
“I was not getting a scholarship check,” Takitaki said. “I was working doing hard labor actually for money to survive -- to pay rent, to put food on the table. It was hard, but hard times make you who you are. I feel like it was a good situation at the end.
“It was difficult to be out of playing football, going to school and doing the thing that I love the most and that is playing ball. I feel like stepping away from that really made me look at a lot of things in life and what I really wanted to do. ‘Do I want to play ball or not?’ I feel like just that time being away, getting a job -- I worked construction for that whole two semesters that I was away from the game -- it kind of really made me get my things in order.”
Following the 2016 season, Takitaki got an opportunity to resume his football career, but rather than transfer and start over somewhere new, he reenrolled at BYU and became a team leader.
“I wanted to come back to BYU and right my wrongs,” Takitaki said. “It is easy to run away. You could always run away and go to another school, hide your problems and never look back, but for myself, I wanted to come back to BYU because I am LDS. I am a Latter-day Saint.
“I wanted to come back to BYU and make sure that I right my name since I have been in all of that trouble. I feel like that was the last, final decision to come back and show everybody that I could do it, and I could finish out here. That is exactly what I did.”
Because of the change they saw in Takitaki, the Browns feel he is the type of player that become a locker room leader at the NFL level.
“He completely turned his life around,” said Eliot Wolf, the Browns’ assistant general manager. “He became a team captain this year. He was just that guy in the program. You go out to practice and everyone is looking to him. He is a ball of energy, and he is a real leader and culture changer.”
