Hali travels amazing road to achieve football stardom

	Before becoming a star at Penn State, Tamba Hali had to survive years of civil war and eventual escape from his native Liberia. David Bergman/SI

INDIANAPOLIS -- By day three of the NFL Scouting Combine, after listening to the wave after wave of prospects who take the podium in the media work room at the Indiana Convention Center, their stories start to sound the same and the details of their backgrounds begin to blend together in the mind.

And then a Tamba Hali comes along, and reminds you that some players have traveled a truly unique road to get here, and have a story that sounds like nobody else's.

Hali, the Penn State defensive end who is expected to be a top-15 pick in April's NFL Draft, kept reporters spellbound Saturday with the tale of his childhood in Liberia, where he and his family were caught up in the bloody civil war that ravaged that nation on Africa's West Coast, a country roughly the size of Tennessee.

"It's hard to explain to somebody what it's like on the other side when you haven't really gone through it," said Hali, who grew up in the capital city of Monrovia, before going into hiding and eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1994, at the age of 10. "It's hard to explain to people what it's like to be actually be in that situation, and feeling like maybe today I could die or see other people get killed."

Hali said he had many days when he saw a life taken before his eyes, by the rebels who regularly terrorized the city.

"Sometimes it would be a lot [of people killed]," he said. "Sometimes it would be just one. Some times you'd see a stack of bodies sitting on the side of the road while you were walking. A lot of kids [in Liberia] weren't educated. A lot of them would be running around killing people for no reason."

Hali's saga renders your standard combine fare almost meaningless by comparison. Somehow, discussion of his 40 time and performance in the bench press just doesn't seem quite so significant when Hali is explaining his ongoing fight to get his mother and sister out of Liberia and to the U.S.

And members of the media weren't the only ones blown away this week by Hali's story. In each of his interviews with NFL teams, he painstakingly retold his tale, gaining a host of new admirers each time.

"I was just overwhelmed, not only with his story, but the way he told it," Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said, after meeting with Hali on Friday night. "He's such a thoughtful, intellectual, moving person. You could hear a pin drop in our interview room when he was done telling his story."

Hali has applied for U.S. citizenship and is waiting to take the necessary exam. He hasn't seen his mother, Rachel Keita, since leaving Liberia in 1994, and said she still lives in a hut, in a Monrovia that is calmer than it was in the years that the civil war raged, but far from safe. A couple years ago, Hali's mother was shot in the leg while walking in the city.