Ex-Vikings draft pick Everett Dawkins now gives it all to his music
After leaving football and hitting some bumps along the way, the former seventh-round defensive tackle has found his calling
Have you ever thought about the things NFL players leave behind in order to chase their football dreams?
During Thursday, Friday and Saturday’s NFL Draft, we’ll watch as over 200 dreams come true and we’ll see hundreds of young men and their families who made sacrifices for their chance receive their official starting point to a career in the NFL.
Many of the 200-plus will not find their way to superstardom. Draft day will be the highlight of their careers. They’ll make it to camp and land on practice squads and keep fighting and then one day — sooner than expected — they’ll be forced to decide on what’s next. And then they’ll be left to think about the things they left behind.
For Everett Dawkins, a seventh-round pick of the Vikings in 2013, the thing he left behind was his artistic side.
Now eight years after the Vikings picked him with the 229th overall selection and nearly four years since his last snap in pro football, Dawkins is putting in an NFL-level effort to make music his profession.
Everett, who raps under the name A1Dawk, grew up the way thousands of kids do in South Carolina: Playing football with his cousins on the weekends at his grandma’s house, which he called “the meet-up spot.”
As his older cousins grew up and succeeded in the game, he watched from the stands wanting to be in their shoes.
“Seeing your cousins playing and all of these people going crazy for them, as a child it’s either something that catches your attention and you know you want to get into it more or if it’s just something where you like sitting in the stands type thing,” Dawkins said over the phone on Tuesday.
He loved the idea of being in the spotlight. It didn’t take long for him to get it either. He was big and quick and played for a state championship high school team that also featured Marcus Lattimore. By his senior year Dawkins ranked as the eighth best defensive end in his class and was a four-star recruit according to Rivals. Dawkins got offers from Florida State, South Carolina, Illinois, Michigan State, Tennessee, and Virginia Tech.
He enjoyed art class. He enjoyed writing. But those things were a distant second to playing D1 at one of the top football universities in the country. So he committed to Florida State.
He became a “buffet buster,” gained 50 pounds and switched to defensive tackle. Depending on the coaching, some years he got to chase quarterbacks and blow up runs in the backfield, other years he was two-gapping to stop the run and let linebackers make plays.
When it came his time to enter the NFL Draft, Dawkins thought he was going somewhere around the third round after a strong Senior Bowl week. ESPN graded him as the 17th best player at his position, calling him an “above average athlete with active hands” but noted he was undersized for a run-stuffer. On draft day, he agonizingly waited until the seventh round to finally get picked. He would later find out that some medical concerns dipped his stock. Still, getting the call was the culmination of putting everything into football from a young age.
“I was kind of getting a little frustrated at one point,” he said. “I ended up getting the call and everything worked out. It was very emotional. All of my family was there. It was pretty dope. That’s something you work your whole life for to happen and it happens, I was emotional.”
“Coming from where I came from and getting an opportunity to accomplish something, a goal like that, a lot of people don’t make it. A lot of people have those goals but they never actually go fulfill them. Even me going in the seventh round is a huge accomplishment and I’m very proud of it.”
In training camp, Dawkins was very much welcomed to the NFL. Some star players didn’t treat rookies like they exist. Some players were freakishly talented like Dawkins had never seen before. He marveled at, and took advice from, Everson Griffen, who was just about to break out into stardom and listened closely to Kevin Williams, a five-time All-Pro.
As is the case with many seventh-round picks, Dawkins ended up on the practice squad. A few months after being picked by the Vikings, Dallas signed him off the practice squad. He was active for one game and played 20 snaps with the Cowboys. He was cut and landed with the Bucs. After seeing some second-team snaps in practice, new coach Lovie Smith opted for his guys and moved on. Interest from NFL teams faded after that.
At a crossroads, Dawkins decided he wanted to keep chasing the dreams forged during those weekends at his grandmother’s house. His agent landed him a spot in the Arena Football League.
