The 1998 NFL draft was scheduled to begin on April 18. In March, ASU held a so-called Pro Day at Sun Devil Stadium for NFL scouts and coaches to evaluate ASU players who didn"t attend the combine. Pat saw this as his best chance to impress a team and get drafted, so he resolved to go for broke in the tryout.
Because the Arizona Cardinals were based in Phoenix and played their home games at Sun Devil Stadium, the Cardinals organization had been paying more attention to Tillman than the other NFL teams had, and therefore understood that he possessed intangible attributes that didn"t show up in the scouting reports. Cardinal general manager Bob Ferguson, defensive coordinator Dave McGinnis, and defensive backs coach Larry Marmie showed up at Pro Day to put Tillman through his paces. Having already decided that Pat was too small to play linebacker in the NFL, they asked him to try out as a safety, which demanded a significantly different set of skills, then held what was scheduled to be a fifteen-minute evaluation on the field. Pat, however, refused to let the coaches leave until he"d performed as well as possible in every drill, extending the tryout an extra thirty minutes. At the end of the evaluation, Pat was hopeful they"d seen enough to want to draft him.
The NFL draft was televised live from Madison Square Garden over two consecutive days. At the end of the first day, only two of seven rounds had been completed. Although the Pittsburgh Steelers selected Jeremy Staat (represented by the agent Frank Bauer, like Pat) early in the second round, Pat wasn"t drafted by any of the thirty-two teams on day one, which didn"t surprise him. By the conclusion of the sixth round, however, as the 1998 draft drew to a close, Pat still hadn"t been chosen.
The Cardinals had three picks remaining in the seventh round. Staring anxiously at a television in the home of Marie"s parents as this final round got under way, Pat, Marie, and their families watched as the Cardinals used two of these picks to draft other players. When their last pick came up, they selected Pat-as the 226th of 241 players chosen. The Cardinals offered him a one-year contract for the minimum NFL salary of $158,000, plus a $21,000 signing bonus. By way of comparison, the first player chosen in that year"s draft, Peyton Manning, received a six-year deal from the Indianapolis Colts worth $48 million, with an immediate $11.6 million signing bonus.
The mere fact that Tillman had signed a contract, moreover, was no guarantee that he would make the team. He would still have to compete fiercely with both veterans and other rookies at the Cardinals" training camp for a spot on the roster. If Pat failed to make the cut, he wouldn"t receive a nickel of his salary.
Despite being one of the most lionized students at ASU-a handsome, charismatic football star over whom countless women swooned-Pat had remained devoted to Marie ever since their first date five years earlier and did not philander. Although Marie is by nature reserved, when she elects to share her thoughts she tends to speak bluntly and to the point; from the beginning, her relationship with Pat was based on such candor. "Pat was pretty straightforward," she says. "There was never a lot of game playing in our relationship, even when we were very young. We were very honest with one another; I think that"s why we were able to stay together."
Pat and Marie had long intended to live together after they both graduated from college. After he was drafted by the Cardinals, she figured they would be residing in Phoenix. "Pat was confident he would make it with some NFL team," Marie remembers. "But he told me not to come to Arizona until after training camp, when he would know for sure whether he was going to play for the Cardinals."
The Cardinals held their preseason camp in Flagstaff, 120 miles north of Phoenix, on the campus of Northern Arizona University. In college, Pat"s teammates called him by a variety of predictable monikers, some of which-"Goldilocks" and "Fabio" being the most prevalent-were inspired by his shoulder-length hair. But his best-known nickname was "Hit Man," for the ferocity of his tackles-not only against rivals in games, but against teammates during ordinary practice drills as well. Because Pat was expected to be one of the first players cut from the Cardinals, he knew that if he wanted to stick around, he would need to perform at full intensity at every practice and make the coaches take notice of him right out of the gate.
During their evaluation of Pat at the ASU Pro Day, the Cardinals told him that if he hoped to play safety in the NFL, he would have to lose at least five pounds in order to improve his speed when covering fleet receivers like Amani Toomer, Jerry Rice, and Randy Moss. When Pat showed up in Flagstaff already seven pounds lighter than he"d played in college, the coaches took note, but losing a little weight wasn"t going to be enough to win him a spot on the roster. On the second day of camp, in the middle of a drill intended to enhance the pa.s.s coverage skills of the defensive backs, he saw an opportunity to make a more persuasive impression. After a veteran 250-pound fullback named Cedric Smith caught a short pa.s.s along the sideline, Pat-who weighed nearly 60 pounds less-launched himself at Smith like a missile, knocked the ball from his grasp, and then drilled the ma.s.sive runner into the turf. It was an absolutely clean hit, and the force with which Tillman delivered the tackle impressed the coaches. As Smith went down, however, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in one of his knees, ending his football career. Tillman regretted injuring the veteran, but injuries were an ever-present risk in the NFL, and as a rookie, he told a reporter for the Arizona Republic Arizona Republic, "you do what you have to do to make the team. You have to let them tell you to calm down."
Ordinarily, NFL coaches try to discourage their players from playing at full speed and hitting with maximum force during practice, in order to lessen the chance of injuries like the one that removed Smith from the Cardinals" roster. But the Cardinals had won only four of sixteen games in 1997, and had been considered one of the worst teams in the league for many years. They had a reputation for playing without pa.s.sion. So head coach Vince Tobin decided that an inspired rookie who raised the intensity of preseason camp might not be a bad thing, and he allowed Tillman to continue to hit aggressively during practice.
In August the Cardinals played four exhibition games, during which Pat tallied twenty-five tackles, more than any other member of the team. On August 29, in the last of these preseason games, Arizona played the Oakland Raiders in Oakland, and dozens of Pat"s friends and family from the Bay Area came to watch him. Motivated by their presence, he intercepted a pa.s.s-the first of his NFL career-that led to a Cardinals touchdown, putting them ahead, 2114, to win the game.
