Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  “Underlying virtually every narrative of football was the most fundamental issue of all: what it meant to be a ‘man,’ ” Oriard wrote. “While the expanding mass media drove the growth of football’s audience, concerns about masculinity were a major factor in making that audience receptive to the game. Brawny and brainy football heroes represented contrasting models of masculinity.”

  And so it falls right in line with a century and a half of American history that when Myles Easter had his first son, then his second and his third, he yearned for those boys to play the sport he’d played as a boy and still loved as a man. And those boys became burdened with the same burden football players had carried for generations before them: an adult culture that counted on them to win pride for their family and community, to achieve their own and their fathers’ ambitions. The way Zac Easter shaped himself into a football player was, in large part, about shaping himself to please his father, and about living up to the exploits of his older brother. Zac the football player was as central a part of his identity as Zac the human being.

  His parents knew football carried with it some dangers, though they, like most Americans, had no idea how serious the risk of brain injury was. But they also knew that football created self-assured young men. An Easter man in the twenty-first century no longer had to pack up his life in a covered-wagon migration to show his mettle like Jacob Stickler did a century and a half before. But the Easter mentality still resonated seven generations later, and football was one of its main proving grounds.

  Myles was nearing the final year of his college career as a hard-hitting safety at Drake University when he saw Brenda Nicholson at a New Year’s Eve party in 1982. It wasn’t the first time they had met. Brenda had been close friends with Myles’s little sister, Melody, since middle school. Brenda was a high school cheerleader, but she was also a tomboy. As a little girl, when she had visited Melody, she’d loved going out to the Easters’ land, climbing trees, playing hide-and-seek, catching fireflies and putting them in jars. “It was my heaven,” Brenda said. Myles was the big, quiet brother who was always doing farm chores with his dad. They reconnected over keg beer in red Solo cups at that New Year’s Eve party. A spark was evident immediately between the big brother and his kid sister’s childhood friend. She didn’t remember Myles being so incredibly fit back in high school. That’s what college football does to a young man. He didn’t remember her being so beautiful, with big hair and form-fitting corduroy jeans. They shared their first kiss, and later that night, well after midnight, Myles drove Brenda and two friends back to town. They pulled over to the side of the road for someone to pee. The night was numbingly cold, and the snow was fresh. Brenda hopped out of the truck, and then she slid straight down an embankment, where snow had been piling up. Myles and Brenda both howled with laughter.

  Myles Sr. was a hard-hitting safety at Drake University in Des Moines.

  The next day, he called her up for pizza, and a relationship quickly blossomed. He was the quieter one, happy to hang with football friends. Brenda was the social butterfly, named “Miss Congeniality” for her high school class (as well as “Best Body”); it was that outgoing, friendly nature that would eventually land her in the ultimate extrovert’s job, as the president of the Indianola Chamber of Commerce. Brenda joined the Easter family on long road trips to see Myles’s football team play, and even accompanied them when they chartered a plane to fly to a game in Texas. Even though she always cringed at the hardest, scariest hits, Brenda loved watching her big, brawny boyfriend lay into opponents on the field. He was such a fierce competitor that his teammates gave him the nickname “Baby Bull.” She wondered why, when he tore up his knee in a game and had to get arthroscopic surgery, he felt football was still worth it, and why he worked so hard to get back on the field. But eventually she came to see his joyful worship of this violent sport as part of what made him such a strong and reliable man.

  Brenda fit right in with the Easters: tough and spunky, smart and independent, a country girl through and through. She was always a workout fiend, and later in life, after three kids, would teach intense 5:00 a.m. fitness classes at the local Fusion Fitness. At the same time, she could slam beers right alongside the country boys. She was always up for a good time, though her Catholic upbringing generally kept her within the bounds of good taste. (Perhaps the raciest moment of Brenda’s high school years was when a group of boys and girls hopped the fence at the community pool and went skinny-dipping.) Brenda was thrilled when Myles invited her to go hunting with him and Duke, the huge bluetick coonhound. They went fishing together, on the farm pond near Myles’s parents’ house and on the North River in the family’s timber. She’d even shoot skeet with her new beau. For Brenda, she simply loved being out in nature with Myles. Within two years, they were married, and a few years later came their first son.

