Haloti Ngata announces his retirement from the NFL at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Photo by Doug Pitt.
It was shortly after midnight when Haloti Ngata thought he was going to die. The former UO defensive tackle was on Mount Kilimanjaro, 4,000 feet shy of the summit of Africa’s tallest mountain, when it first hit him that he might not make it back down.
“I don’t think I was as ready as I thought I was [to climb Kilimanjaro], mentally,” he said. “I started to think, ‘Am I going to die?’ Your heart starts to beat deeper, harder, because the higher you get, the harder it has to work. ‘Am I going to get back home to see my family?’”
But Ngata pressed on, each step harder than the last in the thin mountain air that turns feet to lead and makes each breath a struggle. Onward and upward he inched, until at last he reached the summit and unfurled the flag he’d been carrying in his backpack for days, the flag that officially announced the end of his 13-year NFL career.
The flag that meant he could go home again.
“I had to get up so I could announce my retirement or else I’d have to play another full year of football,” Ngata laughed. “I’d have to come home and tell my wife I didn’t make it and I have to play another year, and then have to hear her yelling at me.”
Following his retirement announcement, ESPN named him “one of the most dominant defensive linemen of his era.” One opponent, Indianapolis Colts center Jeff Saturday, had previously called him “an absolute monster,” while former teammate Jarret Johnson said of him, “You couldn’t build a more perfect football player.”
But without football consuming most of his waking minutes—the minutes that aren’t devoted to wife Christina, and sons Solomon, Haloti Maximus, and Colt, anyway—Ngata still has plenty on his schedule to keep him busy. Starting with the very thing that brought him to Mount Kilimanjaro in the first place—though that story is, in reality, a journey inspired by heartbreak that occurred long before he arrived in Tanzania.
Etuini Haloti Ngata was born in Inglewood, California, in 1984, to Tongan immigrants Ofa and Solomone Ngata. The family moved to Utah when Haloti was six, and little more than a decade later he was bulldozing his way to a five-star rating as the nation’s No. 2-ranked high school football player.
There was just one small problem: Nagata’s grades were nowhere near as good as his ability to wrap up running backs and take down quarterbacks, and he failed the SAT multiple times.
Ofa, though, was determined to see her son enroll in college, and she established a program to provide Salt Lake City high schoolers with free tutors to help them improve their grades. Enrolling in his mother’s program was just the push Haloti needed, and with the program’s assistance he passed his tests and signed with the Oregon Ducks, as—at the time—the highest-ranked recruit in UO history.
As a Duck, Ngata earned Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and first-team All-America honors. While he was dominating opponents in front of a national audience on the football field though, away from Autzen Stadium his personal life was in turmoil. Towards the end of his freshman season, Solomone died in a car accident. During Haloti’s junior year, Ofa fell ill with kidney problems. Haloti declared for the NFL Draft after his junior season to help support her financially, but she died just one week after his announcement.
Three months later, on the first day of the 2006 NFL Draft, Ngata and a few family members headed to the Las Vegas ESPN Zone to see how the first round would unfold. They told the restaurant to expect a small group; word spread, though, and more than 100 people showed up to support Haloti.
“Polynesian people don’t get invitations, they get information,” Haloti Moala, Haloti Ngata’s uncle and namesake, said at the time.
The crowd was not kept in suspense for long—the Baltimore Ravens selected “Haloti Ngata, defensive tackle out of the University of Oregon,” with the No. 12 overall pick. Over the next 13 years, Ngata put together a glittering career that included a Super Bowl title, five Pro Bowl selections, and two first-team All-Pro honors.
Shortly before the start of the 2012 season—one that ended with Ngata holding the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft as a Super Bowl champion—he and Christina were looking to establish a foundation to help deserving individuals. They supported veterans and law enforcement charities in Maryland, but felt there was more they could do. The answer, it turned out, lay back in Utah: without Ofa’s steady hand to guide it, her after school program was in danger of closing down.
“My brother-in-law was speaking to different people in his church about my mom’s program, and how it was not going to be funded anymore,” Ngata said. “It all came back full circle; I now fund the whole program.
“We pay the teachers, and pay for the materials—books, pencils, and stuff like that. For a semester it’s $5,000, and we thought okay, the more money we can raise, the more schools we can get into.”
The Haloti Ngata Family Foundation—with a wordmark that has the “O” in Haloti, “F” in Family, and “A” in Foundation aligned to spell “Ofa”—now helps struggling students in multiple states, including Oregon. Through events such as luaus and golf tournaments, Haloti is able to take an initiative his mother established to help him, and expand it to help others who are in the shoes he once was in (though their shoe size is, admittedly, considerably smaller than his).
Ngata performs a Tongan haka during a Haloti Ngata Family Foundation fundraising luau. Photo courtesy HNFF.