Eight days later, when the Cardinals traveled to Dallas to commence the regular season against the Cowboys, the Arizona coaches told Tillman he would be starting the game at free safety, surprising almost everyone but Pat, Marie, and his family. "I always knew Patty would be a fantastic special-teams player in the NFL," says his agent, Frank Bauer, "but to be the starting safety as a rookie in his very first game-he fooled the h.e.l.l out of everybody."
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
Throughout high school and college, Tillman had worn the number 42 on his football jersey. When he joined the Cardinals, that number already belonged to Kwamie La.s.siter, his primary rival for the free-safety position on the starting roster, so Pat was issued the number 40 instead. He"d worn this new number for the first time a month before the 1998 regular-season opener, during the first game of the preseason, back on August 7, when the Cardinals traveled to Michigan to play the Detroit Lions.
In the predawn hours on the day of that game, as Pat was asleep in his hotel room, a Toyota delivery truck appeared at the entrance to a parking lot behind the American emba.s.sy in Nairobi, Kenya. One of the two Saudis riding in the truck"s cab jumped out and demanded that the guard raise the gate, and when he refused, the Saudi hurled a loud but harmless flashbang grenade toward the emba.s.sy. Several seconds later, after people inside had rushed to the windows of the six-story building to see what had caused the small explosion, the Saudi who"d stayed in the truck detonated two thousand pounds of explosives crammed into the back of the vehicle. The local time in East Africa was 10:30 a.m.
The t.i.tanic blast obliterated the entire rear side of the emba.s.sy and completely flattened a much flimsier building next door, a secretarial college. Thousands of victims were buried alive in the smoldering rubble; their screams and moans could be heard for days. The death count was 213 people. Approximately 4,500 were injured, including more than 150 who were blinded by flying gla.s.s.
Nine minutes after the attack in Nairobi, a fuel truck carrying a similar load of explosives pulled up to the American emba.s.sy in the largest city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam-an Arabic name meaning "Abode of Peace"-and the truck was detonated by its Egyptian driver. Eleven people were killed and eighty-five wounded in this blast.
The attacks, 420 miles apart, had been carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden and his collaborator Ayman al-Zawahri. Six months earlier, while Tillman was preparing for the NFL draft in Phoenix, the two al-Qaeda leaders, purportedly acting on behalf of a coalition they called the "World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," had faxed a fatwa from Afghanistan to a London newspaper in which they declared: [F]or more than seven years the United States has been occupying the land of the Two Holy Places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its Peninsula bases into spearheads through which to attack neighboring Muslims....All of these crimes and sins committed by America clearly demonstrate a declaration of war on G.o.d, his Messenger [the Prophet Muhammad], and Muslims....On that basis, and in compliance with G.o.d"s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:By the ruling, it is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it to kill Americans and their allies-civilian and military-in any country where it is possible to do so....With G.o.d"s help, we call on every Muslim who believes in G.o.d and wishes to be rewarded to comply with G.o.d"s order to kill Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on the Muslim Ulema Ulema [Islamic scholars], leaders, youth, and soldiers to launch raids on Satan"s American troops and Satan"s supporters allying with them in order to displace their leaders so that they may learn a lesson. [Islamic scholars], leaders, youth, and soldiers to launch raids on Satan"s American troops and Satan"s supporters allying with them in order to displace their leaders so that they may learn a lesson.
Although the international news media had disseminated this fatwa widely when it was issued on February 23, few people paid much attention to it at the time. After August 7, bin Laden and his fatwa were regarded in an entirely new light not only by Americans but by people in other parts of the world as well-especially Muslims of a fundamentalist bent. Disaffected young men from the Arabian Peninsula, Chechnya, North Africa, Kashmir, and elsewhere began to flock to al-Qaeda camps in eastern Afghanistan to receive training in the skills necessary to wage jihad against Americans and Jews. "But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda," observed Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower The Looming Tower, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of ma.s.s murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a ma.s.sive response.But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires.
President Bill Clinton and his inner circle immediately began to initiate rescue operations in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and to figure out how they should retaliate against al-Qaeda. A full-scale military campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban allies in Afghanistan was quickly ruled out. The Clinton administration believed that such a drastic move was disproportionate to the scale of the terrorist attacks, and would be hard to sell to Congress and the American people. Moreover, Clinton was deeply entangled in the growing scandal over his dalliance with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. His presidency had been significantly crippled as a consequence, stripping him of the public trust and political capital required to launch a war. After considering the few practical options remaining, Clinton"s advisers determined that the best course of action would be to conduct a surgical air strike against bin Laden.
On August 17, while the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was grilling Clinton for five excruciating hours about his s.e.xual liaisons with Lewinsky, the CIA director, George Tenet, provided the president"s national security team with a list of potential al-Qaeda targets. At the top of the list was one of bin Laden"s favorite hideouts, a sprawling jihadi jihadi training complex in eastern Afghanistan"s Khost Province known as Zawar Kili, whence bin Laden had issued his February 23 fatwa. That evening-after insisting for eight months, "I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman"-Clinton appeared on national television to confess, "Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It const.i.tuted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible." training complex in eastern Afghanistan"s Khost Province known as Zawar Kili, whence bin Laden had issued his February 23 fatwa. That evening-after insisting for eight months, "I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman"-Clinton appeared on national television to confess, "Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It const.i.tuted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible."
The day"s salacious revelations generated a paroxysmal flood of media coverage that eclipsed all other news for days, although Clinton insisted none of it influenced his thinking on how best to strike back against bin Laden. Shortly after his televised mea culpa, the president authorized cruise-missile attacks against two terrorist targets: a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan believed by the CIA to have been used by al-Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons; and Zawar Kili-where, according to CIA intelligence, a summit would be held on August 20 between bin Laden and the senior al-Qaeda leadership.
Arrayed across a ten-square-mile maze of twisting ravines and rock-studded ridgelines, Zawar Kili consisted of more than a hundred buildings augmented by seventy limestone caves that had been expanded into elaborate underground bunkers, the largest of which extended the better part of a mile into the side of a mountain. Actually a complex of heavily fortified villages, the so-called training camp was located just north of the Pakistan border, fourteen miles south of Khost City, and twenty miles east of the canyon where Pat Tillman would die six years later.
