SIX

GO DUCKS

BY THE TIME I WAS READY FOR COLLEGE, I WAS RECRUITED by several schools, including the US Naval Academy, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, UCLA, and both the University of Montana and Montana State University. The only school I might have wanted to go to that didn’t recruit me was the University of Washington, where Don James was head coach of the Huskies. Coach James died in 2013 at age eighty, but even in my day he was legendary. He was the winningest head coach in the team’s 128-year history, with a staggering 153–57–2 record in over eighteen seasons. His teams had a reputation for being well disciplined and tough. They would hit you hard but fairly. Always to the whistle. Even off play, always to the whistle. You know that you don’t come away empty-handed from working with a man like that!

I visited the University of Oregon as a prospective student on a beautiful January day. It was sixty-five degrees, and there wasn’t a rain cloud in the sky. I’d left Montana during a blizzard, and the temperature was twenty below zero. The Oregon coaches told me everything I wanted to hear: they showed me a depth chart that had me competing for a starting job at strong safety. They took me skiing and to the ocean on the same weekend. My grades, my athletics, and my extracurricular activities earned me a full-ride scholarship offer from the University of Oregon.

I could do that math too. Come the fall of 1980, I was wearing the green and gold of the Oregon Ducks.

I played at Oregon before Phil Knight began writing his checks to the school, so instead of the elegant Nike-inspired uniform designs, I had Daffy Duck on the side of my helmet. I missed out on the wilder uniform designs, including the ever-changing logos on the helmets that have come in recent years.

I also played with a weak right ankle. You know that TV show the Weakest Link? Having an infirmity of any kind is actually an instructive life lesson, one that’s valuable when learned very young. First, you lose that false, youthful sense of immortality and invulnerability that many kids have. The kind that, when you are injured, throws you into the shock of depression. Second, you learn to compensate. You can’t put a lot of weight on that foot? Then use it more for balance as you shift the big, strong strides to your good side. You have to stop and pivot on it? You learn to use your toes instead of your entire sole.

You learn that in hand-to-hand combat too. It’s not just hands you’re using. We heard a story about a guy in Korea who lost two fingers off his left hand to a bayonet: index and third, just above the knuckles. The wounded soldier’s hand continued on in, pinning the guy to a tree behind him with those knuckles while he stabbed him with his good hand. That’s another truth about sports, combat, or even street fighting. Many people, even those with severe injuries, don’t register that wound or blow until the adrenaline has dried up. That’s why you learn never to count an adversary out.

Oh yeah, that’s also true for politics, though I get ahead of myself.

Back to college athletics. I was constantly spraining my right ankle, as it had been injured several times. Right before games I’d get an injection, and at halftime I’d get a booster shot of xylocaine to numb it. I never had the time—or the inclination—to slow down enough to let it heal properly. This particular football memento still bothers me from time to time, although I suspect the nine hundred parachute jumps I did while in the SEALs (many in darkness and/or HALO, or High Altitude Low Opening) did not help it heal either.

Nobody’s going to be shocked to hear that football in what was then the Pacific-10 (PAC-10) Conference and is now the PAC-12—welcome aboard, University of Colorado and University of Utah—is a completely separate beast from high school football. First, the priorities are different. Early on in my time there, I was sitting in Head Coach Rich Brooks’s office, and he was letting me know exactly where I should be putting my energy.

“Zinke, here at the University of Oregon football, academics is priority number one,” he said while holding up two fingers, “and football is number two,” he finished by pointing a single finger at me. “As long as that is crystal clear, you should have a very good career at the University of Oregon.” To this day when I talk to Rich, I don’t know whether he was kidding or not, but I got his point.

Second, the play is different too. I found that out from the get-go, my first afternoon. I’d been recruited as a strong safety. Tackling hadn’t been a problem for me in high school, but since I couldn’t run a forty-yard dash in 4.2 seconds, I wasn’t going to make it in that position in college. My speed was nowhere near good enough to cover Division I wide receivers, so the position of strong safety was out. Oregon was known as a track team, and the first time I ever saw real speed was on the old grass Hayward practice fields. I thought I was fast in Montana, but after seeing fast, I readjusted my pursuit angles. But I was able to add a few more pounds of muscle, and I seemed to be a good linebacker prospect.

