Adam Thielen leads the NFC in receiving yards and is coming off a win against the Green Bay Packers where he racked up 98 of those yards.
He nearly never played in the NFL.
The fact that he was a tryout player — not even an undrafted free agent who was offered a contract coming out of college — is well known, but the details of his journey weren’t made public until he wrote about it in the Player’s Tribune, a website that gives players a voice in penning their own stories.
The job was … well, basically, I’d be selling dental equipment. It was actually more of an internship, but it was a pretty decent opportunity at a really good company. So I put on a suit and tie and went in for an interview. It was a good interview. But I remember that at one point, the interviewer asked me one of those cliché interview questions.
“If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?”
He’d obviously know I was lying if I said, “To be in dental equipment sales!” So I told him the truth.
“To play in the NFL.”
The story is well worth reading and even though we know how this portion of the story concludes, there are a couple of moments of tension worth living through as told by Thielen.
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