Zac’s great-great-great-grandfather, William C. Easter, fought with the 30th Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.
Willie K, who served in the army and the air force in the period between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, married a local woman named Meredith Young. They had met in their high school band, where he played saxophone and she played oboe and was the drum majorette. Her family, which had been in Iowa for just as long as his family had, owned the hardware store near Winterset’s town square—it’s still owned and operated by her descendants today. In 1870, her family had built the Cutler-Donahoe Covered Bridge in Winterset, one of the six covered bridges that have given Madison County its international renown. Her family also owned the grain elevator in town. The marriage was a union of two farming families that had lived within a few miles of each other for five generations, and it resulted in three children: Chuck, who would eventually take over the family farm; Melody, who would become close childhood friends with Brenda Nicholson, who lived in the town of Winterset; and the oldest, Myles, who would eventually marry Brenda and have three sons with her. Myles and Brenda named their middle boy Zachary Joseph Easter.
To say that Zac Easter’s vision of what defined a true American man can be directly traced to his father and his father’s strenuous childhood on the family farm is plainly true, but it understates how deep this family’s roots run in the tough, macho, survivalist ethic of Midwest farming life. After seven generations living on what would eventually become 543 acres of Easter family farmland and timber, the Easter mentality became something that was virtually ingrained in the family’s DNA. By the twenty-first century, this tough ethos led Easter men not to the feedlot or the grain bin but instead to the high school football field in neighboring Indianola. The Easter mentality now meant something more singular and narrow: the toughness and stoicism and self-sacrifice that created the best football players, the sport that has come to represent the most extreme possibilities of the male body as well as the male mind.
Over the past several years, as the connection between football and brain injuries has become ever more clear, the NFL’s marketing effort has taken on a nostalgic tinge. Instead of directly confronting American families’ fear of the toll football takes on those who play it, the NFL instead has reminded Americans that football is more than just a sport. It’s also a central part of family life in America. In 2012, former NFL linebacker Junior Seau’s suicide marked an inflection point in the American conversation about head injuries in football. The year after Seau’s suicide, the NFL’s league-wide marketing slogan became “Together We Make Football.” The campaign focused on the lifelong relationships and bonds that are forged and fostered through the sport. A couple of years later, the league’s marketing campaign was “Football Is Family.” It is not a coincidence that in the midst of the sport’s biggest existential crisis in a century—since Teddy Roosevelt gathered football leaders and university leaders to clean up the ultraviolent, dangerous sport—the NFL sought to remind Americans that many of their most cherished relationships are tied up in football.
Much of the story of the relationship between American fathers and sons can be told through sports, often through football, the most American and most manly of sports. When the future of football is debated in the public sphere, the pro-football argument frequently reverts to the nostalgia of childhood: the memories of the thrill of Friday night lights, or of spending fall weekends in front of the television with Dad and Grandpa, or of the way August two-a-day practices were the greatest of lessons in how to become a man. The sport has been lauded as the best sport to make a great man, and the best sport to make a great nation.
The roots of America’s most popular, most lucrative, most addictive sport can be traced back to an almost medieval, primal mentality that became an inexorable part of American history and its obsession with military power and Manifest Destiny. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts put it about football more than a century ago: “The injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors.”
The sport’s roots go far deeper than that 1869 Rutgers–College of New Jersey game, and much further back in history. There’s evidence of similar games being played throughout the millennia. More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese were playing a game called cuju, or “kickball,” and evidence of football’s other ancestors can be found in ancient Greece, Rome, and Japan. But the most direct antecedent for American football dates to England more than five hundred years ago. Rugby is football’s uncle, and rugby itself had derived from the sport Americans know as soccer—or, well, “football,” as people in the Old Country began calling it because the sport was played on foot instead of on horseback. The roots of Old World football can be traced back to England’s medieval period. The earliest versions of the sport, as it were, were played on Sundays and on Shrove Tuesday each year as battles between young peasant men of competing villages. The young men of one team kicked a ball, which was either a bull’s head or an animal bladder, from their village to the rival village. There were barely any rules.
Even from its earliest days, people worried about the sport’s violent nature. In 1531, as Henry VIII ruled over England, the English statesman Sir Thomas Elyot called football “nothynge but beastlye furie and exstreme violence . . . malice and rancor do remain with they that be wounded.” This primitive game eventually morphed into the sport Americans know as soccer, though not without controversy. Major injuries and deaths occurred frequently during the early versions of this sport. Oxford and Cambridge both banned it for a time. Then came a tweak that would eventually lead toward American football. “A deviant form of the game ensued in 1823 when William Webb Ellis, a student at the Rugby School in England, allegedly picked up the ball and ran with it,” Gerald R. Gems, a sports historian, wrote in his book, For Pride, Profit and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values.
