It may be hard to believe, knowing what we know now, but for a brief, shining moment, the Jacksonville Jaguars looked like they were going to have a resurgence under head coach Jack Del Rio. Before he ran the team into the ground, he took the Jaguars to the playoffs not long after taking over, and turned Jacksonville into a tough, physical team with a smash-mouth defense that was among the best in the league.
But he had some less-than-stellar moments, too. If we flash back to 2003, Del Rio hadn't yet proven that he was an absolutely terrible head coach, and was rebuilding the team. Punter Chris Hanson was fresh off his best-ever season, which had garnered him a Pro Bowl berth, and was on track to have another great season.
Then came Del Rio and his absolutely bonkers idea to motivate the team. He came up with a motto: "keep choppin' wood," which was symbolic to keep hacking away when a problem surfaced, and not give up. It was great on paper, but in practice? Not so much, and the Jaguars found that out the hard way.
A punter, a head coach, and an axe
To drive home the message, Del Rio had the idea of placing a stump of wood and a double-bladed axe in the locker room, and told his players to literally chop away. That's right: he told a bunch of hyped-up, testosterone-fueled athletes to swing an axe around in an enclosed, indoor space. What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, as the team soon found out.
Donovin Darius told ESPN in a retrospective that everyone was excited to play with the axe in the locker room - "play" being the operative word. "NFL players are big kids anyway, and you bring a big toy in the locker room, we’re going to play around with it," he said. “I wasn’t surprised that guys were chopping the wood.”
The problem was that he, and presumably most of the players on the team, were not exactly axe aficionados. So it wasn't much of a surprise that Darius nearly took his own leg off one day. “I have never swung an ax [until then],” Darius said. “It hit the wood and just barely missed my leg. It just barely missed me, and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ I never touched that thing again.”
The very next day, the axe found its mark: right in Hanson's leg. How exactly it happened is still unclear - either Hanson missed the stump or the axe went through it - but either way, trainer Matt Ryan found Hanson sitting in the locker room in a pool of blood. And according to Ryan, it was a brutal injury; the front of his shin was "flayed wide open."
Ryan jumped into action, packing the wound with gauze to staunch the bleeding until they could get Hanson to the hospital, and he underwent surgery that day. He was eventually able to recover, and continued playing for the Jaguars until 2007, eventually retiring from the NFL in 2010. And while it probably isn't what he would want to be known for - after all, he was a good punter who made a Super Bowl appearance - his name will forever be linked with the axe-ident.
And to perhaps no one's surprise, this has got to be, by far, the weirdest story in Jaguars history - if not the entire NFL.
Brian Sexton summed it up pretty well for ESPN. “I put my head in my hands [upon hearing about it],” he said. “At that point, now eight, nine seasons into this, I knew what an embarrassment this was for the franchise. I understood Jack wanted to make a point, but he put a weapon in the middle of the locker room. I joke all the time [that] football isn’t a game for well-adjusted men. Why didn’t you leave a gun? You see what I mean? Keep shooting. It was preposterous.”