by Jeffrey Marx
The Patriots initially yielded significant chunks of yardage, giving up first downs on three consecutive plays, and the two-minute warning came with the Titans threatening at the New England thirty-three-yard line. But the defense stiffened, and two straight penalties pushed the Titans back into their own territory. With 1:45 left, the game came down to a fourth-and-twelve play for Tennessee from the New England forty-two. The Patriots defense, one stop away from ending the Titans’ season, would undoubtedly be in attack mode. At the same time, the Titans were only one first down away from being in range for a game-tying field goal. And they would still have plenty of time to go for a touchdown that would probably give them the outright victory. McNair lined up in shotgun formation. Under a heavy rush from his right and about to be hit by blitzing safety Rodney Harrison, he lobbed a pass high in the air to the left, for wide receiver Drew Bennett, who had already made two impressive catches on the drive. Bennett had a clear shot at the ball when he leaped for it at the fifteen-yard line, but his hands inexplicably failed him and the ball bounced harmlessly to the ground. All that remained was for the Patriots to run out the clock on offense.
The battle on the frozen tundra of Foxborough—“a whale of a football game,” Belichick called it—belonged to the home team. Patriot fans were thrilled that in eight days they would be returning to Gillette Stadium for the AFC championship game. Coaches and players were equally excited about being only one step away from the Super Bowl. But Brian was hardly in a celebratory mood. More than anything, he was just relieved.
Relieved that he had not done anything horrible to cost his team both the game and the season. Relieved that he had survived what felt to him like the longest game of his life. Relieved that he and the Patriots had lived to fight another day.
Speaking into his tape recorder the next day, Brian said, “My prayer now is for peace of mind, for confidence in what I am doing.”
Ten
With the second semester beginning back at Parkview, Brian wanted to tape another installment of what he came to call “video mail” for his students. This time, the Monday after the Tennessee game, a day off for the Patriots players, the purpose was to introduce himself to his new classes. The kids already knew that he was away playing football, and that Lori would still be subbing for him until the Patriots were done for the year (either the following weekend—if they were to lose in the AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts—or two weeks after that if they were to win and make it to the Super Bowl). But Brian wanted to have at least some sort of contact with his students as they settled into class without him. After sleeping late and then staying in bed until almost eleven in the morning, he started his day by setting up his camera in the hotel room. The location did not really matter. As was the case when he taped the earlier video in his home office, the shot was so tightly framed on his head that the background was irrelevant. Wearing a white baseball cap with a big, black Nike swoosh across the front of it, Brian looked straight into the camera to “meet” his new students.
“Hello, everyone, my name is Brian Kinchen, your new Bible teacher for this semester,” he said. “I want to welcome you all to seventh-grade Bible. I’ve been looking forward to this semester, as I did last semester. I had a wonderful time with your classmates. And I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time this semester also. I want this to be a time that we can enjoy together…getting to know one another.”
Brian spoke for a few minutes about the way a regular week of class was going to work. Two days—Tuesday and Thursday—would be dedicated to standard teaching and discussion. Working from a book called Sticking Up for What I Believe, Brian would cover a wide range of material that would enable his students to better understand, explain, and defend the underlying tenets of their faith in God. Bible passages and events would also be taught on Tuesday and Thursday. Each of the remaining days would be dedicated to something different. Monday would be chapel day; class would be held in the school sanctuary, and the students would have quiet time to read their Bibles and pray. Wednesday would be focused on the stories of Christian martyrs told in a book called Jesus Freaks, co-written by dc Talk, a Grammy Award–winning Christian rock and rap band that was popular with teens. Friday would be ministry day, a time for outreach and special projects, such as making cards for people who were sick or preparing food baskets for elderly people who had difficulty getting out of their apartments or homes.
When he was done laying out the overall structure for his classes, Brian told his students he would take them on a video tour that would offer some insight into what his life was like while he was away from school and his family. “My little world here in New England,” he said. “I hope you enjoy it. It’s not much. But you’ll get to see some things that you normally wouldn’t. I’ll show you the stadium and the inside of our locker room and things like that…things that are maybe somewhat interesting.”
One of the first things his new students would learn about Brian was that—at least in the role of documentarian—he was unmistakably a man of minutiae. Before leaving for the stadium, not only did he shoot several camera angles to show the inside of his room at the Residence Inn. While offering a running commentary, he also included the view out his window to the hotel parking lot (“had a little snowfall…ground is covered”), an exterior close-up of the door to his suite (“room number one-oh-eight”), and a quick look down his hallway (“I see it every day”). When he got to the lobby, taking a wide shot of the dining area in which he ate breakfast was not sufficient. He also felt obligated to include a tight shot of the waffle iron that had been so good to him.
