by Jeffrey Marx
That afternoon, he went to a birthday party for Ken Walter’s two-year-old son, Kenny. Although a number of Patriots players were there, it was clearly a time for fun and games and cake, not for football talk. But Brian could not help himself. Sitting with only Walter at one point, he apologized for the way he’d been snapping and then went on and on about the fear and anxiety he was feeling. “You just got to stop worrying so much,” Walter said. “Look, I’m a good holder, you know that. Just give me something to catch, just get it in the vicinity, and we’ll get it done.”
Later, back in his hotel room, alone with his tape recorder, Brian said, “I just want so badly to honor God, and to honor my wife and kids, and my students in the school. I want them to be proud of my performance. So I just need to overcome this and get through it.”
Brian reminded himself that he did not need to look to Bill Belichick or Brad Seely for approval. All he needed to do was look to the words of Proverbs 3:5, and he offered his own interpretation out loud: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
Fourteen
A big part of the problem was that Brian simply had too much time on his hands, way too much time to think, and absent any switch to turn off his worrying, he kept seeing in his mind’s eye the recurring image of another long snapper named Trey Junkin. Only a year earlier, Junkin had pretty much been Brian, except that he had survived even longer than Brian in the NFL. After nineteen years with five teams—the Buffalo Bills, Washington Redskins, Los Angeles (and Oakland) Raiders, Seattle Seahawks, and Arizona Cardinals—the forty-one-year-old Junkin had finally retired and returned home to Winnfield, Louisiana. Leaving the game had not been easy for Junkin. Sure, he had once expounded for the benefit of NFL Films on the challenges of his job, most notably the concept of routinely getting clobbered on the head by three-hundred-pound men, and he had stared into the camera to pronounce: “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to do this. Make ’em be doctors.” But that was not how he really felt. No matter what he advised others, Junkin was all in when it came to being a snapper. Eleven times he underwent surgery—five times on his left knee alone, plus a variety of cuttings on his shoulders and elbows—but no injury ever stopped him from eventually returning to the field for more beatings. He proudly displayed a tattoo of the NFL logo on his left leg and often wrote poetry about his life in football.
Some want this life
Not knowing the cost
Of mind and soul
So…
Do you want a peek
At my world?
Dirty jobs…
They’re all I have
Looking back
A different world
Upside down
Very few see it
Three hundred pounders
Breathing hard…Mad
Waiting…for you to move
The ball
Games inside of Games
This trick
Snapping the ball
Fifteen or eight yards
It’s right there
Or…you’re gone
No maybe’s!
A different world
Looking back…
It’s a living!
Junkin never stopped working on the mechanics of his craft, and he never quit obsessing over details. To wit: he always made sure his fingernails were cut the night before a game. After all, he would never want the distraction of a ripped nail when a game was on the line and a football needed to be gripped and delivered. Back in Winnfield, Junkin sometimes missed the excitement of the NFL, but he did not miss being hit by oversize linemen or having to worry about a proper manicure.
Then—after being out of the NFL for the entire 2002 season—he got an end-of-December phone call from the New York Giants, who were about to play the San Francisco 49ers in the opening round of the playoffs. The Giants had struggled all year with their kicking game, and now their most recent addition as a snapper, Dan O’Leary, the same Dan O’Leary who would later compete with Brian at the Patriots tryout, was ruled out with a thumb injury. Giants head coach Jim Fassel wanted Junkin because they had been together in Arizona—Fassel as an assistant coach—and he had great faith in the retired snapper. Junkin saw it as an ideal opportunity. Days earlier, he had been asked by a local writer to pick the teams he thought would make it to the upcoming Super Bowl, and he had named the Giants and the Raiders. That was the only reason he temporarily gave up the deer stands of what he called “backwoods Louisiana” for the bright lights of New York—because he thought he might get an easy ride to the Super Bowl.