Zawar Kili was well known to U.S. intelligence a.n.a.lysts. During the Soviet occupation in the 1980s it functioned as an important base for the Americans" mujahideen allies, and numerous CIA officers, diplomats, and Western journalists visited the complex, as had the maverick Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, the man credited with persuading Congress to give billions of dollars in aid to the Afghan mujahideen. Zawar Kili was built by one of the leading recipients of that American munificence, Commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, who had recruited bin Laden to enlarge it for him not long after the latter arrived in Afghanistan. Working together on the Zawar Kili construction initiated a lasting friendship, and Haqqani developed into an important role model for the impressionable Saudi.
Two of the most famous battles between the Soviets and the mujahideen were fought at Zawar Kili. Approximately five hundred hardened Afghan fighters, known as the Zawar Regiment, were permanently based there during the Soviet conflict, and their stronghold was considered a potent symbol of mujahideen invincibility. Eager to deflate this reputation, in September 1985 the Soviets mounted a ma.s.sive attack on Zawar Kili. The battle lasted for forty-two days, and killed or wounded more than 80 percent of the mujahideen fighters. The survivors held their ground against the infidels, however, and the Soviets were eventually forced to concede the battle and withdraw.
In the spring of 1986 the Soviets directed another campaign against Zawar Kili in which jet aircraft fired guided missiles at the entrances to the largest subterranean bunkers. Commander Haqqani and 150 of his fighters were inside one of these caves when a missile made a direct hit on its entrance, trapping the mujahideen behind hundreds of tons of rubble. Other Soviet aircraft carpet bombed the complex soon thereafter, however, and inadvertently blasted away the confining debris, allowing Haqqani and his men to escape unharmed. But after seventeen days of intense fighting, the advanced Soviet weaponry proved to be too much for the mujahideen. With nearly three hundred of their men dead and more than three hundred wounded, they were forced to flee into the surrounding mountains, allowing Soviet and DRA forces to take possession of the complex.
The communists were surprised to find a mosque, bakeries, mechanical shops, a well-stocked library that included CIA bomb-making manuals, and a hotel with comfortable furniture and carpeted floors. There was even a hospital with sophisticated American-made medical equipment. But the Soviets were terrified that a counterattack was imminent, so they held Zawar Kili for only five hours before beating another hasty retreat. Although the Soviets trumpeted their brief occupation as a major victory, Haqqani"s fighters immediately reoccupied the legendary redoubt and did not relinquish it again for the remainder of the war.
Undeterred by its indomitable reputation, on August 20, 1998, the U.S. Navy launched sixty-six Tomahawk cruise missiles at Zawar Kili from warships in the Arabian Sea, more than seven hundred miles away. Christened Operation Infinite Reach, the attack destroyed some twenty or thirty buildings but killed only six jihadis: jihadis: three Yemenis, an Uzbek, an Egyptian, and one Saudi. Neither bin Laden, al-Zawahri, Haqqani, nor any other al-Qaeda leader was among the casualties. As it happened, bin Laden had been en route to Zawar Kili just prior to the attack, and probably would have been present at the time the missiles. .h.i.t if the trip had gone as planned. Upon arriving at a fork in the road midway in the journey, however, he changed his mind on the spur of the moment and asked his driver to take him to Kabul instead of Zawar Kili, a serendipitous turn of events that perhaps saved his life. three Yemenis, an Uzbek, an Egyptian, and one Saudi. Neither bin Laden, al-Zawahri, Haqqani, nor any other al-Qaeda leader was among the casualties. As it happened, bin Laden had been en route to Zawar Kili just prior to the attack, and probably would have been present at the time the missiles. .h.i.t if the trip had gone as planned. Upon arriving at a fork in the road midway in the journey, however, he changed his mind on the spur of the moment and asked his driver to take him to Kabul instead of Zawar Kili, a serendipitous turn of events that perhaps saved his life.
More than thirty of the Tomahawks allegedly came to earth well south of the training camp, on the Pakistan side of the border, killing two Pakistani bystanders. According to unconfirmed reports, a number of the eighteen-foot-long missiles landed without exploding, were salvaged by bin Laden, and were then sold to China for at least $10 million. Even more damaging to American interests, bin Laden"s stature in the Muslim world was enhanced beyond measure by the failed strike. The president of the world"s richest, most technologically advanced nation had taken his best shot at killing bin Laden, and the al-Qaeda leader had survived without a scratch. Like a supervillain in a Marvel comic book, he seemed to be endowed with the ability to absorb the mightiest blows his enemy could deliver, draw energy from them, and become more powerful as a consequence.
Bin Laden gloated in the aftermath of the missile attack, and claimed that it was a ploy by Clinton to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal. His deputy"s reaction was more ominous. "Tell the Americans that we aren"t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression," al-Zawahri warned in an interview with the BBC. "We suffered and survived the Soviet bombings for ten years in Afghanistan, and we are ready for more sacrifices. The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer."
CHAPTER TWELVE.
After Pat was drafted by the Cardinals, he rented an inexpensive one-bedroom apartment in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, less than a mile from the Cardinals" practice fields and training facility. By late August 1998, around the time of the failed missile strike in Afghanistan, he felt sufficiently confident that he would make the team that he suggested to Marie that she come out to Arizona and move in with him. "I had a hard transition moving out there," she says. "It was definitely a big adjustment for me. The problem wasn"t living with Pat; we got along really easily." Her difficulties, she explains, "were more of a typical "postgraduation freak-out" type of thing. I didn"t know anybody. I didn"t particularly like living in Phoenix. I didn"t know what I wanted to do for work."
About nine months after moving, Marie was hired by the local newspaper the Arizona Republic Arizona Republic as a designer. "It was a good job," she says, "but in the group of people I worked with, I was the youngest by far. It was my first real work experience. It was fine, but I was a little disillusioned. Like, "This is it? Why was I in such a hurry to finish college?"" as a designer. "It was a good job," she says, "but in the group of people I worked with, I was the youngest by far. It was my first real work experience. It was fine, but I was a little disillusioned. Like, "This is it? Why was I in such a hurry to finish college?""
