Darnell Washington tossed and turned in the passenger seat of a U-Haul truck, with the oppressive Las Vegas heat building like a pressure cooker.
Already 6-foot-4 by the end of his freshman year of high school with growing tree trunk legs that would carry him to the NFL, he struggled to find a comfortable sleeping position with his older brother, Ezekiel, in the middle seat and his mother, Katrina Graves, behind the wheel.
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A few months earlier, they had been evicted from their low-rent apartment. Washington crashed on a friend’s couch as he finished out his freshman year at Basic Academy in Henderson, Nev. But when his buddy moved at the end of the school year, Washington and his family packed up the U-Haul, unsure where or when they’d unload it.
They drove to a Walmart parking lot, turned off the ignition and closed their eyes.
Southern Nevada has one of the largest homeless populations in America. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2017 report, nearly 25,000 people in the region experienced homelessness the year that Washington slept in the U-Haul.
For Washington, those numbers aren’t just stats on a page; they were his everyday life.
Graves had been incarcerated, and her legal record made finding a stable job a struggle and keeping an apartment a chore. She worked odd jobs to support her eight children, whose names she tattooed on her arms. If she was lucky, she made $15,000 per year and put meals on the table with food stamps. But each time they moved to a new apartment or a new couch, they knew it came with an expiration date.
All of his older brothers and sisters were off fending for themselves by the time Washington, the baby of the family, lived in the U-Haul with his mother and Ezekiel, the second-youngest. They stayed in the parking lot for about a week. Because they couldn’t burn up all of the gasoline, there was no air conditioning. When the sweltering Las Vegas summer proved too much to bear, they roamed around Walmart as a reprieve. Without a kitchen to prepare meals, they searched for snacks to fill their grumbling stomachs and wondered where they’d rest their heads next.
This weekend, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ promising rookie tight end, with hands like a receiver and a frame like an offensive lineman, will return to the Las Vegas Valley when the Steelers square off against the Raiders in a Sunday night showdown. It will be a homecoming of sorts for a player who often grew up without one.
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“I was homeless a lot,” Washington said. “I probably can’t even put a number on how many apartments we lost. That was the last time.
“But that wasn’t the first time.”
After a week in the parking lot, Washington’s family scrounged up enough cash to buy a few nights in an East Las Vegas motel — close enough to feel the distant glimmering lights of the Vegas strip but a world away from grandiose casinos, where vacationers threw around money without a second thought in the name of entertainment.
Because the family was always on the move, Washington bounced around from school to school to school to school. As he prepared to enter his sophomore year, he enrolled at Desert Pines High and sold raffle tickets for the football team fundraiser.
“Hey Coach, I got the money,” Washington told then-Desert Pines assistant football coach David Hill, who joined the staff at the University of Georgia last year.
Hill had met Darnell and Ezekiel, who is one year older, in the weight room about a week earlier. Blown away by Darnell’s freakish combination of size and athleticism —he’s now 6-foot-7 and 265 pounds and ran a 4.64 40-yard dash at the combine this spring — the coach imagined what this undiscovered gem could be once the college football world found him.
Then, Washington told the coach about his living situation.
“I ain’t worried about the fundraiser money,” Hill remembers saying, shocked. “I just thought this is such a hardship. For you not to want to steal it, that just showed me these are good people.”
From left to right: David Hill, Katrina Graves, Darnell and Ezekiel Washington. (Courtesy of David Hill)That moment was the beginning of a bond that remains to this day. Hill, who often calls Washington “son” in text messages, made it his mission to find a way to keep a roof over Washington’s head and food in his stomach. He’d pay their rent out of his own pocket or ask around town for donations of shoes and other basic necessities. On several instances when money ran dry, he opened the door to his own home.
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“If he didn’t do that,” Washington said. “We’d be back on the streets.”
As the relationship between player and coach grew, Washington began to share more stories about his upbringing.
