How Richards' Hasan Muhammad-Rogers came back from the brink of death

He saunters into the crowded upstairs weight room of his high school and tries to blend in, to just begin to disappear, but he can’t.

That’s Hasan Muhammad-Rogers over there, the one with the dreadlocks and curved arms. That’s Richards’ all-state quarterback headed to Illinois State, also known as the kid who was saved by football, a cliché wrapped in a scar.

He breaks it out in front of his friends.

“I’m Ezekiel Elliott,” he says, a reference to the Ohio State running back with the crop-top shirt. Hasan rolls the bottom of his white spandex cutoff up above the abs, which look sculpted for the moment like the rest of his body – save for two dark marks on the left and right sides.

To the left is where the bullet entered, now a circle black enough to stand out from his dark skin. To the right is where it eventually left, now a bump rising from his stomach. Somewhere in the middle is where it got stuck in his abs.

It’s January now, so it’s been eight months since he was shot by someone he never knew. Weight rooms like this bring the pain back real quick.

“There ain’t nothing to really relate it to,” he says, “other than doing like 1,000 sit-ups, and as soon as you feel like you can’t do no more, being forced to do another 1,000.”

Growing up, workouts were his punishments. Other kids he knew got spankings or whippings, and he was told by his father to run suicides in the street, or to do pushups off the front steps, or to hold a crunch at six inches until he cried.

The gunshot reminded him of those ab workouts, and ever since, the workouts have reminded him of the gunshot. He still does them twice a day – once at school, once before bed at his father’s house.

That’s why today, at an after-school workout with friends, he’s finishing out on the decline bench. The 5-foot-11, 175-pound quarterback sits on the edge, staring straight ahead to wide receiver Spencer Tears, who is ready to hand him a medicine ball.

“Twenty-five?” Tears asks.

Hasan grabs the weight and starts to remember the pain.

…

He didn’t feel it at first.

It was Memorial Day 2014, moments before a Rogers family cookout. He’d just jumped into all of this, grabbing his cousin’s bike off a front deck and taking off down the driveway, where he hit a bump, nearly fell off and came eye to eye with a man he’d never met.

“What are you doing on a bike?” asked the man, who looked to be in his mid-20s.

“I’m trying to see if I can still ride it,” Hasan answered.

That’s when the shots fired, one after another straight down the street. Hasan remembers falling at the sound of something loud and rapid, just as a gold Chrysler 300 facing the other way sped away from the morning light.

Time slowed to a blur. Hasan picked himself up to the sound of a commotion he could hardly hear. Did someone get shot? Someone got shot. Three people, actually. Are they OK?

He started running, straight up his paved black driveway, up the wooden steps and through the front door, where he fell inside into the arms of his father.

“I got shot!” he yelled, the words jammed somewhere between a sentence and a question.

Dennis Rogers couldn’t believe it either. Not until he turned him over, looked at the abdomen area and saw something he’s seen before: an entrance hole. His fingers traced it to the bump on the other side, where he could feel the bullet still lodged in the skin.

The next 10 minutes of Hasan’s life mixed together: his father disappearing, his mother arriving. Police here with questions – Who shot him? Where’d they go? – and he didn’t want to answer and couldn’t if he tried. He was cursing, going mad almost, waiting on an ambulance that seemed like it surely would never arrive.

Finally, it did arrive, and out came the stretcher, which looked to be the surest sign that he was in need of saving. He sat down before they pushed him onto his back and strapped him in. That’s when he first felt the pain, searing like fire blazing right through that six-pack.

They wheeled him inside and slammed the doors shut. On his back, abs still aching, he was left to stare up at two faces. One was his mother, telling him he’d be all right. The other was a paramedic.

“Do you think I’m going to die?” he asked the medic.

“I don’t know,” he remembers hearing. “We’re going to do our best.”

So this must be it, he thought. He was going out of this world just as he came up through it, burning in the abs. For 11 years, that sensation was a consequence for something he’d done wrong.

He didn’t know what he did this time, but he wondered if the punishment was death.

…

As Hasan’s world slowed down, his father’s sped up. Behind the wheel of his burgundy Buick, Dennis Rogers scanned Dolton’s tree-lined roads in search of anything that even slightly resembled a gold Chrysler 300. He was like a frantic rat in a 4.5-mile cage.

