Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
—Leon Joseph Suenens
Here comes Jonny. Every day at Golden West, I’d roll up to practice in my Ford F-150, named Beastie, cranking “Cowboy” by Kid Rock:
Buy a yacht with a flag sayin’ “chillin’ the most”
Then rock that bitch up and down the coast…
I’d tell myself back then I was a badass. I was hitting the weight room every day and felt jacked. Who knows, maybe I looked like Pee-wee Herman, but what’s important is that I was living my swagger—and that meant I was pulling it off. I’d get out of that truck in a cutoff tee, wearing a tight cowboy hat, Kid Rock blaring, and saunter onto the field: Let’s do this.
That wasn’t me, or at least it wasn’t all of me. I’d adopted a character. A kind of alter ego—the part of you that does what you do on the football field. To aspire to be the best at something, that’s what you do. You give birth to a whole different part of yourself. Now, my character creation was pretty tame. I didn’t go nearly as far as some.
For example, when I became a Philadelphia Eagle in 2006 and first walked into that locker room, I saw a murderer’s row of lockers: McNabb. Trotter. Westbrook. Dawkins. Weapon X. Wait… Weapon X? Who was that? And why did his locker have all these little figurines and dolls in it?
Well, Weapon X was future Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins’s other personality. The dude’s ferocious game-day alter ego had its own freakin’ locker. Crazy, right? But I came to see it as making perfect sense. You want to be that good at something? You don’t study it. You become it. You instill that confidence in yourself. We become who we project ourselves to be.
In order for Dawkins to perform at the emotional and physical heights he did week in and week out for sixteen years, he had to create a persona. I’ve played with other guys of otherworldly talent who have all done the same, in part because it’s the only way they can understand how they do what they do. In interviews, they talk about their “game” in the third person, as if it’s something that lives separate and apart from them. That’s because it does. During the week, Brian Dawkins was a civilized member of society: nice guy, with a wife and kids. Come Sunday, he was Weapon X, the ultimate soldier and a dude I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.
Of course, at Golden West, I didn’t exactly back up my macho strut with a Dawkins-like level of play. But each day I was learning. In high school, I found my way to the ball and hit guys. I didn’t know what a pulling guard was or even what zone coverage was. I just flew to the ball.
But now, because we had only just enough guys to field a full team on both sides of the ball, practice became the ultimate classroom for me. At times, it seemed like we needed everybody healthy or we’d have to forfeit. That meant we’d have limited contact at practice. Not only that, during some drills we would barely even run. Coach Joe Hay would clap, and you’d have to step your feet to his clap in slow motion. His clap was the metronome to which we walked through all our plays.
For me, it was genius. Because the game was slowed down, literally step-by-step, I was starting to see it unfold in real time. All those things I shrugged off before—like whoever that “pulling guard” was—now I saw, and saw how to react. Turns out, when you slowly walk through the game, there are no false steps, there’s no overthinking, there’s no hesitation, there’s no second-guessing. Every step is right where you’re supposed to be. You start visualizing the game unfolding in front of you. Football without running and hitting was like Coach Eckles’s pregame workouts without the ball, all over again.
How perfect was this for me? My whole life, after all, was all about visualization, about seeing in your head who you want to be and then realizing the dream. Now I was doing the same thing on the football field. When special-teams practice at full speed with hitting, it’s really just a bunch of idiots flying around and putting themselves in danger. From then on, walk-throughs were how I learned.
You wouldn’t know it from our record—we were oh-and-ten in what turned out to be my only season at Golden West—but Coach Hay was a great coach who loved making a positive impact on young men’s lives. He was a big, strong, energetic dude who worked out like a fiend, but who tragically died in 2012 of sleep apnea at just forty-one years old. I doubt I would have made it to the NFL without what I learned from him.
He was a master motivator. One day he asked us, “Why do we play this game?”
“Uh, we play to win,” someone called out.
“Nope,” he said. “That’s not why we play.”
Hmm. Silence. Now, a team of meatheads were all looking at their feet, dumbfounded. We weren’t exactly a scholarly bunch. Like many a junior college program, we had our share of screwups and delinquents, and even some ex-cons, guys in their midtwenties looking to make good on a second chance. We were one dim-witted crew, suddenly stumped by a simple question: Why did we play this game?
“You play for one reason and one reason only,” Coach Hay said, trying to prompt us.
Still more silence. Finally someone spoke up: “Coach, you’re going to have to tell us. We don’t have a clue.”
Coach Hay opened a can o’ wisdom on us. “You play to become the teammate that your teammates will hate to lose and that your opponents will fear,” he said. “If you work so hard that you become that teammate, the one your brothers need, and the one who every opponent respects—then I promise you, you will win more than you lose. We know we ain’t winning every game. But if you lose, you want that guy you went against to walk across the field and look at you and say, ‘You are the toughest motherfucker I’ve ever lined up against.’ If you have his respect, you’ll win more than you lose. And, gentlemen, that will go far beyond the game. That’s a life lesson.”