Taking the students with him on his way to Gillette Stadium—his left hand on the steering wheel, right hand holding and aiming the camera—Brian casually delivered play-by-play of his daily drive. “Here we are with a view out of my van window as I go to work,” he said. “First flashing red light of the day, where I make a left.” Then, after a brief break in the commentary, he identified another less-than-dramatic landmark: “The underpass that I go through every day.” Brian continued the cinematic adventure with equally gripping footage of a traffic circle, a few more turns, and a Dairy Queen that always let him know he was headed in the right direction. Clearly aware that his tour was not exactly climaxing just yet, Brian self-mockingly intoned, “This is real-life stuff here, people.”
Luckily for the students, Brian soon offered them an upgrade in the form of Gillette Stadium, which first became visible through a wooded area along a residential street shortly before he would turn onto U.S. Route 1. “The Razor,” Brian said, invoking a popular nickname for the mammoth two-year-old stadium that also served as the core of the Patriots’ training complex. “Beautiful facility.” Once there, the tour picked up with an up-close look at the inner sanctums of a professional football team: The dining area in which Brian had been sitting four weeks earlier when Belichick first told him he was going to be a New England Patriot. The team meeting room into which Brian had walked so sheepishly during his first day on the job. The locker room—including a shot of a big Patriots logo designed into the carpet and a look into the neatly kept stall that housed his belongings. The equipment room. The weight room. The training room. Once again employing his keen eye for the truly mundane, Brian even captured shots of the sinks and showers used by the Patriots. “Ton of room in here, for a ton of guys,” he said while slowly panning the empty shower room. When Brian was done showing his students around the inside facilities, he took them out to the playing field. The stands were empty, save for a few workers starting to get things ready for the big game against the Colts. Brian captured footage of the Patriots’ sideline and noted where their benches would be lined up for a game. He showed a few television people setting up for a field-level interview in a corner of the stadium. He zoomed in on a grounds crew rolling up a giant tarp that had been covering the field. And then—stadium tour concluded—Brian went back inside.
Without the camera rolling, he wanted to t
ake care of a little business. Brian sought out Brad Seely so he could talk to the special-teams coach about his punt snapping in the Tennessee game. Actually, what Brian really wanted to do was say he was sorry for how poorly he had performed against the Titans. Seely was low-key and understanding, but the only thing that really mattered to him was figuring out how to correct the problem. All the apologies in the world would never do a thing for the Patriots. The only thing Seely ever wanted from a long snapper—ever needed—could easily be summed up in one word: accuracy.
On his way out of Gillette Stadium, Brian went back to taping for his students. His tour continued with a trip to his favorite neighborhood movie house, Showcase Cinemas, to see Big Fish on the big screen. “I’ll let you know how it goes,” Brian promised. It was dark outside by the time he was back to his van and his video camera. “Good movie,” he said. And then he immediately returned to his memorialization of the inane, showing his students an Italian restaurant (Bertucci’s) where he liked to eat, a small grocery store (Tedeschi Food Shops) where he sometimes picked up ice cream and other snacks, and a video store (Blockbuster) where he rented movies. “I picked up Antwone Fisher to watch tonight,” Brian said. “That’s the highlight of my evening.”
Brian would later edit his video mail to close with additional remarks—back to the tight shot in the Nike hat—taped in his hotel room: “Well, I told you it wasn’t going to be much. But it was something at least to let you get an insight of what I’m doing, and where I’m living, and how I’m getting along here without my family, whom I miss so very much. And I miss being there with you guys. Now…be sure and behave for Miss Lori until I get back home. And I’ll see you—hopefully after the Super Bowl. Thanks.”
Brian could not explain the way he was feeling. Part of it had to be the football-related pressure that was building, with the bad game against Tennessee still haunting him and the AFC championship game against the Colts only days away—a combination that created both great excitement and tremendous vulnerability. Part of it had to be the result of being away from his wife and children for so long, off on his own, other than brief visits, for a full month now; “kind of lonely,” he confided to his audio journal. And perhaps some of it could even be attributed to the movies he was watching, Big Fish being an emotional father-son story that pushed him deep into thought about his own relationships and life, and Antwone Fisher being a tear-jerker about a troubled young man who had been abandoned and abused as a child. Whatever the reason, one thing was clear about the week leading up to the AFC championship game: for Brian, it was a time of heavy introspection.
He was drawn back into a book—The Man in the Mirror—that he had been reading in Baton Rouge as part of a men’s discussion group at his church. Written by Patrick M. Morley and first published in 1989, it is a popular Christian book aimed at addressing “the problems, issues, and temptations” that come with being a man. Brian and his group had already worked through the first four chapters. Now he took a solo journey into the fifth, a thirteen-page look at a question—“Purpose: Why Do I Exist?”—that could easily cover the whole shelf of a library without ever reaching a definitive answer. Morley had concluded that it is essential for one to understand the difference between goals and purpose.
“One of the gripping problems men face is that achieving goals becomes an unrelated string of hollow victories, increasingly frustrating as more and more is achieved,” he wrote. “That’s the problem with goals: you have to keep setting new ones because achieving them doesn’t provide any lasting satisfaction.”
