Pat knew, however, that were he to be convicted of a felony, the scholarship would certainly be rescinded. "There's always a moral turpitude clause in those scholarship agreements," explains Dan Jensen, the San Jose attorney hired by the Tillmans to represent Pat in juvenile court. The judge a.s.signed to Pat's case, says Jensen, "was a strict, tough judge. But we showed her that he had a scholarship and he was definitely going to lose it if he got convicted of a felony. So on her own, over the objections of the district attorney, she reduced the charges from felony a.s.sault to misdemeanor a.s.sault. And Pat wasn't required to disclose a misdemeanor to the school." The judge sentenced Pat to be incarcerated for thirty days in the county lockup for juveniles and to fulfill 250 hours of community service. He would be allowed to complete his last year of high school before reporting for jail.

Darin Rosas, his family, and his friends were extremely upset that the judge had reduced the charges. "I was angry," Erin Clarke remembers. "At the time I didn't agree with the sentence at all. It seemed like the judge was more worried about Pat losing his scholarship than what happened to Darin. I felt like, 'Darin is the victim here. Why isn't anyone worried about Darin?' It didn't seem like justice had been served." Fourteen years after that day in court, however, Clarke has come to see things differently.

In April 2004, she says, "I was driving my daughter to school one morning when I heard on the radio that Pat Tillman had been killed. I remember the air being sucked out of my lungs. It was like a punch in the stomach.... He was the first person I knew who had died in the war, and that morning the war suddenly became very real to me." Later, from the flood of news about Tillman, Clarke learned about the decision he made to join the Army after 9/11, and the sacrifices he'd made to do it, and she was profoundly moved. She lamented that her only personal knowledge of Tillman revolved around one of the most regrettable incidents in his life. "What I take from Pat Tillman is that you are not who you are at your worst moment. After what Pat did to Darin, it seems like he really turned his life around and became quite an honorable person."

Reflecting on the Round Table brawl and its aftermath, Clarke muses, "That judge held Pat's future in her hands. She had the power to send him down one path or another, and she decided to make what turned out to be a really good decision. She said, 'I'm going to believe in you-I'm going to believe you're going to take this opportunity and do the best you possibly can with it.' And you know what? It sounds like that's what he did. I don't think there are many people on this planet who would have done as well with that kind of second chance."

* By comparison, Randy Moss, the star receiver of the NFL's New England Patriots, has run forty yards in 4.25 seconds. Deion Sanders was officially clocked at 4.17 in his prime, and once ran a forty-yard dash By comparison, Randy Moss, the star receiver of the NFL's New England Patriots, has run forty yards in 4.25 seconds. Deion Sanders was officially clocked at 4.17 in his prime, and once ran a forty-yard dash backward backward in 4.57 seconds. in 4.57 seconds.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Sanghisar is a village of fortresslike, mud-walled homes rising from a flat expanse of opium fields in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province. In most regards it resembles a hundred other crumbling hamlets in this arid corner of southeastern Afghanistan. But in the spring of 1994, as Pat was contemplating his impending incarceration, this particular community altered the course of history when the village mullah-a devout but unsophisticated thirty-five-year-old Pashtun named Mohammed Omar-gave birth to the Taliban in Sanghisar's one-room mosque.

Civil war was raging in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. Although the worst of the violence was focused in and around Kabul, chaos afflicted the entire nation. Much of the fighting was between rival ethnic groups: Tajiks led by Ahmad Shah Ma.s.soud and Burhanuddin Rabbani; Ghazi Pashtuns led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani; Uzbeks controlled by the ex-communist Rashid Dostum; Heratis led by Ismail Khan. But even in regions that were ethnically h.o.m.ogeneous-Kandahar, for example, was populated almost entirely by Durrani Pashtuns-the political landscape had splintered into a hodgepodge of tribal realms ruled by warlords whose militias battled each other viciously for turf and plunder.

Before the Soviet invasion, Kandahar's farmers produced an abundance of figs, melons, peaches, grapes, and pomegranates that were deservedly renowned for being the most delectable on earth. As part of the scorched-earth policy they implemented against the mujahideen, however, the Soviets not only obliterated these orchards and vineyards; they also destroyed the elaborate, centuries-old irrigation systems that had enabled the desert to bloom. To survive, the farmers started cultivating poppies instead, which needed to be watered only once every five days or so. And as the opium fields proliferated, militias vied to control the lucrative traffic in "flower oil"-a local euphemism for the gummy brown sap sc.r.a.ped from the plant's seed capsules to produce heroin.

Smuggling narcotics was just one among many criminal endeavors pursued by the warlords, whose entrepreneurial instincts had them constantly looking for ways to expand their sources of revenue. So-called checkpoints, for instance, sprouted like noxious weeds along every road in Afghanistan. The major thoroughfares-especially Highway A1, which formed a giant loop around the entire nation to link its princ.i.p.al cities-were plagued by hundreds if not thousands of such checkpoints, typically consisting of a chain or a log pulled across the road, attended by three or four bearded men brandishing AK-47s. Every time a trucker, farmer, or other traveler encountered one of these roadblocks, he would be asked at gunpoint to pay a "road tax." Refusal was not an option. Women were sometimes raped.

Sanghisar is linked to Highway A1 via a two-mile maze of crude dirt lanes. After the junction with the paved highway, twenty-three additional miles of potholed macadam lead east to Kandahar City-the provincial capital and second-largest city in Afghanistan. In 1994, during a routine trip to Kandahar, Mullah Omar was stopped and shaken down for cash at five different checkpoints on this one short stretch of highway, which made him so angry that he organized a tribal council-a jirga jirga-of more than fifty mullahs to eradicate the roadblocks and halt the extortion.

The religious leaders decided to start small by pooling their weapons, forming a militia of their own, and forcefully removing a single checkpoint-the one nearest to Sanghisar. It was taken for granted that blood would be spilled, but they believed their cause was righteous and saw no other option, in any case. On the appointed day they approached the checkpoint warily with their rifles locked and loaded, prepared for a firefight, but as they drew near, a surprising thing happened: the hooligans manning the checkpoint fled without firing a shot. Encouraged, the mullahs turned their attention to the next checkpoint several miles down the road, and the outcome was similar. Before the week was out, they succeeded in removing every roadblock between Sanghisar and Kandahar. And thus was the Taliban created. The name-a Pashto word meaning "students of Islam"-was bestowed by Omar.