The turmoil started when Washington was still in kindergarten. In one of his earliest memories, he was sleeping soundly in his house. He has only the vaguest recollection of riding in a car. He awoke in a panic in a foster care home after his father abandoned the family — for reasons Washington still can’t comprehend — without even saying goodbye.
Washington remained in the foster care system until third grade, when he went to live with his mother. But stability evaded him. Graves, who suffered from chronic pain from several auto accidents, sold her medication and endured the physical and mental anguish in an attempt to make ends meet. Despite her efforts, the family still moved around every four to five months. At one point, when Graves was in the hospital, Darnell and Ezekiel tried to figure it out on their own, for fear of ending up back in a foster home.
It all took a toll. The moving. Practicing on an empty stomach. The challenge of comprehending why his older siblings weren’t doing more to help.
An immovable force on the football field with an easy smile and a goofy personality, Washington was overwhelmed by the instability and recoiled into solitude.
“I kept to myself because I didn’t want any of my friends (knowing),” Washington said. “At school, I used to put a smile on my face, but at the end of the day, I know I’m not going to a place that I could call home.”
Behind Washington’s stoic disposition, the sadness and rage and frustration and confusion simmered until it boiled up and blew the top off. Washington would erupt during football practices when things went wrong. Other times, when authority figures tried to help him, he’d shut down.
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“He had an attitude problem,” Hill said. “He had so much trauma and so many negative things. It’s a different world. A lot of people can’t even understand that. You’re trying to go to school and be your best, and play sports, and control your temper and not be mad at the world.”
Several of Washington’s older siblings landed in prison. Hill, who became a mentor, coach, older brother and father figure, worked to ensure Washington didn’t succumb to the same pitfalls.
Although Washington had been dealt the toughest of hands, his growing body was like winning the genetic lottery. Hill tried to help him cash it in with a heavy dose of tough love.
They used to have a saying: There are a lot of people better than Kobe Bryant or LeBron James that nobody talks about, because they couldn’t make the right decisions.
“If you mess this up, you’re gonna be the person that they bring in and say, ‘Hey, Darnell, we’d like you to publicly speak to these children, because they are going down a wrong path. Tell them how you messed up your opportunity,’” Hill used to tell Washington.
“I’m not his biological dad. And so sometimes he didn’t want to hear. So I just had to force it upon him a lot of times and continue to explain to him what the significance is of this decision.”
While Hill offered parental-like guidance, Ezekiel provided an example with an iron will that eventually made him a Marine — a career path that Washington proudly brings up often.
Instead of walking to school, Ezekiel bought a Camelbak and ran, seeing it as extra training for track. When the boys played video games, Ezekiel would jump up between rounds, race outside and do a set of football drills, very similar to how, decades earlier, coach Mike Tomlin and his brother did pushups during commercials. On report card day, Ezekiel proudly showed his mother all of the A’s.
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“He always did the right thing,” Washington said. “So I always wanted to do the same thing.”
While Ezekiel shined in the classroom, athletics became Darnell’s outlet for his frustrations — and his path to a different life. His first school year at Desert Pines tells you all you need to know. On the football field, he helped Desert Pines to the 2017 3A state championship. On the basketball court, he was a double-double machine en route to the 2017-18 state championship. And in track, he took gold in the shot put at the state meet to complete the three-season, state championship trifecta.
As accolades rolled in and college offers flooded his mailbox, Washington began seeing a light emerging from the darkness.
“During high school, you get peer pressured to do things,” Washington said. “I just had a tunnel vision. I just never wanted to go back to that living.”
During Washington’s junior year of high school, he was leaving the lunch room when a text message buzzed on his cell phone.
“I’m pregnant,” wrote Stephanie, his then-girlfriend and now-wife.
At first, Washington thought it was a joke. Stephanie used to tease him all the time to try to get a rise out of her boyfriend.
“You got that off the internet,” Washington replied. “Send a picture with, like, a spoon in it or something.”
Sure enough, there it was. A spoon and a pregnancy test with two pink lines.
“All these mixed (emotions) were going through my mind,” Washington said. “Because at that age and at that time, you hear early pregnancy. You hear how things turn bad. You never hear about, ‘Oh, happy ever after ending.’”
