The Long Snapper Read online

  “Well, why don’t you go ahead and call her and let me say hello,” Belichick said.

  Lori was in a classroom at Parkview Baptist—it was the last day of review with Brian’s students before the big end-of-semester exam—when her cell phone rang. A good number of the kids jumped out of their seats and rushed up to surround her desk for the moment of truth.

  “Hey,” Lori said into the phone. “Have you heard anything?”

  “Hold on,” Brian said. “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

  Lori immediately recognized Belichick’s voice. “Long time, no see,” he said.

  “I know, it’s been a long time,” Lori said.

  “Well, looks like I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  “Where?”

  “When you come up here to see your husband,” Belichick said.

  “What?” Lori screamed into the phone. “He made it?”

  “We’re signing him.”

  Lori made no attempt to contain herself.

  “He made it!” she shouted to the students. “Oh, my gosh, he made it!”

  The students exploded with clapping and screaming. For the second day in a row, pandemonium temporarily ruled the classroom. Everyone was so happy for Brian. The students were also thrilled that they now knew a professional football player. A few of the boys immediately declared the Patriots their new favorite team. One of the girls wanted to know if Brian had met Tom Brady, the star quarterback with the GQ looks. (He had not—not yet.)

  When the class ended, Lori rushed off to the school office and shared the exciting news with everyone. Other than offering the standard morning announcements and a prayer to start each day, principal Cooper Pope generally exercised restraint when it came to school-wide broadcasting over the intercom. This time he did not hesitate. With so many people at Parkview, both students and staff, waiting to hear about Brian’s tryout, Pope was eager to share the outcome. “I know that all of you are wondering how Coach Kinchen is doing in New England,” he said into the microphone. “We just got a call from him. For your information, Coach Kinchen is now a New England Patriot. We need to be sure to watch him on TV this weekend. We need to keep pulling for him and to keep praying for him.”

  While the Louisiana school buzzed with excitement, Brian sat in an office at the Patriots headquarters and looked over his contract. He at least skimmed the twenty-five paragraphs of legal gobbledygook in the standard NFL contract and the three additional clauses in a one-page attachment prepared by the Patriots. But he was not really concerned about any of it. He would be paid based on what was then the minimum annual salary—$755,000—for a player with thirteen years of NFL experience. Prorated over the course of the seventeen-week season, sixteen games plus a bye week, that came to $44,411.76 for each of the two games left in the regular season. (In two weeks, Brian would be paid more than triple his annual salary as a first-year teacher.) Playoff money would be on top of that. But the bottom line for Brian had nothing to do with financial compensation. Only one thing really mattered: he was back in the National Football League…starting fresh with a team that had everything going for it. By putting blue ink to paper, signing both the contract and the attachment, Brian instantly became the oldest member of the New England Patriots. He also became the only NFL player who just the day before had been working in a classroom—studying the Bible—with a bunch of seventh graders.

  Pioli’s secretary gave Brian the team’s mailing address so that Lori could ship clothes to him overnight. All he needed now was calories. Brian was already thinking about the size and strength of the behemoths he would soon be battling on the football field—and about the disadvantage he’d be facing because of the twenty-plus pounds he had lost since leaving the NFL. With that in mind, he had one more stop to make before heading to a hotel for the rest of the day. Brian returned to the team cafeteria and loaded his bag with an arsenal of junk food: Candy bars. Cookies. Bottles of chocolate and strawberry Nestle Quik milk drinks—as many calories as he could fit in his bag. His motivation made perfect sense: I’ve got to start getting heavier or I’m going to get abused.

  Four

  He never aspired to be a long snapper, never even once thought about the possibility while growing up. And why would he have? Brian was way too athletic, way too driven, to ever contemplate being relegated to such a limited role. In his earliest days of organized football—Saturday mornings playing for the South Baton Rouge Tigers in a local youth league—eight-year-old Brian was a one-boy wrecking crew. It was only because his father was coaching that Brian was even allowed to play at such a young age. Most of the other boys on the team, including Brian’s big brother, Cal, were ten. But age meant nothing once the action began.

  Gus Kinchen put Brian on the defensive line at middle guard—a position now called nose tackle—and the youngest boy on the team immediately stood out because he reacted so quickly to the snap of the ball. Brian was never going to be the fastest kid in a footrace. But what he lacked in pure speed he more than made up for with great anticipation and remarkable reflexes. Sometimes he responded so well to the first movement of the center that he could stop a play before it had any chance of developing—getting the center and the quarterback all jammed up while they were exchanging the ball.

  It made no difference whether Brian was only practicing during the week or going full throttle in a game on Saturday. He simply loved putting on his football gear and making something happen. Nobody ever had to teach him that; he was instinctively drawn to the entire football experience. Maybe it was somehow ingrained in him because of his family background. Perhaps it was purely the love of competition—a boy just being a boy, wanting to go head-to-head with the other boys and wanting to be better than everyone else. Whatever it was, Brian was always the aggressor on a football field. He was never scared of contact. He loved hitting people, loved trying to barrel through anyone in his way.