The warlords of the day, unrestrained by any law or governing body, committed reprehensible acts with impunity. Seizing young boys and girls and forcing them into s.e.xual slavery were routine occurrences. According to Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban Taliban, soon after the Taliban was founded, Sanghisar residents alerted Omar that a local commander had abducted two teenage girls, their heads had been shaved and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Talibs Talibs who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank.... who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank....A few months later two commanders confronted each other in Kandahar, in a dispute over a young boy whom both men wanted to sodomize. In the fight that followed civilians were killed. Omar's group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system.

Tall and sinewy, Omar is a shy, uncharismatic man who lost his right eye to shrapnel while fighting Najibullah's communist forces during the mujahideen's failed a.s.sault on Jalalabad in 1989. Although a lifelong scholar of Islam, he possesses a plodding, narrow intellect and has little knowledge of, or interest in, worldly affairs. His interpretation of the Quran is stringently literal. But at some point during 1994 the Prophet Muhammad came to this humble village mullah in the form of a vision, in which it was revealed to Omar that Allah had chosen him to undertake the task of bringing peace to Afghanistan. Omar, who placed great stock in dreams and apparitions, resolved to obey the Prophet's commandment. Toward that end he began recruiting students from madra.s.sas-religious schools-to join his cause.

Although he was not a dynamic speaker, Mullah Omar made up for his lack of personal charm with earnestness and unwavering piety. His pitch to the students was well received, particularly in the numerous madra.s.sas that had sprung up in the Pashtun tribal districts that lay just across the border in Pakistan. For nearly fifteen years more than two million Afghan refugees had been subsisting in squalid refugee camps on the Pakistan side of the frontier, and the madra.s.sas there were teeming with the sons of these refugees-young men indoctrinated by fire-breathing Saudi clerics preaching the fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine. These clerics instructed the Afghan youths to emulate the righteous habits of the Prophet Muhammad with the aim of reinstating the caliphate he had established in the seventh century. To restore the world to this fabled state of purity, they were urged to immerse themselves in the holy spirit of jihad. As Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower The Looming Tower, These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time. The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them. They were stigmatized as beggars and sissies, and often preyed upon by men who were isolated from women. Entrenched in their studies, which were rigidly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them. They lived in the shadows of their fathers and older brothers, who had brought down the mighty superpower, and they were eager to gain glory for themselves. Whenever the Taliban army required reinforcements, the madra.s.sas in Peshawar and the Tribal Areas simply shut down cla.s.ses and the students went to war, praising G.o.d as the buses ferried them across the border.

The Taliban ranks expanded with astonishing speed, an indication of the craving among Afghans and Afghan refugees for a national leader who would eradicate the ubiquitous corruption, halt the depravity, and resurrect the rule of law. But the fast rise of the Taliban owed much as well to clandestine financial backing from the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence-the ISI, Pakistan's equivalent to the CIA-although the Taliban has never acknowledged the substantial a.s.sistance it received from Pakistan over many years (and still receives today according to credible sources).

Islamabad's reasons for supporting the Taliban were complex. Within the ISI, for example, there was (and remains today) an influential cadre of Islamists who shared Mullah Omar's fundamentalist theology. Many in Pakistan in fact viewed the Taliban and other fundamentalist jihadis jihadis as an effective bulwark against aggression by India, Pakistan's archenemy and nuclear rival, along the disputed border the two nations share in Kashmir. But Pakistan was also motivated to fund the Taliban for reasons that had more to do with lucre than religion or national defense: Pakistan's trucking industry had long been monopolized by a powerful transport mafia, and this organization aggressively lobbied Prime Minister Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto to open a reliable overland trade route across Afghanistan in order to bolster commerce between Pakistan and the Central Asia republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Before Pakistan's truckers could start hauling goods to and from these countries via Afghanistan Highway A1, however, the warlords needed to be brought to heel, and the Taliban appeared to offer the best prospects for accomplishing this. as an effective bulwark against aggression by India, Pakistan's archenemy and nuclear rival, along the disputed border the two nations share in Kashmir. But Pakistan was also motivated to fund the Taliban for reasons that had more to do with lucre than religion or national defense: Pakistan's trucking industry had long been monopolized by a powerful transport mafia, and this organization aggressively lobbied Prime Minister Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto to open a reliable overland trade route across Afghanistan in order to bolster commerce between Pakistan and the Central Asia republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Before Pakistan's truckers could start hauling goods to and from these countries via Afghanistan Highway A1, however, the warlords needed to be brought to heel, and the Taliban appeared to offer the best prospects for accomplishing this.

On October 29, 1994, a convoy of thirty trucks organized by Pakistan's interior minister rolled west into Afghanistan to a.s.sess the security of the route through Kandahar. The convoy was led by a fundamentalist colonel in the ISI who was guided and advised by a pair of Taliban subcommanders. The trucks were driven and guarded by eighty well-armed ex-soldiers from the Pakistan Army. Despite the size of this security force, a confederacy of local warlords brazenly hijacked the entire convoy as it approached Kandahar City.

Islamabad was outraged, and briefly considered sending a contingent of elite Pakistani commandos to rescue the convoy, but ultimately the Bhutto administration determined the plan was too risky and rejected it. Instead, it asked the Taliban to perform the rescue, and Mullah Omar obliged. On November 3, Taliban forces overran the warlords' militia, executed its commander, and liberated the trucks. That same night, taking advantage of their momentum, they attacked other militias that controlled Kandahar City and routed them as well. Within a few weeks the Taliban were in control of the entire province. By the end of 1994 their forces had swelled to twelve thousand fighters, mostly madra.s.sa students, some as young as fourteen years old. By the middle of 1995, Omar had twenty-five thousand jihadis jihadis under his command, he controlled half the provinces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban were advancing steadily north toward Kabul. under his command, he controlled half the provinces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban were advancing steadily north toward Kabul.

