It has been a Monday like no other. A Monday when so many in Philadelphia (and well beyond) awakened with a literal hangover, flush with the knowledge that the figurative one has finally – finally — subsided.
For the first time in their tortured history, the Eagles are Super Bowl champions.
I can’t help but think of Nick Foles, the second guy this year (after Alabama’s Tua Tagoviloa) to do backup quarterbacks proud. There’s an obvious lesson there about diligence, perseverance, preparation and being a good teammate.
And I can’t help but think about Doug Pederson, once a backup QB himself — to Brett Favre (among others) — as well as an assistant to Andy Reid. Seems like he combined the best of both guys – Favre’s daring and Reid’s devotion to detail – to deliver a championship. (I mean, a pass from a backup tight end to the QB, on fourth-and-goal? Who does that?)
I also can’t help but think of defensive end Brandon Graham, whose strip-sack of Tom Brady late in Sunday’s game represented one of the night’s few nods to defense, and brought the title within reach.
Interesting guy, Graham. Grew up in Detroit, the oldest of four kids to a single mother (and the only male). Played at a high school, Crockett Vocational Tech, that had no lights on its practice field. When it was late in the season and night fell early, the story goes, parents pulled their cars up next to the field and turned on the headlights so that the players could see what was going on.
That helped, though it was still hard to throw deep. No sooner would the ball leave the quarterback’s hand than it would disappear into the darkness.
“So,” Graham told me during a visit to Lancaster three years ago, “we just had to work on running the ball.”
It would be unwise, then, to question the adaptability of a man who has had multiple head coaches, multiple defensive coordinators, even multiple positions since he was taken 13th overall out of Michigan in 2010.
Unfavorably compared for a time to the Giants’ Jason Pierre-Paul – the No. 15 pick in ’10, and a guy who has since had a misadventure with fireworks – Graham has emerged as a steady and at times spectacular performer.
“You get challenged all the time, so many different angles,” he said in that 2015 interview. “Me, I try to come in with a positive attitude.”
Sure seems that way. And on Sunday he just kept coming, period.
So I think about him.
And I think about those who came before, who so often came so close to ending the title drought. Reid, for instance, delivered the Eagles to the brink in 2004, but then struggled (as he so often has) with clock management, in an agonizing Super Bowl loss to Bill Belichick’s Patriots.
Reid enjoyed a highly successful 14-year run with the Birds but is not remembered fondly in Philadelphia, having kept the fan base at arm’s length. In reality he had great depth, and no small degree of warmth. That was illustrated to me most profoundly one day in 2008, when he took aside a writer colleague of mine, Larry O’Rourke, who months earlier had been diagnosed with ALS.
The scene was Chickie and Pete’s, a bar/restaurant in South Philly, amid a fundraiser for Larry. For several minutes the two of them huddled, with Reid essentially telling Larry, What’s to say they won’t find a cure tomorrow, next week, next month?
Just offering hope. Just giving encouragement.
Larry passed away in 2011, but I won’t forget Reid’s decency.
I think about Jim Johnson, Reid’s late defensive coordinator, who made do with whatever players were available. Lito Sheppard was a big-time playmaker (and even a Pro Bowler) playing for Johnson, invisible when he went elsewhere. (And yes, I think about the time Sheppard returned an interception the length of the field for a touchdown, prompting someone to blare Boz Scaggs’ “Lido Shuffle” within the Linc, while 65,000 people sang along. Cool moment.)
Back to Johnson for a bit. One year he transformed a pedestrian tackle named Darwin Walker into a star. Another he somehow found a use for a player he couldn’t stand, Chris Clemons.
Johnson worked such magic again and again. And each week during the season he would limp on battered legs into the auditorium within the team’s practice facility to address reporters.
“He needs to do better; he knows that,” he might say of one of his charges.
Loved that candor. Loved that he seemed to punctuate every sentence with “… no question about it.”
Because he always seemed to have the answers.
I also think about Brian Dawkins, the safety named to the Hall of Fame on Saturday. He had such passion, such a purity of purpose, that you couldn’t help but admire him. He was always in better shape than everybody else on the team, always seemed to play harder, always seemed most eloquent when it came time to boil everything down for the media throng.
He was, in many ways, the team’s beating heart.
A memory: One day I was covering training camp at Lehigh. The previous day I had talked to Dawkins about Dan Marino going into the Hall of Fame.
A team functionary approached.
“Dawkins is looking for you,” he told me.
“That can’t be good,” a writer friend said, helpfully.
So I swallowed hard and sought out Brian Dawkins. Far from being angry, here is what he said: “I think I misquoted myself.”
Wait, what?
He went on to explain that he discussed Marino with some other veteran teammates, and came to the conclusion that because of injury he had never faced the former Dolphins star.
So Dawkins felt compelled to set the record straight.
Think about that. Think about what it says about Dawkins, that he would do that.
And really, think about everything that has led up to this moment in team history. To a moment that has seen the hangover subside, once and for all.