by Ben Utecht
At 5:00 p.m. on the Sunday of the draft, teams can start signing college free agents. Exactly twenty seconds after five, Chris’s phone rang. He answered, spoke for just a moment, then handed the phone to me. “Ben,” the voice on the other end said, “it’s Tony Dungy. Our general manager, Bill Polian, is also on the call.”
“Hi, Coach,” I said, trying to hold back my excitement.
“I’ll get right to the point. I never expected to make this phone call, because you are such a talented player and I knew someone was going to take you in the draft. Their loss is the Colts’ gain. Bill and I have talked, and we would really like for you to become a part of the Indianapolis Colts. We feel very fortunate to be able to add such a talented tight end as yourself to our roster.”
“That sounds really good to me,” I said. I was almost bouncing in my chair. I looked over at my dad and gave him a thumbs-up. Chris mouthed to him, “Indianapolis.” That put a big smile on my dad’s face.
“Hi, Ben, this is Bill Polian. We know you are injured right now. Our medical staff has a pretty good idea what’s wrong with you. They believe you have a sports hernia. We will take care of you getting that fixed. Now, the surgery will mean you probably won’t get to play for a full season, but we’re fine with that.”
“That’s right, Ben,” Coach Dungy joined in. “We don’t want you to even worry about trying to play for the first year. Your job will be to get well and learn as much as you can about our system. We will commit to pay you through your first year, then have you come back strong next year and help us win some football games.”
“So what do you think, Ben?” Bill Polian asked.
“I cannot think of a anyplace where I would rather play than Indianapolis. Thank you,” I said.
“Bill and your agent can work out the details,” Coach Dungy said. “Congratulations and welcome to the Colts.”
I handed the phone back to Chris. The negotiations didn’t take long. The Colts gave me a $20,000 signing bonus, which wasn’t anything close to what I might have earned if I’d been taken in an early round, but I wasn’t complaining. They also guaranteed my first-year contract at $230,000. The Colts were also going to pay for my surgery and take care of all the rehab that followed.
The drive home was a lot happier than the drive to Chris’s office. The entire situation reminded me of my transition from high school to college. Then I worried that I might lose my scholarship because of my injury, but Coach Mason was a man of his word. And now I had worried that I might never get to play pro football. But Coach Dungy was also a man of his word. He promised to call if I slipped through the cracks. I did, and he did.
I looked over at my father as we drove toward home. “Can you believe it, Dad? I’m going to get to catch passes from Peyton Manning and play for a Super Bowl contender!”
“I never doubted it for a minute,” my dad said.
I stared out the window again, thinking about what all this meant. That’s when it hit me. If I had been healthy and had gone in one of the early rounds of the draft, I would not have the opportunity I now had. Not only was I given the freedom to get better before worrying about trying to make the team, but I had a full year to study under some of the best football minds in the world and learn all I could. I cannot describe to you the advantage that gave me when I went to my first training camp fighting for a spot on the roster. Once again I could hear my mother say, “Do you trust Jesus? He’s in control. You will be okay.” Her words just kept coming true in my life. I could not wait to see what was going to happen next.
CHAPTER 9
NEW BEGINNING
I HAVE TO START THIS chapter with a disclaimer. I don’t remember this part of my journey to the NFL. Most of what follows comes mainly from my agent and my dad. That’s the real irony of this part of the story. I was so excited to sign with the Colts and start my career, and yet, as a result of my career I cannot even remember how it started.
According to my dad, right after my conversation with Bill Polian and Coach Dungy in my agent’s office, I flew down to Indianapolis for the Colts’ rookie minicamp. That is also when I signed my first NFL contract and received my $20,000 signing bonus. Twenty thousand is a far cry from what I could’ve had if I had stayed healthy through college, but I no longer cared. Just signing my name on the dotted line was a huge blessing.