  Myles and Brenda reconnected at a party on New Year’s Eve 1982. They married a couple years later.

  For many people, at this point football would recede into the background: a fun diversion, a way to bond with your sons, nothing more. Not for Myles Easter Sr. When Brenda married him, she also married football. They named their first son Myles II when he was born in 1988, and Myles became known as “Daddy Myles.” Their second son, Zac, born in 1991, was a composite of Brenda and Myles. Zac had Brenda’s adventurous spirit—mother and son would later get their motorcycle licenses together, and they would make plans to go skydiving—but he had his father’s drive. Zac would struggle in school, just like Myles had, but it was never because the father or the son couldn’t do the work. It was because they couldn’t feign interest in something that didn’t truly interest them. But when something did engage them—math and finance, health and fitness, hunting and football—the father and the son maintained a laser-like focus, and a perfectionism to get things right.

  Myles and Brenda had only one son so far when Myles took the coaching job at Simpson College in Indianola, a town just twenty-six miles east of Winterset that was known for monthly motorcycle nights on the town square. Soon after Myles accepted the job came Zac, and a year later, in 1992, their third boy, Levi. All three would play football, but it was the first two sons, Myles II and Zac, who truly adored the sport. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, they’d sneak up to the overhead track at Simpson College’s nearly century-old gym and listen to their dad’s halftime pep talks. Those talks were legendary for their intensity. After a bad half, Myles would scream things like that the other team was the foxes and “our team” was the rabbits, running away with our tails between our legs. “We’re going to let the fox eat us!” he once screamed. “Fucking pussies!” He wasn’t afraid to let his players think he was a little unhinged. But what most impressed observers was how he could transition from screaming to teaching. “Okeydokey,” he’d say matter-of-factly, marking the end of his expletive-filled rant. “This is what we gotta do.” Then, he’d turn to the chalkboard and start diagramming tweaks to their defense.

  Daddy Myles valued toughness above all else. It wasn’t so much that Zac heard his father preach that mentality and decided to make it his own, though that was certainly part of it. It was more that Zac was born that way. His older brother, Myles II, was taller, faster, talented enough to earn a Division II football scholarship and a spot in his high school’s sports hall of fame. Zac was shorter, slower, not as solid. But he was the toughest dude on the field. “Whether it was a guard or a center pulling or a running back coming at him,” said Myles II, “Zac was always out there to do some serious damage.” Years later, whenever Myles Sr. and II spoke to me about Zac’s mindset on the football field, I could hear the awe in their voices.

  “Zac, he was always smearing people,” said Myles II. “He was just reckless. All the kids in his grade feared him. Not just in football. If you fucked with Zac, he was going to knock you in your mouth. He was jacked, too. We worked out together in the mornings. Me and Zac used to be the type of guys who wanted to knock people out.”

>   “I got the fuck beat out of me in college,” Myles Sr. said. “But Zac, man. Wooooo-ooooo. He was a thumper. He loved it.”

  Of course, that never seemed a big deal at the time. Zac’s father had a half dozen or more concussions during his football career; he never seemed worse for the wear. The same held for Zac’s older brother. Concussions were just part of the price you paid in this sport that, with the right mentality, could turn you into a man.

  Daddy Myles was able to get Zac into youth football a year early, when Zac was in third grade instead of fourth, because he was the coach of the newly formed team. In sixth grade, Zac’s team was in the playoffs of the regional youth football league. On one play, Zac, playing linebacker, blitzed the quarterback and sacked him. But he hit the quarterback helmet to helmet. The referee threw a flag, giving Zac a personal foul and the other team a first down on the one-yard line. The other team scored and won the game. Zac cried the entire drive home. That was the only game Daddy Myles and Zac’s team lost in two years. The next year, their team won the youth league’s Super Bowl.

