The Long Snapper Read online

  Brian snapped well for the punt team. Late in his second season, he also started snapping for field goals and extra points. But he got almost no action on offense. In three seasons with the Dolphins, he caught a grand total of two passes for fifteen yards. In the beginning, just making the team and being stamped “professional football player” had given him such a sense of accomplishment. But now he wanted all his hard work to pay off with something more. Brian wanted to be a go-to guy in the passing game, routinely hauling in passes and lighting up the scoreboard with touchdowns. That was not going to happen in Miami. After the 1990 season, when Shula had to select which players to protect and which to leave exposed on the free-agent market, Brian was deemed expendable. As challenging as his initial years in the NFL had been—always feeling like he worked his tail off but never really knowing where he stood with his coaches and the front office—this was the first time Brian directly experienced the harshest realities of being a professional athlete who existed on the fringe: In his third year of marriage, Brian had no clue where he and Lori would next live. He had no idea if another team would offer any greater opportunity to make a meaningful mark…or whether his next stop would provide any job security at all.

  The Green Bay Packers invited Brian for a workout and tickled his eardrums with everything he wanted to hear. They wanted him—and he would not even need to be the long snapper. Yes, they would be happy to have him in case something happened to veteran snapper Blair Bush. But what they really wanted Brian to do was play tight end. The Packers had played with only two tight ends for most of the 1990 season. Now they wanted a third. Brian signed a contract and happily joined the Packers. Everything seemed to be going well in training camp. But on Monday, August 26, 1991, six days before the season opener, Brian had an unexpected visitor to his dorm room. Every player in the NFL knows exactly what is meant by the words “Coach wants to see you. Bring your playbook.” It means you are leaving. Brian now heard those dreaded words. Coach Lindy Infante had changed his mind and decided to keep only two tight ends. Brian was released.

  Driving home to Baton Rouge, he was angry about the way he had been treated. After telling him that they were going to keep three tight ends—and after using that information as an enticement for Brian to sign with them—the Packers had abruptly abandoned that plan and put him out on the street. Still, Brian was not overly dejected. No big deal, he kept telling himself. I’ll still be picked up by another team.

  But when a couple of weeks passed without anyone calling for his services, Brian worried. He certainly did not want to think his NFL career was crashing to a halt after only three years simply because one team had decided to go with two tight ends instead of three. And he and Lori had just bought their first house. With little Austin not yet two years old and Lori pregnant again, Brian was not only stressed about his football career. He was also concerned about finances.

  Then a Cleveland Browns linebacker named Randy Kirk, who doubled as a long snapper, pulled a hamstring. Eighteen days after being cut by the Packers, Brian was in Cleveland, trying out for a team led by first-year head coach Bill Belichick. Two days later, Brian went to work for the Browns in their third game of the 1991 season, a home game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Late in the second quarter, with the Browns leading, 5–3, Brian set up with holder Brian Hansen and kicker Matt Stover for a fairly easy field-goal attempt from thirty-four yards out. But Brian threw a low snap and Stover never got off a kick. We lose this game, and I’m history, Brian figured. And, no matter what might happen with the score, he was now faced with an unforgiving reality for the remainder of the afternoon: I mess up again, and there’s no way they keep me here. Amazingly enough, the game ultimately came down to a last-minute field-goal attempt. With nine seconds left and the Browns trailing, 13–11, they lined up to try a forty-five-yard field goal for the win. Brian was not the only one feeling the pressure. It was Stover’s first year kicking in the NFL, and this was his first shot at a game-winner. “I’m out there just about pooping in my pants,” Stover would later admit. “But Brian snaps a bull’s-eye. Perfect hold. And I nail it.” The Browns and their fans wildly celebrated a 14–13 victory—and Brian kept his job.