“I still wanted to play football and it was going to give me an opportunity to go down and work and get that actual on-the-field experience so that’s one of the things that led me to doing that,” Dawkins said. “I had an amazing time with Arena Football. I met a lot of great people, people just like me, guys who were on the borderline who had played in the league or got drafted or whatever it may have been. I was able to make a lot of great friends but at the time to play football that was my only resort.”
Dawkins played a lot of ball in the Arena League but didn’t get many NFL calls during his Arena League days.
Now what?
Before age 30 he was done playing football. He had a “shredded” hip that required stem cell treatment and no clear post-career direction. From the days of being the younger cousin through his entire adult life, everything had been about football.
So he tried a lot of things. Everett attempted to get a landscaping business going while he was still in the Arena League but that failed to launch. He bought a tractor trailer but no financial windfall followed that investment either. He moved to Los Angeles and tried his hand at owning a used car lot but found out quickly that something is usually wrong with cars that come affordable at auction and warranties aren’t always worth the paper they’re written on. He tried Hollywood, Malibu and The Valley. Nothing really fit.
Along the way he occasionally tried his hand at music. In 2014 after he was released by the Giants, his final NFL stop, Dawkins got in a studio for the first time. He may have put aside his artistic side but never completely stopped writing rhymes.
It wasn’t until early in 2020 that he decided it was really time to give music a serious shot.
“A lot of people are scared to do things, man,” Dawkins said. “We only get one life to live. I hit 30 last year, I’ll be 31 this year. If I’m going to do this, I’ve gotta do it now.”
He started studying music, listening to songs on the radio and trying to break down why songs were hits and what the production sounded like. Dawkins listened back to classic records like Reasonable Doubt by Jay-Z and Illmatic by Nas looking for clues as to how the legends grabbed the ears of an audience with their first album.
“I’m just trying to take it seriously like football,” Dawkins said. “You have to study, you have to work on it every day and keep on crafting.”
Dawkins started taking a business approach to his music too. He tried multiple studios and couldn’t quite find the right sound until he came across an engineer named DeVan Hooker, who works with Atlantic Records and runs 8ight Wonder Studios.
Hooker was like a coach. He wouldn’t hold back when something wasn’t working. The right sound doesn’t come easy and he pushed for it.
“That’s what a lot of people need and I had to have the ego to be able to take that feedback and not take it personally,” Dawkins said. “A lot of people aren’t like that, they think you’re just down on them or hating or whatever but you have to be realistic with yourself.”
After months of writing and studying and recording, he finally put out his first song.
“When I heard my first song, I was like OK this is my best song,” Dawkins said. “I really like the song. I keep playing it and running it back. I was like, I’m ready.”
In a way, it was like getting drafted. It both validated his previous effort and sent him on a path toward something that could be a career.
Dawkins put out several songs and sent them for feedback from people in the industry as if he was having coaches watch his game tape. Now he’s working on an EP with somewhere between four and six new songs. He knows that building up a loyal audience means constantly putting out new music.
“I have a vision of going the independent route, I have a vision of building up my own fan base and making it so there’s a need for my music, for people to want to hear my music,” Dawkins said. “You build that buzz up and that’s when all the other bigger guys and labels reach out to you. I’m so big on ownership. It’s huge. I’m hearing about all of these artists who have horror stories about how they sold their masters for $20,000 back in the 90s and now it’s worth millions and they can’t buy it back. Nobody ever knows how big they’re going to get. A lot of these cats came from nothing, they got in front of the right people and their music was able to grow. For me, I would like to build my own fan base up and do everything organically.”
Dawkins is back in South Carolina now. Los Angeles wasn’t really a fit. He had his first son earlier this April and feels like he’s found his post-career path.
“It’s been a couple of lumps that I’ve taken, I did everything else,” Dawkins said. “Now I’m trying to just keep working on my craft.”
Not everyone who gets drafted this weekend will make it and not everyone will find their place after football. So for Dawkins, having a new game and new goals to chase feels pretty good after putting his artistic side on the back burner for football.
Listen to more of Everett’s music here
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