by Jeffrey Marx
“Are you going to play anymore after this?” Kasay wanted to know.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Brian said, practically recoiling. “Without a doubt, this is it. One more game, and then I’m home with my family.”
Kasay had no idea that Brian had been struggling with his snaps. He would hear about that later in the week and immediately make the link to this conversation. He would then understand why Brian had reacted with such certitude that the Super Bowl would be his final game of professional football.
The next afternoon, the Patriots had a light practice at Rice University, and Brian found himself right back in a funk. He had a bunch of good snaps. But he also threw two high balls during the punt period and then a low one that Ken Walter had to trap against the ground while practicing with the field-goal unit. Belichick did not do any yelling this time. But he definitely had Brian on his mind.
Walking slowly off the field at the end of practice, Brian noticed that Belichick seemed to be looking right at him, perhaps trying to catch his attention. He did the best he could to avoid eye contact with his coach. All he wanted to do was get off the field and sidestep any negative rehash of what he already knew to be yet another disappointing practice session. Brian kept walking. But Belichick called out to him.
“Brian.”
He was stuck.
Brian stopped, and Belichick walked over to him.
Speaking in a calm and matter-of-fact way, Belichick offered a simple tutorial, with his focus on the punt snapping: “Look, Brian, all you got to do with your snaps is finish your hands through to the target. When you get in trouble, it’s because you’re stopping your snap short, you’re not finishing it. Just make sure you fire your hands to his hip line”—meaning the hip line of the punter—“and the ball will be right where it needs to be. Just think about that follow-through, that finish with your hands, and you’ll be fine.”
It was nothing Brian had not already known for years, nothing he had not already heard a thousand times as a player and said another thousand times as a coach. But he did not take the comments only at face value. He also processed them as Belichick’s way of reaching out with support and saying, “Calm down. I’m still behind you. Everything is going to be okay.” Brian would never know if he was reading too much into the brief exchange, but it nonetheless gave him temporary peace.
“Thanks, Bill.”
Brian gave his coach a light pat on the stomach and headed for the locker room.
That night, alone in his hotel room, with the door closed and curtains drawn to at least somewhat protect the windows in case of errant fire, Brian spent a few minutes setting up for target practice. He pulled a few pillows from the side-by-side queen-size beds, and he carefully positioned them against the wall just beneath the windows, strategically stacking them and propping them up so that they would stand at attention for him. Then he went for the football and gloves he had surreptitiously packed away and removed from the locker room after practice. Already wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, Brian pulled on his gloves, and then he was ready. This was how bad things had gotten. Seeking to restore his confidence, Brian was about to go through his motions in a late-night solo session within the cramped confines of an average-size hotel room.
He placed the ball on the floor directly in front of the door. Facing away from the room, he positioned himself over the ball, gripped it, and looked back through his legs at the pillows. He wanted to hit the fluffy target—his imaginary “holder” for a placekick—about a foot and a half to two feet off the ground. Taking in a deep breath, he reminded himself to follow through with his hands, to finish, and then he fired away.
Thwack. Right into the pillows. Precisely where he wanted it. Brian retrieved the ball and did it again. Ten times in a row he threw good balls. Then he took a break and did it again—ten more snaps without a single throw hitting either the curtains or the floor. The football found the carpet only after bouncing off the pillows. After three sets of ten, Brian felt pretty good about himself. He was ready for bed.
The next day, Tuesday, January 27, the annual circus known as Super Bowl media day was held at Reliant Stadium. It was an opportunity for writers and broadcasters from all over the world to ask players and coaches from the Patriots and Panthers—one team at a time—nearly anything they wanted to know. Sometimes the questions would actually have something to do with football, although that was by no means a requirement. With the NFL having issued credentials to more than three thousand journalists—and with the term journalist being used quite loosely—there would be no shortage of wacky moments. After all, the whole Super Bowl experience had long since expanded way beyond even the standard excesses of most big-time sporting events. Other than the game itself, the rest of the week was all about hype and entertainment.