  In fact, he soon gained a firm hold on his position with the Browns. Special-teams coach Scott O’Brien came to count on him not only for his accuracy as a snapper, but also for what he contributed in other ways. O’Brien generally relied on a player he called “the personal protector” to make calls and direct the blocking scheme once everyone was lined up for a punt. As the only player between the offensive line and the punter, the personal protector (or “PP”) was the punter’s final hope for security against anyone who might otherwise threaten him with the possibility of a punt block. But the PP was also responsible for shouting out protection calls and making adjustments, because he was in the best position to see how the other team was setting up to attack. O’Brien noticed that Brian was often somehow a step ahead of the PP, and he began to think of his snapper almost like a coach on the field. There was one other attribute Brian brought to the punt team. He was among the best at his position when it came to getting down the field and making a tackle. O’Brien wished he had more guys with Brian’s toughness and intensity.

  Once Brian was secure with his job as a snapper, he wanted more work at tight end. He practiced hard and lobbied to play on offense. But the Browns always found someone bigger or faster—or both—to put ahead of him. In 1992, Belichick even brought in former New York Giants All-Pro Mark Bavaro, a two-time Super Bowl champion who was by then battling a degenerative knee condition. Bavaro had not been able to play the previous season, and his doctor had advised him to retire. But Belichick wanted him. Though the arrival of Bavaro meant yet another year without Brian catching a single pass—his third consecutive season with no receptions—the two became good friends. Both were deeply spiritual, pretty quiet and reserved away from the field, but once they put on their pads and helmets, they were two of the most aggressive guys on the team. Brian enjoyed Bavaro’s company and learned a lot from him. He also liked to give Bavaro a hard time—always in fun, but sometimes with a bit of envy and attitude as well—because Bavaro missed so many practices to rest his bad knee.

  “You’re not practicing again?” Brian would ask in the locker room. “Must be nice.”

  Then Bavaro would hobble off to the training room while Brian joined the other backup tight end, Scott Galbraith, on the practice field, always stuck with the grunt work throughout the week even though Bavaro would inevitably be the starter and get the vast majority of playing time on game days. It was almost like Bavaro had two jobs that season. One was to get his body ready for the games—that knee was extremely painful. And the other was to put up with all of Brian’s barbs and snipes. Bavaro knew that the situation could cause tension. But he and Brian actually enjoyed the give-and-take that came with the unusual dynamics of their relationship. Although the teasing was a constant, Bavaro very much appreciated the encouragement he also got from Brian. In return, Bavaro kept assuring Brian that his time at tight end was going to come. He was young. He was a good player. And Bavaro knew that his own stay with the Browns was not going to last long.

  Bavaro was indeed gone after one season in Cleveland. Even so, Brian expected that the Browns would again dash his hopes by bringing in someone new to play ahead of him. But he got off to a good start in training camp during the summer of 1993, and Belichick was ready to give him the chance he had always wanted. With his sixth NFL season approaching, Brian was finally informed that he would be a first-team player on offense—the starting tight end!

  Brian was not the only person deeply moved by the news. His dad had always shared from afar the emotional challenges that came with being a peripheral player. Gus Kinchen could certainly relate to the frustration of consistently longing for something more. He, too, had experienced a significant amount of job-related stress, having spent most of his adult years in what he defined as “an up-and-down busi
ness life” working for IBM and others. But business had lost its appeal as other priorities took hold of him. Gus eventually went to a seminary in Mississippi and then became a youth minister back in Baton Rouge. Now he was working as area director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. When Brian called to tell his dad that the starting job was at long last his, Gus was naturally overjoyed, and he could not help but reflect. He thought about Brian’s terrible disappointment during draft weekend in 1988. He thought about everything his son had endured en route to achieving his long-coveted goal of being a starter: The mental anguish. The physical grind. All the waiting and the hoping.

  Gus was not one to get overly emotional with his children. But he wanted to express how very proud he was of Brian. So he wrote a poem. It made no difference that Gus was not exactly a candidate for poet laureate. All he cared about was writing from the heart and reaching out to his son with affirmation and encouragement.