Brian did not like to mark the pages of a book. Why mess up a perfectly good volume? But he was nonetheless locked in on that passage, fully aware that he needed to do more than just read it once and then forget about it. The words spoke directly to him. All his life, he had been a goal setter. All his life, he had been focused on specific achievements and had always measured his self-worth based on some sort of murky, performance-related scale. By living that way, he could never do quite well enough, could never be quite good enough. Brian always knew there had to be a better way. As genuinely spiritual as he was, though, he had never been able to figure out how to find it and fully embrace it, how to truly live it.
“To be satisfying,” Morley continued, “our goals need to reflect our examination of life’s larger meaning. The plain truth is that most men don’t know their purpose in life, or their purpose is too small. A man can do nothing more important than to wrestle with the purpose of his life.”
There was so much more that really got Brian thinking.
“Purposes are threads of continuity that we weave into the long-term view of our lives.”
“Purposes are a place to begin. They help us focus our lives and give them direction so our goals do not become an unrelated string of hollow victories.”
“Goals are what we do. Purposes are why we do what we do.”
At the end of the chapter, Brian found a worksheet for developing a life-purpose statement of his own. He read what Morley had to say on the subject. He thought about it for a while. Then he reached for another book he had with him—this one he was never without for very long—and he also grabbed a pencil from the desk in his hotel room. Brian was ready to break his personal rule about writing in a book. He flipped to a blank page in the back of his Bible, the same Thompson Chain-Reference Bible he had used ever since his maternal grandparents (“Grammie” and “Gramps”) had given it to him during the summer of 1985, and put pencil to paper. Under the heading “Life Purpose Statement” and the date “1–14–04” (the Wednesday before the biggest football game of his life), Brian wrote: “To continually seek God’s heart, and share Him with the world through the love and respect I give to everyone around me. Loving and raising my children to have hearts for God and to be my living legacy in this world and the next.”
A short while later, Brian was saying good night to his children by telephone, telling them how much he loved them, and his third son, Logan, hit him out of nowhere with an innocent question that felt like a kick to the gut.
“Dad, are you going to be home for my birthday?”
Logan would be turning eight in five days, on Monday the nineteenth, the day after the game against the Colts.
“I hate to say it, but if we win, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it,” Brian said.
“You won’t?” Logan said.
“Does that make you sad?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Logan. But don’t worry, I’ll still be sending a present for you, and I’ll see you soon. I promise, okay?”
“Okay.”
But was it really? Brian had long felt that being a dad, always being there for his boys when they wanted or needed him, was his greatest purpose in this world. Now he was feeling the hurt of missing Logan’s birthday while sitting alone in a faraway hotel room…sitting there because he had temporarily made football a priority over everything else. In all the excitement of returning to the NFL, Brian had never considered what it would be like to be gone for Logan’s birthday. It had never even dawned on him that he would be away for such an important occasion—and there was nothing he could do about it now. Soon after hanging up the phone, Brian felt the moisture starting to pool in his eyes.
In all his previous years of professional football—thirteen seasons with the Miami Dolphins, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, and Carolina Panthers—Brian had never felt the need to give himself a daily report card on how he was snapping in practice. Why would he have? To borrow the analogy that Brian often used, snapping had for him always been like riding a bicycle, and, Lance Armstrong types aside, who in the world would ever need to evaluate and chronicle how well he was doing on a bicycle? There was no need to think about it a whole lot. Just hop on and go.
But everything was different now. Brian had never before experienced a game like the one he had against Tennessee. He had never before faced the pressure of a game as big as the AFC championship. All the routines
and rituals of a game week, normally just taken for granted, were now under a microscope, every action and reaction being carefully dissected and analyzed. And so Brian could not help himself. After each of the final few practices leading up to the game against the Colts, he shared with his audio journal a self-critique of his day’s work. His snapping on Wednesday was “really good.” It was a huge relief to feel like he was back to normal again. Thursday was “another good day.” And Friday was “pretty decent.”
The only notable aberration was a low ball Brian threw while the team was working on field goals—and Belichick immediately getting on him about needing to get the ball up. “I know that!” Brian angrily yelled back. That prompted some raised eyebrows on the practice field. It also brought a few chuckles from some of the players. It was not often that someone spoke back to Belichick. “In retrospect, it was not very respectful, I guess,” Brian conceded when speaking into his tape recorder that night. “But I was more yelling at myself than anything.”
That aside, though, Brian sure felt a whole lot better after a predominantly good week of practice than he had coming out of that first playoff game against Tennessee. Lori, Austin, and Hunter were back in town again for the weekend, and Brian was determined to temporarily put the upcoming game out of his mind so that he could enjoy being with them. Saturday afternoon, Brian and the boys took a long walk in the woods behind the hotel, very much enjoying the snow and ice of New England, a special treat for father and sons from the Deep South. That evening, shortly before Ken Walter was to pick up Brian to take him to the hotel where the Patriots stayed the night before a game, Lori gave her husband a big hug and looked straight into his eyes.