The Patriots dressed for media day in the same uniforms—blue jerseys and silver pants—that they would wear for the game. Once they were on the field, the players and coaches adhered to something of a caste system as they positioned themselves for the unleashing of the credentialed masses. Belichick and the most prominent players were each assigned to a podium equipped with a microphone and loudspeakers. Players and assistant coaches considered to be on the next level of status were spread out and given assigned seats in the stands. All the other guys were free to walk around and fend for themselves.
Brian was a walk-around guy. When the journalists entered on the concourse level and he saw how many people were suddenly streaming down through the stands to join the Patriots on the field, his jaw was about ready to hit the ground. “Unbelievable,” Brian said to a few teammates who were standing with him on the sideline. “All for a football game, huh?”
Players and coaches were queried about offense and defense and about the personal stories that made them who they were. They were also asked some of the most ridiculous questions imaginable.
“When you wear the helmet, does it mess up your hair? How do you deal with the helmet head?”
“If you could tackle one person, either Clay Aiken or Celine Dion, who would you pick?”
“Can you spell Massachusetts? How about referee?”
And those were questions from adults. An eleven-year-old girl gathering material for Weekly Reader, an educational magazine for students, kept walking around and asking players, “Who on your team can eat the most hot dogs?”
Players with their own video cameras interviewed other players. Local television reporters interviewed national broadcasters. Perhaps the lowlight of the one-hour session with the Patriots came when someone asked safety Rodney Harrison to name the craziest place he had ever “made whoopee” with his wife. Harvey Araton of the New York Times—attending his first Super Bowl media day—decided it was “sports journalism’s most repellent day of the year.”
Brian had his own share of nutty moments. At one point, he was approached by a guy dressed as a superhero: black tights, black mask, orange-and-green cape. He identified himself as Pick Boy, and it turned out that he was from a Nickelodeon cartoon show called U-Pick Live. Pick Boy wanted to know if it was true that Brian was the oldest guy on the team, and Brian confirmed that for him. Pick Boy asked, “Are you scared you’re going to break a hip?” Brian and a few reporters standing around him all laughed. “Not this Sunday,” Brian said. “No hips.” He was also asked by someone from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno who he thought was better looking—him or Tom Brady? “Unfair question,” Brian said.
More than anything, though, Brian was asked—by serious journalists—to tell the story of how he had been called out of the classroom to join the Patriots. He welcomed the opportunity to keep sharing the story because it allowed him to put the focus right where he wanted it: on his faith, on his desire to honor God. Brian kept speaking, and writers kept scribbling. Combine the already unusual existence of a long snapper with the almost absurd circumstances that had landed Brian with the Patriots—his long-ago retirement and year-earlier string of three failed tryouts, his second career
as a seventh-grade Bible teacher, and the desperate late-season call from the Patriots—and it was really no wonder that the writers who happened upon Brian ended up wanting every detail they could get out of him.
Trying to put his whole hard-to-believe narrative into perspective, Brian compared it with something out of fiction: “You hear about it. You read about it. You might even see it in a movie. But I don’t think you ever expect to be a part of it. What are the odds?” After a while, all he could say was “I’ve run out of words to describe it.” That was not a problem. The writers would have no trouble taking what he had already given them and spicing it up with their own personal touches.
Tampa Tribune columnist Martin Fennelly would introduce readers to Brian by writing, “Meet the newest New England Patriot. Meet the oldest New England Patriot. Meet a story that warms hearts and blesses this game.” Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times would come up with an equally appropriate way of putting it: “Say hello to the luckiest man in the Super Bowl.” After mentioning that Brian had spent part of his fall as a volunteer assistant with Nick Saban and the LSU Tigers, Shelton would also point out that he might be only days away from claiming a spot in football record books: “If LSU rewards Kinchen with a ring, and if the Patriots win the Super Bowl, Kinchen could be the only player in history to win a college championship ring and a Super Bowl ring in less than a month. As miracles go, that’s not as good as Jonah and the whale, but it’s close.” Mike Lopresti of Gannett News Service would also make good use of the Bible-teacher angle. Referring to the first call Brian got from the Patriots during class, and his initial reluctance to accept their invitation to a tryout, Lopresti would write, “God was giving him one more chance. Who says no to God, not to mention Bill Belichick?”
