Tyler Brayton walked sheepishly up to his grandfather, Bobo Brayton, outside the Oakland Raiders’ locker room beneath Seattle’s Qwest Field.
The grandson put his arm around his 81-year-old grandfather – and not because the former baseball coach at Washington State for 33 years had just driven five hours from Pullman, Wash., to see the Raiders play the Seahawks.
“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” the younger Brayton said.
He knew his Grandpa had just seen him get ejected late in Monday night’s game for kneeing Seahawks’ tight end Jerramy Stevens in the groin. It happened directly across the field from where Bobo Brayton, his wife and his sister from Sedro-Woolley, Wash., were sitting – though they hadn’t seen the incident that led to their boy walking directly into the locker room with 1:54 left in the game.
Brayton told his grandfather he was sure he would be fined.
“I told him, ‘It will be, what, five hundred, a thousand bucks?”‘ Bobo Brayton said Wednesday by telephone from Pullman.
Told the league imposed a $25,000 fine, the elder Brayton exclaimed: “That’s a lot of money! Must be inflation. We could go on a fishing trip – and a hunting trip.”
Tyler Brayton, a former University of Colorado star, spent much of Wednesday apologizing.
“I feel like I let a lot of people down,” Brayton told reporters at the Raiders’ headquarters in Alameda, Calif. “I embarrassed myself, my family, the Raiders organization, the entire NFL. For that, I apologize.
“I kind of allowed my personal frustrations and emotions to get the best of me. My actions are inexcusable, provoked or unprovoked. I also apologize to Jerramy Stevens and the Seattle Seahawks. Doesn’t matter what the situation was, I had no right to do that.”
Brayton said he was particularly sorry his grandparents were there to see it all.
“If that’s the last game they ever see me play (in person), I don’t want them to remember it as that,” he said. “I just hope I get a chance to atone someday when they get to come to another game.”
Don’t worry, Tyler. Grandpa is still on your side.
“I imagine Tyler was antagonized a little bit, or Tyler wouldn’t have done that,” the elder Brayton said.
The NFL agreed. It fined Stevens $15,000.
“And I saw Jerramy laughing on the field after it,” Bobo Brayton said. “It couldn’t have hurt too much.”
The younger Brayton, 6-feet-6 and 280 pounds, was an all-area defensive end and all-state tight end at Pasco High School, just north of the Oregon border in eastern Washington.
