“The rise of pro football and relative decline in the popularity of Major League Baseball seems more momentous, a demarcation between past and present, not merely in sports but in the culture itself,” MacCambridge writes. “This is true for several reasons, among them the speed with which pro football surpassed baseball, and the fact that well into the 1950s, so few people saw it coming . . . ‘Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better know baseball,’ wrote [French-American historian] Jacques Barzun in 1954 . . . But in the span of two generations in postwar America, pro football became a truer and more vivid reflection of the American preoccupations with power and passion, technology and teamwork, than any other sporting institution in the country.”
Football would continue to rise. A competing league, the American Football League, was founded in 1959, the year after the landmark Colts-Giants game. In 1961, the NFL signed its first national television contract. Soon, the leagues merged, which led to the first Super Bowl in 1967. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle turned football into a sport with broad middle-class appeal. Nineteen of the twenty most-watched American television programs ever are football games. (The other had an even more direct tie to violence and to the military: the series finale of M*A*S*H.)
Over the next few decades, football became an American staple. In a world that seemed to be simultaneously shrinking and expanding through new technology and media, through political upheaval and international migration, football was something Americans could count on as a simple morality play: one hundred yards from end zone to end zone, four downs to get ten yards, eleven men per side, may the best man win. It became a sport that helped unify a balkanizing nation. From the coasts to the landlocked plains, football captured the imagination of fans and businessmen and sportswriters alike, so it’s only natural that the sport spread into families’ backyards. In Indianola, Iowa, the Easter family looked at football as a sport of truth and beauty, a game whose physical and mental challenges constituted a rite of passage from boyhood into manhood. Zac Easter looked at football as a compulsory joy. Quite simply, football was something that Easter men did: Easter men like his father, the former Division I scholarship player who became a college and high school coach. Easter men like his older brother, who also got a college scholarship to play football. Even Easter men like his younger brother, who never really took to the sport but who felt compelled to play for the high school team anyway. To Zac, football was far more than just some game you watched on Saturdays (the Iowa Hawkeyes) and Sundays (the Green Bay Packers). Football was a test of your manhood. Don’t play football and you’re not a man. Football was looking at the pain intrinsic in the sport as a gift, something worth fighting through to build one’s character. Like Vince Lombardi had said, “The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It’s your mind you have to convince.”
Years later, even as Zac Easter’s mind was breaking apart, he wrote words that would have made Lombardi proud: “I remember being one of the hardest hitting linebackers ever since I started . . . I learned around this age that if I used my head as a weapon and literally put my head down on every play up until the last play I ever played. I was always shorter than a lot of other players and learned to put my head down so I could have the edge and win every battle. Not only that, but I liked the attention I got from the coaches and other players.”
At the time, that way of thinking still seemed admirable.
Before Zac was born, Myles Sr. took a job as defensive coordinator at Simpson College, a Division III school in Indianola. He never made his boys play football—it was more like it was just assumed. “I loved football,” he said. “I was getting to the point where I loved it more than the kids did back in high school.” Not that the boys didn’t love it, too. As little kids, they’d come to Myles’s practice every day and hang off to the side with the kickers. By third grade, Zac was playing full-contact football in helmet and pads, like most other boys in his town.
His dad’s expectations and his older brother’s example—the “Easter mentality,” as people called it in Indianola—were a lot for young Zac to live up to. “I was tired of teachers and even Principal Monroe comparing me to my brother and asking me why I wasn’t as good of a student as my older brother,” Zac wrote. “I guess I got to the point then where I just didn’t care and realized the only way to [feel] adequate to fill the Easter family shoes was to play football.”
To his teammates and friends, who didn’t see the mental struggles that were covered up by Zac’s hard-ass attitude, Zac became a heroic sort of figure. “You could ask any of our friends who was the biggest prick on the field, and it was Zac,” Nick Haworth, one of Zac’s best friends since childhood who played football with him through high school, said admiringly. “When you’re playing like a prick, you’re getting after it, and that’s what Zac did. He didn’t take shit from anybody. And he hit hard. And Zac, that sonofabitch, when he hit, he used his head. He wanted to be tough, man.”
The Easter family: (front row, left to right) Brenda and Levi. (back row, left to right) Myles Sr., Zac, Myles II.
“I won’t lie,” Zac wrote. “I look back now and always felt like I had something to prove to my dad and trying to fill my older brothers football shoes.”
He added, “I’m sure [my dad] loves me but he’s always had a hard time showing it. I feel like all my concussions were for him in the first place because I just wanted to impress him and feel tough.”
Zac wasn’t born with what he needed to become a football star, so in high school he secretly began taking prohormones, a steroid-like supplement banned in many sports. Zac’s father didn’t know about the supplements. But he noticed Zac, who’d always been a little chubby, getting into phenomenal shape. Myles Sr. and his boys would sometimes grab a few Coors Lights and go down to the basement for bench press contests. Before those sessions, Myles Sr. always told Zac that he’d bench press fifty pounds more than him. One day when Zac was in high school, he bench pressed 285 pounds of metal. “OK,” his father said, “I can beat that.” Myles Sr. was working his way up in weight when he pushed 315 pounds of metal off his chest and . . . Pop! He tore a pectoral muscle.
