Becoming a Redskin: Robert Griffin III's journey from Texas to Washington

“We dropped everything and went to see him,” Jacqueline Griffin said. “We spent half an hour with him afterwards, and then he went back to the airport.”

The hectic schedule had some people close to Griffin wondering whether he was spreading himself too thin, but he promised them it wasn’t too much and insisted the marketing engine would shut down once training camp started. The goal was partly financial. Griffin hoped to live for the year off his sponsorship income, which could reach seven figures for someone with his national appeal, and put all his Redskins earnings — more than $14 million in bonus and salary — in savings.

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In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, NFL prospect Robert Griffin III discusses hard work, expectations and his goals for his rookie season.

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“I’ve definitely been busy, but I’ve found my pockets of time to chill out and relax for three or four days, and make sure I can spend some time with my family before I have to go off,” Griffin said. “I usually ask myself, ‘Am I doing too much?’ And usually when I ask myself that, I am. And I haven’t asked myself that.”

The Redskins and Griffin’s agents at Creative Artists Agency did their part to keep Griffin’s schedule clear by limiting his media availability. He did almost no one-on-one interviews between the draft and the start of training camp, other than those arranged by sponsors, who traded access to Griffin for exposure for their products.

But from the outside, it appeared as if Griffin was everywhere. He did Leno. He posed for pictures with Snoop Dogg at an Adidas event. He won an ESPY, and walked the red carpet. His first Adidas commercial, a dark, futuristic spot titled “Do What Light Does,” went viral on Twitter.

The summer seemed to breeze by without a hitch, save for one thing: In late June, news broke that Griffin had been the victim of an alleged extortion plot by a former Baylor walk-on basketball player. The scheme was broken up by the FBI, and the basketball player, Richard Hurd, was arrested.

Although the existence of such a plot, naturally, shook Griffin’s inner circle, nothing ever emerged about the derogatory information Hurd claimed to have. The story disappeared in less than 48 hours.

“We have nothing to hide,” Jacqueline Griffin said. “So we’re not worried about it. It seems like high-profile people, whether they’re an athlete or an actor or whatever, they come under a lot of scrutiny and people are trying to dig and dig. I’m not saying [Robert is] perfect or we’re perfect, but there’s nothing you’re going to find that’s gonna be. . .  I mean, good luck.”

Moving on

On July 8, Griffin and his fiancee, Rebecca Liddicoat, stood together in the middle of his near-empty, off-campus apartment in Waco, having just finished boxing up all their belongings for the move to Washington, and cried.

“I didn’t feel any kind of sadness until it was done,” Griffin said later. “When I saw the apartment empty, that’s when I knew this chapter was closing. It was tough for me to go to campus and say, ‘See you later’ to people I’d been working with for years. That’s where I had sweated. That’s where I tore an ACL and recovered from it. That’s where I won a Heisman and [where] we won 10 games [in 2011]. We did so many great things there.

“To leave that all behind and move on to something new, it was sad. There were a lot of tears.”

The next day, still overcome by emotion and “just having a moment,” as he would say later, Griffin jumped on his Twitter account and tweeted pointed questions to some of his Redskins teammates, with the hashtag #KnowYourWhy. “Why do you play the game? Why do you sacrifice?”

“I was kind of just feeling like, this part of my journey is over. It really hit me hard,” he told the Web site Rant Sports. “. . . I know my why. I sacrifice for my teammates. I want to make my family proud. So I know my why. I just want them to know theirs.”

From Waco, Griffin’s belongings traveled on a moving van up I-35 toward Dallas, and eventually made their way east along I-30, I-40 and I-81 towardNorthern Virginia, where they were unloaded into a rental home in a gated community not far from Redskins Park.

Griffin and Liddicoat found the house on their own — they plan being to rent this year, and buy in 2013 — with some direction from the Redskins. Griffin’s mother, who had helped her son move into his Waco apartment four years earlier, made a point of staying out of it this time, in deference to Liddicoat. “That’s a good thing for them to experience together,” she said. “It’s gearing towards their future.”

Theirs was a highly typical house-hunting experience for new transplants to the Washington area, characterized first and foremost by sticker shock.

“Robert’s a very frugal kid,” his father said. “He was shocked [by the prices]. He called me — they were looking at a place, following the [Redskins’ suggestions]. And that harsh reality — everyone who knows him knows he’s not going to be some guy spending wildly. But he had to make a choice, and he felt it was important to be close to the [Redskins] facility, so he did it.

“I want him to live at middle class. Now, the rent he’s gonna pay is not middle class, but his expenditures away from the rent will be. And that’s important to me. If I see something I don’t like, he’s gonna get it from me.”

Before the Waco apartment was packed up, before the final move east, before the start of training camp, Griffin’s parents visited him at Baylor one last time.

Griffin and his dad worked out together and threw the football around. And Griffin and his mom set aside some time for their own ritual, the one they had followed together since Robert was a boy. He sat in a chair, and she stood behind him and braided his hair, painstakingly twisting each lock just so, giving her son his trademark look.

Usually, this was their time to talk — “Mommy time,” she sometimes called it. But this time, Jacqueline Griffin worked in near-silence, and Robert Griffin III kept his eyes — and his focus — on something else the entire time: the Washington Redskins playbook that stayed open on his lap, thick with schemes and possibilities.