Things did not work out quite that gloriously. Playing in San Francisco on January 5, 2003, the Giants held a commanding 38–14 lead late into the third quarter. Then came one of the most remarkable comebacks in league history. The 49ers, led by quarterback Jeff Garcia and wide receiver Terrell Owens, sent the Candlestick Park crowd of 66,318 into a frenzy by scoring twenty-five unanswered points and surging ahead, 39–38, with only 1:05 to play. Still, the Giants had one last chance to pull out a victory. With six seconds left, they lined up for a forty-one-yard field goal. Earlier in the fourth quarter, Junkin had thrown a bad snap that messed up the timing of kicker Matt Bryant and resulted in a critical field-goal attempt sailing wide to the left. This was Junkin’s chance to redeem himself. Instead, what happened next was ugly and painful for New York fans, and excruciating for Junkin. He threw a wobbly ball that bounced just in front of holder Matt Allen’s outstretched hands. Allen was able to control the ball and stand it on the ground for Bryant. But it was too late. The kicker was totally out of sync and could not regroup. Allen jumped to his feet and yelled the standard call—“Fire! Fire!” to let his teammates know that the kick was aborted and he would either run or throw the football. Scrambling to his right, Allen heaved the ball downfield, but it landed harmlessly on the ground, dead, same as the Giants’ season.
It was the second-largest collapse in NFL playoff history. (In 1993, Houston had been ahead of Buffalo 35–3 before losing in overtime.) No matter how woefully the whole Giants team had fallen apart, though, Junkin took the brunt of the blame. As the father of two boys, both then in their teens, Junkin had always stressed to them the importance of accepting responsibility for their actions, and now it was his turn. Much to his credit, he faced an onslaught of New York and national media types, not exactly the most subtle of creatures, and, with moist, red eyes, he answered their questions as best he could.
“I cost fifty-eight guys a chance to go to the Super Bowl,” Junkin said. “My career is over. I’m done. And I’d give anything in the world, except my family, at this point, right now, to have stayed retired.”
For nineteen years, hardly anybody even knew his name because he had done his job so well. Now he was going to be all over the New York tabloids—“The Cruel Hands of Fate,” the front page of Newsday would declare in a bold headline. Junkin quickly became the subject of incessant ranting on talk radio. And the television replays of his nightmarish moment might as well have been running on continuous loop. All of a sudden, everyone was talking about the importance of long snappers. One of the best lines came from Hall of Fame kicker Jan Stenerud, who tried to put into perspective the general indifference toward a snapper until something goes wrong. “It’s like a bad intersection,” he said. “Most times, there is no stoplight until there’s an accident.”
A psychologist friend soon told Junkin that he would hurt for ninety days, and then he would feel better. What kind of nonsense was that? Long past the three-month mark, he was still tormented by the snap that got away, still waking up in the middle of the night with a redundant collection of flashbacks and what-ifs. “If I live to be a hundred, it’ll happen once a week,” Junkin told an interviewer. “It’s just something I’m gonna have to live with.”
Now Brian was living with it, too. He kept thinking that he might be on the way to doing something that would turn him into another Trey Junkin. Or worse. After all
, when Junkin misfired, it cost his team a first-round playoff game. Brian would soon be playing on the grandest of all American sports stages—and with millions upon millions of people watching on television all over the world. The mere thought of messing up in the Super Bowl, of maybe even becoming the unforgettable goat of the game, simply horrified him.
Another story from many years earlier—also of a supposedly washed-up long snapper making a late-season return to the NFL—would have been a whole lot better for Brian to dwell on. It was the story of Tom Goode, who spent four years as a top-notch offensive lineman with the Houston Oilers and four with the Miami Dolphins, doubling as a long snapper. Prior to the 1970 season, Goode suffered a bad string of knee and wrist injuries, and the Dolphins placed him on their “injured reserve” list, meaning that they still retained his NFL rights—with certain restrictions—but also that he probably would not play that year. Goode went home to West Point, Mississippi, assuming that his career was over. Then, first week in December, the telephone rang. The Dolphins really needed him and wanted to know if he could make it back. Goode flew to Miami and was in a doctor’s office for his physical when everything changed again. The Dolphins had been unable to clear him through the NFL “waiver” system that allowed other teams to claim him before he could return to his old team the same season he’d been put on reserve. If Goode wanted to play football again, he would be doing so with the Baltimore Colts. Worse things could have happened. With quarterback Johnny Unitas leading the way, the Colts were one of the best teams in the league. Goode borrowed a winter coat from a friend and headed north. A month and a half later, on January 17, 1971, he was playing with the Colts in Super Bowl V against the Dallas Cowboys.