  Both on and off the field, Brian was quite stubborn. One of the best ways to get him to do something was to tell him that he could not. Yet he was also extremely shy and quiet. He often lacked confidence. One day in grade school, a teacher gave Brian and his classmates an assignment to write about why they were important. “I am important because God made me important,” Brian wrote. “I am important because I want to be important. I am important because I try to be important. I am important because my parents teach me to be important.” Despite such bold statements, though, Brian was never really that sure of his place in the world. Much later, as an adult with children of his own, he would reflect on his youth and conclude that he had been a classic middle child: never getting as much parental attention as he wanted, always yearning for more, constantly seeking recognition by way of achievement. As much as he enjoyed sports for the pure bliss of physical activity and the sheer fun of playing games with his friends, Brian also craved—and then relished—the affirmation that came with outstanding performance. “Great job,” someone would tell him after a football game or a tennis match or whatever he was into at the time, and then those simple words of praise could easily spend hours, if not days, dancing in his head. No doubt about it: those words were fuel for his engine.

  By the time he entered high school, Brian had already excelled at any sport he took up: Football. Basketball. Swimming. Golf. Tennis. Track and field. Friends and teammates knew that Brian was an unusually gifted athlete. But they also marveled at his drive to keep working and keep improving. On top of everything else, Brian was extremely analytical—always trying to figure out the ideal form or the perfect motion or whatever he needed to adjust so that he could do something better than he was already doing it.

  Decades later, followers of the local sports scene would still shake their heads at what Brian did as a high school senior in the 1983 Class A state championships of track and field. He set a state record in the shot put and also won the discus. He placed second in the high jump and sixth in the javelin. And he did all of that in a single day. Brian was the only athlete from Un
iversity High School who even qualified for the meet, but his solo efforts in the field events were enough to propel his “team” to first place in the overall standings prior to the running events (in which he did not compete). The twenty-nine points he personally accumulated ultimately placed U-High seventh in the meet. With the passing of years, the story would only get better. Legend would eventually have it that Brian won the entire state meet all by himself. It was not true, but so what? It was only a track-and-field story. Anyone in Louisiana knows that football is the only sport that really matters.

  Football was certainly top priority for Brian. His goals were always clear: Play well enough in high school to follow in his father’s footsteps by earning a football scholarship to LSU. Then shine in college and be drafted into the NFL—preferably by his favorite team, the Miami Dolphins, whose Hall of Fame fullback, Larry Csonka, was the one player he had always admired the most. “Hard, tough, no-nonsense guy,” Brian would tell friends. “That’s who I want to be like.”

  It did not take long for Brian to gain recognition for his own no-nonsense approach to the game. Three straight years, starting as a high school sophomore, he was named an All-State linebacker. Teammates had a more personal but equally telling label for him: Super Kinch. As a senior, playing both linebacker on defense and fullback on offense, Brian led U-High to the Class A state championship game. Schools all over the country—Notre Dame, UCLA, Texas A&M, and Duke, among them—expressed interest in his services. But none of them had a chance. On February 1, 1983, with college football’s national signing day coming the next week, the LSU coaching staff sent Brian a Western Union Mailgram with an abbreviated version of what they had already been telling him for quite some time: “LSU fans everywhere are talking about you. We want to see you playing in Tiger Stadium.” Eight days later, Brian was one of twenty-one players who signed national letters of intent to join the LSU Tigers.

  It was one of the greatest days of his young life—and how could it not have been? He had grown up hearing so many stories about the 1958 national championship team. He had spent so many Saturdays tailgating outside the stadium with family and friends. He had always worn the purple and gold of LSU. And Brian knew the way everyone around Baton Rouge followed LSU football, the way everyone loved LSU football. So where else could he possibly want to be?

  For the people of a state that has historically absorbed national-image beatings for an ugly plethora of ills such as racism, dirty politics, and bad schools, LSU football has long served as something of an elixir, a common bond that goes way beyond any weekly measurement of points on a scoreboard. LSU football brings people together and lifts the collective spirit. It offers a chance to be among the best at something. And even when the Tigers might be having an off year, well, clearly nobody likes that, but the games are still top priority on calendars all over Louisiana. Of course, LSU fans do not rally around their players and coaches only during the season; they scrutinize and worship The Program (always capitalized) all year long. Even Huey Long, the celebrated governor and U.S. senator known as the Kingfish, could not help but inject himself into the minutiae of LSU football back in the 1920s and 1930s. He assisted with recruiting and routinely offered advice on everything from personnel moves to the marching band. According to a biography by renowned historian T. Harry Williams, Long once told one of the coaches, “LSU can’t have a losing team because that’ll mean I’m associated with a loser.”

  Through the years, countless ordinary LSU fans have been equally passionate about their Tigers. That is why they incessantly put vocal chords at risk by pelting rival teams and their followers with screams of “Tiger bait, Tiger bait.” It is why legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant once described Baton Rouge as the worst place in the world for a visiting team—“like being inside a drum,” he said—and why Tiger Stadium became commonly known as Death Valley. It also explains how the standard LSU football game was long ago transformed from mere sporting event into full-scale cultural spectacle. With home games traditionally played under the lights on Saturday nights, tailgating goes all day long and covers not only stadium parking lots but also significant chunks of campus. This is a major social event—“the best pre-game party in the country,” ESPN has declared it. Trailing only Mardi Gras and perhaps Jazz Fest, it is one of the biggest bashes in the state, with close to a hundred thousand people gathering in temporary community and never without ample supply of adult beverages. And to think: all of this revelry revolves around a bunch of college athletes—kids playing games! LSU football players are treated like absolute royalty.