  “Zac and I, when we played, we were hit or sit,” his older brother said. “We loved contact more than the other kids.”

  “Of all the boys, he was the one who wouldn’t show pain, who’d be fearless, who’d be calm under pressure,” Zac’s dad said. “He’d throw his head into anything.” He paused thoughtfully. “He was the kind of guy I like on defense.”

  “I first started having constant headaches while playing youth football and played through it in fear of telling someone, and feeling like a pussy,” Zac wrote when he was wrestling with the impact of past concussions. “I started playing youth football a year early in 3rd grade because my older brother was on the team and my dad was the coach. I started off playing the two positions that I played throughout my career, linebacker and full back . . .

  “I had gained the reputation from my coaches and classmates about being a tough nosed kid and a hard hitter so I took this social identity with pride and never wanted to tell anyone about the headaches I got from practices and games. In 6th grade, I really became a road grater as a fullback and running back. I was short and chubby, but I would try to run over the linebacker’s every time I got the ball. I’m sure my parents still have the game tapes to prove it.

  Zac was thrilled to play for the Indianola Indians as a freshman.

  “On one of our last practices that season, I remember going against Dmitry Renneger in a tackling drill. Me and Dmitry always got paired together because we were considered the biggest kids and the most aggressive, but Dmitry was about a foot taller then me so to be able to hold my own I had to use my head as a weapon . . . At the start of the whistle that practice I clashed head on with Big D at full speed. I remember this because it was one of the worst headaches ever and I remember secretly crying for the rest of practice and later at home. I don’t know if it was a concussion, but once again it could be questionable now that I look back. [In a] week or so the football season was over and I would say that’s when my life started to change. I started getting terrible migraines and neck pain at school and at home. Anything I did would give me a terrible headache and I felt like no one would ever believe me. I remember being teased and feeling like a pussy to my brothers and dad. Finally, I cried to my mom and she started to believe me.”

  “In the end one of the doctors told my mom it was probably my hormones triggering the migraines and tension headaches.”

  Myles Sr. read this typewritten autobiography once, after Zac’s death, as well as his handwritten journals. He doesn’t dwell on them. He hasn’t gone to a therapist to work through his grief. He has his own form of therapy: He grabs a few beers and calls for the two dogs. He stalks the family’s woods behind their house, shotgun in hand, and when he sees an animal that doesn’t belong there, he aims and fires. If he gets one, he notches it on the annual kill list he keeps taped to the family’s refrigerator. That’s his therapy.

  But drowning himself in hunting or alcohol or other diversions is not to say he ignores the sadness of losing a son. He does not talk about it much, but friends noticed that he became deeply, profoundly sad after Zac’s death. Nor does he ignore his own role, and the role of the sport he’s loved his entire life, in his son’s demise.

  “I would like football go back to where it was innocent, in the sixties and seventies for me,” Myles said. “You knew people got hurt, but you didn’t know the lasting effects.”

  But you can’t go back to that more innocent time. Or, perhaps more accurately, that less educated time. Now, we know—and when we know, we cannot ignore. Instead, the father lives with the consequences.

  “This all started in youth football,” Myles Sr. said. “I wish we had known back then. That’s the thing that haunts me. That’s the part that really tears me up. We started him in third grade. I think it started way younger than when he was in high school. I know it did. And I don’t like to think about it, so I try not to think about it. It’ll drive you insane. Because you’re supposed to protect them, and you didn’t . . . If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let him play. Period. There’s a toughness thing that would have been lost, a team thing—physical toughness—if he hadn’t played football. But that stuff goes out the window because it ruins your body.”

  He sighed. He closed his eyes. Opened them.

  “We didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know.”

  His voice trailed off.