That was when Goode’s already improbable journey was elevated to the truly remarkable. The score was tied, 13–13, when the Colts made a dramatic last-minute interception that gave them a shot at victory. With nine seconds left, they called time-out and gathered themselves for a thirty-two-yard, game-winning field goal. Only weeks removed from being unemployed and watching the NFL on television from his couch, Goode was about to have the league championship resting in his hands. Of course, holder Earl Morrall and kicker Jim O’Brien would also have a lot to do with the outcome, but only if Goode could first get them the football without incident. Once the Colts were ready for action, the Cowboys called a time-out of their own. They wanted to “ice” the rookie kicker and let the pressure build on him. Goode waited calmly. And he said a prayer. He did not ask for a good snap or for victory. He mainly wanted to express his appreciation for being where he was. God, thanks. And be with brother Jim, Lord. He’s got a big job to do. And Lord, be with the Cowboys, because I think we’re going to win this game!
“It seemed like a week went by during those time-outs,” Goode would recall many years later. “But I was just thankful to be there. After all the years I had played, all the balls I had snapped, it was just the ultimate thing, and I was thanking God for putting me in that situation.”
The referee eventually blew his whistle for play to resume. The snap and the hold were perfect. The kick was good. And the score was final: 16–13. The Colts were Super Bowl champions. Goode was a Super Bowl champion.
A few days later, he appeared somewhere unthinkable for a long snapper: on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Due to the angle of the photo chosen to memorialize the winning kick—it was taken from behind the Dallas defense—Goode was front and center while O’Brien was only partially visible in the background. Of course, the magazine never mentioned Goode in its game story. Why say anything about the snapper when all goes right? But the cover photo alone was more than anything Goode ever could have imagined. It captured him right after unleashing the final snap of his career, forever freezing him in his standard hunched-over position, with Dallas linebacker Chuck Howley using his back as a step stool while trying to block the kick. Years later, decades later, people were still mailing copies of that magazine to Goode for him to autograph.
“That one play probably got me more publicity than all the other plays, all the other years, put together,” Goode said. “Usually nobody even thinks about the old center until he makes a bad snap. It’s a thankless job. But making that one snap, being on the cover of Sports Illustrated and all—I guess that was my claim to fame.”
In November 2003, the month before Brian got his call from the Patriots, Goode announced that he was retiring from his second career—a long stretch of coaching college football that included stints as an offensive assistant at four Southeastern Conference schools and concluded with twelve years as head coach at East Mississippi Community College. The Mississippi legislature offered a resolution commending Goode for his many years in athletics, and also for his work with the Enon Baptist Church and a number of civic organizations. Goode was quite certain that he never would have been able to reach and impact young people the way he had without that one high-profile snap of a football in the 1971 Super Bowl.
“I’ve probably used that story thousands of times,” Goode said. “It’s meant a lot through the years, especially to young kids. You can get their attention with it. And then you’ve got a chance to really talk to them.”
Yes, Brian would have been infinitely better off flooding his thoughts with the storybook ending of Tom Goode instead of pummeling himself with the cautionary debacle of Trey Junkin. But Brian had never even heard of Goode. And he could not get the specter of Junkin out of his mind.
