Percy Harvin Recalls Story About Punching Teammate Golden Tate In The Face Before The Super Bowl And Marshawn Lynch Coming To The Rescue

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The man who first coined the saying “winning heals all” had evidently never stepped foot in the locker room of the 2013-2014 Seattle Seahawks.

The team would go on to pummel Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII to the tune of 43-8, but the real competition popped off in the week leading up to the game.

When the Seahawks were supposed to be galvanizing the troops, an inter-squad brouhaha between wide receivers Percy Harvin and Golden Tate required an intervention by The Enlightened One, Marshawn Lynch.

Reports swindled in the lead-up to Super Bowl XLVIII that Harvin, who was painted by several teammates as “angry, moody, and erratic,” body slammed teammate Golden Tate at the team hotel, and that the other players “initially feared Harvin broke Tate’s neck.”

Now, Harvin, who has been out of the NFL since 2016, is not only confirming the validity of those reports, but taking full responsibility for being in the wrong.

In an interview with Bleacher Report, the former Pro Bowler described taking offense to Golden Tate’s comments during Super Bowl media week in which he said the Seahawks had made it to the Super Bowl without Harvin (who was out the previous week with a concussion), and intend to win with or without him.

“Thinking about it now, I can’t even believe I did it. … Fast forward, we’re in the meeting room, and I kind of asked him about it, like, ‘Yo, bro. What’s going on? You’re not even happy for me? This has been going on on all season.’ I was so already wrapped up it probably didn’t matter what his answer was…. I was already at 10.”

Harvin then punched Tate in the face, opening up a cut on his chin and sending him flying into a trash can.

“Let’s just say we locked up. The owners had to come in to the locker room. The fact of hitting him into the trash can — all that type of stuff — it was true. Like I said, it was bad. The whole situation — what we keep harping on — that’s what made it bad, because we had team pictures that day, and you could see: tense. We didn’t seem like a team that was ready to play a Super Bowl.”

The following day, Super Bowl morning, Marshawn Lynch approached Harvin to talk some sense into him, which ultimately led to Tate and Harvin burying the hatchet during warm-ups.

Harvin then admitted that he never addressed directly with Tate or receiver Doug Baldwin, who he got physical with the following year for bringing up the altercation with Tate, but has grown to admit his wrongdoing after managing his immense anxiety.

“Those was probably the worst years of my life (when I joined the Seahawks), just because it came with so much. My anxiety is that it’s worse when I go into unfamiliar situations…. When I was diagnosed, I still didn’t acknowledge it. But when I noticed it was when I started speaking or going into different environments, particularly the press conference with the Seahawks. My shirt was sweating. They had to bring me water a couple times during my press conference.”

Harvin claims while he had prescription medication for the anxiety, the only thing that ever worked was weed. He admitted to being high for every game he played–“There’s not a game I played in that I wasn’t high.”

[h/t Bleacher Report, For the Win]

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Matt’s love of writing was born during a sixth grade assembly when it was announced that his essay titled “Why Drugs Are Bad” had taken first prize in D.A.R.E.’s grade-wide contest. The anti-drug people gave him a $50 savings bond for his brave contribution to crime-fighting, and upon the bond’s maturity 10 years later, he used it to buy his very first bag of marijuana.