  Four

  The Hammer

  The final day of the Iowa State Fair, two Sundays before Labor Day, marks the end of summer in the state. Over the course of eleven days in August 2006, more than a million people walked down the Grand Concourse on the industrial east side of Des Moines; munched on corn dogs and fried Oreos and pork-chops-on-a-stick; browsed the thousands of stalls of farm animals; and headed to the Grandstand for nighttime entertainment. That year’s fair featured big country music acts—Brad Paisley, Trace Adkins, Big & Rich—as well as James Taylor. Taylor played on the second night and sang his hit song “Fire and Rain,” as the sun set. About a friend who committed suicide, it is perhaps one of the saddest songs ever written.

  Moments like that are rare at the Iowa State Fair, a place of fun and frivolity. That August, there were tractor pulls and a stock-car race, and a champion big boar named Waldo that weighed more than a thousand pounds. What made the 2006 fair different than any Iowa State Fair since Myles Easter Sr. had been born in 1961 was that Norma “Duffy” Lyon had retired. For forty-five years, she had sculpted the famed butter cow that stood regally behind glass, as well as other tableaus of Americana: Elvis Presley, American Gothic—the painting by Iowa artist Grant Wood—and John Wayne. During the summer of 2006, Iowans were abuzz at what Lyon’s successor, her longtime apprentice Sarah Pratt, would sculpt alongside the butter cow. She chose Superman, since the recently released Superman Returns film starred Iowa native Brandon Routh.

  The end of summer 2006 marked the beginning of a new chapter for Zac Easter. He would soon be a high school freshman, and by the time the state fair shut its gates on August 20, Zac had already been on the gridiron for the past couple of weeks as a promising new member of the Indianola Indians football team. His older brother, Myles II, was the big, tough senior, a varsity captain who would soon accept a football scholarship at Minnesota State University, Mankato, one of the top Division II programs in the country and where the Minnesota Vikings held their preseason training camp.

  When Zac was sized for his helmet that August, the Easter mentality was already accepted as something ingrained in him because it had been ingrained in the team for years through Myles II and their father, the team’s defensive coordinator.

  Eric Kluver, the head coach, had been hired a few years before, and one of his earliest moves had been to reach out to Myles Easter Sr. He’d felt Myles’s toughness would be a perfect addition to his staff. Indianola was a small school compared with many of its conference rivals in the Des Moines suburbs. The bigger sc
hools had twice the students, and more money for facilities and coaches. After a disastrous first season when he opened up the passing attack and played a more skillful, speed-based spread offense, Kluver decided the only way Indianola could compete against larger, stronger, faster schools was by playing in the trenches: by slowing the game down, by out-toughing opponents. As other teams used newfangled pass-happy offenses, Kluver and Myles Sr. turned back the clock to how football was played when they were growing up.

  One of Myles Easter’s first changes was to punt-return coverage. He was a great tactician on special teams, mostly because special teams can bring the most aggressive and reckless collisions in football. Punts and kickoffs are the most chaotic moments on the field, eleven people sprinting headlong into eleven other people, all primed to lay waste to their opponents. (As the concussion crisis deepened, the NFL revised rules to make those plays less prone to violent collisions.) Myles Easter had blockers form a wall on punt returns, similar to mass-formation plays that created so much controversy in football’s early days. By the time Myles was coaching his sons, other teams weren’t using walls on punt returns, so that bruising strategy afforded his team a competitive advantage. Indianola’s blockers would hit an onrushing defender as hard as they could, then let him run free as the ball carrier dashed past. “You set up a wall, and it’s like knocking people off a tee,” Myles II said. “If they didn’t have their head on a swivel, they were getting fucked up.” Sometimes opposing players would be “decleated”—hit so hard their spikes flew off their feet. One of the most memorable plays of Zac’s high school career came on a punt return, when he knocked down three people in a row: the Easter mentality distilled into a single ten-second burst.