Pat had no such qualms about his new job in the National Football League. When he was made the starting free safety in the initial game of the 1998 regular season, he became the first rookie to start at that position for the Cardinals in ten years. Arizona lost its first two games, badly, but Pat played well in both of them, making eighteen tackles and deflecting a pa.s.s. And as the season progressed, the team started to win more games than it lost-something downtrodden Cardinals fans hadn"t experienced in fourteen years.
Learning to play free safety was extremely challenging for Pat, however, primarily because he was frequently required to cover whippet-fast receivers on deep pa.s.s plays, something he hadn"t had to do much as a linebacker. Although he performed well most of the time, occasionally opposing teams took advantage of his inexperience and relative lack of speed to burn him badly on long pa.s.ses downfield. By late November, with five games left in the regular season, the Cardinals were 65. If they could win three of their remaining five games, they would make it to the playoffs for the first time since the strike-shortened year of 1982. Because Pat had made some rookie mistakes, Coach Vince Tobin decided to bench him and start Kwamie La.s.siter for the rest of the season instead, hoping the veteran free safety would give the team a better chance of going to the playoffs. When reporters asked Pat how he felt about losing the starter"s job, his reply was brief, but his disappointment was clear: "I appreciate your concern, but I have nothing to say."
As it happened, the Cardinals lost the next two games, despite replacing Tillman with La.s.siter. But then, with their backs to the wall, the team regained its mojo and won the last three games of the season-two of them via long field goals with no time left on the clock. And, mirabile dictu mirabile dictu, the resulting 97 record was good enough to send the much-maligned Cardinals to the playoffs. A week later, they traveled to Dallas for the NFC wild-card game and stunned the Cowboys by beating them, 207, the first time the Cardinals had won a playoff game since 1947. The dream came to an abrupt end a week after that when they lost to the Minnesota Vikings, but 1998 marked an astonishing turn of fortune for the previously hapless Cardinals, and Pat had contributed much to the success.
He was a good fit with the team, and was comfortable in Arizona, thanks in part to his standing in the local community from his days as a Sun Devil. In April 1999, Pat and Marie bought a house on West Buffalo Street in Chandler. It was nothing lavish: a tidy little faux adobe with sixteen hundred square feet of living s.p.a.ce, a tile roof, yuccas and palm trees in the front yard, and a two-car garage. Pat paid $141,400 for it. "Because of the vagaries of the NFL, we didn"t know how long we"d be in Phoenix," Marie recalls. "The whole time Pat was with the Cardinals, he was only given one-year contracts. But after his first season we thought we"d be there at least another year, and houses were inexpensive compared to what we were used to in the Bay Area, so Pat bought the house."
Despite Pat"s status throughout Arizona as a bona fide celebrity, he and Marie didn"t live like most other players in the NFL, and their existence was notably lacking in the customary trappings. When he started playing for the Cardinals, Pat didn"t even own a car; he rode his bike to work every day. Eventually he bought a used Jeep Cherokee, and later exchanged that for a secondhand Volvo station wagon, but that"s as upscale as he ever got. "The other Cardinals players thought Pat"s beat-up old Volvo was hilarious," remembers Benjamin Hill, Pat"s childhood friend. "His teammates are all driving blinged-out Escalades, and he has this soccer-mom car."
Although Pat"s salary was the minimum allowed under the NFL players" agreement, "it was a lot of money for him coming right out of college," says Marie. "But Pat had always been pretty conservative with money. He was conscious that football wouldn"t last forever. Also, he had an appreciation for hard work and people who worked hard to earn a modest salary. Living extravagantly made him kind of uncomfortable."
Pat stood out from his NFL teammates in other ways as well. When it came to pets, for instance, most football players were "dog guys," but not Tillman, who owned two felines during his years with the Cardinals and was an unabashed "cat person." Tillman even went so far as to try to persuade his friend and teammate Zack Walz of "the superiority of cats over all species." During the off-season, Tillman had reenrolled at ASU to earn a master"s degree in history, which also set him apart. "Because of his schedule he couldn"t attend cla.s.ses on campus," Marie recalls, "so Pat would meet independently with a professor from the history department who gave him a.s.signments and worked with him online."
A few of Pat"s college friends were still in the Phoenix area-most prominently Jake Plummer, who had signed with the Cardinals a year before Pat did. Both Pat and Marie badly missed their friends and family back in California, though. "The friends he made in high school were his best friends, and they stayed his best friends his whole life. Pat hung out with some of the other Cardinals players, and there was a group of wives I would go out with when the players were out of town. But we never really fit in with the NFL lifestyle. It just wasn"t Pat"s thing to go to the clubs in Scottsdale on weekends, or play golf during the off-season, which is what most of the other players did for fun."
Pat"s taste in recreation ran to more adventurous pursuits that held no appeal for his NFL colleagues, who tended to steer clear of leisure activities that might conceivably result in a career-ending injury or worse-at least in part because their contracts generally forbade them to engage in activities such as skiing or skydiving that endangered life and limb. Pat"s contract had such a clause, too, and he was no more eager than his teammates to get hurt or killed. But he relished physical challenges too much to play it safe, contract or no contract.
In the military, when soldiers venture beyond the security of their forward operating bases, which are enclosed by ma.s.sive blast walls topped with concertina wire, they refer to it as "going outside the wire." The term could just as easily serve as a slogan for how Pat lived much of his life. "I think you"ve got to get out of your comfort zone," he once explained to a journalist. "If you"re kind of comfortable all the time-it"s like if you"re skiing and you"re not falling, you"re not trying. I kind of want to push myself. A lot." He believed that to experience personal growth, he had to be willing to take calculated risks. In so doing, he trusted that his strength and athleticism, augmented by good judgment, would keep him from harm. He possessed that trust since before he was even old enough to articulate it.