After rookie minicamp, I returned home to get ready to fly out to St. Louis with my dad for my surgery. The team had decided to send me to Barnes-Jewish Hospital to see Dr. L. Michael Brunt. Dr. Brunt is one of the leading specialists in sports hernias, which is what the Colts suspected I might have. However, before I flew out I put my signing bonus to good use and purchased my very first car. Actually I bought an SUV, a Chevy Tahoe. At six feet seven I don’t fit into many vehicles, but in my Tahoe I felt like a king.
After I signed with the Colts my dad made the trip down to St. Louis with me. I was both nervous about what the doctor might find but relieved that I might actually get some relief. I’d lived with the pain since the beginning of the 2003 football season, and had experienced the major pop-pop-pop-popping in a game on November 8. I’d now lived with the results of that injury for six months with zero improvement. When Dr. Brunt met with us, he seemed confident that this was a sports hernia, but he needed to do an exploratory surgery to know the extent of the injury. At this time a sports hernia was still a new and hard-to-diagnose condition. Normally, a sports hernia consists of lots of microscopic tears in the oblique abdominal wall. Unlike with a regular hernia, sports hernia tears are so small that they do not result in a noticeable bulge. That’s what makes them so hard to diagnose. Dr. Brunt’s research has advanced the entire medical community’s understanding and treatment of the condition.
When I first met with Dr. Brunt he seemed particularly concerned. “With the popping you experienced and the way this hasn’t gotten better, something should show up on the MRI,” he explained. “I’m anxious to get in there and find out what is going on.”
The operation revealed more than a textbook sports hernia. Dr. Brunt found two significant bilateral tears across my lower abdominal wall. Each tear was about two inches in length. He also cleared up the mystery of why nothing showed up on the scans. “The tear is very low,” he explained. “So low that I couldn’t see it because of the white of the pelvic bones.” He couldn’t just sew up the wall. I now have two large sheets of mesh inside me holding my abdominal wall together. “This should fix you right up and I don’t think you’ll ever have a problem with this again,” Dr. Brunt assured me. “Your recovery time is going to be longer than the typical sports hernia. If you had not aggravated the condition by continuing to play, I’d say you could be back out on the field in a couple of months. Now . . .” He paused to think. “It’s probably going to be significantly longer. But, the good news is, you will be able to get back on the field and play just as well as you ever have. This will fix you up for good.” Dr. Brunt was an answer to prayer. Again, I was so fortunate to have him as my surgeon. The Colts could not have sent me to a better doctor.
• • •
A day or two after my operation I flew back home to recuperate. Karyn and I spent as much time as we could together during my recovery time. We both knew that once I moved to Indianapolis we weren’t going to see much of one another. I can’t remember who brought it up first, probably me, but we talked about marriage a couple of times. I was pretty direct. Karyn knew how I felt about her. She knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and I was pretty certain she felt the same way about me. “But,” I told her, “I really need to get my feet on the ground with the Colts before I can really think about anything else. I don’t even know if I’m going to stick with the team. Nothing in my contract is guaranteed. I don’t think it would be fair to you for us to get more serious until my future gets settled.”
Of course, I was lying through my teeth.
I wasn’t lying about the uncertainty about my future with the Colt
s. Even though I had signed a contract, and both Coach Dungy and General Manager Bill Polian had told me I was going to be paid while I recovered from my injury, contracts in the NFL are not guaranteed. Players can be released at any time, and many are. That’s the harsh reality of life in the National Football League.
I moved to Indianapolis in late spring. Because of the uncertainty surrounding my long-term prospects with the team, my first home in Indianapolis was a shared suite at an extended-stay hotel near the team training facility. Eli Ward, one of my teammates from the Golden Gophers, became my roommate. Eli was also trying to make the Colts as an undrafted free agent. I felt like I was back in a dorm in college. We didn’t spend a lot of time in the room. My days were filled with trying to soak up everything I could about the Colts’ offense while Eli learned their defense.
