Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
—George Carlin
“Bob Stull says you’re my guy,” said the soft-spoken bear of a man with a nervous tic of a cough. It was November of 2006. Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid had been an offensive coach under Stull back in the 1980s, when Stull—now the UTEP athletic director—had coached at my alma mater. Now there were seven games left in the season and Reid’s long snapper, Mike Bartrum, had broken his neck. Reid needed someone, and he needed someone fast. Stull had called to tell him he had just the guy.
By now, I was officially a journeyman NFL player. After the Bills waived me, I’d been picked up and released twice by the Tennessee Titans. So I’d become a veteran of the coldhearted Not For Long League. I was a hired gun, and I was okay with that. Once I’d used up my worth to a team, I’d ride off into the sunset like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. That was cool, I’d think, and head back to Cali and my magic and my friends.
Now Reid stood before me, just before my Eagles tryout. He didn’t move his head, but looked me up and down with his eyes. There was a faint smile—at least I think there was, because it was always hard to tell with his big, bushy mustache—and he turned and walked away.
Out on the field, there were three of us who had been called in. One was Jon Condo, a talented snapper who would go on to play for the Raiders for a dozen years. The other candidate was Adam Johnson, a young dude who I’d mentored when I was with the Bills and he played for the University of Buffalo. Great kid, but c’mon: I can’t lose out to someone I was coaching just a couple of years ago, right?
Eagles punter and field-goal holder Dirk Johnson was on the field to receive our snaps, crouched down on one knee eight yards away, his hand outstretched, ready to catch each snap before holding it down for an imaginary kicker. Each of us would get ten chances. It was do-or-die. Each snap needed to be about fifty miles per hour, precisely three and a half rotations in a tight-ass spiral, the ball arriving into Dirk’s hands laces up and outward. If one snap went even slightly awry… you’re off the island, my man.
“Fire in it there, don’t be a pussy,” I said aloud before each one. And they were money. But so were Condo’s and Johnson’s. After, the three of us were headed back to the locker room when special-teams coach John Harbaugh yelled out, “Hey, Jon, hang back.” Soon Coach Reid emerged from the tunnel, with that slight, sideways smile.
“You are my guy,” he said. “Listen, I don’t care what you do. You want to go home? Go home. You want to snap? Snap. You want to lift weights? Lift. You want to run? Run. I don’t care. But if that snap ain’t there on Sunday, you’re fired. Clear?”
Whoa. “Yessir,” I said.
“See you at practice,” Coach Reid—who will forever be Big Red to me—said, turning and walking away. From that moment on, Big Red had purchased himself the loyalty of a long snapper. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being babied. I had to grow up real fast as a twelve-year-old, and ever since, I’ve taken it as a slap in the face when a coach—or any authority figure—treated me like anything other than a man. When I left the state of Washington and finished my therapy, I vowed that I’d never be babysat. Coaches who check on players for curfew drove me nuts—not because I wanted to go out partying, but because it made me feel infantilized. Now here was a coach talking to me like I was a man: I don’t care how you get the job done. Just get it done.
From that day on, Big Red was someone I wanted to make proud. Someone I would run through brick walls for. And I wasn’t the only one. A locker room full of men, I’d soon learn, would take to the field and play their butts off each week for the big guy on the sidelines. I’ve had great coaches, but none inspired the kind of loyalty in so many players like ol’ Big Red did.
Reid’s Eagles had been to the Super Bowl two years earlier, losing to the Patriots, and they were still—and would continue to be—among the league’s elite. By the time I joined the team around midseason, our star quarterback, Donovan McNabb, had been lost to a season-ending injury. We were five and six when backup quarterback Jeff Garcia showed me how much leadership means to a team.
In his book The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams, author Sam Walker says there are great players, yes, but that most great teams are not made by them or, for that matter, by great coaches. Walker’s exhaustive study found that it’s usually one great leader who turns a team from good to great—and it’s almost never the most talented player. Michael Jordan was, by far, the best player on his dominant Chicago Bulls teams in the nineties. But, Walker argues, the doggedness and humility of seven-foot center Bill Cartwright was as crucial in leading that team to victory as were Jordan’s dunks.
On our team, Donovan McNabb was immensely talented, and a good teammate, but you wouldn’t exactly call him an inspirational leader. When he went down with that knee injury in 2006, the media wrote the team off. But they underestimated a locker room full of men, not least of whom was our backup quarterback.
Garcia wasn’t a big, imposing guy, but he had the heart of a mountain lion, and that competitive spirit caught on. He’d been a Pro Bowl quarterback a few years before with the San Francisco 49ers, so he had skill, but it was his ability to rally guys around him that made all the difference. It wasn’t that he was a loud, rah-rah kind of guy. That’s acting, not leadership. No, Jeff Garcia showed up every day to do the work—first one to practice, first one out of the tunnel—and in the way he carried himself he demanded that you do the same. He wasn’t out late, going to strip clubs, talking shit. A leader is not someone who points fingers and yells and screams. A leader is someone who people follow because, in everything he does, he puts others first.