Omar's impressionable young fighters believed that because they were holy warriors directed by the will of Allah, the Taliban could not lose, and this aura of invincibility affected the mujahideen they were fighting. When confronted by approaching Taliban forces, on several occasions mujahideen fighters simply surrendered en ma.s.se, without firing a shot, and then joined the Taliban themselves, at least in the case of the Pashtun mujahideen the Taliban encountered in the southern and eastern provinces. Among those who defected and came over to the Taliban was Jalaluddin Haqqani, from Khost, considered to be perhaps the most talented and effective of the mujahideen commanders.

Energized by the Taliban's victorious march north, and inflamed by religious fervor, Mullah Omar enacted his singularly draconian interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. By decree, every man was required to grow a beard no shorter than the span of his fist. Women were forbidden to work outside the home, or be seen in public unless accompanied by a male relative and covered head to toe in a stifling burqa. Girls were forbidden to attend school. A strict ban was enacted on such "unclean things" as satellite dishes, movies, videos, musical instruments, musical recordings, singing, dancing, dog racing, kite flying, chess, marbles, billiards, alcoholic beverages, computers, televisions, wine, lobster, nail polish, homing pigeons, firecrackers, statues, pictures, and Christmas cards.

Despite this chilling a.s.sault on education, the rights of women, and ordinary pleasures, the initial response of most countries (including the United States) to the ascendancy of the Taliban ranged from apathy to guarded optimism. Any political ent.i.ty that managed to replace Afghanistan's h.e.l.lish state of anarchy with some kind of order was thought to be a good thing. Or so it seemed at the time.

As Taliban forces continued to advance north and west into non-Pashtun regions, their progress slowed, and they even suffered some significant defeats. In the spring of 1995, twenty thousand Taliban fighters supported by tanks and jets advanced on Herat, adjacent to Afghanistan's western border with Iran. When the Taliban attacked, Herati forces led by Commander Ismail Khan slaughtered hundreds of young madra.s.sa students and forced the Taliban to retreat all the way back to Kandahar.

Omar sent a desperate message to madra.s.sas throughout the Pakistan Tribal Areas requesting reinforcements, and thousands of fresh-faced students responded without hesitation, eager to serve Allah, bearing arms provided by the ISI. Once they had regrouped, the Taliban counterattacked, and this time they decimated Khan's forces and forced Khan to flee to Iran. In September the Taliban captured Herat, the five-thousand-year-old city celebrated in the writings of Herodotus, considered the cradle of Afghan civilization.

By early 1996, the Taliban had reached the margins of Kabul, threatening to overrun the nation's capital. Until then, the main mujahideen factions-led by Ma.s.soud, Hekmatyar, and Dostum-had continued to fight one another for control of Kabul, inflicting an appalling toll on the city and its inhabitants. But the arrival of Mullah Omar's army on Kabul's outskirts frightened the mujahideen commanders into calling a hasty truce and joining forces against the Taliban-a coalition dubbed the Northern Alliance. Through most of the spring and summer the struggle for the capital degenerated into a b.l.o.o.d.y stalemate in which several thousand civilians were killed by Taliban rocket attacks. Then, in August, Omar persuaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to increase their support in order to provide the Taliban with the means to launch a decisive offensive.

In a shrewd tactical move, this offensive was not directed at Kabul itself. Instead, the Taliban skirted the capital and attacked important Northern Alliance bases to the north and east, which were captured with ease. The Taliban were fortified in these battles by swarms of fresh recruits from madra.s.sas across the border, whose arrival at the front lines was expedited by Pakistan. By late September the Taliban had surrounded Kabul, and had severed all lines of supply to the Northern Alliance. Ceding to the inevitable, under the cover of darkness Ma.s.soud pulled back all the way to his redoubt in the Panjshir Valley, deep in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, leaving Kabul virtually undefended.

On the night of September 26, 1996, Mullah Omar's fighters rolled into the capital without resistance, wearing their trademark black turbans and flying the white Taliban flag from their Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. The first thing they did was search out the ex-president and Soviet puppet, Mohammed Najibullah. He was found around 1:00 a.m. at his residence inside a United Nations diplomatic compound, where he had been living under house arrest since being forced from office in 1992, spending his days lifting weights, watching satellite television, and translating an English history of Afghanistan into his native Pashto. The five men who found him were led by the commander of the a.s.sault on Kabul, a Talib named Mullah Abdul Razaq. During the Najibullah regime, the Soviets had killed several members of Razaq's family, and he'd been waiting to exact revenge on Najibullah ever since.

After brutally beating Najibullah and his brother, Shahpur, Razaq and his men drove them to the Presidential Palace, where Najibullah was castrated and then dragged through the streets around the palace behind a truck, still alive. Finally he was shot to death, Shahpur was strangled, and wire nooses were twisted around the necks of both brothers. They were then strung up from a police watchtower above a traffic circle in the middle of Kabul. A mob formed around the dead men, beat their bodies with sticks, and shoved rolled-up rupees into their nostrils.

This was not the sort of "order" that had been envisioned by Western governments when they expressed the hope that Mullah Omar would prove to be the Pashtun equivalent of George Washington and become the savior of his nation-a nation that Omar had recently renamed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban now governed the country, nevertheless. The administration of President Bill Clinton issued contradictory statements about this turn of events, muddying the waters about whether the United States approved of the country's new leadership or opposed it. But some Americans were encouraged. Unocal, the American oil company, believed that with the Taliban in control it might be able to finally realize its ambition to build a lucrative pipeline across Afghanistan to carry natural gas from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Just weeks after Kabul was captured, Unocal opened an office in Kandahar, not far from Mullah Omar's headquarters.

To the handful of intelligence a.n.a.lysts who were paying close attention, however, there were many reasons to be alarmed by the Taliban victory, as well as by other recent developments in Afghanistan. During the Soviet occupation, the CIA had handed out some twenty-three hundred Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the Afghan freedom fighters. The Taliban now possessed at least fifty-three of them. Another five hundred to six hundred Stingers remained unaccounted for, but were believed to be in the hands of warlords somewhere in the country. And Sheik Osama bin Laden, who had left Afghanistan in 1990, was back.