From the age of three, Pat loved to climb and swing from trees. As he grew older, his fascination with high places led him to scramble on the boulders and crags that bristled from the hills above his home. By high school he and his buddies were amusing themselves by diving off high bridges into rivers and lakes. When he was a homesick seventeen-year-old attending his first Sun Devils training camp in August 1994, he a.s.suaged his loneliness by leaping off a forty-foot cliff he discovered in the hills above the ASU practice fields. Every morning and afternoon the team would a.s.semble for grueling workouts. During the break between training sessions, when most of the players would collapse on their bunks for a couple of hours of rest, Pat would hike alone up to this outcrop and dive repeatedly from its lip into the cool waters of the creek that flowed beneath it.
Not long after cla.s.ses started at ASU that fall, Pat began to make weekly ascents of a light tower that rose two hundred feet above Sun Devil Stadium-not in search of a cheap thrill, but rather for the tranquility he found up there. Far above the din and bustle of the city, he enjoyed collecting his thoughts and taking in the expansive view. The world below was put into perspective. The lofty vantage calmed his mind.
Hanging on the wall of Benjamin Hill"s office is a photograph of him standing with Pat and Jeff Hechtle on a granite ledge in California"s Sierra Nevada, forty feet above the surface of Lake Tahoe. Every summer from 1996 until Pat and Kevin joined the Army in 2002, Hill and his future wife, Jamie; Hechtle and his future wife, Cindy; Pat, Marie, and Kevin Tillman; Hill"s younger brother, Brandon; and an a.s.sortment of their closest friends would vacation together at Tahoe for five or six days. During these cherished gatherings, they would go water-skiing and play endless rounds of Trivial Pursuit, drink a lot of beer, talk all night, decompress. They also engaged in a great deal of cliff diving.
The photo in his office, Hill says, was taken just before he and Hechtle made their first leap from the ledge where they nervously perched. "Pat had just done a jump off the top," Hill remembers. "Jeff and I were trying to get our courage up to do it. There"s a bulge in the cliff you need to clear, and you have to get a good jump off the side or you"ll hit the rock face on the way down." Marie was waiting in a boat below. After they"d been standing on the ledge for about twenty minutes contemplating all that could go wrong, she yelled, "Jump, you p.u.s.s.ies!" These gentle words of encouragement finally shamed them into leaping.
"That particular jump wasn"t a big deal," says Brandon Hill. "It"s not life-or-death. It"s a mental thing. You just have to make up your mind to do it." Pat once even did a backflip off this outcrop. The Hill brothers make clear, however, that Pat also made a number of leaps from other high places where the margin for error was nonexistent. One such leap near Sedona, Arizona, a hundred miles north of Phoenix, was "the craziest thing I"ve ever seen in my life," Brandon recalls. "I still think about it. If I hadn"t witnessed it with my own eyes, I wouldn"t have believed it."
The landscape around Sedona is a phantasmagoria of red sandstone spires and forested ravines offering many ways to recreate. Pat couldn"t get enough of the place and frequently sojourned there during the seven and a half years he lived in Arizona. One afternoon during Pat"s tenure as a Cardinal, he and Kevin went hiking along the rim of Oak Creek Canyon, six miles north of Sedona near Slide Rock State Park. Their route followed the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the creek. As they walked along the brow of the precipice, they pa.s.sed a ponderosa pine growing from a jumble of jagged boulders on the bottom of the canyon about ten or twelve feet away from the vertical cliff face. The ledge on which they stood was level with the upper branches of the pine, and Pat decided it would be an interesting challenge to jump from the ledge to the treetop.
Pat pondered the leap for a while, stepped up to the brink, walked away, stepped up to the lip again, and then walked away once more to contemplate the jump for a while longer. After several long minutes, he approached the edge yet again and then launched himself into the void with all the power he could generate. So much adrenaline was surging through his bloodstream that he jumped harder than necessary, causing him to slam into the tree with excessive force. He held on, but it wasn"t pretty.
Two weeks later, Pat repeated the hike along the rim of Oak Creek Canyon with Kevin, Brandon Hill, and two other friends. When they arrived at the place where Pat had made the death-defying jump, he decided to do it again. He wanted to see if he could execute the maneuver with less effort this time and stick the landing more gracefully.
When Brandon looked at what Pat intended to do, he thought it was insane. The world record for the standing long jump is twelve feet two inches-only slightly farther than the distance from the canyon rim to the top of the pine. If Pat failed to make it all the way across the gap, or did manage to leap that far but didn"t get a solid grip on the tree, he would plummet into the boulders at the bottom, almost certainly killing himself.
Pat, however, was sure that he would avoid these outcomes. He took a moment to eyeball the distance to a strong-looking horizontal branch, and to calculate his trajectory. Then, says Brandon, "he walked up to the edge of the cliff, perfectly composed. His posture was like a gymnast or a diver, only more stable. Most people doing something like that would waver a little. Not Pat. He looked totally in command. In one smooth motion he crouched down, swung his arms, and leapt. Just like that. No hesitation. Didn"t think about it at all. It was unbelievable."
Pat judged the leap perfectly. After flying across the gap, Brandon recalls, "he clamped his big old paws around this eight-inch-thick branch he"d been aiming for. His body swung pretty hard from the momentum, but he didn"t have any trouble holding on. Then he threw a leg up onto the branch and just shinnied down the trunk to the ground like the jump was no big deal. Sometimes I still lie awake at night thinking about it."
As startling as this leap was, it was run-of-the-mill for Pat. Throughout his life he was constantly devising new challenges for himself, many of which were extremely dangerous. "He didn"t do these kinds of things to impress people," says Brandon. "You"d never hear Pat talking about the unbelievable things he pulled off. Any stuff that he did, the only way you"d know about it is if you were right there with him to witness it. He did these things for himself. Most of the time there was n.o.body even around to see him do it."
Benjamin Hill admits that occasionally when he saw Pat testing himself in some crazy fashion, he couldn"t resist admonishing his friend: "Especially during the years he was playing for ASU and the Cardinals, sometimes I"d ask him, "Why are you putting yourself into these situations where you could so easily get hurt, when you know how good things are going for you right now, and how much is at stake? What"s the point?"" The point, Pat would explain to Hill, was that "he felt like he needed to continually challenge himself, physically and mentally, to stay sharp. He"d been doing it his whole life, and believed it"s what had gotten him to where he was. If he stopped seeking out challenges because he was afraid of hurting himself, he felt like he"d lose his edge."