The village of more than 23,000 people stretches from 138th Street down to the Little Calumet River and eastward from Halsted over to Interstate-94. It ranks No. 1 among Chicago municipalities in property crime rate, with 70 victims out of every 1,000 people, according to the Chicago Tribune’s crime database, which compiles data as recent as 2011. Dolton’s rates for violent crimes – homicide, arson, sexual assault – aren’t out of the ordinary for the region, but its proximity to some other high-crime neighborhoods leaves it constantly open to spill-over.

In May 2014, the month Hasan was shot, more than 250 people in Chicago suffered the same fate. Since May 2014, the total is up to more than 2,800. The data the Tribune tracks is for city limits, which end right near Dolton’s northern boundary.

Dennis didn’t find the shooters that day. The police never did either. When any of them describe the incident, the phrase they use is a tired one: “He was in the wrong place at a wrong time.” As much as anyone knows, the man Hasan talked to about his bike had posted a rap video slamming the men in the gold Chrysler. When Hasan answered him, that’s when he became an associate.

Hasan was shot, along with a 21-year-old and a 12-year-old. All three were unintended victims, and they all survived, but together, they became more blips on the radar. “Three wounded in random Dolton shooting,” a local newspaper headline read. Publicly, their identities were stripped down to age and gender, like nearly 3,000 Chicago residents in the span of a year.

“It’s just madness,” Hasan would say a year later. “Everything good always turns to bad out here.”

When the police hear about shootings, as with any crime, they also get a physical description of the suspects that is often vague. In Dolton, a community that is 90 percent African-American, it becomes easy to lose the distinction between victim and perpetrator.

Yet for as much as people growing up on the South Side can sometimes feel boxed in – by geography, by economics, by society – the region has produced some of the most famous examples for breaking that mold. They’re athletes: Derrick Rose, Dwyane Wade, Anthony Davis, Jabari Parker, Donovan McNabb. All of them grew up on the South Side, rising from the ashes of what they saw out their front door.

“I’ve seen so many come back and not make it, go to college and come back,” says Dwyane Wade, who grew up in Robbins and starred in football and basketball at Richards. “I’ve seen my older brother do it.

He was very good, went off to college and he just came back, and it was like, this is it? This is all you do, you just come back?

“And I didn’t want that for myself. I wanted different. I wanted to be one of the first ones. I wanted to show other kids it can be done.”

Growing up in Dolton, playing at Richards like Wade did and getting to new places on the wings of a sport was Hasan’s dream. By the time of the shooting, he was already an all-state quarterback with an offer from Illinois State. Playing college football was inevitable — if he could just live long enough to get there.

…

Hasan’s stretcher slowed to a stop in the basement of Franciscan St. Margaret Health in Hammond, Ind.

His abs continued to ache, but it was no longer a dizzying pain. People were moving fast but deliberately, as if procedure was replacing panic.

“That’s when I thought, All right, I might not die. Now, we gotta think about playing football,” he recalls.

Doctors began to debate: Do we take the bullet out or leave it in? He told them to take it out. Any football hit could dislodge it into a new section of the abdomen to puncture and force to bleed.

He watched as they did – using large metal prongs to lift open the skin and pull out the silver bullet – until all that was left was his damaged abs, the muscles ripped all the way across the front.

He spent two days in the hospital, unable to move. Fearing he wouldn’t get necessary rest, doctors took away his phone, leaving him alone in the company of his fears. He overheard doctors doubting whether he could come back for football, later telling him he had his strong abs to thank for even being alive.

The Indiana State coach called to offer a scholarship while he was in bed, during one of the few instances where he was allowed to have his phone. He picked up and said he was at the hospital but that he was there visiting his aunt. He couldn’t begin to think of things not working out.

So he had to make sure they would. Followed by two weeks of bed rest at his father’s house, just feet from where the shooting took place, Hasan returned to practice but sat out that first Monday. When Tuesday came, he arrived with his medical clearance letter, but Coach Tony Sheehan had his doubts – that is, until Hasan lied down on a bench and started to lift again.

“The longer they’ve got to sit, they distance themselves,” Sheehan says of injured players. “When they get back in, emotionally, I think it kind of helps.”