After departing in 1990, he'd resettled in his homeland, Saudi Arabia. Not long thereafter, Iraq invaded Kuwait, prompting bin Laden to propose to the Saudi royal family that he lead 30,000 veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War into battle against Saddam Hussein on their behalf. The Saudi leadership unceremoniously declined bin Laden's offer. Instead, they invited the United States to base 300,000 soldiers in Saudi Arabia, which bin Laden perceived as an intolerable insult. Incensed, he started mustering an army of holy warriors, which caused his family-among the most prominent in the Arab world-to disown him, and the Saudis to put him under house arrest.

In 1992, bin Laden fled to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where he escalated his criticisms of both the United States and the Saudi royal family, and established military training camps where hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters were taught to build bombs and conduct acts of terrorism. By this time the CIA had finally begun to pay attention to bin Laden, and the agency viewed his activities in Sudan with growing alarm. Tremendous pressure was subsequently brought to bear on the president of Sudan to expel bin Laden, and eventually, with sincere apologies, the former told the latter that the time had come for him to leave. Furious, bin Laden departed but vowed to exact revenge on the United States for uprooting him. And then he contacted some of his old mujahideen a.s.sociates in Jalalabad to let them know he was in the market for a new home. When the Afghans replied that they would be delighted to have the sheik back among them, bin Laden began preparations to shift his entire base of operations to Afghanistan. Upon learning of his plans, American officials smugly congratulated themselves for displacing him from Sudan.

Bin Laden departed Khartoum in a chartered jet on May 18, 1996, refueled in the United Arab Emirates, and landed in Jalalabad. Two trips were required to ferry his entourage, which included three of his four wives, several children, and approximately a hundred bodyguards. In Afghanistan he was warmly welcomed by three commanders from the Northern Alliance, who provided him with austere accommodations a few miles outside of the city.

At the time of bin Laden's return, Mullah Omar and most of the Taliban leadership were extremely wary of him; among numerous reasons for distrusting bin Laden, he had come to Afghanistan as a guest of the Northern Alliance, with whom the Taliban were then fighting viciously for control of the country. But bin Laden's longtime friend Commander Jalaluddin Haqqani had recently defected to the Taliban, and when Omar's forces captured Kabul four months after bin Laden's arrival, bin Laden decided it would be wise to make an overture to the man who had just driven his erstwhile hosts from Jalalabad and now ruled the nation. Bin Laden therefore dispatched a confidant to Kandahar and requested an audience with the Taliban leadership.

An October meeting was arranged in Kabul between bin Laden and one of Omar's most trusted deputies. By the time it concluded, bin Laden had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Taliban regime, and the Taliban had reciprocated by promising him sanctuary. The rapprochement seemed to please both parties very much.

The relationship was sealed a month later when bin Laden traveled to Kandahar to meet Omar in the flesh. Upon being introduced, the Saudi sheik flattered the once-humble mullah of Sanghisar by addressing him as Amir al-Mu'minin Amir al-Mu'minin, "the Prince of the Faithful"-a rarely bestowed honorific typically reserved for Islam's greatest caliphs. The flattery succeeded: Omar was charmed by bin Laden, and invited him to move his family from Jalalabad to Kandahar, where the Taliban could more easily ensure their safety. Bin Laden accepted the invitation and took possession of three compounds in and around Kandahar during the first months of 1997, whereupon he began spending much time in Omar's company. While delivering a Friday sermon at the largest mosque in the city, Omar brought bin Laden before the teeming a.s.sembly and lauded his new friend as "one of Islam's most important spiritual leaders."

The nascent partnership was not without complications, however: The Taliban received many millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi royal family considered bin Laden a serious threat. Moreover, the Saudis maintained deep ties with the United States and were working closely with the CIA to monitor bin Laden's activities and disrupt al-Qaeda.

The ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, had worked with bin Laden since his arrival in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Pakistanis and the young Saudi engineer were allied against the Soviets, and helped bring bin Laden and the Taliban together. But the ISI also received millions-perhaps billions-of dollars of clandestine aid from the Saudis, who were sworn enemies of bin Laden.

The ISI also had a long relationship with the CIA. The latter had given billions of dollars to the Afghan mujahideen from 1978 through 1992, and most of the American support had been channeled through the ISI-which was closely allied with both the Taliban and bin Laden, who were now America's enemies.

Unquestionably, the region's politics were intricately tangled and constantly in flux. But the United States had a poor grasp of these shifting, highly nuanced dynamics and failed to appreciate the magnitude of the threat posed by the budding relationship between bin Laden and Omar. As the British journalist Jason Burke would note in the Observer Observer in November 2001 (with the benefit of hindsight), the bond between the head of al-Qaeda and the Afghan leader "signified more than an alliance between the world's most wanted terrorist and the world's most reviled regime. It was the start of the final-and most critical-phase of bin Laden's development. Having secured the Taliban's protection, he was free to start building the most efficient terrorist organization the world had ever seen." in November 2001 (with the benefit of hindsight), the bond between the head of al-Qaeda and the Afghan leader "signified more than an alliance between the world's most wanted terrorist and the world's most reviled regime. It was the start of the final-and most critical-phase of bin Laden's development. Having secured the Taliban's protection, he was free to start building the most efficient terrorist organization the world had ever seen."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

In the spring of 1994, when Santa Clara County Superior Court sentenced Pat to be incarcerated for thirty days upon his graduation from Leland High School, he was stunned and chastened. On Friday, June 17, Pat attended the Leland commencement ceremony with his cla.s.smates. He spent Sat.u.r.day night hanging out with Marie and his closest friends until the sun came up, and then on Sunday morning his parents drove him to the county juvenile hall to begin serving his sentence.

When the judge had reduced Pat's original felony charge to a misdemeanor, it kept his scholarship to Arizona State University from being automatically rescinded. But it wasn't clear what action, if any, ASU would take should Pat fail to complete his sentence before the start of the football team's summer training camp. If Pat were late to camp, or missed it altogether, he would find himself beginning his collegiate football career on shaky ground. Unproven freshman players had been cut from football teams for much less.