I went into the first scrimmage as an outside linebacker. At the time Oregon had a fullback named Vince Williams, who would later play with the San Francisco 49ers in the early ’80s.

I’d bulked up in high school, adding fifty pounds of muscle in four years. But in that scrimmage I was supposed to tackle Williams, who at 245 pounds had 20 pounds on me and still could run a 40 in 4.4. We lined up across from each other. He got the ball, I stepped in the hole to defend, and then I lowered my shoulder to tackle him. I remember being in good position and then seeing his thigh come up and hit me in the helmet, which sent me flying backward. I found myself on my back looking up at Vince as he stepped on my chest and vaulted over me on his way to score. The offensive coaches replayed the film over and over at practice to show what a great running play it was. I was embarrassed but had to admit it was a hell of a run.

Welcome to the PAC-10, time to work harder.

When I started college, Oregon was a middle-of-the-road PAC-10 team. It was a tough league. Washington, USC, and UCLA were all powerhouses. Oregon was on the upswing, but it was not the juggernaut it is today. Case in point: When we first reported for gear issue, the equipment manager, Rap, handed me a helmet that was too big. It went down over my eyes. He immediately removed it from my head. I was impressed as I was expecting another helmet. Instead, he took a knee-pad off the shelf, dropped it into the oversize helmet, and placed it back on my head. “Next.”

Rich Brooks was a phenomenal coach. He’s credited with turning Oregon from a mid-level PAC-10 school into a national contender, and he deserves that credit. He taught a class—the History of Football 1 and 2, which went into great detail about the development of various offenses and how they were and weren’t effective. Rich knew football.

Coach Brooks was incredibly demanding and even intimidating. For much of practice, he would observe from his perch high in the stadium bleachers, watching like a hawk. When he swooped on the field, it generally was not good. The coaches and players instinctively picked up the intensity. I don’t remember a time he was so elated with my play that he descended to the field to say, “Hey, Zinke. Great block. Great job. You’re having a really good practice.”

I later became a SEAL commander who took part in more than three hundred combat missions, but to this day my palms still sweat when I see Coach Brooks. As I got older, my respect for him has only grown. He would have made a great SEAL commander.

Thing is, even though Brooks didn’t dole out compliments or pats on the back, he also wasn’t passing blame. If his team lost, he took responsibility for the loss, whether it was due to a bad play by an individual or a bad call by a coach.

A football head coach is like a commanding general in that you can’t blame failure on anyone else. Whether a success or a failure, an operation’s result is always the commanding general’s responsibility. I liked that, respected it, and learned from it.

Part of taking responsibility for an operation’s success or failure is knowing what’s available to you in terms of resources or abilities. In my sophomore year, I transitioned from an outside linebacker to center. It was more of an emergency move, actually; we had a number of injuries on the offensive line. Even though I was the largest outside linebacker on the team, we were flush with talent at that position. I remember being called into the football office during the week we were preparing for UCLA. Coach Brooks and the rest of the offensive coaches were seated at the table. They asked me to sit down across from them and asked me what I thought about finishing the season on the offensive line. Before I could answer, they took a moment to share all the advantages the move would bring to me. It would make me a better athlete, give me an opportunity to start, etc. The pitch sounded vaguely familiar. I said yes, and Coach Neil Zoumboukos, aka Zoomer, drew the offensive line playbook from his lap and the deal was done. I weighed about 225 pounds and became the smallest starting center in the PAC-10 and probably in all of Division 1. But I was happy to step in where needed. I played center for two years and was a four-year letterman.

Center turned out to be a good position for me. It requires a lot of in-game awareness and quick strategic thinking. Size-wise, it was less of an ideal position—I used to wear double sweats to make myself look bigger—but I liked the challenge of blocking noseguards or cutting off linebackers, of having to be aware of the right and left side, and of calling line positions. And, of course, figuring which angle to take on my defender.

I had a few memorable encounters with players who ended up in the NFL, including Scott Garnett, a defensive lineman for the Denver Broncos, San Francisco 49ers, San Diego Chargers, and Buffalo Bills. Impressive guy; you just had a feeling that, if he wanted it, the pros were his. When I went up against Garnett, he was playing for the University of Washington. Washington, remember, was the only school I was interested in that didn’t recruit me.