Fifteen
A white fire engine, lights flashing and siren blaring, led the Patriots’ buses out of a parking lot at Gillette Stadium. A few thousand fans waved and cheered, all bundled up against a wind chill of three degrees as they stood behind steel barricades and did the best they could to catch a glimpse of their favorite players. “Dedicated people,” Brian said to nobody in particular as he watched out a bus window and waved right back at the frenzied fans. This was early in the afternoon of Sunday, January 25, and the Patriots were on their way to Logan Airport for their flight to Houston and the Super Bowl. Countless additional fans, shivering but nonetheless giddy, lined the sidewalks along U.S. Route 1 and shouted out with love and support. If the treatment the Patriots were now getting was any indication of the week to come, Brian and his teammates were in for quite an experience.
It was not only playing in a Super Bowl that would be a first for Brian. The oldest player on the team—the oldest on either team preparing for the game in Houston—had never even been to one. He had been close. Several times he had traveled to Super Bowl cities and participated in NFL-sanctioned events to raise money and awareness for local charities, usually including a food bank, in the days leading up to the game. But he never wanted to stay for the game itself. Brian had always said that the only way he would ever go to a Super Bowl was as a participant. If he was not playing, he was not going. So he would inevitably end up flying home in time to watch on television. Now he could think back to those days and smile about them. He could smile because he had never broken that pact with himself—and he was finally headed to the Super Bowl for more than just pre-game festivities. Going as both a player and a schoolteacher only made it better that it had taken him so long to get there. Because now he was not going as some untouchable gladiator who had nothing in common with any of the regular people who would be watching it all. Strangely enough, he was now pretty much one of them. A thirty-eight-year-old seventh-grade teacher in the Super Bowl? The name on the back of his jersey might as well have been changed to “Everyman.” And what a remarkable thing to be: Everyman at the Super Bowl…Everyman playing in the Super Bowl.
The travel day gave Brian a good opportunity to get away from all the stress he had been feeling, to clear his head and get a fresh start. On the chartered 757 to Houston, he leaned back and watched a movie. After landing at Ellington Field and a bus ride to the Inter-Continental Hotel, where the Patriots would be staying until the night before the game, Brian dropped his luggage in his assigned room and grabbed dinner. The
n he took off in a rental car to visit a few old friends. It just so happened that they played for the team that the Patriots would soon be battling for the NFL championship.
The Carolina Panthers had come a mighty long way since Brian played for them in 1999 and 2000. Led by second-year head coach John Fox and newcomer Jake Delhomme at quarterback, they had overcome what Brian playfully called the Kinchen Curse. The year after letting him go, the Panthers had the worst record in football, winning only one of sixteen games, which resulted in the firing of head coach George Seifert. The only other time Brian had been cut by an NFL team, the Green Bay Packers in 1991, his release had also been followed by a disastrous season for the team that let him go (an equally pathetic record of 1–15) and the firing of the head coach (Lindy Infante). Coincidence? Or curse? Brian always got a chuckle out of that. Either way, the Panthers had turned things around in a remarkably short time—from 1–15 in 2001 to a regular-season record of 11–5 in 2003—and now Brian would be playing against the same organization that three years earlier had seemingly put an end to his career. Brian was not thinking in terms of payback—what good would that do?—but he could certainly revel in the delicious irony of the situation.
Carolina had reached the Super Bowl by defeating the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC championship game. With a good number of former teammates still playing for the Panthers, Brian wanted to visit with them before the week got too busy and the countdown to kickoff might make such socializing a bit awkward. After speaking by phone with tight end Kris Mangum, who was in his seventh year with Carolina, Brian made a half-hour drive to the Wyndham Greenspoint, where the Panthers were staying, on Houston’s northern outskirts. Sitting in the lobby with Mangum and team chaplain Mike Bunkley, sharing both memories and updates, Brian was well situated for brief reunions with a smattering of other guys who happened to pass by and see him. Brian enjoyed spending a few minutes with each of them: defensive end Mike Rucker, defensive backs Mike Minter and Damien Richardson, kicker John Kasay, and others. To each man, Brian offered pretty much the same abbreviated version of the “kind of surreal” circumstances that had delivered him to where he was now sitting.