Terry Crews loves a good competition, but not for the reasons one would think. Across years of hosting Americans’ favorite TV shows, including “America’s Got Talent,” a YouTube series “Crews Control,” and a new cooking series “100 Cooks” to premiere in June, Crews has watched thousands of contestants walk out under the lights and lay everything on the line. And he has come away convinced that what keeps him saying yes to these projects is not the act of competition or rivalry. “I study what makes the difference between people who win and people who don’t,” he says.
What genuinely lights him up is each contestant’s creativity, their willingness to do their craft at their best in a way no one else would dare. Whether it’s the singer who finds an arrangement no one expects or the home cook who turns a family recipe into something unrepeatable. “The more creative you are,” he says, “the more you’ll win.” And he loves taking in what it looks like when people pour everything they have into something that sets them on fire.
That conviction in creativity and discipline made him one of the most expansive talents in American entertainment: NFL defensive end, actor, franchise comedy anchor, talk-show host, children’s book author, furniture designer, painter, and advocate. From the outside, the sheer stacking of skills can look like a man who just took every offer. But Crews is intentional about how he wears each hat. “When I’m doing AGT, that’s all I’m doing,” he says. “When I’m painting a painting, I’m 100 percent into that. By focusing on one thing at a time, you could do so many things. There’s no reason to limit yourself.” His picture book, Terry’s Many Hats, distills that whole philosophy, and he wrote it, he says, for the seven-year-old turning the pages and the parent reading it to them. And he says that having a variety of skills would come in handy for generations to come. “You’re going to have to reinvent yourself probably once or twice in your life,” he admits.
Crews speaks to that next generation with the authority of a man who was raised beneath every ceiling imaginable. He grew up in Flint, Michigan, a city he described as ”dying in slow motion.” With the auto industry collapsing, a crack epidemic taking hold of the streets, domestic violence crippling his own home, the only way for him was out. And it had to be much like a rocket leaves a launchpad, because there was no plan B waiting to catch him.
The first time he reached for a football scholarship, they told him no. He came back and asked again. Somewhere in that refusal to accept a first no as final came the determination to live by the distinction of knowing the difference between losing and accepting defeat. “No was negotiable,” he remembers. He lost plenty along the way, and he is the first to say so, but losing and accepting defeat were never the same to him. “If you can’t run, walk,” he says. “If you can’t walk, crawl. If you can’t crawl, scoot.” There were long stretches, he concedes with a laugh, when he was doing a great deal of scooting. The speed was never the point, but rather that he refused to stop moving forward.
That same never-ending hustle eventually came with a cost. Success at the altitude he has reached does not arrive without a ledger, and the currency is hardly financial. “You don’t get time back,” he says, recalling missed recitals, dinners in distant cities, and ordinary weeknight memories his now-adult children carry, and he does not. “There were times when my kids were like, ‘Hey, you weren’t there for this. You weren’t there for that,’” he remembers. “And it hurts.”
For years, he stayed late because he felt he needed to prove something to the room, to the industry, to the version of himself that had clawed out of Flint with nothing to lean on but momentum. He sees it differently now. “I remember I could have gone home,” he says. “But I stayed in order to prove how loyal I was. And now, thinking back on it, I should have gone home.”
What that cost taught him was the difference between drive and depletion, and the hard-won art of reclaiming his own balance after years of pushing past his limits. He reaches for an easy-to-relate analogy from the gym to explain it. “You don’t know how much you’re overdoing it until you overdo it.” At the very top, “when you are in the top 3 percent in the world at what you do,” as he puts it, the margin between commitment and excess narrows to a razor’s edge, and, Crews admits, he crossed it more than once before he learned to feel where the line was. The man who built a career on the principle of never stopping has spent his fifties learning the equally demanding discipline of knowing when to stop. “You have to learn how to apologize,” he says.
Through all the ambition, the absence, the long seasons in faraway places, the one constant was Rebecca, his wife of 37 years, who covered the ground he could not cover and kept a home whole for him to return to. When Crews speaks of legacy, he wants no monetary treasures, but only one thing. “I want them to interview my wife, Rebecca,” he says, “and ask her ‘what was he like?’ and I want her to tell everyone in the world that he loved me better than anybody ever could.”
He knows the weight of that sentence because he has lived the unglamorous version of it and found it more than enough. Before the franchises and the cover shoots, before Hollywood knew what to make of him, there was an evening in a small Los Angeles duplex when he and Rebecca had nothing the world would have recognized as success. “We were so broke that I had a pizza night for the girls,” he remembers, “and all we had was flour to make dough, spaghetti sauce, and we threw some cheese on top.” He found a Blockbuster coupon, rented a video, and the four of them sat together in a space that was, in his own words, beautiful and special, “because we just loved, we just had each other.” Then, with his voice rising at the memory, he says, “It was like being in Monaco.” Though since then, they have done the yachts, the finest restaurants, and celebrated vacations along the Côte d’Azur, yet none of it has come close. If all of it vanished tomorrow—the fame, the money, the success—he was unequivocal about what he would do. He would find his way back to that moment with his wife and children and say, “Here we are again. Let’s do it again.”
It is in that conviction that Crews points to one word he says defines his lifestyle. “It’s called eudaimonic,” he says. The ancient Greek idea describes a life of fulfillment earned through purpose, one that comes at a cost. It’s the feeling, he says, of watching Michael Jordan lift a championship trophy with tears in his eyes. It’s when you know that “the purpose has been fulfilled. And it cost you. And it hurts,” he says, before adding, “I have a purpose-filled life.” This is the engine beneath the many hats, the fulfillment that comes from having spent everything to earn the trophy, far more than the trophy itself. It is also why he surrounds himself with people who have climbed even higher than he has, studying them the way he studies the talent on his stages and returning to his own work inspired.
Protecting a life with such deliberate direction requires structure, and Crews has built his around boundaries he now makes a priority. The realization that he had spent decades overdoing it eventually formed into a daily practice. The younger Terry Crews ran on a fear of missing out. The Crews today knows the value of a sacred morning. “I’ve learned how to say no,” he admits. “As long as I have my priorities straight, I won’t miss anything.” His mornings now belong to no one else. He wakes up around 4:30 or 5 a.m., and nothing is scheduled until 10 a.m. “My mornings are hallowed ground,” he says, describing movement, journaling, writing down goals, charting where he wants to go, and sitting honestly with the question of who he still wants to be. “If you don’t have a vision,” he says, “you’re done.”
At 58, Terry Crews is still envisioning things he wants that he cannot yet name, still discovering what is within him. The curiosity that carried him out of Flint—through football, through Hollywood, through AGT, through his YouTube series “Crews Control” and now into Food Network’s “100 Cooks, “a sprawling new competition that pits a hundred home cooks against one another— has been the fuel of his success. Every morning, he comes back to the same question of who he wants to become. Everything else, gladly, is a hat. Watch him keep adding to the collection.
Photography: Leigh Keily
Groomer: Annette Chiasson
Designer: Nana Boateng
Shot on location at: Vantage, Bel Air, CA
Structural Engineer: E. Avico, Inc.
Tel: (310) 657-6576
E-mail: [email protected]
For pricing, availability, and private showings of Vantage,
please contact: Leeor Arshadnia
Tel: (310) 999-1112
E-mail: [email protected]