Washington’s biggest fear was finding a way to tell his mother, who knew too well the challenges of welcoming a new life into a world where the odds seem stacked against you.
“I thought my mom was gonna flip out and start screaming,” Washington said.
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Instead, Graves sat down and told her baby what it would take for him to take care of his own. She told him it was time to grow up. From now on, it’s going to be all about the baby.
“She actually surprised me,” Washington said. “She just had a great good talk with me, and after the talk, I was just excited.”
Washington worked at Kohl’s to help pay the bills at home. He credits the support he received from both sides of the family for making the early pregnancy a blessing that brought him and Stephanie closer. At the same time, he redoubled his efforts in athletics with the new motivation. Beyond the hope of supporting his mother, he now had his own family to think about.
College recruiters started taking notice. A five-star recruit, Washington accumulated nearly 40 offers. Clemson. Michigan. Ohio State. Texas. Alabama. Florida. Miami. Tennessee. Rated as the No. 34 prospect in the nation and the top tight end in the 247Sports Composite, Washington’s decision was about more than himself. When recruiters rolled out the red carpet to show him the shiniest facilities and biggest weight room, he wanted to tour the family housing and hear about local daycares.
On Jan. 2, 2020, Washington stepped on stage at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Fla., for the Under Armour All-America Bowl. He was flanked by his mother, Hill, Stephanie and a special guest: his infant daughter, Laila.
As Washington announced his commitment, he held up his baby, decked out in a Georgia Bulldogs onesie.
“I just want to be the best father I can,” Washington said. “Through thick and thin. I just want to be the father that I never had.”
Five-star tight end Darnell Washington announced his commitment to Georgia with his daughter’s onesie. Washington is already signed, adds to the Dawgs top five class pic.twitter.com/JzXx89J8Tn
— Tom VanHaaren (@TomVH) January 3, 2020
This summer, Washington once again crammed his 6-7 frame into his Dodge Durango and set off for Steelers training camp in Latrobe, Pa.
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As they rolled through the winding roads to Saint Vincent College, the car was packed. Washington married Stephanie before his freshman year of college — “It wasn’t no Kenny Pickett wedding,” Washington laughed — and their young family grew again in family housing at Georgia when they welcomed a second daughter, Gia.
Accompanying Washington, his wife and two daughters was former Georgia teammate Broderick Jones. The two met at the All-America Bowl and immediately hit it off. On the field, they often lined up next to each other with Jones at left tackle and Washington at tight end. Off the field, they were just as inseparable.
“That was like a brother away from home that I had,” Jones said. “That’s how I looked at it. I stayed on him, and he stayed on me. We made sure we were always doing what we were supposed to.”
GO DEEPER
'Blessed child': Steelers first-round pick Broderick Jones was always destined for greatness
Washington’s dominant playing style continued at Georgia, where he won back-to-back national championships and cemented himself as one of the 2023 NFL Draft’s most unique prospects. Yet, on draft night, he felt snubbed. He slipped into the third round, possibly a product of some teams having concerns about the medical report on his knee.
However, the slide came with the silver lining that Washington would be reunited in Pittsburgh with Jones, the Steelers’ first-round pick — a familiar face in a new city who had watched Washington grow as a player and a father.
“He’s a great dad,” Jones said. “Seeing him as a dad, it’s crazy because he’s been doing it for so long. I want to get to that point in my life. I just look at him like, he can teach me some things.”
The car pulled into the parking lot outside the dorm rooms. The big-bodied former Bulldogs stepped outside.
“Daddy, I don’t want you to go back to work,” the now 4-year-old Laila said.
Reluctantly, Washington hugged his girls goodbye. As he set off to continue his work on the field, he assured them he’d be home soon.
GO DEEPER
Steelers camp: Darnell Washington making progress, Joey Porter Jr. makes a big play
(Top photos: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images, Logan Bowles / Associated Press)
The Football 100, the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time, goes on sale this fall. Pre-order it here.
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