By: Eric Anderson|Yahoo Sports
Troy Vincent has a booming voice, the kind preachers use to wake up the guy in the last row of pews. The former NFL cornerback uses that voice when he cares about something, which is pretty often.
When he talks about his childhood, though, Vincent speaks slightly above a whisper.
"You're a young boy, you're 10, 11, 12, 14," he says. "The sounds, the visuals, they never leave."
Vincent grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Trenton, N.J. He and his younger brother, Sam, slept in one room and their mom, Alma, slept in the other. Between the two rooms there were "8 inches of sheet rock," Vincent says, and through that wall he heard things that terrified him.
"You ball up, get under a bed, go hide in the closet," Vincent says. "You hear the rumblings, the screams. You're helpless."
Vincent says his mother's boyfriend beat her "countless" times over several years when the family lived in the now-defunct Dolly Homes projects. He has spoken about his past before, but he wants to tell his story again now because it matters more than ever. As the NFL's vice president of operations, Vincent is a close adviser to commissioner Roger Goodell. At the owners meetings, which started Wednesday in New York, there is no topic more pressing than the league’s domestic violence problem. Vincent’s private world and his public profession have merged amid the league's crisis. Goodell has brought in several domestic violence experts in the last several weeks, but Vincent, a former player, has a unique awareness that has shadowed him as long as he can remember.
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