Amazingly, considering all the incautious things he"d done over the years both on and off the football field, Pat had suffered very few injuries. Almost everyone who knew him began to take it for granted that he was virtually indestructible.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
Given the Cardinals" unantic.i.p.ated success in 1998, Arizonans expected great things of their NFL team in 1999. Alas, they were sorely disappointed: the franchise won only six of its sixteen games. For his part, Tillman was relegated to playing on special teams and occasionally coming off the bench as a second-string safety-although he did start the last game of the season after the first-string safety, Tommy Bennett, went down with a serious knee injury.
Despite his backup role and lower profile, the 1999 season was a positive experience for Pat, in large part because the coaches switched him from the free-safety position to strong safety, a move that suited his talents. As a strong safety he had to worry less about covering superfast wide receivers going deep, and could concentrate more on stopping short pa.s.ses and running plays, which favored the reflexes he"d honed as a linebacker. Stung by his demotion to second string, he trained harder than ever. He also benefited tremendously from having a year in the NFL under his belt. One of his problems as a rookie had been his overeagerness-his tendency to try to be part of every play and make every tackle. As a consequence he would sometimes be too quick to react and get fooled by misdirection plays. During his second year he learned to rely more on his intelligence instead of raw intensity, which reaped huge dividends. After the final game of the season-a lopsided loss to Green Bay on January 2, 2000-Pat was already looking forward to playing again in the fall, and was determined to hang on to the starter"s job he"d won at the end of 1999 by default.
The 2000 off-season, like all off-seasons, "wasn"t easy for Pat," says Marie. "He would get restless sometimes. He wasn"t the type to golf or hang around the house. He liked to be productive with his time off. I think that"s part of why he entered the marathon. It gave him something to work toward and accomplish in the off-season."
Pat had registered to enter the Avenue of the Giants Marathon, held the first week of May in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, just south of Eureka on the far north coast of California. Never having run a race of that distance, he asked for advice from Perry Edinger, who had been the head athletic trainer at ASU when Pat played football for the Sun Devils. Edinger put together a detailed training schedule for him, tailored to fit a five-week vacation through western Europe Pat and Marie had planned to begin on March 6.
Pat had never been across the Atlantic, and a journal he kept throughout the trip reveals his fascination and unjaded delight upon experiencing even the most mundane aspects of European culture. Despite the rigors of travel, he managed to go for a run almost every morning. When he set out for his predawn workout in Paris on the third day of the journey, the doors leading out of the hotel were locked, he wrote, "so I was forced to escape through the second story window to be on my way.... My route took me along the Seine River all the way to the Eiffel Tower and back. It was quite the experience to be soaking up that much of Paris so early in the morning. When I returned, the Frenchy at the hotel was giving me a hard time about the window deal. I pretty much just blew him off and returned to my room to get ready for the day. There was no need to bounce Frenchy off the walls after such a fine jog."
As Pat and Marie rambled through Germany, he made it his mission to sample every variety of local beer and sausage he came across, and then offered an a.s.sessment of each in his journal. In Munich, he raved about the spicy Bratwurst Bratwurst and reacted favorably to a and reacted favorably to a Schweinwurst Schweinwurst, but upon having his first taste of an almost raw Weisswurst Weisswurst, he observed, "The texture was soft and taste not particularly noteworthy.... Before I even left the table my stomach was screaming. Marie had to carry my a.s.s back to our room." Pat"s dedication to evaluating the local food and drink was such that he even felt compelled to critique the offerings of a McDonald"s they patronized in the Berner Oberland region of Switzerland. After seeing a baffling item called a McFu Burger on the menu, he wrote, "I had to have it." It turned out to be "just your standard quarter-pounder-type burger, minus the cheese, plus oriental sauce with lettuce and crazy carrot pieces and what have you. It was delicious. My hat is off to the McFu."
A day later, in Interlaken, he was out on his daily run when he encountered a trail posted with signs warning that the route was closed and access was forbidden-which proved to be an irresistible draw. "Downed trees were all over the path," he wrote, "forcing me to do some nice maneuvers to get through. This of course only enhanced the enjoyment of the run and soon I was off the trail and along the brilliant turquoise river."
Pat loved turning encounters with natural obstacles-boulders, rivers, fallen logs-into makeshift sport. "Out of the blue, he would always come up with creative ways to challenge himself," says his friend Alex Garwood, who is married to Marie"s older sister, Christine. Garwood remembers once going on a hike with Pat near Sedona when Pat suggested they abandon the trail and instead make their way down the middle of Oak Creek by jumping from rock to rock: Pat wanted to see how far he could go without getting his feet wet. We went at least a couple of miles that way. My feet got very wet, very soon. I slipped and fell in repeatedly. He didn"t get his feet wet at all. And it was so fun to watch. He not only demonstrated exceptional athletic ability, but brains to match. It was almost like a chess game to him: thinking it through, planning his moves in advance, jumping from rock to rock, rock to bank, bank to tree branch to log to rock. Making these incredibly long, incredibly graceful jumps. And having the trust that he could do it. He had amazing balance-there was a way he"d move his hands to keep his balance that was distinctively Pat.
After Switzerland, Pat and Marie made stops in Venice, Florence, and Rome. On the coast of northern Italy they visited Cinque Terre, where Pat scrambled up the sea cliffs in Monterosso. "Because I hadn"t climbed in a while," he admitted, "I felt a bit nervous on some of the rocks." They paused for a couple of days on the French Riviera, which he thought was overrated. In Monaco, he wrote, one could sense the proximity of "big money but you also feel like the party is hidden somewhere.... Maybe my blue-collarness is getting the better of me here." Of Cannes, he remarked, "Perhaps I was expecting a bit too much.... Was it wrong to expect spectacular beaches?...Was it wrong to expect hotties everywhere, or at least every now and again?"