Those first couple weeks of the season, with his abs raw and shredded and facing teams with plenty of pass rush, he took hits he’d feel for weeks. His arm strength was down, not having the core to power throws and playing through a bright pain each time he stretched his arm to release.

He was forced to invest in his legs more, and that helped in the long run. By Week 3, so much of his core had returned, and his throws were 15 yards longer than they’d ever been before.

Hasan ran things his senior year like he was back playing for his dad in Dolton Park. He threw shotgun fades and ran option keepers, pump faked defenders out of their shoes and reversed the field on scrambles he’d take to the house. He was the starting quarterback, safety, punter, punt returner and kick returner for a 10-2 team that made the Class 6A quarterfinals. Teammates called him “Hot Sauce” as he threw up money signs, an homage to Johnny Manziel, another scrambling gunslinger often told his height would give his quarterback career a shelf life.

The pain he felt from where the bullet ripped through his abs never disappeared, and it maybe never will, but he played through it, compelled by the looks of a father who once had his shoulder popped in on the sidelines of a youth football practice so he wouldn’t have to miss a game. In a strange way, losing the muscles in his core made his body stronger, at least in the impact he delivered to others, or maybe just in his tolerance for pain. On one play, he leveled a cornerback two yards into the end zone. On another, he spun off a hit at the 2 and knifed through two more defenders for the score. After the accident, Hasan attacked plays as if destined to keep them alive.

“When he noticed how quick it can be gone, he finally figured it out,” says Ryan Willett, one of his starting receivers and also a cousin on his father’s side. “He turned into another person. An animal.”

Hasan threw for 2,480 yards and 27 touchdowns while running for 612 yards and nine more scores. He landed on multiple all-area and all-state teams, including an honorable mention from Chicago Football.

He earned offers from North Dakota, Indiana State and Northern Iowa before pledging his commitment to Illinois State in October.

His final season was like a toast to life itself, and no moment was finer than the one that came on his 18th birthday, the day he was set to enter manhood. It was the second round of the 6A playoffs at Lincoln-Way West, and Hasan and the Bulldogs found themselves in a quick 20-6 hole. From there, Hasan erupted. He threw touchdown passes of 65, 57, 80 and 3 yards to put the game on ice in a 34-27 victory.

He had to call his father, who left to coach a Dolton game with Richards trailing at the half. Hasan started off with the final score, what a comeback, and did you know he had five touchdowns to go with almost 400 yards?

His father just asked the same two questions he always poses after every game.

“How many interceptions did you throw? Did you fumble?”

No matter what Hasan has done in football, be it before he took the bullet to the abs or after, it never felt like it was good enough for the man who raised him. His father was the one who signed him up for football at age 6, who said he had to play, who didn’t let him go out for basketball because of the way it would mess with the seasons, who had him holding a sit-up position long enough to where not even a bullet could penetrate his core. In four years, Hasan took home about every personal accomplishment a high school football player could gather except the one he wanted the most: a “good job” from his old man.

With a couple months remaining until he’d leave for college, Hasan was still left to wonder why.

…

There’s a knock at the door of an A-framed, one-floor, orange-brick house snuck tightly into a row of similar places in Dolton, and Dennis Rogers rises from the couch to say hello. He’s a shorter but rather robust man, clearly one who played football at a much different pace than his 175-pound quarterback of a son.

Inside, he goes right into that. He played linebacker and tight end at Eisenhower High School in Robbins years ago. He stuck to just linebacker his senior year because hitting was so much more fun. He’d earned scholarships to Western Kentucky and Kentucky State. He, too, was on his way out.

“That was the game plan — that should have been the game plan,” he says. “But I didn’t have nobody telling me, ‘You’re going to play football.’ I had people actually cheering me on to be in the streets, so that’s the way I went.

“I ain’t got s*** to show for it.”

He says he missed his junior season because he got in some trouble with the law. He came back for senior year, playing only middle linebacker, but by the time the school year ended, he wasn’t eligible to graduate. He enrolled in summer classes, but by then, both colleges had pulled their offers.

He gave in to the streets. After so many years, sitting on a black leather couch in his dimly-lit front living room, he’s somewhat vague on the details, opening only certain layers of the wound. He says he’s seen things. He’s watched the infrastructure of “the streets” dissipate from the “old heads” who maintained order to the “young punks” who just get their hands on the guns. He’s been shot at. He’s watched people bleed out and die.