One way Zac asserted himself against his father and older brother was by defecting from the family’s NFL team, the Minnesota Vikings, to the Green Bay Packers. It was Zac’s mischievous streak at work. While Myles II sat alongside his father in Vikings purple-and-gold, Zac shouted, “Go, Pack, go!” He relished the opportunity to rib his older brother and dad. Zac loved Brett Favre—he had the same swagger as Favre, the same gunslinger mentality, the same imperviousness to pain—and his dad finally relented and got him a Packers jersey emblazoned with Favre’s number: 4. Favre might have been a quarterback and Zac a fullback/linebacker, positions that require different mentalities, but Favre’s throw-caution-to-the-wind approach and his much-admired ability to play through pain seemed heroic to Zac. Myles II might have been taller and faster than his brother, talented enough to earn a college football scholarship and a spot in his high school’s sports hall of fame, but Zac was always the toughest dude on the field. “He was out there to fuck people up,” said Myles II. “He was there to do some damage.”
Two
The Ancestors
In the spring of 1854, Jacob Stickler, a fifty-three-year-old man of German descent—the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Zac Easter—decided to quit his backbreaking work in the Pennsylvania coal mines and head west. Like anyone willing to brave the dangers and uncertainties of America’s frontier, Stickler was in search of a new beginning. He left his wife and daughter behind, hitched the horses to his wagon, and headed toward the same place where so many other Pennsylvania coal miners were going: to the gently rolling hills of Iowa, a haven of rich, black, sandy soil and miles upon miles of prairie land ripe for grazing. The land was plentiful, and, through the Manifest Destiny way of thinking that led white men to settle on land long occupied by Native Americans, the land was also his for the taki
ng. At the time of Stickler’s trip toward the frontier, the eastern migration to Iowa was at its height. Iowa’s population in 1840 was only about forty-three thousand people, or less than one person per square mile statewide. A decade later, after Iowa had been admitted as the twenty-ninth state in the Union, its population had nearly quintupled, to nearly two hundred thousand people. Those people’s fortunes rested on living off the land, and in time, the settlers would turn Iowa into one of America’s most productive agricultural areas, the breadbasket of a booming nation.
If the final leg of Stickler’s trip was anything like that of his fellow travelers, it could not have been particularly pleasant. Roaming the Iowa prairies at the time were not only plenty of buffalo and deer that could provide sustenance for an able hunter but also animals that presented danger: wolves and badgers, wildcats and rattlesnakes. Plagues of Rocky Mountain locusts—settlers derisively referred to them as grasshoppers—would occasionally wipe out the sun while devouring everything from cropland to clothing right off people’s backs.
Though his new home was a grueling thousand-mile trip from his old home, what Stickler would find when he arrived in Iowa was both comfortably familiar and thrillingly foreign. Some migrants referred to Iowa and its agricultural bounty as the El Dorado of that time, so valued was that black gold; heading to Iowa was for these frontiersmen like the Spanish conquistadors and other European explorers searching for that mythical lost city of gold. Yet Iowa was also a place that was strikingly similar to the home Stickler had known back East, at least in terms of the white people who lived there. As a fellow Iowa settler wrote in a letter at the time: “We have a good and we think nice country, and good society, the majority being Pennsylvanians.”
Stickler homesteaded 240 acres of land, hills and timber and prairie, where muddy eroding cliffs descended to the meandering North River and Howerdon Creek. It was not far south of Des Moines, which in 1857 would be named the capital of the new state. No white man had lived on this land before, though it had been home to generations of Native Americans. A nearby village for the Sac and Fox tribes had been abandoned only a decade before Stickler staked his claim to the land. For the next 150 years, Jacob Stickler and his descendants would occasionally unearth an old arrowhead or tomahawk blade while they were tending the fields or walking the timber. The closest hub of settlers’ civilization was a recently plotted town called Winterset a few miles away. The place was originally going to be called Summerset; an unseasonable cold spell during the summer when settlers were debating what to call their new home caused them to change their minds. Stickler’s first year there could not have been easy. He spent that first winter holed up in the same covered wagon in which he’d made the long journey. His wife, Rachel, and their only child, a grown daughter named Diana, came later, after that long winter.
Diana was married to a man named William Miner Ford, a West Virginian by birth who’d also worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines. It was the two of them who established the family farm in 1855 on the land Jacob Stickler had settled on the year before. These were heady times in Iowa—the state’s population had more than doubled in the five years since the 1850 census. The Fords had four children, all born in Iowa. The second-youngest, Emma, who was born just as the Civil War was beginning, married a man named Josiah Easter a few days after Christmas in 1879, when both were still teenagers. It was around this time when Iowa youths started playing the new, tough-minded sport of American football, on fields that ranged from stockyards to fairgrounds to pastures. Josiah took over the family farm in 1895 after his father-in-law passed away. For generations that followed, the family grew the same crops and raised the same animals that most Iowans did: corn and soybeans, cattle and hogs and chickens, and always supplemented by an enormous garden. Josiah and Emma had ten children. The youngest was born in 1906, a boy named William Ford Easter. The same country doctor who delivered William Ford Easter would, the very next year, deliver another baby in town who would come to define a generation of American manhood: Marion Robert Morrison, who later changed his name to John Wayne.
