25,000 Miles to Glory: Football, Freedom, Friendship, And America

Mary

INTRODUCTION

Steve Sabol, Hail Mary, and a

Dream

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

– Samuel Johnson

There are few things that set my mind at ease and force me to live in the moment more than driving my 1967 VW Bus. I affectionately named her Hail Mary, and since the first time I ever laid eyes on her she has woven herself into the very fabric of my soul.

Far from my home in Texas, I found myself driving through rural, western New York after experiencing a Buffalo Bills game first-hand. I could not help but let a slight grin invade both my face and spirit as I drove through the rolling hills, which were spotted by livestock that reminded me of the Texas that I missed so much while traveling the country. Driving into a sunset on a simple, two-lane road with a few fellow travelers was the canvas that life had painted for me and I was more content than I had been in a very long time, maybe ever.

Going down a hill, the cars in front of Hail Mary were quickly approaching so I applied the brakes. My idea was to slow down, but she had other plans. The brake pedal got stuck and needed to be pried off the floorboard, but I pressed down on the pedal again hoping to awaken from the nightmare that was quickly becoming my reality. Again, the pedal stuck to the floor. The emergency brake was useless and most likely had been dormant for most of the forty-six years of Hail Mary’s existence. I scanned the scenic landscape I had enjoyed just moments before, looking for a place to safely crash her.

What kind of life experience brings someone to the point of driving a nearly fifty-year-old vehicle into a cornfield and hoping for the best crash possible, and how did that someone become me?

I had just turned forty and my life had reached a fork in the road. As the great New York Yankee, Yogi Berra advised: When you reach a fork in the road, take it. So I did, little knowing that the fork would lead me to my current predicament of racing down a two-lane road in western New York in a 1967 VW Bus without any brakes.

My misery had company in the form of two other football fans, Grayson and Eric who, the month before, joined me as we set out to conquer the National Football League (NFL)—one stadium at a time for seventeen consecutive weeks—while filming a documentary about the entire experience. I had even managed to convince NFL Films to work with us on the project. But now, not even halfway into the adventure, we found ourselves challenging our own mortality, thanks in no small part to Hail Mary.

Driving an automobile without brakes is definitely a unique experience and, ironically, when time is of the essence your mind has the ability to question your entire existence on Earth in just a few seconds: Is this what the road less travelled really looks like? Who thought this was a good idea? Why am I here? Where is here? How did I get here and how can I get out of here alive? I would soon have the answers to all of those questions.

Before buying Hail Mary I was clinging to a monotonous, regimented, mundane existence of being relegated to a nobody. My uninspired life was not what I had signed up for or dreamed about as a child, and I was determined more than ever to do something substantial with my life; to make something happen and to fulfill those promises and dreams I had as a child. I was longing to put miles on my soul. This was supposed to be my moment of glory, but first I had to find a way to stay alive and prevent Hail Mary from careening off the road.

Tom Landry, legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, said football is as important to Texas as religion is to a priest. Respectfully, I think he underestimated the importance of football. I grew up in Texas and more than willingly embraced most every aspect of being a Texan, including, and perhaps most of all, being a die-hard football fan. Texans are indoctrinated to football early and often—it has become almost a parental obligation or a birthright in the Lone Star state, where learning to throw a spiral goes hand-in-hand with learning how to walk.

My first recollection and most vivid memory of my room growing up is of the small pennants adorning the walls. Not those of just my team, the Dallas Cowboys, but of every team in the NFL. The five-year-old version of me would drift into a dream while gazing up at the logos emblazoned on the sides of the helmets. I burned up most of my days as a child dreaming of those places and stadiums, even pretending to be a professional football player. The family couch was the offensive line and my living room was the stadium that came alive through my television every Sunday in the fall. Those cities and teams were distant, almost mythological places, and to a young football fan the actual stadiums were little more than ideas to fill an imagination fertile for everything football.

The long street I lived on as a child was more than adequate as a stadium, and the other kids in the neighborhood consistently provided enough players to competitively field two teams. Most of the time there was a clear demarcation of who was on which team and the teams rarely changed, allowing me to build up a significant animosity toward the players of the opposing team. As a Cowboys fan, I dismissed the other team’s players as being on the Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants or, perhaps worst of all, the Washington Redskins. They simply were on the wrong side of the fence and I was determined to push them through the fence if the score of the game necessitated such action.

The games and players I saw on television were emulated in the neighborhood contests fought on my street and in various backyards. Because Austin, Texas, rarely had a significant amount of snowfall at any one time, the legendary cold-weather games in places like Denver, New England, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati were difficult for us to emulate. In January 1985 that changed, if only for a week. We received nearly eight inches of snow over a few days, but making a snowman or snow angels never entered my thought process. It was all about football and, finally, we would get to play in the snow. Our overzealous parents, who insisted several coats be worn, provided the best defense that had been played in years. Although points were at a premium, we had our snow game and it would be talked about in our neighborhood with the same reverence and conviction as the Ice Bowl.