Man, I was jacked. I loved Coach Hay’s Knute Rockne–like talks to the team, even when he made fun of me. One day, he asked us, “Why are your names on the back of your jerseys?”
Genius over here shot up his hand. “I know, Coach,” I said. “There are a lot of guys out here, so if you don’t know someone’s name, you can look at his jersey and call him by his name when you talk to him and that’ll make him feel good, and maybe he’ll train harder because he’ll think you care about him.”
Hay just looked at me. I think he was kinda stunned. “That’s the stupidest answer I’ve ever heard,” he said, prompting all the other deep thinkers to crack up. Then Coach Hay got serious.
“I actually think it’s pretty simple,” he said. “Everything that happens in life is going to happen between those white lines on the field. Everything—how you get up, whether you help your brother, whether you bitch and moan—is a direct reflection of who you are. That’s the person you’re bringing to this world. And you can’t hide from it.”
Some teams—like, famously, Joe Paterno’s Penn State—purposely sent players out on the field without their names on their jerseys. The idea was to reject individual ego: team trumps all. Hay wasn’t having any of it.
“I’m all for having your name on that jersey, because it holds you accountable,” he said. “Everything you experience in this game is gonna happen to you in life. You’re gonna fuck up, you’re gonna be called out, you’re gonna score touchdowns, you’re gonna fumble, you’re gonna have big hits, you’re gonna get hit, you’re gonna break bones, you’re gonna let people down, people are gonna let you down. But ultimately, how you react to all that within those white lines? That’s who you’re going to be as a person. Are you going to be a whiny little bitch who points fingers and doesn’t take responsibility, or are you gonna be someone who helps up a fallen teammate? People will look at that name and know from how you respond to everything that happens to you what kind of man you are.”
Whoa. We were just laughing (at me), and now we’d gone real deep. That’s how Coach Hay was—he had a way of saying things that made you want to be a better person. One time, we were running lines—running from one side of the field to the other, touching the white sideline, and running back. Coach Hay stopped us, mid-drill.
“Hey, you guys want to know why we haven’t won a game?” he said. “ ’Cause you don’t take care of the small things. I tell you to run to the white line and touch the white line, and yet half of you guys come up four inches short. You’re never gonna achieve the big thing if you let all the little things slip. You might not think that four inches is that big a deal, but eventually those four inches catch up to you. Years from now, you’re gonna fall short of something really important in your life, and you’re gonna wonder why. It’ll be because you learned to settle. You accepted coming up just a little short. If you do the little things right, I promise you the big things will come. But only if you hold yourself to the highest standard.”
Coach Hay’s warning stayed with me. Years later, after I became a pro, I got the bright idea to take flying lessons. I’ve always felt closer to my mom when I’m in the sky, and I’d always thought about the song her friend Leslie Moore sang at her funeral: “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” and particularly the line “I could fly higher than an eagle.” So there I was, in the cockpit, and my flight instructor, Reed, was telling me to hold the plane at ten thousand feet.
“I am,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” Reed said. “You’re holding at ten thousand and twenty-five feet.”
When we landed, Reed pulled me aside. “Look, man, it doesn’t really matter to me,” he said. “But if I tell you to hold at ten thousand feet, hold at ten thousand feet. Because if you’re going to settle for fifteen feet here and fifteen feet there, you’re going to settle everywhere in life, and I know you—you’re not that guy. So do it for yourself—have a higher standard for who you are.”
I must have been ten years removed from that Golden West locker room, but it hit me: Coach Hay, you muthafucka, you were so damned right. Now I see his message everywhere. On the wall of their state-of-the-art training facility, the San Antonio Spurs have this quote prominently displayed, and it makes me smile, think of Coach Hay, and send a high five skyward:
When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
—Jacob Riis
What Coach Hay knew—and, no doubt, what Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich knows—is that losing hurts more than winning feels good. It’s unacceptable to be the weakest link in the chain, so how do you avoid that? By the steady application of principle, which is a lesson that extends well beyond sports. That was the point of retired US Admiral William McRaven’s commencement speech a couple of years ago that went viral and eventually turned into a book, Make Your Bed: Little Things Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World.
“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” McRaven told University of Texas at Austin students in 2014, in a speech I memorized. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.”
Of course, none of this wisdom helped us on the field at Golden West. We were terrible. We had a lot of great athletes, but we lacked discipline. In fact, our last game of the season kind of captured the whole year. It was at Riverside City College, and they scored in the last ten seconds to beat us. Then, during their celebration, their team and fans started chanting, “Oh-and-ten! Oh-and-ten!”
Well, a bunch of guys on our team had done prison time. You could beat us on the field, but disrespect us? Now you’ve violated prison rules. So some of our goon teammates led the charge and we had a full, bench-clearing brawl to end our season. I looked at Brett Woods, who’d come to Golden West with me from high school, and we had a moment before following our rampaging teammates into the scrum.
“We just got our ass kicked in the game and now we’ve gotta get our ass kicked in a fight,” Brett said.
