Pat Tillman film a haunting blindside - Los Angeles Times
I have never quite gotten the Pat Tillman story out of my system. Only now am I understanding why.
It has been six years and two days since he died, his head blown off amid a pile of rocks on the side of a hill in Afghanistan, killed by guys on his own team, other U.S. soldiers. After lying about it, the military eventually called it friendly fire and treated it as a mistake. Horrible, yes, they said. But a mistake.
He was a football hero, a star safety for the Arizona Cardinals. Before that, he was a free spirit linebacker at Arizona State, whose hair flowed out of his helmet and whose tackles left physical and mental imprints.
When he walked away from a fat pro contract to become a soldier, fighting in the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan, we all swooned. What a guy, what a hero, what a story.
We are so used to pro athletes being incapable of gazing beyond their own navels, unable to fathom anything of importance beyond their next contract and ensuing trip to the jewelry store, that we couldn’t get enough of Tillman. Journalism celebrates the unusual, and this sure was.
Like other writers in the West, I had a head start. I had been face to face with Tillman, had met him, had a feel for him. Once, after an otherwise unmemorable UCLA-Arizona State game, my postgame question, as we walked along, brought him to a stop. I had danced around something controversial and he did what no other athlete, before or since, has done. He called me on it.
“That’s not what you really want to know,” he said. “Ask it again.”
For the record: An earlier version of this column said Pat Tillman had been “murdered by guys on his own team,” which was subsequently changed to “killed by guys on his own team” to match the version that appeared in the print edition. I did, this time straight to the point. He answered the same way. I was now a Pat Tillman fan. Veteran scribe learns from long-haired linebacker.I laughed when he was taken near the end of the NFL draft and the babblers at ESPN assured all that he was too small to make it. They had likely never talked to him, certainly never been hit by him.
I loved the stories about him riding his bike to training camp and, when he drove, parking his junky old car next to the Beemers and Mercedes in the team lot.