Pat was supposed to arrive in Tempe the first week of August. Serving the required thirty days behind bars by then wasn't the problem; it was doing the 250 hours of community service. Although he would spend each weekday of his imprisonment working at a job that would gradually chip away at that obligation, a parole officer explained to Pat's mother that if he relied on the juvenile hall bus system to take him to his community service a.s.signments, Pat was unlikely to complete the required hours before August, because the buses were often late and sometimes didn't run at all. And the judge was a stickler about fulfilling all 250 hours of the sentence. To get Pat to work on time, therefore, Dannie was allowed to pick her son up at the county lockup and drive him to his daily a.s.signment, working at a homeless shelter called the Julian Street Inn. A fringe benefit of this arrangement was that on several occasions Dannie brought Marie, or one of Pat's brothers, or one of his friends to visit with him during the drive, which was a great consolation to him.

One of the things Pat's parents emphasized to the Tillman boys as they were growing up was that whining wasn't acceptable behavior. And true to the family ethos, Pat never complained about his stint behind bars. When he was released from juvenile hall in late July, he admitted that being locked up had been hard and had tested him. He insisted, however, that he had learned more from the whole regrettable experience than from "all the good decisions he ever made," as he later told Sports Ill.u.s.trated Sports Ill.u.s.trated.

According to Marie, "He looked around at the kids he was in jail with and didn't see himself as that kind of person. He wasn't some kid who was constantly in trouble and it finally caught up to him. He'd never been arrested or even suspended from school. And now here he was spending a month in juvenile hall with a bunch of kids who had some pretty serious criminal records. It was definitely a wake-up call for Pat." Although it was an expensive lesson, he'd been shown that good intentions were not enough to ensure a positive outcome. He learned something about the perils of acting rashly, without first considering potential consequences.

If his subsequent behavior is any indication, being locked up for thirty days was a turning point in Pat's life. The transformation would turn out to be a long, drawn-out process rather than an overnight personality makeover, but it was nevertheless profound, and it began to reveal itself before he was even out of jail: he started to approach his intellectual development with the same kind of discipline he'd long applied to his athletic development. Throughout high school Pat had received Bs and Cs with the occasional A on his report cards. He didn't read much. When he went to juvenile hall, however, his mother started bringing him books to pa.s.s the time, and it initiated a genuine pa.s.sion for reading that persisted for the rest of his life.

After he was released from jail, Pat had about a week until he was due to show up at Arizona State to begin training camp. On August 2, he flew to Arizona, accompanied by Marie, his parents, and his brother Richard. When they walked out of the Phoenix airport, the temperature was well over a hundred degrees. The midsummer heat lay upon the city like a ma.s.sive weight that seemed to crush the vitality in everything it touched. Being able to bear such heat for more than a few minutes was difficult to imagine, and the entire family was taken aback. Pat nevertheless accepted it as a fact of Arizona life and resolved to adapt.

As it turned out, the heat was relatively easy for him to deal with. Homesickness, though, was another matter entirely during his first months away from New Almaden. "It was an especially weird transition for him," Marie explains, "because two days after his high-school graduation he went to jail, and then when he got out, he pretty much went straight to college. He was surprised by how much he missed his family and all his friends back in Almaden. Most people don't realize it, because Pat comes across as such a tough person, but he's a homebody. He really really depends on his friends and family." depends on his friends and family."

The intensity of Pat's homesickness was exacerbated by the fact that Marie had enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, five hundred miles away. "I applied to ASU," says Marie, "but I didn't really like it there. I figured it would be a mistake to make such a big decision based on some boy. So I went down to Santa Barbara instead. Both of us sort of a.s.sumed that we would stay together as a couple, even though we were going to different schools. But we also knew that when you're young, a lot can change, and that we would just have to see what happened. We always gave each other s.p.a.ce to grow. There was an understanding that you have to do what you need to do, and if the other person decides this isn't what I want-well, then maybe you go your separate ways."

Shortly after Marie and the Tillmans bid a wrenching farewell to Pat and returned to California, Pat accompanied the football team to the Sun Devil practice facilities at Camp Tontozona, eighty miles northeast of Tempe near the town of Payson, amid the pine forests of the Mogollon Rim. Here, in the relatively cool air fifty-four hundred feet above sea level, the team held its preseason training camp. Pat missed Marie and his family so acutely during this period that he sometimes found himself reduced to tears, and he phoned home almost every day.

During training camp, Bruce Snyder, the Sun Devils' football coach, made a point of meeting one-on-one with each new player. During his meeting with Pat he explained that incoming freshmen were typically redshirted-a designation by which they would be restricted from appearing in any games their first season but remain at ASU for five years, thereby gaining a year of training at the college level before commencing their four years of NCAA eligibility. Upon hearing from the head coach that they should expect to be redshirted, most unproven freshmen would simply nod meekly and acquiesce. But not Tillman. When Snyder told Pat that he probably wouldn't get an opportunity to play in any actual games his first year, Pat politely told Snyder, "Coach, you can play me or not play me, but I'm only going to be here four years. And then I've got things to do with my life." Although Pat desperately missed Marie, his mother, and the comforting surroundings of New Almaden, his loneliness hadn't diminished his self-a.s.surance. Homesick or not, he didn't hesitate to let Snyder know his mind.

After seven days of grueling two-a-day practices capped by a scrimmage that drew four thousand devoted Sun Devil fans to Camp Tontozona, the team returned to Tempe shortly before the start of cla.s.ses. ASU was the fourth-largest public university in the nation at that time, with more than fifty thousand students, and the campus was colossal. Because Pat was a.s.signed to live in an athletes' dormitory far from the campus center and didn't have a car, his mother and his uncle Mike Spalding drove from California to Arizona to bring him his bicycle. When they arrived, Pat was overjoyed to see them. He slept in Dannie and Mike's hotel room during the several days they remained in Tempe, and when the academic year commenced, his mom and his uncle walked him to his first college cla.s.s.