We were on offense. I was an inch taller than Garnett, but he had about eighty pounds on me, and that day he was playing taller than me. NFL-quality players can do that. Garnett had tree trunks for arms, and I think he had “Boss” carved on his bicep. He was Samoan and more locomotive than human.

The play was a draw. My job was to shotgun snap the ball, stand Garnett up, give him his choice as to which way he wanted to go, and ride him when he started moving. Our running back was supposed to read off my block. Simple enough.

The ball was snapped, and Garnett was facing me straight up and looked over me. He started left, and I got into a perfect blocking position. Garnett then saw that it was a draw and reached under my pads and picked me up off the turf. My feet left the ground. He tossed me aside and tackled our running back for a five-yard loss. It was going to be a very long day.

Even though Washington didn’t recruit me, on that day that school—and Scott Garnett—contributed to my education. I learned that: (a) I wasn’t going to the NFL, and (b) physics applied to football too.

But I was still playing for Oregon, and one of the other players I went up against was Ronnie Lott—a future Pro Football Hall of Famer who played for the San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Raiders, New York Jets, and Kansas City Chiefs.

Lott was with the University of Southern California (USC) Trojans when my Oregon Ducks played a game at their home stadium—the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Lott was part of the team’s legendary defense—a near–pro-quality line that, right before a play, would stand up and go back down as a single unit. The USC line was so large that when they stood up they literally blocked the sun, and it seemed like for an instant the sky would go dark.

When we played USC, Lott was a strong safety. He took out our team’s entire offensive core in about five shots—four guys, five hits. He went to his third helmet during the game. That’s how hard the guy hit. The game was a rout.

So I clearly couldn’t get the better of an NFL-quality player through physical ability, but I was once able to do so by using tactical deception. The Ducks were playing the Arizona Wildcats, and I was lined up across from Joe Drake, also known as JoJo, who later played for the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. JoJo was built like a fireplug and as strong as a bull. His neck was so big that his helmet looked small. There was little chance that I would be successful in moving him anywhere, so Zoomer, the line coach, devised a plan. The plan was divided into three phases. The first was to get JoJo riled up by calling him names before the snap. When I snapped the ball I would let him bull over me and grab his jersey while rolling back and hang on for dear life. The second phase was more devious. After the play I would walk over to the referee and tell him that JoJo was throwing punches. In the PAC-10, all of the referees knew who I was and watched in amazement how a guy my size could survive sixty minutes of play. It was fair to say they gave me the benefit of the doubt. The final phase was to repeat phase one and hope that JoJo would actually start hitting me as I had falsely claimed after the previous play, giving the referee reason to flag JoJo for unsportsmanlike conduct and toss him out of the game. As planned, phases one and two were executed perfectly, and during phase three JoJo started punching. The first blow nearly knocked my helmet off, and a yellow flag was thrown just in time to save my life. Zoomer taught me a very important lesson that I would use over and over as a SEAL commander. When you can’t win going toe to toe, change your tactics to your advantage. SEALs call it Unconventional Warfare; football coaches call it drawing a penalty.

I wasn’t the best player on the Duck football team, but there were some great ones who played next to me. Gary Zimmerman played right guard and was drafted by the United States Football League’s Los Angeles Express before moving into the National Football League with the Minnesota Vikings and the Denver Broncos. Gary was part of the 1997 Super Bowl XXXII champion Broncos, and he’s now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Gary was the only person I ever saw throw a beer keg over a roof. True, the building was single story and the keg bounced and rolled over the peak, but it counted just the same. He was a force to be reckoned with and feared by every defense in the league. Playing next to him probably saved me from permanent injury.

But I was working hard to be the best player I could be. My drive probably isn’t much different from that of other folks; it comes from a desire to succeed (or why bother?), but it also comes from fear of failure. No, fear isn’t the best word. That’s what you have when you ask a girl on a date. It’s more a matter of shame. Like bringing your folks a report card where you knew you could’ve done better or letting your teammates down in any endeavor. I never want to fail, and in athletics I was always looking over my shoulder. Let’s call it a soul-deep detestation of failing, of not doing my duty. That is an enormous driver. It has defined me.