It’s a life he had, but it’s one he walked away from years ago. He says it was the birth of his oldest daughter, the third of four children, that made him start to think about futures and the drastically different outcomes that wedge themselves into people's lives. When he looked at his first son, a little baby he called Hasan, his mind gravitated toward football.

The memories came back, and he started to craft a plan: He’d get Hasan a football scholarship out of these streets, regardless of whether he was tall enough and regardless of whether he even really wanted one. First, they’d move from Robbins to Dolton because Dolton allowed tackle football signups at age 6. They’d sign up together – Dennis as the head coach and his son as his soon-to-be quarterback. They’d practice with the team for Part One and then head home for Part Two.

“'No matter what – you eat, sleep, s*** football,'” Dennis recalls telling him. “'This is what makes you who you is. Football is Hasan Muhammad-Rogers. If you ain’t got that, it’s going to be rough for you out there.'”

Dennis didn’t know if there were other avenues his son could take to a bright future, and he didn’t wait to find out. Football is what he knew. It was aggression, the legal kind. Football was a war won by the strong over the weak.

He remained cognizant of the temptations of their surroundings that could threaten Hasan’s future like it once did his. As his father, he guarded the home with a pit bull and a Rottweiler, and he only let his son hang around with other athletes. As his coach, Dennis pushed and pushed and never let up. Nothing was good enough, and nothing ever would be.

The image he’d project to others, he says now, was drastically different.

"Any little thing you do, somebody's going to disagree with it as, 'You playing Daddy Ball,'" he says. "But my whole thing was, 'Any time you want to put your son against mine, do it. Because I know what I got.'"
From a camp chair in the corner of the room, Hasan leans back and starts to chuckle.

“I don’t give a f***,” his father continues. “If somebody’s talking about Daddy Ball, if you want to put your son against mine, we can do this. Any sport you wanna do – you wanna box, anything you want to do, we can put your son against mine and we’ll do it like that.”

By now, Hasan is howling.

The stories continue to roll, starting with the games Dennis would spend in the stands talking smack to anyone around him, words his son on the field would never hear. He says his proudest moment as Hasan’s father came back with the Dolton Bears, when they had to leave that game at halftime to get to another one in Robbins, and the Robbins coach was upset that Hasan hadn’t been there for warmups.

“‘Bench him, f*** it,'” Dennis recalls saying.

Hasan was benched for the first half, which ended with Robbins trailing. In the second half, he capped off a final drive with the game-winning touchdown pass as time expired.

“So I had something to say to all the coaches,” Dennis recalls.

Hasan catches himself mid-cackle.

“Wait, the New Lenox game?” he says. “Ah, I remember that!”

There’s something new happening here between a father and his son. Hasan’s laughter is reaching a state of euphoria, a reaction he simply can’t control.

He’ll say later that he’d never heard these things – the stories, the support or any of the reasons why.

He’d later look back on the way his dad raised him through football with a new descriptor: This was “his secret master plan,” the phrase a freshly opened window into how much his dad had kept from him for 18 and a half years until that afternoon, when a father and a son from Robbins decided to show each other their scars.

…

This isn’t about the past. Not now. Hasan has made it out, off to Illinois State. Now, this becomes about both of them a little more. Hasan wants to avoid being one of those guys who just comes back.

Two hours south in Bloomington, he already knows his life will be new.

“I was out there for a weekend and didn’t hear one gun shot,” he says. “That’s a lot different right there.”

He’s going to redshirt this year, sitting behind Tre Roberson, the returning starter at quarterback for a team that lost in the Football Championship Subdivision national title game. It’ll be the first time in 12 years he won’t see the field, let alone be a starting quarterback. His job now is just to train. He’ll need to get back to his roots, those days of pain in that Dolton living room. Only now, the voice he hears will need to be his own.

From atop the decline bench in the Richards weight room, he takes the medicine ball in his hands.

“I’m going for 25,” he says. “I might hit 15.”

He draws an iPhone from the fold in the shirt he pulled up above the abs and scar. He brings up Lil Wayne’s “No Quitter Go-Getter,” his go-to tune, and begins the crunches as the lyrics kick in.

“Got everything to gain and I’m proud of the pain.”

He finishes at 25.