As they prepared to say good-bye and start the ten-hour drive back to the Bay Area, Pat begged them to postpone their departure until after the cla.s.s was over. Seeing how sad he was, Dannie and Mike agreed. When they finally climbed into their car to leave, Pat, on the verge of bawling, gave his mom a note he'd written to both of them. As Mike steered the car west through the blistering heat of the Sonoran Desert, Dannie read the note aloud: Mom & Mike,I would have just come out and said this but I know my eyes would have swelled and I would not have been able to talk. I would like to tell you that I am very glad you came to see me. I don't think you realize how much it means to me. This whole thing is a lot harder to deal with than I ever expected. It makes me feel like a woose every time I begin to cry. However, I can do nothing to change it. I'm sure I will be fine pretty soon. My moods right now change constantly from OK to sad to really sad. Your being here really helped though. It is comforting to know someone cares.I will call quite a bit and if either of you are bored please call, I will enjoy the company. I will probably not decide to go out and meet people for a while.... Thank You For Everything.Pat The juxtaposition of Pat's vulnerability with his fearlessness and self-a.s.surance is not an easy thing to wrap one's mind around, but it was an absolutely central aspect of his personality. Armchair psychoa.n.a.lysts might be inclined to explain his toughness as a macho pose-a protective sh.e.l.l he donned to disguise his insecurities. Marie strongly disagrees: "It wasn't some stereotypical tough-guy act. He really had these two opposite aspects to his personality. It was a dichotomy: he was this very tough person, but he also had this softhearted side, and he didn't mind showing it. And he was that way as long as I knew him. It goes back to this incredible sense he had of who he was-his self-confidence. He didn't feel the need to hide much, or pretend to be something that he wasn't. He wasn't insecure about the sensitive side, or worried that he wasn't tough. He considered both qualities important, and didn't see them as irreconcilable in any way."

CHAPTER NINE.

As Pat settled into life as an ASU student, his homesickness gradually receded. Because Marie's cla.s.ses at UCSB didn't begin until the end of September, she traveled to Tempe twice during that period to visit him. After starting college at Santa Barbara, she usually commuted to Arizona a couple of weekends each month to see Pat, and spoke to him on the phone every day, all of which did a lot to keep his loneliness at bay. As did the huge demands on his time made by football and cla.s.ses, which left few spare moments to indulge in self-pity. Because Pat was determined to excel academically as well as athletically (as he had not done in high school), he spent almost as much time studying as he did in the gym or on the practice field-a significant change that to no small degree can be attributed to his experience behind bars. "After the Round Table incident," Marie concurs, "Pat felt he couldn't afford to be reckless and risk getting into trouble anymore." Instead, he decided to concentrate on school.

At the beginning of the semester Pat enlisted the services of a tutor to make sure he did well in his mathematics cla.s.s. Two other students happened to sign up for the same tutor-his roommate and football teammate, B. J. Alford; and an uncommonly talented tennis player from Hungary named Reka Cseresnyes. Throughout the semester the three freshman athletes met with the tutor twice a week. "We studied together," says Cseresnyes, "and sometimes we would run into each other on campus or have lunch at the cafeteria. We wouldn't really hang out beyond running into each other and having these talks. But every time we'd get together, we would end up having deep conversations. So we became friends very quickly."

Cseresnyes had grown up in Budapest under a repressive communist government, witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain as a teenager, and then leaped at the opportunity to come to the United States upon winning an athletic scholarship to attend Arizona State University. Pat was fascinated by her exotic background and barraged her with questions about life in the Soviet bloc. "I was this girl from Hungary," she recalls. "My English was rough at the time. Pretty early on, Pat became a famous athlete on campus. He had great charisma, and everybody recognized him because he had such a characteristic face. I couldn't believe he was even talking to me, someone who had a thick Hungarian accent. I was almost thinking, 'What is wrong with this guy?'"

Cseresnyes was amazed, she says, "by how friendly and down-to-earth Pat was. He was interested in other people and remembered things about them. He talked about his girlfriend so nicely. He was interested in the world beyond sports. Mostly we talked about politics and international relations. He was a critical thinker and would always challenge me-he was an amazing questioner. Which was the best way to figure out what Pat was thinking, because he didn't like to talk about himself that much. He would always turn the conversation back to whoever he was talking to: 'So what's going on with you?'" Their discussions and study sessions planted the seeds of a friendship that lasted, and strengthened, over the rest of Pat's life.

At the end of their first semester at ASU, both Tillman and Cseresnyes received As in their respective math cla.s.ses, and Pat excelled in his other cla.s.ses as well, earning a 3.5 grade point average. During his second semester it improved to 3.81. The semester after that, in the fall of 1995, he received an A in each of his five courses, for a perfect 4.0 GPA. "Once he got in the habit of studying, he found a lot of success," Marie says. Part of the motivation for that success, she adds, "was that most people expected football players to be kind of stupid. I think it appealed to him to go against the stereotype. He liked defying expectations."

Pat also controverted the a.s.sumptions of those who thought he was too small and too slow to play college football for a powerhouse Division I-A school. During his first year he was only put into games as a special-teams player, during punts and kickoffs, and the Sun Devils had a lackl.u.s.ter season with three wins and eight losses. Pat earned a varsity letter, nevertheless, and Coach Snyder characterized his play as "so smart and so aggressive." The following year Pat started just one game, but he frequently came into games off the bench to play inside linebacker, and over the course of the 1995 season recorded the sixth-highest number of tackles on the team.

That year the Sun Devils' record improved to 74, although there were some embarra.s.sing defeats along the way, the most humiliating of which was inflicted by the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. On the first play from scrimmage, Nebraska ran the football sixty-five yards for a touchdown, and the rout was under way. The Cornhuskers had scored nine touchdowns by halftime, a school record, and the final score was 7728.

The loss was especially humbling for the Sun Devils' defense. If a football team racks up that many points, it suggests that the team being scored against has some serious defensive flaws. Nevertheless, when the 1996 season commenced the following September, Sun Devil supporters were optimistic about their prospects. Many of the team's best players from 1995 were back, most prominently the quarterback Jake "the Snake" Plummer, a leading contender for the Heisman Trophy. Although Pat was not yet considered to be of the same caliber as Plummer, the ASU coaches acknowledged that he had developed into an exceptional defensive player by designating him the starting weakside linebacker for the new season. Lyle Setencich, who coached the Sun Devils' linebackers, told Sports Ill.u.s.trated Sports Ill.u.s.trated that Pat was "the best player I've ever coached at reading body language. One game, he noticed that a tackle would look inside every time his team ran a draw, and sure enough, Pat read it and hit the fullback right in the mouth." that Pat was "the best player I've ever coached at reading body language. One game, he noticed that a tackle would look inside every time his team ran a draw, and sure enough, Pat read it and hit the fullback right in the mouth."