By March 25, Pat and Marie had returned to Paris to rendezvous with Christine and Alex Garwood, who had flown over from California to accompany them for the final two weeks of the trip. After worrying about how pricey the city was, Pat wrote, "Expensive or not, Marie and I should enjoy Paris with the company of Alex and Chris. Marie and I have done a pretty good job of staying off each other"s throats but the extra travelers should give Marie a much needed break from me.... Naturally, the trip has a way of bringing us very close together while also getting us ultra p.i.s.sed-off at one another. Needless to say I have truly enjoyed Marie"s company and conversation. Hopefully she feels the same.... Hopefully."
The next journal entry begins: It wasn"t my fault! Blame Alex.... Blame Paris.... Oh Lord!! I got f.u.c.king hammered last night. Beyond hammered...Because we were in Paris, the ladies wanted a nice dinner. Little did they know what they were in for.... The restaurant was small and quaint. Jazz played in the background and the help was real cool. A cheese dish and mushroom concoction made up our appetizers...the mushroom deal was unbelievable. Unfortunately, with the appetizers came the vino.For dinner I had lamb, which kicked a.s.s. All of our food was excellent with great sauces.... Our conversation was humming, and as the wine was poured it got louder and louder. For dessert the ladies had creme brulee and Alex a brownie. I opted for more wine.Now things start to get hazy. Alex and I are getting obnoxious as we get drunk. Like usual, I am swearing up a storm and as Marie tells it, the people around us are not pleased. We are not kicked out, but were politely cut off and went on our way. They were really cool and didn"t get p.i.s.sed but were happy to see us leave.
Remembering that night, Christine Garwood issues a bemused sigh and then elaborates: "A girlfriend of Marie"s had been to Paris, and she said we should go to this restaurant. It was a tiny place. When we first got there, n.o.body was there but us. The waitress was from New Zealand, I think, or Australia. At one point she said something like, "Oh yeah, the last Americans who were here drank two carafes of wine per person." So of course Alex and Pat took that as a challenge, and the wine started to flow.
"We were there for several hours. We had some good banter going back and forth with the waitress. The chef came out to chat with us. It was really fun, and the wine kept coming. Pat and Alex had had enough to drink and they started to get loud, and by that time the place had filled up." Two French couples at the table next to them made it clear that the Americans" increasingly raucous behavior had ceased to be amusing. "The waitress and the host were really nice about it," says Christine, "but finally they indicated that Pat and Alex were getting a little crazy and it might be time for Marie and I to get the guys out of there. They were so cool to us. They were like, "Okay, you had a great dinner, why don"t you go take a walk now.""
As they were strolling back to their hotel, Pat, goofing around, grabbed the iron grate covering the entrance to a closed storefront and started yanking on it, hard, making a racket that attracted the attention of a pa.s.serby, a Frenchman who glowered at the Americans to communicate his disapproval. Pat stared right back and drunkenly declaimed, "Don"t forget that if it wasn"t for us, you"d all be speaking German now." With his view of American boorishness thus confirmed, the satisfied Frenchman departed without further incident, and Marie managed to get Pat moving again in the direction of their accommodations, a tiny room in an inexpensive pension.
When they arrived, Pat immediately pa.s.sed out next to Marie in one of the two twin beds. Not long after he retired, however, his head started to spin, and he was overcome with the sudden urge to expel the contents of his stomach. Fortunately, he managed to lean his head over the side of the mattress before vomiting; unfortunately, Marie"s open rucksack was resting on the floor beside the head of the bed. "He threw up into her backpack," says Christine, "and his puke was red red. There was nothing in his stomach but wine. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Marie cleaned it up. She was not happy about it. She had only brought a few T-shirts and a couple of pairs of pants for the whole trip. And now everything she had was stained red. Actually, it was sort of funny. We laughed about it.
"Pat was a handful," Christine continues. "That"s the word my sister used to describe him. She totally loved Pat-we all loved Pat-but he was definitely a handful. During the off-season he"d have people over to their house in Arizona-Kevin, my cousin Frank, friends visiting from Almaden-and they"d stay up until all hours. They"d be extremely loud, even though she"d be sleeping in the next room and would have to get up and go to work the next day. She"d scream and yell a little, then eventually give up: "Okay, whatever." She realized that Pat"s rambunctiousness was an essential part of who he was, and there wasn"t a lot she could do about it, even if sometimes she wanted to."
Although Pat acknowledged in his journal that he overindulged during their grande soiree Parisienne grande soiree Parisienne, he expressed no regrets about the evening. "We top the night off with Alex pa.s.sed out on the bed and me puking all over the room," he wrote. "Well, I had a great time, and so did Alex. The girls perhaps could have done without the puke and obnoxiousness, but they"ll get over it and I know they had a good time for most of it. The good outweighed the bad. For me however, there was no bad...until morning rolled around."
One of the sacred tenets of Pat"s moral code was that it"s unacceptable to let a hangover interfere with one"s duties and commitments. According to Pat"s training regimen, such commitments included a short but early run. "Because of last night"s antics," Pat wrote of the run, "this morning was rougher than it had to be. Alex and I had an hour run planned and we didn"t want to miss it. Because of my puking I was actually fine. Alex, on the other hand, was a mess, getting through the run purely on guts, his body worthless. Fortunately we finished it and got the day off to a good start. It would have set a bad precedent letting the drinking get the better of us."
