Healthy Hollywood: NFL Star DeAngelo Williams Always Thinks Pink

Football star DeAngelo Williams proves real men do wear pink! In fact, if you’re football fan, you know the NFL turns into a parade of pink during October’s Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Some of the world’s most macho guys are sporting pink cleats, pink towels and other pinkish touches to their uniform. It’s really an awesome sight to see on the field!

What fans may not know is that Carolina Panthers star DeAngelo Williams is the pioneer of the NFL’s pink push. Back in 2009, he helped persuade the league to allow players to wear pink in October.

“It started off as a friendly conversation and then it got serious and brought about all the pink in the NFL. It is fascinating because the NFL has so much influence in this country and we wear a little pink and people ask questions. And, those questions lead to saving lives and preventing things that possibly wouldn’t have been prevented had it not been for seeing a NFL player, a masculine player of that size and magnitude, wearing the color pink,” states DeAngelo to Healthy Hollywood.

Healthy Hollywood caught up with the running back this morning in New York City at an event to support the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance (MBC Alliance). It is National Metastatic Breast Cancer Awareness Day and the MBC Alliance wants to make folks aware of metastatic breast cancer (MBC), which originates in the breast and spreads to other part of the body. It is a disease that has affected Williams’ family. His mother passed away from MBC this past May and four of his aunts died from breast cancer.

“It is not necessarily paying tribute to them. It is bringing awareness to breast cancer the disease in general, and it has helped save lives. It not to honor them because when we are all gone and the pink is still in the NFL, the survivors will smiles because they will know exactly that struggle means or someone that had lost someone to this deadly disease will know they aren’t in it by themselves,” adds DeAngelo.

I couldn’t be more impressed with DeAngelo. He attended the event with his fiancé and his two gorgeous young daughters. He couldn’t have been nicer or more sincere about his efforts to raise awareness. He tells me he is humbled by the gratitude from survivors and those women he inspired to get tested, adding, “I usually follow that statement with ‘why are you thanking me and they say because you’re brining awareness to this cause. You have put it on a national scale.”

As a tribute to his mother, DeAngelo dyed his dreads pink. “That’s my way of saying the NFL wants to raise awareness from October 1 to October 31 but I want to raise awareness every time I step on the field,” he says.

— Terri MacLeod