Most of my school pictures in the elementary years, or at least the ones I could control, were taken of me wearing some sort of football uniform. My lunchbox was metal with the helmet of every NFL team on it. Tony Dorsett, the Hall of Fame running back for the Dallas Cowboys, was there to open the new mall in Austin and so was I. My brother and I waited in line for what seemed like an eternity to a young football fan for him to sign our photo. You look tired, he said when we got to him. Anything for you, Mr. Dorsett, I said, in shock that this was The Tony Dorsett and he was talking to me.

I learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide using the number seven first because touchdowns were easy for me to calculate. The number three was next because of field goals and was followed by six, which were touchdowns without the extra point. I gambled on my first football game in sixth grade, picking the Dolphins to beat the Bears because I could not bring myself to bet against Dan Marino on Monday Night Football. It was the only game the Bears lost that year.

Somewhere along the way my life had subconsciously become more about football than anything else. I would not have stopped it even had I been aware of my obsession that sometimes teetered on being completely irrational. At first I was only irrational during Dallas Cowboys games. Then, with the advent of fantasy football and having to watch my players as well as all the players on the opposing team, I became irrational during every NFL game. Actually, delusional may be a better word for it: I truly believed that I had an impact on the players and games, or the success or failure of my fantasy football team. During the football season I would often leave my office in downtown Austin and walk the five blocks to Fed-Ex Kinko’s to change my fantasy lineup only to return a few hours later to change it back.

My inability—or unwillingness—to conform to what society expected from adulthood, my delusional sense of self-importance within the world of football, and that youth who grew up wanting to go to football games in far-away places got me dreaming. Not just dreaming, but believing that I could go to every NFL stadium. While sanity would dictate I needed to spread out the thirty-one stadiums over years and travel largely by air, dreams are not usually sane. If you have a dream, why not go big?

With that in mind, it was clear that I needed to do all thirty-one stadiums in one year—not ten—and not use a plane to get from game to game. The appropriate vehicle for the trip of a lifetime needed to have extraordinary character to match the size of the dream in my heart. An RV is cliché, and using a modern automobile would dilute the challenge to a large extent. If this was going to happen I needed to include a flair for the dramatic, add some panache, and an element of danger to my circumventing the country in the name of football. This dream would require the services of an air-cooled, 1967 Volkswagen Bus.

CHAPTER 1

A Leprechaun and a King

Denver, San Francisco and San Diego

(Three stadiums and 2,683 miles)

If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.

– Dan Rather

My friend and co-dreamer, Grayson, found a camera guy who was willing to take the adventure with us. He had worked with him before, but it was not the same crew I hired to film us at the Super Bowl. Actually, it was not a crew at all, rather it was a single guy who needed to work audio, video, and anything else that might come up on the road. The new camera guy was young and somewhat experienced, and had a very expensive Red camera—easily the most expensive piece of equipment in use for the documentary, including Hail Mary. As great as having a high-end camera was, the man behind the camera was not as reliable as we needed for such a production.

Three days before we left, Grayson decided a change was necessary. I told him it was his call and if he wanted to go a different direction to just lead the way. I was not as convinced as he was that we would be able find someone willing to leave their current life in three days to ride in a forty-five-year-old vehicle for four months with little in the way of creature comforts, including pay. Before I could figure out how to film a documentary without a cameraman Grayson managed to find someone else.

That someone was Eric. He lived in Conroe, Texas, which is just outside of Houston. After making the two-hour drive to Austin, Eric landed on my doorstep with his wife and mother who turned around and headed back to Conroe after meeting Grayson and me and saying goodbye to Eric.

He had quit his full-time job to go on this trip. His willingness to fulfill his dream of producing a documentary by leaving behind the structure that a job, house, wife, and dog provided, was a positive sign to me. He was friendly with a nervous energy surrounding him. That was understandable—we all had a nervous energy about us, including our wives, mothers, and significant others. He also wore a New York Giants cap, but he was originally from New Jersey, making the cap excusable. He was quite a bit larger than Grayson and me, which made riding in Hail Mary a challenge for him, but he never balked at the idea of spending four months in tight quarters. Eric was opinionated and proud of being from New Jersey, but I was equally as proud to point out that he moved to Texas as quickly as he could. I also shared my take on the Giants quarterback, Eli Manning, less than fifteen minutes into the trip. Eric did not share my assessment of Manning being finished as a good quarterback in the NFL, and was just as eager to express his thoughts on the Dallas quarterback, Tony Romo, and the Cowboys. The Giants and Manning would prove me right as their season was over before the calendar reached the end of October. The Cowboys and Romo waited until December to prove Eric right.