  Focus

  Once we were riding in the car

  I heard you speak of what you are

  Then the thing that pleasured me

  To hear your dream of what would be

  Many rough and trying places

  Seeing bloody, muddy faces

  Wanting to get a chance to run

  And find your own place in the sun

  So you pressed on…to reach the mark

  Discouraged oft’n with heavy heart

  Steady creeping, stalking, lurking

  Persevering, dreaming, working

  And now you finally have your chance

  To have your dream, you want to dance

  So walk with God and be at peace

  The golden ring’s within your reach

  And we who love you look with pride

  At one who swam against the tide

  Who chased his dream, and dared to dare

  Who walked with God who brought him there

  Gus folded the paper on which he had written his poem, and he smiled as he stuffed it in an envelope. After all, he was mailing it to the starting tight end of the Cleveland Browns.

  Brian enjoyed the added responsibilities that came with being “the guy” when listening to his coaches game-plan for the tight end. He knew that being a starter brought added respect from his teammates, which meant a lot to him. But the best thing was simply getting to do what he had always known he could do: perform with the first-string offense. He was realistic enough to know that Belichick did not all of a sudden view him as a long-term solution to Bavaro’s departure. Brian had not magically grown bigger or become faster at the age of twenty-eight. Then again, no NFL coach was in the business of handing out jobs to men who were not capable of performing. Why not take the opportunity and make the most of it?

  After making only two receptions in his first five years in the NFL, Brian caught twenty-nine passes for an average gain of twelve yards in 1993. He also scored his first two touchdowns as a professional. He was never going to dazzle the defense by racing down the field and hauling in a game-changing bomb. But Brian was solid and dependable, a sure-handed receiver and—especially given his lack of size for a tight end—a remarkably rugged and efficient blocker. Brian also kept snapping, but with the addition of what he saw as a “monumental” benefit derived from being a regular player on offense. In earlier years, when he had to just stand on the sideline and wait to see what the offense would do, which would then dictate when he had to charge onto the field and snap, there was way too much time to think about all the negative possibilities and potential ramifications of his job. And—as if the mind games were not enough—he also routinely faced the physical challenge of entering a game cold for only one play at a time. Now that he was regularly playing offense, Brian no longer found himself standing around and getting stressed about snapping. When it came time for a punt or a kick, he simply broke from the huddle and went to the ball instead of lining up at tight end. It was just another play. He was already warm and into the flow of the game. As a result, he was more comfortable than ever with snapping—and his performance showed it. As stated in a summary of his season prepared by the Browns, Brian “served almost flawlessly as deep snapper.”

  The summary could have also said that Brian had continued his education in the Business of Professional Football 101, because 1993 was defined not only as a season of personal breakthrough for him, but also as a time of break-up between the Browns and one of Cleveland’s all-time favorite athletes. It was the year that Belichick abruptly dumped quarterback Bernie Kosar, angrily releasing him from the team after a dustup in the middle of the season (it was not their first clash) and replacing him with Vinny Testaverde, a former Heisman Trophy winner who had joined the Browns after six years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Cleveland fans were furious not only with the outright dismissal of Kosar, but also with Belichick’s seemingly cold and detached handling of the situation. It did not help Belichick’s cause when the Browns proceeded to lose six of eight games to close out their third-straight losing season. The Cleveland Stadium chants of “Bill must go” were silenced only by the completion of the schedule. Bill Belichick was not a popular man—not with the fans, not with the local media, not with his own players. He did not go, however, not then anyway—and neither did his tight end.

  The next two years brought additional time as a starter for Brian—with totals of twenty-three starts and forty-four receptions in 1994 and 1995—along with even-more-dramatic twists and turns for the team as a whole. In a stunning reversal, the 1994 Browns went to the playoffs (Brian’s first time playing in the post-season) with a record of 11–5. But then came another about-face: back to losing again, with an ugly mirror-image mark of 5–11 in 1995. That was not the worst of it. On November 6,1995, with seven games left in the season, team owner Art Modell, struggling financially and unable to secure a deal for a new stadium in Cleveland, announced that he was going to move the franchise to Baltimore in 1996. The uproar in Ohio made the Kosar controversy look like minor-league stuff. But off went the Browns…soon to be renamed the Baltimore Ravens (and with Ted Marchibroda replacing Belichick as head coach).