Pat was thrilled by his promotion to starter, and so was his family. The Tillmans were an uncommonly tight clan. Nothing was more important to Pat than Marie, his parents, his brothers, and his uncle Mike. It would be hard to overstate how much their support and company meant to him. He was thus overjoyed when his brother Kevin-who had been drafted by the Houston Astros after graduating from high school and received an offer to play professional baseball-instead accepted a baseball scholarship at Arizona State and enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 1996.

Pat and his ASU teammates won their first two football games of the 1996 season, but for their third game would face Nebraska again. After clobbering the Sun Devils in 1995, Nebraska had gone undefeated through the remainder of the year, went on to win its second consecutive national championship, and was generally considered the best team in the history of college football. When the Cornhuskers came to Tempe to play ASU on September 21, 1996, they had won twenty-six games in a row (the last time they'd lost was in 1993) and were ranked first in the nation in every significant poll.

On the evening before the game, the ASU players asked the coaches to vacate the premises and then proceeded to jack themselves up for the rematch by screaming, pounding on the walls, overturning tables, jumping on furniture, and tossing chairs around the room. When they emerged, according to one report, they brought to mind crazed animals. The next day they played with unprecedented focus and intensity.

Come Sat.u.r.day afternoon it was ninety-one degrees in the shade, although there was no shade to be had on the field in Sun Devil Stadium, where seventy-four thousand screaming fans filled the seats. ASU received the opening kickoff and then moved the ball seventy yards downfield on its first five plays from scrimmage. On the sixth play, Plummer was sacked for a loss. Unfazed, after taking the next snap, he dropped back for a pa.s.s, but a Nebraska defensive end had antic.i.p.ated the play and blitzed into the backfield with an un.o.bstructed shot at him; it looked as though the ASU quarterback was about to be taken down again. Plummer, however, proceeded to give an astonishing demonstration of why he was called "the Snake": he somehow managed to wriggle out from under the tackler's grasp, scramble to his left, and sidearm the ball twenty-five yards to the receiver Keith Poole, who was standing alone in the end zone, putting ASU ahead, 70.

That ASU had scored first was surprising. But everyone expected Nebraska to come thundering back: over the course of the previous season the ASU defense had ranked dead last in the Pac-10 Conference, and was widely disparaged as the team's great weakness. Nevertheless, as the Sun Devils kicked off to Nebraska, Pat and the rest of the ASU defense resolved to shut down the Cornhuskers and hold on to their lead.

Pat's primary a.s.signment going into the game was to cover the option pitchout-to stop Nebraska from gaining big yardage on plays in which the quarterback Scott Frost tried to fool the linebackers into thinking he was going to run with the ball or throw a pa.s.s downfield and then instead tossed a lateral outside to Ahman Green, a speedy tailback who would later become a star for the Green Bay Packers. This deceptive play was one of the most effective weapons in the Nebraska a.r.s.enal, and was especially hard to defend against. It would demand astute, lightning-fast a.s.sessments by Tillman to determine how to react to the option as it unfolded.

Shortly after the Sun Devils' touchdown, with the Cornhuskers on the Nebraska seven-yard line, Frost attempted just such a play: scurrying to his right, he chucked an underhand pitchout to Green that came in unexpectedly hard, causing Green to bobble the ball and then drop it. Although Green managed to scoop it up quickly from the turf, he seemed rattled by the sight of Pat accelerating toward him, and thus never got the ball properly tucked away. It squirted out of Green's hands a second time and bounced to the ground behind the goal line. Before Green could recover it, Tillman and his teammate Mitch.e.l.l Freedman converged on the loose football and swatted it out of the end zone for a safety. ASU now led 90. The purportedly invincible Cornhuskers looked stunned.

In the second quarter ASU kicked a twenty-seven-yard field goal, Tillman tackled Frost in the end zone for another safety, and then ASU kicked a forty-four-yard field goal to give the Sun Devils a 170 lead at halftime. In the third quarter ASU scored yet another safety. In the fourth quarter the Nebraska offense finally started to play effectively, and put together a drive that moved the ball most of the way to the goal line. A Cornhusker touchdown seemed imminent. With less than two minutes remaining in the game, Green attempted to run the ball into the end zone, but he fumbled on the ASU three-yard line, and Pat dived on the loose ball to preserve the 190 shutout-punctuating an afternoon of brilliant play by Tillman that contributed substantially to ASU's shocking upset of the Cornhuskers. At the conclusion of the game, thousands of delirious fans swarmed onto the field, pulled down both goalposts, and carried one of them four blocks down Tempe's Mill Avenue.

As the 1996 season unfolded, the Sun Devils kept winning, suggesting that their upset of Nebraska was perhaps no fluke. On September 28, ASU defeated the University of Oregon, 4827. A week later they beat Boise State, 567, and then the week after that beat UCLA, 4234. On October 19, when the Sun Devils overcame the formidable USC Trojans in double overtime, 4835, sportswriters began to mention the possibility that the team could go undefeated and end the year ranked number one in the country. The roll continued with wins over Stanford, Oregon State, California, and the University of Arizona. At the conclusion of the regular season ASU was a perfect 110, and had earned an invitation to play in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day.

The video player starts to click and whir, and an aerial shot of a gigantic football stadium fills the television screen as a familiar voice intones, "ABC Sports welcomes you to the Rose Bowl! The granddaddy! The Buckeyes of Ohio State against the Sun Devils of Arizona State!...Happy New Year and welcome everybody. I'm Brent Musburger with the coach d.i.c.k Vermeil. ASU-they have the ability to win it all!"