When I first got to Philly, it struck me that everyone in our locker room believed in their bones that we were going to win. I’ve been on talented teams—my second year in Buffalo comes to mind—where you could just tell that some guys on either side of you had checked out. They stopped believing.
In Philly, we went on a run behind Jeff because of the confidence he gave off. If we were losing, it didn’t matter. We’d look at him, take in his body language and his positivity, and even if he didn’t say anything, you just felt: We’re good. We’re gonna figure this out. Over eight games that season, Jeff threw ten touchdowns against only two interceptions, we won five straight and the NFC East Division, and he made the cover of Sports Illustrated. And then he led us to a playoff win over the New York Giants.
Some guys just make others believe, and for nearly the next decade, the Eagles had many of those players. Throughout the league, there are players (not to mention coaches and executives, for that matter) who don’t want to win so much as be the reason their team wins. Ego kills, man. You get one guy who places himself above the brotherhood and the whole vibe can collapse. But you get a bunch of guys who place “we” over “me” in everything they do? Man, you’re gonna win some football games.
For example, you couldn’t be around safety Brian Dawkins—and his alter ego, Weapon X—and not try your damnedest to find a gear you never knew you had. Dawkins was so intense, so driven, so focused… it made you realize you could always do more.
And then there was my man Jon Runyan. Jon was an All-Pro left tackle for fourteen years. A poll of NFL players in 2008 found that being blocked by the six-foot seven-inch, 330-pound Runyan on a screen pass was one of the scariest things in the league. After he retired, Jon went on to become a US congressman and now works for the NFL. But to me, Jonny Runyan will always be a guy who made everyone around him better.
Big Jon didn’t have to say a word in the locker room. He led in his very being. Think about this. Big Jon played for months with a broken tailbone. He had to ride everywhere in a sprinter bus with a pole in the center of it, because he couldn’t sit down. We played at San Francisco and he stood on the long plane ride there and back after playing an NFL game.
“How are you doing this, dude?” I said to him. “How are you playing everyday when you can’t even sit down?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Just don’t fall down.”
That’s why I loved Jonny Runyan: Just don’t fall down. Easy.
Like most long snappers, I’d long been a mercenary. But then, in Philly, the damnedest thing happened. I’d found security in the Eagles family, and in the city as a whole. Generally, long snappers toil in anonymity. No one knows what we do, let alone who we are. But in Philly, the most sports-crazed of towns, something happened. Shortly after I arrived, a local reporter, Joe Santoliquito, approached me and commented on how serendipitous it was that the song “Wind Beneath My Wings” was sung at my mom’s funeral—with its line about flying higher than an eagle—and here I was, playing for the Eagles. Whoa. “You’re going to do great things here,” that writer said, and his words became a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only did that Bette Midler song instantly become the pregame soundtrack in my headphones—while my teammates psyched themselves to rap backbeats or ear-splitting heavy metal, but the city and I just clicked, like it was destiny. People started recognizing me. Out to dinner, I’d get high fives. At the supermarket, a fan might yell “Magic man!” and ask for an autograph.
The Eagles asked me to host a weekly TV show during the season. I’d interview my teammates, make them the victim of my card tricks. How sick is this: in 2009, I won an Emmy, for best host. Suddenly I started seeing fans wearing Eagles number 46 jerseys. With my name on the back. What the…? I’d go up to strangers on the street who were wearing my jersey and offer to sign it for them. “You do know I’m just a long snapper, right?” I’d say to them.
People sensed that I was more than a hired gun. I was an Eagle. I was a Philadelphian. My family had shattered when I was twelve, and without really planning it, my team and this amazing city had become my extended family. Before, snapping a football was a job. Now, quite by accident, I’d found a higher purpose. When our team owner, Jeffrey Lurie, got married, I was the only player invited to the wedding. “You’re family,” he said, and I beamed inside.
It wasn’t unrelated that my play improved year after year. After all, wouldn’t you go all out for your family? In 2010, I made the Pro Bowl, and would again five years later. Ever since 1979, when the disco song “We Are Family” was the theme song for the World Series champion Pittsburgh Pirates, sports-team marketing departments have painted their franchises as families. But for me, the idea of the Eagles as family wasn’t just some sports-page cliché. For me, it meant bringing to our relationship the same type of commitment we all bring to our actual families.
One day, for example, the team doc brought some grave news. I had torn ligaments in my ankle. Out six to eight weeks, at least. Big Red came to see me. “I’m not going to put you on injured reserve,” he said. “If we make the playoffs, I want you there.”
If Andy put me on injured reserve, I’d miss the rest of the season. Instead, he was going to keep me on the active, fifty-three-man roster. Which meant I was taking up a roster spot. Which meant someone was getting fired so they could clear a spot for a temporary snapper to come in.