The nineteenth century heralded the beginning of modern sports—modern meaning a set of static rules were written down and a referee was instituted to ensure people followed those rules. The development of soccer and rugby in England came during a time of great change during and after the Industrial Revolution, as country folk moved into cities, as police forces were developed, and as people’s lives underwent greater regulation in these urbanized societies than they’d ever experienced before. Sport afforded urban dwellers an outlet as well as a proving ground.
In America, the “sport” of football began as really nothing more than controlled riots on college campuses: a hazing ritual. In the early to middle 1800s, upperclassmen rushed through college campuses en masse with the intent of harming the freshmen. Harvard and Yale both banned the game in 1860, which also happened to be the same year that secondary schools on the East Coast first started playing football. The first national rules convention took place in 1873. Another rules convention, in 1880, helped form the version of the sport we know today; that’s when Walter Camp, “the Father of American Football,” introduced the concept of a line of scrimmage. This differentiated the organized nature of American football from the more chaotic nature of rugby. While rugby had a mass scrummage after every tackle, the line of scrimmage allowed one team to retain possession of the ball for a period of time instead of having to fight for it after every play.
This also made the sport more like modern warfare, which created the illusion of a welcome antidote to what society worried was an increasingly emasculated American male. In the period after the Civil War, when the American sport of football first took hold, more Americans moved to cities. That meant men no longer had to meet the everyday rigors of living off the land to provide for their families. Traditional masculine traits seemed less important in these urban settings, where people now toiled behind desks. That masculine anxiety was only heightened by the increasing calls for women’s suffrage, and by the expanding role of women in the working life. In 1870
, 21 percent of college students were women. Ten years later, that grew to almost 36 percent; by 1920, it was more than 47 percent. In 1880, there were only thirty-two women lawyers in all of America; by 1910, there were 1,341. There were five times as many female doctors in America in 1910 as there were in 1880.
The rapidity of the cultural shift was acute. A fear of an increasingly feminized American culture provoked a masculine backlash that took many forms: from aggressive foreign policy to medicines that purported to boost manliness and vitality, from the sudden booms in bodybuilding and Western fiction to the increasing popularity of the “manly sport” of football. American men felt diminished during this period, and football offered a controlled setting in which they could prove their manhood in the face of physical danger. In the same tradition as fighting competitions between knights in the Middle Ages, football became the ultimate public display of masculinity.
On top of that, the peaceful period after the Civil War meant American men could no longer prove their mettle through battlefield exploits. Football, then, became “surrogate war,” in the words of several historians, a way to gain the mentality forged in wartime while participating in an activity that didn’t induce mass casualties. The idea of a team retaining possession of the ball for a set period of “downs”—proposed by Walter Camp—required more strategic maneuvers on the part of players and coaches: plays that were planned in advance, specific roles for each position, and responsibilities for all players that required working together as a single unit. This new sport was billed as a competition of military preparedness—“mimic battlefield,” as one early proponent of football called the sport—as well as a training ground for future corporate leaders. “If ever a sport offered inducements to the man of executive ability, to the man who can plan, foresee and manage,” wrote Camp, “it is certainly the modern American football.”
“As the United States began to emerge as a world power,” sports historian Gerald R. Gems wrote, “football provided significant messages to both American and foreign onlookers. The game elicited comparisons with the battlefield where ‘two armies are managed on military principles . . .,’ and the ‘American’ competition was judged ‘one of the most scientific of outdoor games . . . where players worked with ‘clock-work precision.’ In the aggressive, competitive, industrial modern world, football served as a training ground.” The football field became a training ground for both generals and executives. It is not too much of a stretch to think of football as the perfect place of indoctrination for the uniquely American ethos of Manifest Destiny—the nation’s inevitable expansion throughout the continent—and to the imperialistic mindset America took on in the twentieth century. At its most elemental, football is a series of violent marches into an enemy’s territory, where one team gains land at the expense of the other team. At the time of football’s rise, Americans certainly understood those analogies to infantry warfare, where one team tries to find the greatest weakness in the other team’s line, and then attacks.
When Zac was five years old, his father took him to hunt pheasant for the first time. Myles Sr. was five when his own father first took him to hunt pheasant. The outing with Zac was muddy and cold. They were in the back corner of a field, as far away as possible from the farmhouse, when Zac did what most five-year-olds would do: He started whining.
“Dad, carry me!” he whined. “I can’t walk anymore!”
“I ain’t carrying your ass,” Myles replied. “You’re hunting.”
It was an early lesson in being a man.
After a few minutes, Zac piped up again.
“Dad, I think I’m going to die,” he moaned.
“Well, OK—well then, die,” his dad replied. “The crows and buzzards will eat you. We’ll be OK.”
All of a sudden, Zac got a surge of energy. He made it through the rest of the hunt. His father told him afterward that he was proud of him. The lesson stuck, and so did Zac’s love of hunting, a real man’s hobby if there ever was one. When each of his sons turned eleven years old, Myles would take him on his first deer hunt with the boy actually carrying a gun. “It was kind of like Christmas, all the anticipation,” Brenda Easter said. “The boys would get so excited. All three of them couldn’t wait.” By the time they were eleven, they knew not to complain while they were out hunting with their dad.