Whatever you want to call that quality, it works. In college I benched just under four hundred pounds and squatted more than six hundred pounds. I held the squat record at Oregon for many years.

So while I might not have been the top man on the Ducks, I was good enough at center to be named All-Conference and awarded the Pacific Ten Conference Medal for Athletics and Leadership. And in 1984 Oregon’s athletic department and the Daily Emerald, the university’s newspaper, awarded me the prestigious Emerald Athletic Trophy for outstanding achievement in athletics, scholarship, and citizenship. It’s the highest honor a student athlete can receive at Oregon.

I said earlier that sometimes there isn’t a winner or loser. That was true in one of the ugliest college football games in history—the November 19, 1983, game between the University of Oregon and Oregon State. It was my last time in a Duck uniform, and it should have been a nondescript game between two pretty bad teams. The Ducks’ record was 4–6, and we were the favorite by two touchdowns. The Oregon State Beavers came in with a 2–8 record. Neither team would be mistaken for the cream of the PAC-10 that year.

When I was a prospective freshman looking at schools, I visited Oregon on a beautiful clear January day. That day was four years in the past. My senior year, the 1983–84 academic year, was one of the wettest in Oregon’s history, and this day was doing everything it could to help set the record. There was wind, there was horizontal rain, and there was about an inch of water on the field. The weather was part of the reason that game was eventually nicknamed the Toilet Bowl. It has been referred to as one of the worst college games ever played. The horrible weather wasn’t the only reason for the poor level of play in that game, however. Earlier in the season the Ducks lost our quarterback Mike Jorgensen and two linemen to injury. By the time we reached the Ducks-Beavers game, the coaches had decided that 1983 was going to be a rebuilding year. They chose to redshirt the better players, taking them out of play for the season so they’d have an extra year of eligibility.

For this game we had a freshman quarterback by the name of Chris Miller. After college, Chris ended up playing for the Atlanta Falcons, the Los Angeles and St. Louis Rams, and the Denver Broncos. He even was selected to the NFL Pro Bowl in 1991.

On that day, awful play was a team effort. I was not one of the guys who got redshirted, so I had been out there taking hits for the team all season. Miller wasn’t showing off his Pro Bowl form. He tossed two interceptions, including one that looked more like a punt than a pass and wasn’t anywhere near a player with a Duck jersey.

Actually, awful play was a two-team effort. The Ducks and the Beavers managed to combine for five interceptions, eleven fumbles—including five that were recovered by the other team—and four missed field goals, including two that were from under thirty yards. Basically, we were slopping the ball all over the field, and neither team was scoring. If the puddles on the field had gotten any deeper, I would have been able to breaststroke into the end zone.

We went into the final two minutes of the game with the score tied 0–0. Miller was out of the game at this point. I hiked the ball, and our new quarterback, Mike Owens, passed—successfully—to kick returner Lew Barnes, who lateraled the ball to Ladaria Johnson.

Ladaria Johnson had made his mark with me earlier in the year at the school’s kickoff banquet. Ladaria was from Los Angeles and built to be a running back. He was fast, strong, and athletic. At the start of every season, Oregon Alumni Association sponsors the annual Duck Football Kickoff Banquet where the team would meet the legends and enjoy a free meal. During the event, the players would stand up and introduce themselves. “I’m Ryan Zinke, Whitefish, Montana, center, number 66, senior, major in geology.”

Ladaria got up and said, “Ladaria Johnson, running back, Compton High School, senior, majoring in electronics,” and sat down. The coaches were all nodding in approval and commenting, “Electronics, that’s great.” I broke out laughing. Oregon didn’t offer electronics as a major. Ladaria just got up and decided electronics sounded cool. I thought it was hilarious. Not only was electronics a vocational trade not offered at Oregon, but none of the coaches caught it. Remember, at Oregon, academics was “number one.”

So there was Ladaria with the ball, running through the muck and the puddles until he was finally forced out of bounds. Time ran out, and that’s how the game ended, with the score tied 0–0. Game over. The people in the stands started rioting. They’d been sitting through this awful weather watching sloppy play, there was no resolution, and they didn’t know who to be pissed at, so they took it out on everybody. They were throwing stuff onto the field at the players and the coaches. And so my college football career ended on a scoreless and rainy afternoon being hit by garbage.