I spent a month in Indy before I had my first break in the schedule that allowed me to go home for a short stay. In spite of what I had told Karyn before I left, I didn’t want to wait to get married. I made my second major purchase after becoming a professional football player: a ring. Now I just needed to find the right way to give it to her.
Deep down I’m a hopeless romantic. I surprised Karyn when we shared our first kiss, and I surprised her when for the first time I told her I loved her. I guess I sort of surprised myself with the latter. Since I had told her I wanted to be serious with her right before the Music City Bowl at the end of my redshirt junior season, I knew I loved her. Telling her, and saying the words first, made me very nervous. Looking back, I think the two of us were sort of playing a waiting game to see who would speak the words first. I lost. Or maybe I won. Either way, I went first. The two of us were eating breakfast together at a Perkins Restaurant & Bakery. We talked about our relationship and all we’d been through in the past and where we were going to go in the future. Before I knew it the words “I love you” came out of my mouth. Thankfully, Karyn said, “I love you, too.”
I was determined not to have the words “Will you marry me?” just come slipping out. For me, the timing had to be perfect, both for the moment and for where we both were in life. Even though I did not know if I was going to stick with the Colts, I did not want to wait to start our life together. Karyn was also in a transitional time, but she was in a place where whatever the future held, it would be better for us to face it together. She had graduated from U of M in December 2003, which meant we were both done with school at the same time. Her college golf career was over, but she stayed busy with the sport. She had a couple of national tournaments on the horizon with an eye toward playing professionally. Karyn also began pursuing a childhood dream of competing in pageants. Along with golf she spent a lot of time training for the local Miss Twin Cities pageant, which had been held a couple of months earlier, in February 2004. All of that meant that both of us were looking toward the future, and the future was now.
Memorial Day weekend I went home to Minnesota for the first time after my surgery. Early Saturday morning I crept to Karyn’s room to wake her. The fact that I was there at 6:00 a.m. should have told her something was up. I’m not exactly a morning person, or at least I wasn’t before I became a father. “I missed you so much that I want to spend as much of the day together as we can,” I said. I tried to be as sweet as possible when waking her. “I’m sorry for waking you up so early, but it’s time for us to leave.” She looked at me suspiciously. “C’mon, my babe,” I said. “You have to trust me. Let’s go.”
Thankfully she bought the line. Karyn smiled and gave me a big hug. “So what are you up to?” she asked.
“I don’t know. All I know is that it’s time for us to leave,” I said.
Karyn got dressed and the two of us climbed into my truck and took off driving. She lived in the Twin Cities with her parents at the time, and there’s a lot to do there, but I drove north right out of the city. “So where are we going?” Karyn asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought maybe we’d go see Terra and Jared.” Jared was my teammate from the Golden Gophers and Terra was on the golf team with Karyn. The two had recently started dating. Jared lived north of the cities.
“Okay, that sounds like fun. I would love to see them,” Karyn said.
When I passed the exit I needed to take to go to Jared’s house, Karyn noticed. “I think we should have pulled off there,” she said.
I played dumb. “Oh, shoot,” I said, and I kept on driving. When I didn’t take the next exit and circle back, she knew something was up, but I didn’t say a word. I just kept driving.
After driving for about two and a half hours I pulled into the little, touristy town of Nisswa, Minnesota. I handed Karyn a ball cap and said, “You need to pull this down over your eyes. I don’t want to see where we’re going now.”
Karyn gave me an open-mouth, “I’m not sure I trust you” smile, but went along with me anyway. She did add, “What are you doing, Ben?”
I just grinned. “You’ll see. . . . But not until I tell you to take off the hat, okay?”
“Okay,” Karyn said.
A few minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of the Deacon’s Lodge Golf Course, which is her favorite place to play. “Okay, open your eyes,” I said.
Karyn immediately recognized where we were. “What is this?” she said, surprised.
“Well, I know you have that big tourney coming up and need to practice, so I thought this was a way you could do that and we could still spend time together,” I said.