There would be additional stories in a few other newspapers, and they would all make for good reading. But none would include any mention of the most pressing issue Brian was now facing—his inability to snap with any consistency. Some of the stories would report just the opposite. The Lopresti column for Gannett: “His snaps have been straight and true.” Sportswriter Sheldon Mickles in the Baton Rouge Advocate: “He’s been flawless.”
Oh, if those writers only knew about the emotional turmoil that was eating up their favorite football-snapping Bible teacher. If they only knew the level of doubt concealed below the surface. That night, Brian once again set up pillows against the wall in his hotel room. And this time he increased the number of snaps. He threw forty instead of thirty.
Sixteen
Concerned about poor conditions of the field they were using for practice at Rice University, the Patriots got permission from the NFL to move their Wednesday-afternoon session indoors to the “bubble” practice facility of the Houston Texans, just across the street from Reliant Stadium. The Patriots would practice there for the rest of the week. The change of scenery did nothing to help Brian. Despite his nocturnal success throwing against pillows in the privacy of his hotel room, he reverted to his struggles once he was back with the team. In fact, not only did he return to the same level of inconsistency at which he had been operating. He took a deep dive from there—ending up with the worst collection of snaps he had ever thrown in a single day.
First, during field-goal period, Brian snapped a ball over Ken Walter’s head, and he was immediately thrown right back into what he thought of as “a prison” of fear and doubt. He did not have a clue as to what he could possibly be doing so wrong. All Brian knew for sure was that he could not figure out how to break free from whatever was keeping him mentally and physically locked up. And this was only the beginning of the nasty descent that would come to define his day.
After the ninety-minute, full-squad practice, Brian, Walter, and Adam Vinatieri went into the stadium, along with special-teams coach Brad Seely, so they could get a feel for the environment. They started with field goals from a variety of distances, about a dozen at each end of the field. One of every three or four snaps was good, but the rest were all over the place. Seely, Walter, and Vinatieri were acutely aware that Brian was in deep trouble, but none of them outwardly expressed a whole lot of emotion about it. This was way too late for any coach or anyone else to get on Brian about his performance. What good would any criticism or even anger do at this point? Plus, nobody could possibly be any harder on Brian than he was already being on himself. “Come on, Brian!” he scolded himself. “What are you doing?”
All Walter and Vinatieri could do was just keep plugging away. Working with Brian was still relatively new to Vinatieri; he had never known what it was like to work with him during all those years when Brian was one of the most consistent and respected long snappers in the NFL. For Walter, though, the situation was entirely different. He had known Brian since the early 1990s, when, as a ball boy, he had seen him both snap and play tight end for the Cleveland Browns. Then they had later spent those two years working together as the snapper and the punter/holder for the Carolina Panthers, and they had become good friends. Taking snaps from Brian, Walter had always known him to be a perfectionist who almost never threw anything but an absolute strike. Now this.
Walter told himself that he would just have to “step it up” as a holder in order to overcome Brian’s lack of accuracy: Receivers make a quarterback look good by making good catches. Same thing I need to do for Kinch. Fortunately for the Patriots, Walter was one of the best holders in the league. He took tremendous pride in his ability to handle just about anything thrown his way, sometimes even going so far as to call himself “the Ozzie Smith of holders”—a reference to the baseball Hall of Famer who was one of the best-fielding shortstops of all time. On the field at Reliant Stadium, Walter was now reaching and stretching so much for Brian’s snaps that he would later joke about the workout his abs were getting. But he kept handling the snaps and getting the balls down with a good spot for Vinatieri, and the kicker kept booming them through the uprights. Of course, the final outcome of each kick did nothing to ease either the frustration or the worry that kept assaulting Brian’s nerves.