Nobody likes an uncertain ending, and that’s true in football and in war. That’s why when you do go to war, you make sure that you have the right training, the right equipment, and the right rules of engagement to win decisively on the field of battle, because our troops deserve it.

Incidentally, the National Collegiate Athletic Association changed the rules in 1996 to allow overtime, meaning that there would be no more scoreless tie games in college football. The Toilet Bowl was the last one. I’m not sure if that’s a win or a loss.

One last football story. A few years later I was at The In & Out, a distinguished military club in London with dark wood-paneled rooms. I was there having a drink with a few of the officers and our wives from the Naval Headquarters Plans and Policy Branch when I saw a man standing at the bar wearing a Navy Cross pin, which is the second-highest honor awarded by the US Navy, behind only the Medal of Honor. The Navy Cross is awarded for extraordinary heroism in combat, and the bar is pretty high since many of the presentation ceremonies coincide with their funerals.

Turned out he was a retired marine who served in Vietnam. When I introduced myself, he said, “I know exactly who you are. You played for the Ducks. My wife and I were season ticket holders and are huge fans.”

I was flattered as I thought he remembered me as the guy who persevered through adversity. The guy who went to the whistle. I was smaller than most of the other players, but I never gave up. I worked harder and played harder, and surely that ethic must have been etched into his memory.

He turned and said in a serious tone, “You were a lot smaller than the guys around you, and my wife always thought you had the best ass in the PAC-10.” That’s how he remembered me.

Not knowing what to say, I just said, “Thank you,” and invited him back to the table. Lola and the rest of the wives thought it was hysterical, but I just sat speechless in the club’s high leather chair drinking a fine bitter beer and enjoying a Cuban cigar.

I went to college on a full-ride football scholarship. Even with it, though, every summer I’d come home to Montana to work with my father in construction. Being my father’s son, I did not get many breaks. One of my first assignments of the job was to pump out septic systems. These were the big ones, the ones that would have ladders and large grinder pumps at the bottom. I would don coveralls, pump the sewage out, and descend to the bottom of the tank to clear the grinder of debris. Typically, it was a wedged pair of women’s panties or a towel that was the culprit. It was a time where little concern was placed on contagious viruses or diseases, and the only precaution was a well-earned shower at the end of the day. I was well respected by the rest of the men, but only a few would eat lunch with me.

When I was in school, though, the scholarship took care of my tuition, books, room, and board, but with three kids and a single mother in my family, there wasn’t a lot left for incidentals. And even though Oregon had held its minimum drinking age steady at twenty-one when a lot of other states were lowering them during the 1970s, I still managed to generate a few additional noncollege expenses.

I’m not going to pretend that kids in college don’t drink. They do. We did. I’m not going to pretend it’s a good thing. It isn’t. I cannot say it’s a wise thing. It surely isn’t that either.

What it is, though, is part of cutting the cord. It’s like that other stupid thing most of us try: smoking. It’s ironic how destructive the things are that we do to prove to ourselves and others that we’re all grown up. I’d include in that learning to drive and then a week later acting like we’re in a Fast & Furious film. Or premarital sex. A bunch of years back, there was a copy of the I Ching in a rec area on a base, and I picked it up. The ancient Chinese had a way of putting down philosophy that was wise yet so accessible, and this stuck with me: “On average, an infant laughs nearly two hundred times a day; an adult, only twelve. Maybe they are laughing so much because they are looking at us.”¹

We do do stupid things. Maybe members of the armed forces understand this better than anyone else; you enjoy life while you can, while it’s yours.

Back to drinking. The trick—dumb luck might be a better description—is making sure that whatever you end up doing while you’re drinking doesn’t do much damage, either to yourself or anyone else.

There are a lot of things people shouldn’t attempt when they’ve been drinking, and one of them is cutting their hair. But one night, aided by a bottle of cheap tequila, that’s exactly what I decided to do with two of my closer friends from college, Hud and Bock.

