Fred Stokes always showed promise on the football field.
After playing only during his senior year at Vidalia (GA) High School, it earned him a scholarship to Georgia Southern University. There, he played offensive tackle on two Division I-AA National Championship teams and was named a first-team All-America his senior season.
And when the NFL scouts came to work him out, Stokes still showed promise. However, it wasn't as an offensive tackle.
"The Falcons and the Steelers were going to put me at guard because I could pull," Stokes said. "But I think it was the Raiders, they were like, 'I'm going to put this bag back here. This is going to represent the quarterback, and I'll put another bag over here. When I say go, can you just go around this bag and get to the quarterback?' And I guess word got out that, 'When you go down there, the offensive lineman, why don't you take a look at him as a linebacker or a defensive end.'
"But there was no inclination from anybody. I just knew that they would try me out at linebacker and at defensive end. I'm a kid from a single-parent home, two younger sisters and just my mom. I was like, 'I don't care, I'll play anywhere. I just want to play.'
"Most teams who were seriously considering me were telling me offensive guard. Nobody actually said, 'We're thinking about drafting you.' I never heard the word draft."
That was until the Rams called during the 12th round of the 1987 Draft.
"'Hey, Fred, we want to welcome you to the team. We just drafted you.' It was one o'clock in the morning and I was overwhelmed. I took off down the hall in the dorm screaming, 'I just got drafted! I just heard this guy on the phone. Don't know who he was, but he said he was representing the Rams, and I got drafted!' And then I went to sleep. So nothing changed in my life except for that conversation," Stokes laughed.
Yeah, nothing changed other than he was moving from his dorm room in Statesboro, GA, across the country to Los Angeles. And that he'd be going from playing in the Sun Belt Conference to the NFL alongside future Hall of Famers.
"When I got to the Rams, the thing I remember is that Jack Youngblood, who is an amazing guy, took me under his wing," Stokes said. "I'm a country boy. I mean, I'm boots and jeans. We owned horses when I was in Georgia. So I got that information out there, and Jack actually took me to his house and we rode horses together. He talked to me about the nuances of the game, the mindset.
"And Jackie Slater would work with me. 'Fred, when you come off the ball, can you do this for me?' I had those guys and Jack Faulkner, the player personnel director, another amazing guy. I was blessed to have some men around me that saw maybe what I couldn't actually see at the time. They call it potential. And you know, that's where my mindset was. I was just eager. I was hungry. And I wanted to stay humble."
To do that, Stokes only had to remember back to his recreation team winning a state championship when he was a young teenager. Riding home on a school bus, they passed by Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and saw a marquee promoting an upcoming Falcons game against the Dallas Cowboys.
"We wanted to stay and see it since we won our game. But we couldn't, obviously," Stokes said. "Well, fast forward to 1987 and I got drafted by the Rams. We play the Atlanta Falcons and I found myself standing in that stadium, almost in tears. Here I am wanting to watch the Falcons in 1977, not knowing that 10 short years later I would be playing against the Falcons. Standing in their stadium on the field instead of sitting in the stands. It was overwhelming.
"I'm big on mindset and so I just tried to keep that mindset the whole time I played. That it was a game and it was a dream that I was blessed and very fortunate to play."
The defensive end would play 10 seasons in the NFL. The first two with the Rams; followed by four with Washington, where he helped them win Super Bowl XXVI; then three more with the Rams; before finishing with one season in New Orleans.
"When I went back to the Rams, Jack Youngblood was there and I remember talking to him. He said, 'I told those guys from the front office they shouldn't have never let you go. Because kid, I know you can play,'" Stokes said. "And, of course, I proved myself when I was in Washington. But just him kind of giving me that vote of confidence, saying that we should have kept you…
"I told Jack, 'When I was here, I was single.' I went to the Redskins, and I got with Coach Joe Gibbs. I'm a man of faith and I believe that everything happens for a reason and a purpose. I got married; I've got two kids. I said, 'Jack, I needed to leave so I could get my life together.'
"But going back wasn't in terms of a hey, I told you so kind of thing. The Rams welcomed me back, and it really was almost like being back home."
Retiring from the game in 1997, Stokes returned to Georgia Southern and earned his degree. He then became involved with Bubba Burgers before beginning to travel around the world selling food products at military installations.
After doing that for five years, he crossed paths with the owner of a meat packing plant in Georgia, and in 2006, Fred Stokes Foods was born.
"He reached out to me and said, 'Hey, have you ever heard about Jimmy Dean? We'd like to do that with you. What would it take? What are the logistics?' And we worked out the numbers," Stokes said. "So now I've got a company that makes Fred Stokes Smoked Sausage. And we're just getting in our first stores with Fred Stokes Smoked Back Bacon.
"We were in some Walmart stores and some other grocery stores, but now we only just do food service. That's some hotels, restaurants, and a couple of sports bars. But the bacon is getting ready to go into some c [convenient] stores."
Stokes, who makes his home in Orlando, FL, with his wife, Regina, is also heavily involved with a non-profit he founded – L.I.N.T. Brother – because of something that occurred during his second stint with the Rams.
"In '94, I was on the verge of committing suicide. And not because of anxiety, but because men hide. We've been misled with information about what a real man is. People ask me, and there was nothing wrong with my mind. After getting with L.A. and having one of the best years of my career in '93, in the '94 training camp, I just kind of fell back on some old habits of mine," Stokes said.
"And I'm like, 'Oh, my God. I've been speaking, I've been representing,' and you hear this voice. 'People are going to think you're a hypocrite. You're a fraud.' It's like, 'Yeah, why don't you commit suicide?' But I believe that that happened so that I can know what it felt like to be at the edge of life, so to speak, and can help men walk back from that.
"It's about minimizing stress and anxiety, but at the end of the day, you've got men that have not talked or said anything like I was, and next thing you know, they've committed suicide. And it's like, 'What happened?' It's the issues of life. Out of all the deaths by suicide, 80 percent are done by men. Of the 80 percent, over 60-some percent had no known mental health issues at time of death.
"Before the concept L.I.N.T. – Life I Never Tell – I just was telling men you need another man to talk to. And I was saying it from a personal place. I'm telling you; I was getting ready to commit suicide because every other man, every other guy on the team, the men all around, they looked like they had it all together. Why am I struggling?
"When you talk to men, you truly get down to the lint in the pocket of their lives. Because we associate with lint in your pocket. So if you take all the contents out of your pocket, and pat your pocket, they appear to be empty. But then turn the pocket inside out and do it, and you can see the lint down in the crevices. That's where we are. It's the hidden darkness down in the crevices in the pocket of our lives that you can't see behind the stuff."
