Adaptability is key

Terry Crews shares his life story with UTRGV community

Alejandra Yañez | THE RIDER

Triple threat actor, artist and activist Terry Crews was the third guest in the 17th season of the Distinguished Speaker Series Monday night via Zoom.

Director of Student Activities Cindy Mata-Vasquez started out the evening by dedicating the event to UTRGV men’s basketball Coach Lew Hill, who died recently. 

Mata-Vasquez then introduced Crews as an action-movie hero, sitcom star, game show host, former NFL player and bestselling author.

Crews took to Zoom by doing his famous pec jump right off the bat during his introduction. 

Arlett Lomeli, a sociology professor, and Billy Ulibarri, a sociology lecturer, moderated the event. 

ASL interpreters Richard Givens and Gaby Arvizu signed the event.

Lomeli welcomed Crews by thanking him for agreeing to be the guest speaker and asked him to tell the audience where he got his start as a courtroom sketch artist in Flint, Michigan.

“Wow. Well, I am an artist first and foremost, which is really wild because I grew up in a very religious household,” Crews said. 

The artist told the story of his childhood and said art was his escape from the harsh realities at home having a father who was addicted to alcohol and a mother addicted to religion. 

“My art talent sort of just developed out of this desire to want peace,” he said.

Growing up in Flint, Crews spoke about the contaminated water in the area. 

“My relationship with Flint is very painful simply because my mother passed away in 2016,” he said. “She had lymphoma, she had cancer, and she would not leave Flint.”

Crews said he tried to get his mother out of the area, and says he will always wonder if the contaminated water had anything to do with her illness. 

He said many politicians addressed the water issues in his hometown by simply bringing truckloads of bottled water. 

“But no one stayed to fix the problem,” Crews said. 

The artist was irritated by the way politicians used Flint for their own personal gain, but never truly helped make a lasting change. Due to this, Crews said he has donated and continues to donate money to help families back in his hometown. 

Throughout the night, Crews was asked about his versatility and adaptability throughout his professional careers.

As a former NFL player, he shared his view on the world of athletics, saying he had never felt more objectified than he did during his time as a football player. 

“You’re a number and a lot of times people see the superstars, but I was always at the end of the roster trying to make it,” Crews said.

 He said in sports many times the “machine is more important than the person” and this is a mentality that he does not agree with.

Crews said he believes in putting people first and uses his resources to help players make the transition from athletics back into society, something he admits was a struggle for him as well. 

“I’ve met so many players that look at me and they go, ‘Wow, man, how did you get out?’ and I always reach back and help some of the players who are maybe confused when their career is over because there’s a depression, you know, you give so much and then it’s over,” he said. “You have to learn how to move on and I like to help players in their transition.”

Asked about his transition from being a professional athlete to acting, Crews replied that he never imagined he would be an actor.

“I never wanted to be an actor,” he said. “I thought, because of Star Wars and all this stuff, that I was gonna be a filmmaker, special effects artist or storyboard artist.”

Crews said his first job in Los Angeles was sweeping floors at a factory, until he got a security job at a TV studio, where he was asked to audition for a TV show called “Battle Dome.” 

The artist landed his first audition and his acting career took off from there.  

“I was in as an actor and I never looked back,” Crews said. 

He attributes his success in acting to having fun with his characters and considering his job as free play.

“The fact that I didn’t go to acting school was my advantage because I did not know enough to think I couldn’t do it,” Crews said. 

He said his favorite project to work on was the movie “White Chicks” in 2004.

Ulibarri asked Crews about his role as a silence breaker in the Me Too movement back in 2017, when the artist took to Twitter to tell his story while on set of the show “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

“I remember when it was happening, when all these women were coming out against Harvey Weinstein and others, and all I could think about was when it happened to me,” Crews said. 

He said he felt he needed to speak up because of the way women were being treated online for coming out and speaking their truths.  

“I felt that if I didn’t stand up, I would be a fraud,” Crews said. “I said, if I don’t stand with these women, if I don’t speak out, I don’t think I’ll ever have another chance. … What happened to me, I feel like it was the same situation in a lot of ways because it was a power dynamic. It was a thing where this guy was a very powerful Hollywood exec and he felt he could do whatever he wanted.”

He said sexual abuse is a much bigger issue than people like to think, for both men and women, and he said he is thankful to the women who spoke out for giving him the courage to tell his story and for other men as well. 

Asked what university communities can do to combat sexual harassment, Crews replied, “Men must hold other men accountable.”

He compared it to racism by saying that it starts with small indiscretions that people ignore and then becomes a bigger issue over time. 

“People always feel like it’s happening somewhere else,” Crews said. 

He said, in reality, sexual harassment is happening everywhere and it is everybody’s responsibility to let people know when they are crossing the line before situations escalate. 

Crews said his message for the community of the Rio Grande Valley in choosing their battles would be to separate from the “Us vs. Them” mentality.

“The battles that I chose to fight were about humanity,” he said. “It was literally knowing that you are my brother, you are my sister. We are all in this together. … The real battle is in knowing who you are and knowing that you are unique, you are special and you have something that no one else has.”

Before the Q&A session, Crews ended his lecture by offering some advice as someone who has made a life out of transition and adaptability. 

“I have an acronym for this and it’s A.C.D.C.,” he said. “And A stands for adaptability. You have to be able to shift, especially now, and that’s one thing I realized when I got cut from teams. The C is for creativity. If you are the most creative  person at whatever you’re doing, you’re going to survive. And then D is decision, and with decisions you have to be able to go, especially with social media. People are judging themselves by other people and decide they’re not gonna do anything because they say, ‘Well I don’t have 5 million followers.’ Well, you have to start, you have to make a decision to do the thing you wanna do. And then the C is to commit.”