I went first. I wanted z’s carved into my head on both sides and connected in the back with lightning bolts. Painting them the school colors of green and gold would be an option for later. Hud’s girlfriend, V, short for Vanessa, managed to get them shaved in; my hair was pretty short, but you could tell they were there. Then we drank more tequila, and it was Hud’s turn.

I started in on him with an electric razor that had an attachment for mustache trimming. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. A mustache trimmer and a pair of scissors—just like a real barber, right? What could be so difficult? But Hud’s hair was a lot longer than mine, and halfway through the haircut the trimmer broke. Let’s just say the effect was less than professional. His reaction was less than human. It was weeks before he looked normal again.

But that didn’t stop us from working together. That was the night I broke the Oregon track record for the 440-yard dash at Hayward Field. Actually, Hud and I broke it together, and nobody else knew about it until the release of this book.

You see, after we finished cutting Hud’s hair—or, at least, after the mustache trimmer gave up on us—we decided to go get something to eat at a local all-night diner. So Hud and I piled into my Chevy Blazer, a tough four-wheel drive with an open top.

On the way to the diner, we made a small detour onto Hayward Field. Hayward is where the university track team trains. It’s where Steve Prefontaine, the great Oregon track star from the early ’70s who ran in the 1972 Munich Olympics, mesmerized track fans. His big event was the 5,000-meter run. He set the American record in the 1972 Olympic trials. It didn’t matter what event he ran in; he dominated almost all of them. I think he lost maybe four races during his entire college track career.

Prefontaine would have lost that night, though. There wasn’t a sprinter alive then or today who would have beaten Hud and me. Of course, we were sitting in my Chevy Blazer, which we pushed to around sixty miles per hour on that running track’s straights. I remember actually passing a few late-night joggers on the final turn.

Somehow we didn’t get caught. Although today, with the increased security, we wouldn’t have even made it onto the field.

After our unofficial record-setting run, Hud and I headed to Hoots, the all-night diner I mentioned, for a little grease to soak up all that tequila. We walked in, and they took one look at our new haircuts and called the police. I kid you not. Hud and I both had white T-shirts on, and we looked as though we might have escaped from the local mental institution. We managed to talk our way out of that. Hud was extremely bright, and both of us were smart enough not to mention our athletic achievement from earlier in the night.

As smart as Hud was, he was also a hell-raiser. We’d go to parties, and if I went to the bathroom or stepped outside for a few minutes, I always asked if anything had happened while I was away. If anything had, Hud was usually right in the middle of it.

There was a house party near campus one night. I showed up late, and the place was packed. Hud was already there. When I looked into this wall-to-wall mass of people, I saw a washing machine coming through the party, just mowing people down as it moved through the crowd.

That washing machine was on Hud’s shoulders. Hud had seen a car outside that needed a wash, and then he saw the washing machine, and something just added up right in his head. So he pulled the washing machine out of the wall, carried it through the house, and threw it onto the car. Problem solved.

Somehow it made sense at the time.

Look, we were football players. Not all of us were Tim Tebow. The Ducks needed talent that could play now, and the coaching staff was under a lot of pressure to win. So a lot of the players on the football team had been recruited from junior colleges in California. As I said earlier, this was in the days before Oregon was a household name and had the ability to recruit and sign top-quality players. Recruiting players on the basis of athletic talent alone, as the coaches in my time had no other choice but to do, sometimes comes at a higher risk.

Oregon used to have a team book with photos and stats, which the Oregon police used for mug shots. Whenever there was a crime on campus, they’d pull out their copy of the book, put it in front of the victim, and ask, “Which one of these guys did it?”

They could have used fraternity pictures too. The Delta house there was something else, and the Beta house was infamous too. It’s no coincidence that National Lampoon filmed the movie Animal House at Oregon.

Despite the six or more hours a day I would spend either at practice or in training, I knew my football days were limited, so I paid attention to academics as much as I did athletics. I studied geology as a result of closing my eyes and randomly pointing to a major from the academic catalog, and I never looked back. I am just glad I did not find electronics. Late-night studying earned me the nickname “The Professor” among my teammates, but I was never sure whether they were referring to my being crazy or brilliant. Nevertheless, I was awarded the Sahlstrom Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement and Attitude at Oregon my senior year.