My imagination, which often pushes the boundaries of reality, was fertile with ideas of how the documentary of our trip would look and feel, but there was never any hesitation that Hail Mary would be front and center. I believed she would help people identify with us and what we hoped to accomplish. I figured it should be obvious that we were just like millions of NFL fans: Just three ordinary guys traveling the country to every NFL stadium.

Who could not relate to us or, at the very least, relate to having a dream and actually living it? Being relatable was important to me because I wanted to make a film that inspired others and in some small way make the world a better place through the realizations of their dreams. I saw Hail Mary as possibly being the main character, because, although she has many flaws, she also has as many, if not more, endearing qualities. For reasons unknown to me, people are enamored with a split-window VW Bus. To put it simply Hail Mary has IT—whatever IT is.

One day when I was a teenager I jumped into our backyard swimming pool while snow was falling. As soon as I hit the water, I started moving with the desperation of a fugitive to get out. I guess at that age our brains have not fully developed and, after considering everything we can consider, we think to ourselves, this should work. That is exactly what happened the previous Halloween when I purchased a smoke machine because, if for no other reason, on Dallas Cowboys game days I could start it up outside the living room doorway and, wearing my Troy Aikman jersey, run through the smoke to my seat. I believed the smoke machine would take my game watching to the next level. Once again, I considered everything I could and thought this should work. Funny thing about a smoke machine is that even though it is not real smoke it will set off a smoke detector. Regardless, I was undeterred in making ample use of the smoke machine throughout the year.

I envisioned the opening scene of the documentary as a tight shot of the VW logo on the front of Hail Mary with smoke rising, then a wide shot of her emerging from a plume of smoke—like Darth Vader at the beginning of Star Wars. We loaded Hail Mary with all the essentials needed to live on the road for the next seventeen weeks and placed the smoke machine directly underneath. With both garage doors closed, I pressed the red button on the remote and smoke began to fill the garage. My only thought was that this must look totally awesome and will be even better on camera. The dream of creating a documentary was about to begin and we were about to launch Hail Mary into the world! We raised the garage door, but before it could open enough for her to see the light of day all of the smoke escaped. Despite our best efforts and a less than well-thought-out tactical plan, we would not be launching Hail Mary into the world—at least not through a cloud of smoke.

We did not even make it out of my driveway before having our first issue with Hail Mary. The back would not close, so we quickly took ourselves to Vintage Wizards to see our mechanic, John. As he was fixing the latch on the back, Grayson asked him the worst thing he had ever seen happen to a VW Bus. John smiled and started to laugh under his breath, almost in disbelief of the question. He repeated the question back to us to verify that his ears had not betrayed him and that Grayson had indeed asked the worst thing he had ever seen happen to a VW Bus. His answer struck fear into the hearts of us all and made a childhood episode of a VW Bug catching fire an indelible episode in my life.

John, with a slight grin, told us the worst thing he had seen happen to a VW Bus was that it had caught on fire. Before we could respond to his initial comment, he warned us that if Hail Mary did catch fire we should grab all of our stuff while we could because we were not going to be able to put it out. … catch on fire and it’s gone, John’s exact words would haunt me for the next four months.

The other piece of advice John gave us was to take it slow, try to drive at night, and do not push it too hard. Being that we were already behind schedule on Day One because of the ninety-minute detour we had to make for our first issue with Hail Mary, we were going to have to push it to stay on schedule. I would learn later in the trip that sometimes in life you are forced to push your VW Bus to get it started, but to make a VW Bus do something it does not want to do or that exceeds its capabilities is an exercise in futility.

I also learned that the efficiency of travel is inversely related to the ability to connect with people. Evidently, Hail Mary liked to connect with people, because she was anything but efficient.

John’s advice was counterintuitive. The last thing I wanted to do was break down at night and have to sleep in Hail Mary until morning when, hopefully, we could find help to get us back on the road. On our way out of Austin we stopped at a grocery store to pick up some food for the road, since being already behind meant skipping a meal or two to stay on schedule.

About fifteen miles outside of Austin we were greeted with a light drizzle that served to cool us off in the otherwise unforgiving Texas heat. Not a storm, but enough to get the ground wet and form the occasional puddle on the road. Along with the drizzle came a peculiar noise emanating from the front passenger tire, or maybe it was the windshield wipers, or really God knows where. My heart sank and I alerted my passengers that fifteen miles into the trip we had an issue. The mood in Hail Mary became more serious, but not dire. At least we were not on fire.