In 2017, Ngata’s foundation got an extra $25,000 boost when he won the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year Challenge. The challenge was a straight popularity contest: the NFL player with the most fan votes on social media would win. Thanks, in part, to his Tongan heritage, Ngata received the most votes in WPMOY history.
“Lucky for me, I’m Polynesian,” he laughed. “Poly Twitter just went crazy with it! Polynesians who were fans of other teams were, instead of voting for a member of their team, were just saying, ‘Oh, a Poly, I’m going to vote for the Poly.’ They all just threw my name in a bunch of times. It went worldwide—it was very cool, and I felt really blessed and loved to have so many people tweet it out. That’s how I won the Walter Payton Challenge: because of the fans, and the Polynesian people.”
As Ngata’s professional career wore on, and nine years in Baltimore turned into three in Detroit, then one in Philadelphia, his mind began turning to life after the NFL, and how he could devote himself more fully to his young family and his foundation.
But first, he had to retire. Enter Eagles teammate Chris Long, and an opportunity to help even more people.
“Chris invited me to a charity event out in Africa,” said Ngata. “I was in the middle of thinking about retirement, and he invited me to Africa to hike, so I thought I’d do both at the same time: help raise money for Africa, and announce my retirement.”
Haloti Ngata and Chris Long with schoolchildren in Tanzania. Photo by Clay Cook and Thomas Ingersoll.
The charity in question is Waterboys, an organization founded in 2015 by recently retired defensive end Chris Long, older brother of Chicago Bears and former UO offensive lineman Kyle Long. Waterboys unites professional athletes and fans from across the NBA and NFL to raise funds and awareness to provide clean water to communities in need. The initial goal was to drill 32 wells, one for each NFL team. Four years after its founding, Waterboys has funded 61 wells and now has a new goal: to provide water to one million people.
One of Waterboys’ programs is Conquering Kili, where military veterans and athletes climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the clean water wells. The trek to the summit of the 19,341-foot volcano is a symbolic one, representing the walk many African women make each day to fetch water for their family—up to 16 miles total per day, depending on how far a village is from its nearest clean water source.
"It made me feel good to be part of a foundation that was giving back to help," said Ngata. "You’re not only helping a village, you’re helping a whole area. Everyone benefits from the water well, not just people but their livestock. Without the livestock they don’t get their milk, they don’t get their food. It was cool and heartwarming to help people in Tanzania.”
Haloti Ngata at a school in Tanzania. Photo by Clay Cook and Thomas Ingersoll.
“By far one of our favorite programs of the Waterboys Initiative, ‘Conquering Kili’ is a unique program that brings together athletes and veterans to make a big difference for communities that desperately need water,” said Chris Long. “The challenge of climbing the world’s highest free-standing mountain is what draws people in, but it’s the cause that makes this program so special. When our climbers leave Tanzania, they leave with more than a personal accomplishment, they leave as advocates for clean water and our mission.”
It was atop Kilimanjaro that Ngata planned on announcing his retirement, though Long warned him that the hike—which takes five days just to reach the summit—was far from a walk in the park.
“He said, ‘You know it’s not an easy thing, hiking the highest freestanding mountain, so you’ve got to train for it.’” Ngata said. “I was like, ‘All right,’ but I did not expect it to be as hard as it was. It’s probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Ngata dropped 25 pounds in one month while preparing his body for the climb, but the reduced weight could not prepare him for the combination of physical exhaustion and thin mountain air.
“At the end, Chris was almost literally pushing me on my back to help me get up,” Ngata said. “I was getting dizzy every six-to-ten steps, I was breathing real hard. He said, ‘Take a break when you need it, but keep trying to move.’ He knew my plan to retire at the top, and he told me, ‘I wanted to see you make it up and retire. You were one of the guys I wanted to make sure got up there,’ so he had a reason to help push me.
“He didn’t want me back [on the Eagles],” Ngata joked.
With his retirement officially out of the way, Ngata—who says he will continue to support Waterboys whenever possible—is turning his attention back to the Haloti Ngata Foundation, and planning more events to raise money for high school students nationwide. At the same time, he is honing his coaching skills, attending baseball and lacrosse clinics so he can coach his sons’ teams.
“Whatever I can do to be around them, that’s all I want to do, really,” said Ngata.
But while his playing days are now officially over, the NFL is not quite finished with Haloti Ngata yet. On May 29, the Baltimore Ravens announced that he will be the team’s 20th inductee into its Ring of Honor, joining the likes of Ray Lewis, Jamal Lewis, and Johnny Unitas.
From there, just one more footballing summit awaits: a Hall of Fame bust in Canton, Ohio. Should Ngata get voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the NFL would be wise to set aside a lot of chairs at the induction ceremony.
After all, Polynesian people don’t get invitations, they get information.
- by Damian Foley, UO Communications
Main image of Haloti Ngata on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro courtesy Doug Pitt.