She reached over and hugged me. “That’s so thoughtful,” she said.
You have no idea, I thought. “Your clubs are in the back,” I said. “Your dad stashed them there while you were getting ready. I’m sorry but I can’t pick them up for you because of the surgery.”
“Oh, that’s right, Ben. I’m sorry. You won’t be able to play. We can go do something else if you want, something we can both do.”
“Hey, this was my idea. I’ll drive the cart and you practice. At least this time I won’t get sunburned like I did in Iowa,” I said. One year earlier I walked along with the group following Karyn during the Big 10 golf championship. I had buzzed my hair really close, and forgot to take a hat with me to the tournament. Karyn played thirty-six holes in one day. My scalp was burned to a crisp.
On this day the clouds filled the sky and occasionally spit a little rain. We didn’t mind, and it kept other golfers off the course. The two of us practically had the entire place to ourselves. I knew she needed to concentrate to play well, but this wasn’t a tournament, so we talked and laughed through the first seventeen holes.
We finally made it to the eighteenth hole, a long par five. Karyn hit a nice drive, then hit a long second shot to set up an easy approach shot into the green. I drove the cart. She climbed out and hit a short iron up onto the green. “Nice shot,” I said. “I bet you can hole this out for a birdie. That will be a nice way to finish the round.”
Karyn grinned. “Perfect way to end a perfect round. I hope I play this well next week,” she said.
We drove along the cart path to the green. She grabbed her putter, and I stepped out of the cart to watch her putt. As she squatted down to line up her shot, she looked closer at the hole. “Wait a minute,” she said. “The inside of the cup is painted pink, not white. What’s going on?”
“Don’t look at me. I have no idea. Someone must be playing some kind of prank,” I replied.
Unconvinced, Karyn walked very suspiciously over to the hole. She leaned over, took one look, then snapped her head back toward me. “The cup is full of dried rose petals,” she said. “You seriously don’t know what this is?”
“Really,” I said, raising my hands to protest my innocence. “The group in front of us must be playing some kind of practical joke. Is anything else in there?”
“I don’t know,” Karyn said. “Let me look.” She reached into the cup and moved the petals around. Then she rose up with a small box in her hand. She turned back to me.
By this p
oint I was right up close to her, down on one knee, my Bible open. “The Bible says a cord of three strands is not easily broken. That’s my vision for us. You, me, and God. Karyn, will you marry me?”
Tears started flowing. “Yes, Ben, yes. Yes, I will marry you,” Karyn said, her voice shaking. She threw her arms around me and we shared a kiss on the eighteenth green.
“Hey! What’s going on here?” a voice called out.
Karyn and I both turned around. My dad came walking up out of the woods next to the green with a camcorder in his hand, videotaping the whole ordeal. Then my mom and her mom and dad came driving up in a golf cart, holding roses for us. The moment was magical, if I do say so myself.
The six of us stayed over that night in one of the hotels connected to the golf course. Karyn and I did not share a room because of our commitment to save ourselves for the wedding night. In my mind, that wasn’t going to be too far away, so I was up for the challenge. After all, how long does it take to plan a wedding?
On the drive home to the Twin Cities, Karyn kept staring down at her ring. She seemed to have something on her mind, but I thought she was probably just thinking about the wedding. Finally she looked over at me and said, “So how would you feel if I gave one more local pageant a try?”
“What?”
“I took first runner-up at Miss Twin Cities. It was only my first attempt. My dream since I was a little girl has been to one day become Miss Minnesota, then compete in the Miss America contest.”
“Karyn, you said this would be just a one-time thing. I thought the Miss Twin Cities was the end of it,” I said.
“I know, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve already started looking into what it takes to really compete and be successful. I figured I had time since the last time we talked about marriage you said you wanted to get your feet on the ground in the NFL before you thought about getting married. But after this surprise, I figure if I am going to try this, now is the time,” she explained.