  In his memoir It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, a former LSU captain named John Ed Bradley offers a telling exchange he once shared with a teammate, Marty Dufrene, an offensive lineman from Lafourche Parish (in Cajun Country), long after their playing days had ended.

  “Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to that first time I ran out with the team as a freshman—out into Tiger Stadium,” Dufrene told Bradley. “God, I was fifteen feet off the ground and covered with frissons. You know what frissons are, John Ed? They’re goose bumps. It’s the French word for goose bumps. It was the highest high you could have, and no drugs could match it—the way it felt to run out there with the crowd standing and yelling for you. I wish every kid could experience that.”

  “If every kid could,” Bradley responded to Dufrene, “then it wouldn’t be what it is. It’s because so few get there that it has such power.”

  As one of the few, Brian Kinchen arrived at LSU wanting to quickly establish himself as a linebacker who would contribute in big ways. But a coaching decision abruptly ended any chance of that: Brian was “redshirted” as a freshman, meaning he would practice with the team but would not play in games. This was a fairly common practice that allowed a not-ready-for-prime-time newcomer to get acclimated while still maintaining his four years of collegiate playing eligibility. The expectation was that Brian would now spend five years instead of four at LSU. It was not what Brian wanted: he wanted to play right away. But there was nothing he could do about it.

  As significant as the redshirt decision seemed at the time, though, head coach Jerry Stovall made another move that would ultimately have a far more dramatic impact on Brian’s college experience and even on the entire course of his adult life. Stovall moved Brian from defense to offense—from linebacker to tight end—because a couple of guys were hurt and someone needed to fill in during practices. Brian was a good choice, Stovall felt, because he had both the athletic ability to excel at his new position and the character to put the team first and do whatever was asked of him. There was an old saying that had long made the rounds in football circles—and that Brian now started hearing for the first time at LSU: “The more things you can do, the better chance you have of sticking around.” Brian did not only stick around at tight end. He excelled to the point that the offensive coaches never gave him back to the defense. Stovall was not surprised. To him, Brian was “a real warrior” who always responded well to a challenge.

  That also became the consensus of others who coached and played at LSU. An in-house scouting report on Brian would have read something like this: “Fierce competitor. Nobody outworks him. Relentless when blocking. Great hands when catching passes. Makes up for lack of speed with excellent routes and technique. Plays hurt. Quiet but confident. Strong. Tough. Intense.”

  “Brian was a much better athlete than most guys that played tight end—that’s what stood out,” recalls Ed Zaunbrecher, then LSU’s offensive coordinator. “You couldn’t measure his value just based on his numbers. He helped us with a lot of things that would never show up in the numbers.”

  His junior season—1986—offered perfect illustration of that. Brian caught twenty-seven passes for 262 yards and four touchdowns, certainly not eye-popping statistics in an offense that broke the school record for total yards in a season and led the Tigers to the Southeastern Conference championship. Yet Brian impressed a lot of people: he was named first-team All-Confer
ence and honorable mention All-American. So much for numbers. His childhood dream of playing in the NFL seemed within reach.

  One day at practice, LSU assistant coach Terry Lewis, who worked with the tight ends, pulled Brian aside and asked him if he had ever tried long snapping. Lewis enjoyed teaching the specialty skill, especially when he could handpick someone who might be able to snap on punts and would also be athletic enough to then get down the field to help with coverage. Lewis knew how Brian used to hit as a linebacker and had always been impressed by the way he attacked defenders as a tight end. Why not see if he could contribute on special teams as well?

  “Never snapped in my life,” Brian told Lewis. But he was willing to try.

  “It’s simply passing the ball between your legs,” Lewis assured his new pupil. “Same way a quarterback throws it.”

  Well, not exactly. Lewis started with instructions for gripping the ball: Grab it comfortably with your right hand, your dominant hand, cupping the ball, with your ring finger on the third lace. This is your throwing hand, and you want it underneath the ball, with the seam opposite the laces staring you right in the face. Your left hand, the guide hand, goes just to the left of that seam, with your thumb parallel to it.

  “It feels pretty awkward,” Brian said.

  “Always does when you’re just starting out,” Lewis said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Next came basic coaching points for proper stance when leaning over the ball: You want your feet spread a little wider than shoulder width. You can have a slight stagger—with the dominant foot back just a bit—if that feels better and helps with balance. You want to push your big toes down into the ground, maybe even causing slight daylight under your heels. Got to have a little flex in the knees. That will help you keep your butt down. Must keep that butt low or the ball will go flying too high. Extend your arms as far out as possible to create space between your body and the defensive lineman on your nose, but without reaching beyond the point of comfort.