Well, that didn’t sit right. Not if we were really family. If we’re really a band of brothers, I couldn’t let one of my mates go down because of me. The clincher for me was when I read a quote from my teammate Brian Dawkins in the paper. “I play the game the way a fan would play if he had a chance to strap on a uniform for one game,” he said.
Man, that sealed it. If you went to a die-hard, face-painted Eagles fan and said, “You can play in one game, but you’re going to have to play through the pain of torn ligaments in your ankle, would you do it?” None of them would think twice. Before you finished asking the question, they’d be at the stadium, getting padded up.
Screw it, I thought. I had a week to get ready. “Let’s rehab this,” I said to our trainer, Rick Burkholder, who nodded his head and said, “Fuck, yeah.” Rick was up for the challenge.
I moved into the training facility and rehabbed around the clock. Three hours on, two hours off, three hours on, two hours off. The pain was excruciating. I just kept telling myself that old adage again: Moments of pain for a lifetime of glory.
By Friday, if I really concentrated, I could hide my limp and jog slowly in a straight line. Big Red came into the trainer’s room. “What’s it gonna be, kid?”
“I’ll be there for you on Sunday, Coach,” I said.
There was that sideways smile again. “Good to see you still have a little linebacker left in you,” he said.
Come game day, I took a couple of shots to numb the area. It was totally legal. And it was what I had to do. I’d been listed as “questionable,” so when the team was out on the field for the pregame warm-up, the Giants had their special-teams coach, Tom Quinn, keeping his eye on me. If I was seen limping or in pain, they could keep me off the field, or worse, they could go right for my injury, seeking to knock me out of the game. Man, it was painful pretending I wasn’t in pain. I just grunted my way through every step. Just before kickoff, one of our assistant coaches, David Culley, asked how I was doing.
“I’ll tell you how I’m doing,” I said. “I’m gonna make a solo tackle and I’m gonna snap a game-winning field goal to win this muthafucka.”
He looked at me kinda funny. “Don’t go crazy,” he said. “Just snap the ball and get off the field.”
Well, first snap, I made it down the center of the field untouched until… I was helmet to chest with the ball carrier. Boom. Check solo tackle off today’s to-do list. Then, with less than two minutes remaining, I snapped the ball on what turned out to be the game-winning field goal. Talk about positive thinking and visualization.
Afterward, in the training room, the trainers took the tape off my ankle and it was blown up, all blue and black and purple. We were icing it when Big Red walked in. He’d always carry a pen that he’d click over and over again. He stopped, looked at me, clicked his pen twice, and gave me a nod.
That nod meant the world to me. It’s the nod football coaches like Andy Reid give when they know you’ve played through an injury that should have kept you off the field. It’s a nod that says, I understand you did a hard thing. I respect the doing of hard things.
That nod spoke volumes. Later, at my locker, a couple of guys walked by, also pausing to give me a nod. They were the ones who were on the bubble, and they knew it. Had I not gutted it out, one of them would have been fired. That’s what you do in a family: You place the others in it before you. And it starts at the top.
The thing players loved about Andy was the same thing the media hated about him: he never threw anybody under the bus. If a player called an ill-advised time-out, there Big Red would be at the postgame press conference: “Yeah, that was my call,” he’d say. “That was my mistake. I’ve got to do a better job there.”
As a player in that scenario, you’d go into the locker room expecting your boneheaded play to become fodder for reams of newsprint, not to mention breathless criticism from the TV and radio talking heads. But then you’d look at your coach, that big dude with a ’stache, and you’d start to see him as a type of human bulletproof vest, taking incoming meant for you, and not even thinking twice about it. Again, family. How can you not give your all for a guy like that?
Those great Eagles teams I played for under Andy for seven seasons starting in 2006 weren’t necessarily full of superstars. But we were a group of men, not boys. We were a group of men who handled ourselves like men, who treated each other like men, who loved a coach who said, “Yo, I care about you. I care about your families. I’m pulling for you and I’m here to help make you better.” We proved that if you get a group of guys together sharing that kind of commitment, nobody can stop that.
At least for a while, that is. Between 2006 and 2010, our record was 48–31–1, with two division titles and four playoff appearances. By 2012, though, the results on the field were no longer there. Our longtime defensive coordinator, Jim Johnson, passed away in 2009; with Johnson running the defense, Reid had been able to concentrate on the offensive side of the ball. When I first became an Eagle, Reid and Johnson were among those crowding around me one day to see some magic tricks. I lifted Johnson’s watch right off his wrist without him even knowing it—and news of that quickly made its way throughout the building. Everyone was so tickled that Johnson had been one of my good-natured victims, because he was just so beloved. After his death, something was missing. Our eight-and-eight record in 2011 dropped to four-and-twelve in 2012.
Big Red was fired at the end of that season. Sometimes, in the NFL, players need to hear a different voice—and coaches need to have a different group of listeners. That was the case here. Andy moved on to Kansas City, where all he did was win again. And our locker room was about to receive a jolt of energy when college coaching phenom Chip Kelly was hired.