“Getting our ass kicked twice in one night,” I said. “That’s not a good day.”
With that, we ran out there and tried to look angry, moving around, trying like hell to avoid anything that could, like, hurt. (Can we just pause for a moment to acknowledge how dumb fighting in football is? Guys trying to punch guys in the face who are wearing helmets? Seriously?)
After that debacle, I revisited my Division I dream. I loved Coach Hay, but thought, I’ve gotta get outta here. My academics were solid enough that I could be eligible right away for a major program. The problem was that not a whole helluva lot of college scouts were coming to see this winless team. So I hatched a plan.
First, I got back in the weight room, for hours at a time. Instead of listening to that inner voice of doubt—“No one from an oh-and-ten juco can make it to the big time”—you could find me every day on a bench press, grunting “I am Division One!” with every rep, telling myself the story I needed to hear.
The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that long snapping was my ticket to realizing my dream of playing before a stadium of a hundred thousand screaming fans. I had snapped my senior year of high school, and I fooled around with it during practice at Golden West. I didn’t really know how to do it, but I knew I had a knack for it. I could get the ball back to the punter or holder in a serious hurry, even if I had no clue where it would end up.
Today, there are actually camps just for long snappers. I can’t believe there are fourteen-year-olds out there who dream about nothing else but snapping, but apparently there are. The snappers who make it to the NFL share many of the same traits. They’re all extremely comfortable in that awkward position, and they can generate power out of it without falling forward, which creates a pendulum effect and causes the ball to sail high. For whatever reason, I’m really flexible. I can do splits and can squat like a catcher. The trick is generating power while staying square and flat-footed, like you’re seated in a chair, maintaining your balance while some drooling idiot is trying to knock you on your ass.
There’s no natural torque to the motion of snapping, so the force has to come from your hips, hamstrings, back, and shoulders, all while sliding backward. Back then, in the weight room, I knew none of this. What I knew was that, when I bent over the ball and snapped it between my legs backward, it sizzled through the air and would land in a punter’s hands—if it was on target—with a loud thud.
Yep, snapping would be my ticket. My high school teammate Paul Tessier, who I’d followed to Golden West, was now at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). “Dude, we’re looking for a snapper,” he told me.
There was only one problem: I had no videotape of me snapping. But thank God for Pamela Anderson’s sex tape. See, back in the pre-Internet, pre-high-definition days of videotape and VCRs, you could get a bootlegged tape and splice together a copy of it, using two VCRs. A bunch of us grew very adept at this art when Pamela Anderson’s sex tape started making the rounds. Everyone wanted one.
Well, it was time to put this talent to good use. I went to Coach Hay and asked if he could loan me some game tape. There was our long snapper, Tim Thurman. Tim was six-foot-six, and better then than I ever was. Another teammate was Nick Heinle; like me, he played linebacker and defensive end. Nick wore number 48 and I was number 47. We were both white and built roughly similar, but Nick hit way harder than I did. He was an animal.
We were kind of an odd couple, Nick and I, the meathead and the sensitive guy. One day, Coach Hay asked, “Dorenbos, what did you do this weekend?”
“I watched the movie Notting Hill, Coach,” I said. “It stars Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant—”
“Jesus,” Hay said, cutting me off, “are you shitting me? Heinle, what’d you do?”
“I stayed home and watched Braveheart, sir,” Nick said.
“Hell yeah, you did,” Hay said. “Dorenbos, go to the movies more often with Heinle.”
Anyway, once I got tape of Nick’s big hits from Coach Hay, I spliced together a highlight reel of some of my plays, Nick’s biggest hits, and Tim’s best snaps, and passed it off as my own. Sure, Tim was six-six, but these were the days of grainy video footage. No one would notice that in some plays I was six inches taller, right?
Yeah, that’s right, you could say I conned my way to a full scholarship for a position I never really played. But I knew I could do it; I just needed the opportunity. Tessier thought I was a stone-cold lunatic. “You did what?” he screamed when I told him I’d sent the tape to his coaches.
Feel free to judge me for how I got my scholarship. Yes, it was, on one level, dishonest. But what I learned growing up, going through what I’d gone through, led me not to give a fuck—and it was liberating. I had no fear, which is, by the way, precisely the character trait you want in your long snapper.
Besides, by now I’d seen that who gets a free ride, just as who gets an NFL roster spot, can be totally political. You have to have gone to the right school, with the connected coach, just to get on the radar. Everybody was just trying to convince someone to give them a shot.
After seeing my tape, UTEP called and invited me to visit. I drove out there and headed straight to an empty Sun Bowl. I walked out to midfield and just stood there, imagining sixty thousand fans looking down on me, screaming their asses off. Dude, this is it, I told myself.
I nailed my interviews with the coaches. They saw my passion and commitment and offered me a spot. I accepted. What do you know? Positivity had worked. All that self-talk, all those “I am Division One!” reps in the gym… I’d believed it, and I’d made it so. Now there was just one minor thing left to do: learn how to snap a freakin’ football.