Seely finally suggested it was time to move from field goals to punting. Perhaps the change would somehow help Brian. It did not. His first snap bounced in front of Walter. Seely told his punter to move up a yard or two. Maybe that would enable Brian to get in a groove, and then they could move back to the regular distance of fifteen yards. This was new territory for the special-teams coach, and he was willing to try almost anything. Brian managed to improve his punt snaps after that, but he still failed to find the consistency he wanted and needed.
When they were done in the stadium, Walter and Vinatieri walked off together, just the two of them, and when they looked at each other, Walter could almost see in Vinatieri’s eyes the same unspoken questions he was asking himself: What do we do? How do we handle this? Walter suggested that they might want to slow down a little bit on field goals. Maybe Vinatieri ought to wait a moment or two longer than normal before starting his approach to the ball, which would allow Walter extra time to handle whatever Brian sent their way. “Just wait till the ball gets to the spot, and then go,” Walter said. “We’ll be a little slower than usual, but we’ll get it done.” Walter and Vinatieri also reminded each other of a general rule they had put in place long before Brian joined the team: if a ball ever gets away from them, Walter would be the one to chase it down and pick it up, not Vinatieri. Even with such a negative thought in mind, though, they both kept telling themselves that everything would be all right. “Look, I know I have the best holder,” Vinatieri said. “We just need to let Brian get through this the best he can. We’ll be okay.”
Meanwhile, Brian walked alone off the field, deeply upset about the position in which he was putting his teammates and coaches. They had worked way too hard and accomplished way too much for one person—for him—to somehow blow the whole season for them. But he was single-handedly putting them all at risk. What should he do about it? What could he do about it?
Brian went by himself to lift
weights. And to think.
When he finally got back to the hotel, at almost seven o’clock, he had a quick dinner and then went to find Brad Seely. Brian wanted to look at the videotape from practice and try to figure out what he was doing wrong. He and Seely came up with one possibility. Brian had always focused on keeping his back as straight as he could—almost parallel to the ground—when snapping. On the tape, his upper back and shoulders appeared to be pointing down too much when he released the football, creating angles that increased the likelihood of a high snap. But what about the balls Brian had bounced on the ground? Were they the result of overcompensating for a high one? No matter how many times Brian and Seely ran the tape in slow motion, they were unable to pinpoint anything definitive about Brian’s mechanics that would explain his alarming inconsistency. That was the hardest part of the whole thing. If Brian could just figure out what in the heck he was doing wrong, he could fix it.
By the time Brian left Seely, the intense frustration of the moment, combined with all the pressure Brian had already been feeling, was about to break him. This was no longer just about getting a football where it needed to be. This was about being on the verge of blowing up on the biggest sports stage in America—and with enough cameras in place to capture a multitude of angles for posterity.
Brian wrestled with what he knew to be a mighty contradiction. On one hand, he was simply getting ready to play a football game. A game. How could anything that happened in a football game possibly matter in the grand scheme of things? He kept reminding himself that it would never make a difference in the eyes of God. On the other hand, Brian was nonetheless feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of costing his team a championship and looking like a total buffoon for all the world to see and ridicule. No, ridicule did not even cover it. How about hate and scorn? After all, many of the same New Englanders now reveling in the great success of the Patriots already had a track record that illustrated how they were likely to respond to a critical miscue by one of their own. Most of them had never managed to find any warmth in their hearts for the man they blamed for costing their beloved Boston Red Sox the 1986 World Series. More than seventeen years later, fans and the media still disdained first baseman Bill Buckner for the slow grounder, hit by Mookie Wilson of the New York Mets, that rolled through his legs and allowed the winning run in Game 6. Cruel jokes still circulated: Hey, did you hear Buckner tried to commit suicide? He jumped in front of a bus, but it went between his legs. Stories were still written about “the Buckner game,” and they sometimes included people recalling where they had been when “it” happened, as if President Kennedy had been shot again.