This moment for each of them marked the seeds of the tough, stoic mentality being passed from father to son. What real men do is battle through the pain. They certainly don’t whine about it. But the Easter boys’ childhood was not without love. Far from it. It’s just that this sort of love was a love of a hardscrabble man whose family had worked the land for six generations, and who disdained the modern-day softening of society, with men who were supposed to be in touch with their feelings and with boys who could no longer be boys. “Today, you can’t have the same childhood that I had,” Myles Easter said. But he tried to instill in his boys the same ethic that came out of his own upbringing, these modern ways be damned.
Astute observers could see a lot of Zac’s great-grandpa, William Ford Easter—the one who took joyrides on the family’s horses and flew the biplane low over the fields while hunting foxes—in the little boy: the sweet, curious kid who always wanted to learn how things worked and how he could fix them but also had a devious streak that made him determined to break stuff. Seven-year-old Zac disassembling a Tonka truck to see how it worked sounds just like William Ford Easter deconstructing and then reassembling those old combines. Like his great-grandpa, Zac had a mischievous streak that bedeviled his parents. In the woods with his brothers, Zac would toss an M-80 firecracker down a hole to scare out a snake or two. If the boys were lucky enough to capture a snake, they’d stuff another M-80 down its throat and blow its head off. Zac was fearless, confident that he could push his body to its outermost limits—invincible.
Three
The Father
On a chilly spring day not too long ago, I stood with Myles Easter Sr. in the family’s kitchen as he wondered how everything had gone so wrong. Around his neck he wore a chain with a metal pendant that was a reproduction of Zac’s thumbprint. He knew Zac was as in love with football’s violence as he was, and he was still proud of Zac’s toughness, in spite of everything. Myles took a heavy breath, then he spoke, his voice a stew of pride and guilt: “He was my type of guy.” The natural human reaction when tragedy strikes is to look inward, to examine your own role, to wonder if you could have prevented it somehow. What if you’d turned left instead of right? What if you’d said something encouraging to a loved one when he was feeling at his lowest? What if Zac had never played football, had never ruined his brain?
What if?
But Myles Easter Sr. is a man’s man, not prone to hours of self-reflection or weekly appointments with a psychotherapist. As America’s coasts and metropolises become stereotypical havens for sensitive hipsters, the old-school tough-it-out archetype of the American male lives on in the places in between, perhaps nowhere more saliently than in small towns and rural areas throughout the Midwest. After his middle son’s suicide, Myles’s wife suggested they and their sons, Myles II and Levi, all go to counseling. “I don’t need that shit” was his response.
Myles Easter was born in 1961, the year after Frank Gifford suffered one of the most famous on-field concussions in NFL history, the year the Minnesota Vikings became the fourteenth NFL team, and the year that an influential medical report sparked a debate on whether the newfangled plastic helmets actually were more effective that the old leather ones. The oldest of three children, he was raised on that same land that had been homesteaded by his great-great-great-grandfather more than a century before. Myles’s father worked the farm; his mother cooked three meals a day, raised the children, and taught private music lessons to help make ends meet.
There were a few constants in Myles’s early life: farm animals, dogs, guns, and football. The animals around the farm were his daily company, from the good animals, like the hogs that
made the family money, to the bad animals, like the foxes and snakes that were forever menaces. Life lived in conjunction with domesticated animals and in competition with wild animals brought an element of unpredictability and stoicism to Myles’ childhood. A rat bit him at age five, and for the next sixteen days straight, he had to get a daily rabies shot in his stomach. Moments like this bred a no-complaints sense of toughness from a young age. Early each morning, he was outside with his dad, doing farm chores, feeding and watering the hogs that roamed the timber. In winter, they pulled the hogs out of the timber and grazed them in the field, where the hogs would devour corn left over from the harvest. Getting the hogs out of the timber was the most dangerous part. “You pull up to the gate, you better be ready,” Myles recalled. “We got food, and those hogs are running! They’re all hauling ass, sprinting at your ass, and they’re grunting: ‘WOOF! WOOF!’ I’m opening the gate, my dad’s driving in fast, and then I gotta shut the gate fast so they don’t get out.”
When Myles was five, his father gave him a couple of hogs to tend to on his own. He named them Zebra and Rhino, and eventually sold the pair for sixteen dollars. Raising those hogs helped give Myles the toughness and work ethic to one day become a classic football man. There’s something about castrating hogs—heading into the barn early on a cool fall morning, pinning the hog down with your legs, pulling up the hog’s back leg as the animal is kicking you and fighting you, and then snipping off its balls and feeding them to the dogs—that feels like a perverse sort of training for football.
Love, Zac Page 4