  The first-year Ravens were all about footballs flying in every direction. No team in the league gave up more passing yards than Baltimore’s defense allowed. And only one team—the Jacksonville Jaguars—amassed more yards in the air than the Ravens did on offense. With Testaverde having the best year of his career at quarterback and top-notch wide receivers Michael Jackson and Derrick Alexander often drawing double coverages, Brian was perfectly positioned for the most productive season he would ever have. “I always knew Brian would be left in one-on-one coverage,” Testaverde would later explain. “Everyone would just put a linebacker or the strong safety on him, and before you knew it, Brian would be open by two steps. He was not a big-name guy. Never really had a lot of balls thrown to him before that. But fifty-five catches later, Brian has his career-year, and I have my career-year, too. Coincidence? I don’t think so. We were very good friends, and we definitely helped each other a lot.”

  Marchibroda appreciated Brian for the same reasons Shula and Belichick had: dependability, determination, intensity, work ethic, character, and intelligence. Great guy to have on the ball club, Marchibroda thought. Yet no matter how well Brian played in 1996, his coach still saw him as too small and too slow to be a permanent fixture at tight end. Marchibroda was always looking for someone a little better. And he eventually got the guy he wanted. When he told Brian that the Ravens were bringing in two-time Pro Bowl selection Eric Green, a former first-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of the biggest tight ends in the NFL (six-foot-five, 280 pounds), Brian was devastated. He left Marchibroda’s office with tears in his eyes, thinking, If I’m not good enough to keep a starting job with the numbers I’m putting up, then I might as well just turn in my helmet and forget about it. The hurt and the disappointment would never leave him, but Brian had never before quit on a group of teammates. Why start now? Lori kept encouraging him. She ke
pt reminding him that being a starter was not the most important thing in the world: “Look at all the guys who never even get to play in the NFL, period—starter, second-string, special teams, whatever.” And Brian ultimately stayed with the Ravens for two more years. That was a good thing for Matt Stover—for whom Brian had snapped ever since the day of that first game-winning field goal with the Browns back in 1991. With the help of Brian and a few different holders along the way, Stover became one of the most accurate field-goal kickers in NFL history. Although Brian’s playing time on offense was greatly reduced by the arrival of Green, his contributions on special teams still made him a valuable commodity.

  That was again evident soon after Marchibroda and his staff were fired following three straight losing seasons—1996 through 1998—in Baltimore. Special-teams coach Scott O’Brien, who had moved from Cleveland with the franchise and had now worked with Brian for eight years, quickly landed a job with the Carolina Panthers. His first assignment from head coach George Seifert was to find a new long snapper. No-brainer, as far as O’Brien was concerned. Brian is a free agent. We just bring him in and get him signed. And the Panthers did.

  Nobody was more pleased with the acquisition than John Kasay, a Pro Bowl kicker who was entering his ninth season in the NFL. Kasay had never before worked with a snapper who was such a consummate professional, so precise and meticulous about every element of his job. Brian always had to have his special gloves on—he was the first snapper Kasay had ever seen wearing gloves—because they gave him the same feel on the ball no matter what the weather conditions. His feet always had to be the exact same distance apart when he was getting in his stance. And he would consistently “snap laces”—meaning that the football would reach the holder rotated to the point where his top hand was on the laces—thereby allowing the holder to easily place the ball on the ground with them facing away from the kicker (which makes for a better kick). But the most amazing thing to Kasay was the way Brian could always tell, and the way he would immediately point it out, if Kasay and holder Ken Walter were setting up improperly for a field goal. “We could be two inches off, and Brian would know it,” Kasay would recall. “That attention to detail…that was always very personal to him.” As were the results. “Brian never had a bad snap,” Kasay said. “Not in practice. Not in warm-up. Not in a game. I mean, never.”