Hammered, trashed, s.h.i.t faced, plastered, buzzed, polluted, pickled. Regardless of the terminology, Tillman loved to get intoxicated with good friends. He enjoyed almost everything about getting drunk, in fact: the sound of the Guinness going blub-blub-blub blub-blub-blub into the gla.s.s; the shedding of cares; the heightened sense of interpersonal connection; the swelling euphoria; the way it caused the music to bore a hole through one"s skull; the giddy, fleeting glimpse it seemed to provide into the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. When Pat was lit, recalls Alex, "he"d throw his head back, his eyes would turn into these little slits, and he"d let loose with this booming laugh. Then his arms would shoot out wide, knocking beers over, and he"d act like it was the funniest thing he"d ever seen. But his laugh was so infectious you"d be laughing, too. And if you were in a restaurant and the people at the next table were not happy about the noise, he"d look over at them and be, like, "I have no idea why you aren"t laughing, too, because this is really funny." into the gla.s.s; the shedding of cares; the heightened sense of interpersonal connection; the swelling euphoria; the way it caused the music to bore a hole through one"s skull; the giddy, fleeting glimpse it seemed to provide into the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. When Pat was lit, recalls Alex, "he"d throw his head back, his eyes would turn into these little slits, and he"d let loose with this booming laugh. Then his arms would shoot out wide, knocking beers over, and he"d act like it was the funniest thing he"d ever seen. But his laugh was so infectious you"d be laughing, too. And if you were in a restaurant and the people at the next table were not happy about the noise, he"d look over at them and be, like, "I have no idea why you aren"t laughing, too, because this is really funny."
"Being with Pat was the best," Alex continues, his voice turning wistful. "The drinking was better, the conversation was better, the laughter was better-everything in life was just better when he was part of it."
Although imbibing was certainly one of Tillman"s great pleasures, his favorite beverage wasn"t alcoholic. It was coffee, which ran through his life like the Ganges runs through India, lending commonality to disparate experiences and far-flung points of the compa.s.s. And although Pat delighted in the rituals a.s.sociated with coffee-grinding the beans, mashing down the plunger on a French press, perusing the menu at espresso stands-the coffee itself was really just a lubricant, a catalyst, a means to a particular end, which was stimulating conversation.
Marie agrees. "He loved to have people around," she remembers. "He loved conversation. When we"d get together with our good friends-the friends we"ve had since Almaden-by the end of the night Pat was often the last guy talking. Or if he was tired, he would, like, lay down on the floor, but he would insist that everyone else keep talking, keep the conversation going. Then he would just lie there, listening to his friends" voices."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
A month after Pat and Marie returned from Europe, Pat drove from Arizona to northern California to compete in the Avenue of the Giants Marathon, and on May 7 ran 26.2 miles through Humboldt County"s majestic, dripping redwoods, finishing in three hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-eight seconds, good enough for 170th place in a field of 666. He was the only player in the NFL to complete a marathon that year.
Training for long-distance running, as it happens, doesn"t help a great deal with the maximum intensity, start-and-stop, largely anaerobic demands of playing professional football. But Pat had been working hard in the weight room as well as on running trails. When he arrived in Flagstaff on July 21 for the start of the Cardinals" training camp, he was stronger than he"d ever been, and weighed less than he had since high school, having resolved to raise his play to the highest possible level.
Writing the first entry in the journal he"d decided to keep throughout the 2000 football season, Pat p.r.o.nounced, "This year is a huge year. This year will decide whether I am a starter, contributing the way I want, or be stuck in a special teams/nickel/backup role for the remainder of my career. The opportunity has been given to me, I"m prepared both physically and mentally, it is all up to me. Huge f.u.c.king year, man." Explaining his reasons for journaling (something he had never done during previous football seasons), he added, "1) This is a pivotal year for me and by taking the time to put down my thoughts I might just help myself. 2) I think in the future it will be a good thing to have, both to learn from and laugh at. 3) After keeping my journal in Europe, I learned to enjoy it. I realize it"s no good but it"s still fun to put your thoughts together.... Practice starts tomorrow."
Playing the safety position, Pat confided in his journal, "is still kind of new to me" and is "more mental" than playing linebacker. "For me, it has taken some time to believe I can cover receivers (don"t get me wrong; it will never be my strong suit). At linebacker I never doubted my speed or coverage because I had no reason to. At safety I have had to learn how to do it. It"s an ongoing process but I feel much more comfortable than the last two years. I really believe I can be a top safety in this league.... To get to where I want to be I need to constantly prove myself. I cannot give the coaches any reason to think someone else should be playing.... Every day, every play, just f.u.c.king concentrate."
As he almost always did, Pat accomplished what he set out to do, impressed the coaches at training camp, and by the final game of the 2000 preseason-in San Diego on August 25-Pat had secured the starting strong-safety job. Like most of the starters, he didn"t play much in that last exhibition match before the regular season. "The best part of the game," he wrote, "was the time I got to spend with Ma, Nub, Pooh,"* and the dozen or so other supporters who"d driven down from the Bay Area to watch him play. "It was nice to see everyone after the game, even if it was for a short while. My sources tell me there was high drama going on in the stands: Puking, fighting, yelling, etc. My friends and family clearly brought the thunder I was hoping for.... and the dozen or so other supporters who"d driven down from the Bay Area to watch him play. "It was nice to see everyone after the game, even if it was for a short while. My sources tell me there was high drama going on in the stands: Puking, fighting, yelling, etc. My friends and family clearly brought the thunder I was hoping for....
"The season is now ready to begin. This week I plan on spending a s.h.i.tload of time watching film and preparing for Sunday," when the Cardinals would play the Giants in New York. "Hopefully we"ll force the Giants to throw the ball so I can come down with [an interception].... One thing I will concentrate on is putting my face on people. The last couple of games I"ve not made the plays I should. Sunday I"m going off.... I am really f.u.c.king excited to get this season going. It"s incredibly important I start off with a bang."
As it happened, the official 2000 football season did begin dramatically for Tillman, but not in the way he"d envisioned. The Giants, who would finish that season with a 145 record and go all the way to the Super Bowl, were one of the best teams in the NFL. The Cardinals were among the most awful. The game, to put it charitably, was a mismatch. The worst moment for Tillman came in the second quarter. With the Giants back on their twenty-two-yard line, New York"s running back Tiki Barber took the handoff from quarterback Kerry Collins, darted through a hole on the right side of the line, and accelerated into the open field. Tillman, positioned perfectly to stop him, dived to make the tackle. Barber danced out of the way, however, causing Tillman to fall on his face, and then galloped seventy-eight yards for a Giants touchdown, the longest run of his career. New York ended up beating the Cardinals, 2116.