I turned off the windshield wipers and waited to hear the noise. The noise waited, toying with our emotions before returning with the wipers off. Since it was not the wipers, it must be the tire, so I pulled over to the side of the road. Everyone emerged from Hail Mary and gave their certified approval that the tire met the standards of three people who had no clue about vehicles, much less the tires on a ’67 VW Bus. With all of us in agreement, we reclaimed our places in Hail Mary and began making our way to what we hoped was Denver.

We drove as far as we could the first day, which was Lubbock, Texas. The 373-mile drive had been filled with disappointment and not much else. The food we brought with us was already gone, so we agreed to stop at the Chic-Fil-A across from the Texas Tech football stadium. College kids do not have the same appreciation for a VW Bus as the rest of the population, so we went largely unnoticed. I remember sitting in a booth and gazing out the window at Hail Mary who was looking as exhausted as her crew. Seeing the thousands of bugs that now lay silent across her nose, I thought to myself, This is going to be a long trip. From the looks of her, she seemed to share the sentiment.

As glamorous as people may make this trip out to be, our hotels and overnight accommodations were anything but glamorous. The Best Western in Lubbock provided temporary shelter from the harsh elements of a Texas summer as well as a calmness that was a welcome relief from the constant movement a VW Bus generously provides. The room had little else in the way of creature comforts, but we were grateful to be on the road to meeting our destiny. The Best Western may have been the most expensive and nicest motel we stayed at the entire trip, but we needed the best accommodations we could afford since that may have prevented any one of us from suggesting driving back to Austin and forgetting this whole thing ever happened, and another one of us agreeing with him.

Making up time in a VW Bus is like driving in reverse to take miles off an odometer—it just does not happen. Despite our best efforts, we were still about two hours behind schedule, and because the September heat in Texas is debilitating, I honestly did not know if Hail Mary and her passengers were going to make it out of the state. While each of us was experiencing his own degree of discomfort, Hail Mary was suffering the most, which led to a side benefit to having to stop often to let a VW Bus cool down; getting to see more of where you are.

At first it was a frustrating necessity, but eventually provided some unforgettable experiences. Then the days either began to get shorter or the miles began to get longer, because soon enough we found ourselves in Colorado, driving at night, just like our mechanic John had suggested.

We have hills in Central Texas, not mountains, and other than skiing in New Mexico, my time spent in mountains was sparse at best. I definitely do not remember anything that would have prepared me to drive a vehicle that struggles to go sixty miles an hour on a straightaway into the heart of some of the highest mountain ranges in the United States.

Our inability to efficiently climb mountains provided adequate time to not only enjoy the view but to read the road signs. I began to notice that one sign, in particular, made a frequent appearance along the roadside. To me it read in an ominous tone that, come late December, snow chains would be required on our heroic trip from Seattle to Dallas. Not optional—mandatory. The signs muffled the grandiose dream I had of leading a parade at a Cowboys game to finish the tour around the NFL. We would need to address the schedule as soon as we could because putting chains on Hail Mary in hopes of not sliding off the mountain was not a particularly appealing way to spend the last days of our trip, or even perhaps the last few moments of our lives. For now, Denver was calling, so the schedule and tire chains would have to wait.

During the first two days of the trip the road won. If our travels had been a football game we would have lost 63-0. I do not think any of us had signed up for a trip like our first couple of days—I know I had not.

The toll riding in a VW Bus takes on a body is something I had not fully experienced or was anticipating, so I know it came to the other two as an extreme shock. Down, but not out, we saw the lights of Denver, Colorado, on the horizon and, just like a thoroughbred at the Kentucky Derby going down the backstretch, we began to give Hail Mary a little extra push.

The Today show crew was in Denver for the kickoff of the season and our cameraman Eric had a contact. Al Roker likes your story and wants to meet you guys tomorrow at four o’clock in the morning at Sports Authority Field, was the reply to the message he had sent the contact. In hindsight, the likelihood of Al even knowing about us was like expecting Hail Mary to win the Indy 500. Nevertheless, we got a huge boost to our morale when we needed it most, which made the inevitable letdown of the Today show worth it.

I had obviously never been on Today and was more than a little excited. Our perceived good fortune was proof that if you dare to live your dreams, great things will happen! We called everyone we knew to tell them to watch the Today show the next morning. The VW Bus was buzzing with excitement and we could feel the energy from everyone back home who were rightfully concerned that things might not work out in our favor. Being on the Today show would be as much validation to them as it would be to us.

We strolled into our budget motel early Thursday morning. Since we would be meeting Al Roker in a few short hours, sleep did not come easy. After a couple hours of silence, everyone was ecstatic to get back into Hail Mary. Tired from