A childhood spent working and romping the family’s acreage shaped William Ford Easter, just as it would shape generations of Easter men after him—especially his great-grandson Zac. As a boy, William would join his father in riding through the family’s timber in a horse-drawn wagon, the two of them wielding axes to cut down trees for firewood. Sometimes, as Josiah steered the wagon on the edge of their property along an old buggy trail that stretched all the way to Winterset, the horses would suddenly stop. The horses wouldn’t move another inch, acting nervous and fidgety. The boy would be scared, but his dad would hop down from the wagon, aim his double-barreled shotgun at the tall grass, and blast to smithereens the rattlesnake that was agitating his horses. The lesson to his son was clear, and the lesson would be passed on from each generation of this family just as it had been since Jacob Stickler homesteaded here: The meek would not inherit this slice of the earth. Life here was for men who were tough and fearless.
William Ford Easter had a bit of a wild streak when he was younger, according to family lore. Being tough and fearless was one thing; being reckless and disrespectful was quite another. Once, as a teenager, William mounted one of the horses from the barn, took it into town, and raced it on the downtown streets. That infuriated his no-nonsense father, Josiah, so much that William would still be telling that story a half century later. But eventually, he settled into the life that was expected of him, a hardworking life on the farm, growing crops and raising animals. Occasionally, he’d still feed those wild urges of his earlier years, like when he went up in a World War I–era open-cockpit biplane one winter day with his brother, flew low over the farm and aimed his 12-gauge shotgun at the foxes that had been killing his farm animals. He shot three of them.
Easter men have never relied on other people to fix their problems. Since their forebears first began to tame their rough, hilly patch of land in Iowa, they have always taken pride in handling challenges on their own. When the family transitioned from farming with horses to using modern farm machinery around the time of World War II, doing so came with an added responsibility for William Ford Easter, as well as an added joy. He loved it when farm machinery broke down because that meant he got to repair it. One year, he bought two used, nonfunctioning combines. He spent the entire winter fusing the parts of those two combines into one working machine. To make ends meet, he got a job managing the Ford garage in nearby Saint Charles. He adored the Ford Model T, the first mass-produced car that had been introduced to the American public when he was two years old. When he bought one of those Model Ts brand-new, his father told him he was wasting his money on such a fancy car. A couple of years later, he sold it—and he’d taken such good care of it that he recouped what he’d paid for it.
William Ford Easter married a woman named Blanche Kuntz, and together they weathered the Depression and the Dust Bowl the only way they knew how: By being frugal, by never buying anything they didn’t need, and by heading to the nearby country church down the rocky road, where William sang a sonorous tenor in the choir as they prayed for God’s help in taming this unpredictable land. During the bruising winters, the Easters heated only one room of the house at a time with fuel they’d cut from the family’s timber, shutting the rest of the doors of the house to trap the heat in that one room. They never took on debt, and after the banks went bust, they had piles of cash savings stuffed around their house. Perhaps because of the economic struggles of the time and how they affected child-rearing, they only had one child, William Kuntz Easter: “Willie K,” Zac Easter’s grandfather.
Willie K was born in the early 1930s, as the Dust Bowl raged throughout the American plains. It was during those years that the farm was at its lowest point. One growing season, it produced exactly one bushel of rye grass: nothing more, the rest of the farm just dirt and dust. Around that time, William Ford Easter decided he’d get on a horse and ride it 370 miles east to Chicago, where he pl
anned to march into a bank and cash in his cash-value life insurance policy to scrape together more money. When he got to Chicago, though, the life insurance company had gone belly-up. From that day on, William said life insurance was “all a bunch of bullshit.” That story became legend in the Easter family, and it enshrined their frugal ways. It wasn’t until Willie K was a high school senior that the family got electricity in their farmhouse, and even then, they didn’t overuse what they saw as a luxury. Until the day William Ford Easter died in 1995, he’d never put more than one light bulb in a light fixture that had space for six. But even as the family scratched out a living throughout the Depression, there was always a pride in doing things their own way, and a pride in being a part of an America that had only itself to rely on.
One of Willie K’s most distinct memories from his childhood was during World War II, when female fighter pilots—the Women Airforce Service Pilots—would fly low over the farm, transporting military bombers from one coast to the other. Moments like that connected this family to the great national pride that stemmed from conquering the Nazis in World War II. And for a family like the Easters—whose military service stretched from the great-great-great-grandfather who was shot in the leg during the first charge at the Battle of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, all the way to Zac, who went through army boot camp and had dreams of becoming an Army Ranger—words about patriotism were more than just empty platitudes.
Love, Zac Page 3