On the video it's January 1, 1997-a gray, drizzly afternoon in Pasadena, California. The entire Tillman family is present somewhere in the packed stadium to watch Pat play, as are dozens of Pat's friends. The Sun Devils are ranked second in the college polls; if they defeat the Buckeyes today, they will be the national champions.

ASU wins the coin toss and quarterback Jake Plummer, a close friend of Pat's, informs the referee that the Sun Devils will receive the kickoff. The OSU kicker boots the ball downfield as 100,645 people bellow their approval from the stands. After returning the kickoff to their own thirty-three-yard line, the Sun Devils move the ball to midfield for a first down, but then their offense sputters and they have to punt. Pat comes into the game for the first time with the punting squad, his hair spilling across the shoulders of his jersey from beneath his helmet.

The ASU kicker punts the ball, Pat hesitates for a moment to force the OSU blockers to commit, then dances around three of them and sprints furiously downfield as the pigskin arcs high into the leaden sky. Tillman's body language is so distinctive that there's no mistaking him even when he appears as a minuscule figure darting across the television screen, much too small for the number on his jersey to be visible. David Boston, the Buckeye player waiting to receive the football, catches it cleanly and dodges a tackler with a quick juke to the side. A moment later, however, a second ASU player wraps his arms around the Buckeye ballcarrier and stands him upright, and then Pat hurtles into both of them at maximum velocity, driving Boston backward for three yards before slamming him to the ground.

Two plays later the Buckeyes' quarterback, Stanley Jackson, takes the snap and tries to run with it, but Pat penetrates the OSU defense and tackles Jackson for a five-yard loss. "Jackson...down at the thirteen-yard line," Musburger exclaims, "as the Sun Devils brought heat right up against the middle: Pat Tillman and Shawn Swayda." On the next play Pat again gets to Jackson behind the line of scrimmage and brings him down for another loss, forcing the Buckeyes to punt from their own end zone. For the first thirty minutes, the game is a defensive standoff, and when the teams leave the field for halftime, the score is tied, 77.

On the first possession in the third quarter, ASU kicks a field goal, but OSU storms right back with a seventy-two-yard touchdown pa.s.s to Demetrious Stanley, and at the start of the fourth quarter the Buckeyes are up, 1410. With less than six minutes remaining in the game, things are looking grim for the Sun Devils. OSU has the ball at the ASU twenty-one-yard line and is threatening to score again, putting the game out of reach. On third down the OSU quarterback throws a short pa.s.s to Stanley again, whom Tillman is covering one-on-one. With Stanley's tremendous speed, it should be a mismatch, but Pat antic.i.p.ates the receiver's moves, stays right with him as he cuts to the inside, and slaps the pa.s.s to the ground as the ball arrives, forcing the Buckeyes to attempt a field goal on fourth down. ASU blocks the kick, recovers it, and runs the ball downfield for a touchdown. The crowd goes wild, but a penalty nullifies the score, and the ball is brought back to the ASU forty-two-yard line.

With time running out in a game in which they have had trouble moving the ball, the Sun Devils need a touchdown on this possession or they will lose. Plummer has been sacked five times. His receivers have dropped eight of his pa.s.ses. But the Sun Devils have been coming from behind all season at the last minute to win, and Plummer orchestrates a thrilling drive that takes his team to the OSU nine-yard line. There, however, the OSU defense stiffens, and sacks Plummer yet again for a loss. On third down, with a minute and forty-seven seconds left to play, ASU coach Bruce Snyder calls a timeout to figure out what to do.

After the Sun Devils come back on the field, Plummer takes the snap and drops back to pa.s.s, but the Buckeyes launch a ferocious all-out blitz, and all the ASU receivers are tightly covered. As OSU tacklers converge on Plummer from all directions, he ducks and weaves and scrambles first right and then left, barely slipping away from the grasp of one Buckeye after another. "Plummer in trouble!" Musburger announces. "He steps away...cuts free...breaks loose.... [He's at] the five.... Touchdown, Sun Devils! The Snake does it again! This team won't die!" The ASU players mob Plummer in the end zone. Musburger and Vermeil start congratulating the Sun Devils' quarterback for leading the astounding comeback. With just over a minute and a half remaining, an ASU victory appears to be in the bag.

But after the Buckeyes receive the ensuing kickoff, quarterback Joe Germaine starts guiding his team efficiently down the field, pushing the ball to the ASU five-yard line with twenty-four seconds left on the clock. From the sideline, OSU coach John Cooper sends in a play designated "two left twins 240X smash." Germaine takes the snap and drops back to pa.s.s. David Boston, lined up as the Buckeye split end, smashes into his defender and then spins away to the outside. Germaine lobs him a soft pa.s.s, Boston gathers it in and prances untouched across the goal line. Ohio State wins, 2017.

To come so close to winning the Rose Bowl and becoming national champions, only to have it all slip away in the game's final seconds, was a crushing blow to the Arizona State players and fans. Pat, however, spent little time agonizing over the defeat. He had acquitted himself well on the field, and in any case there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change its outcome. He simply accepted the loss and moved on.

CHAPTER TEN.

One of the people Pat roomed with at Arizona State was a three-hundred-pound teammate named Jeremy Staat who was considered the best defensive lineman in the Pac-10 Conference when the Sun Devils began the 1997 season, eight months after their bitter defeat in the Rose Bowl. Because he was uncommonly quick for a big man and exceptionally talented, Staat attracted a great deal of attention from National Football League scouts and agents. When the University of Southern California arrived in Tempe to play ASU on October 11, an agent named Frank Bauer who hoped to represent Staat was in the stands watching the game. "I'd come to see Jeremy play," says Bauer, "when all of a sudden I see this raggedy-a.s.s linebacker named Pat Tillman running down the field, crazy as heck. He only weighs about 208, but he's. .h.i.tting the h.e.l.l out of people, and he's fearless. I'm going, 'Holy cow!...I've gotta go talk to this Tillman kid.' I didn't even know who he was. He wasn't on anybody's radar in the NFL. n.o.body had any reports on him."

Following the game, which ASU won, 357, Bauer went down to the locker room to say h.e.l.lo to Staat and then sought out Tillman. "Here's this kid with the long hair, wearing shorts and flip-flops," Bauer recalls. "I told him, 'Hey, I think you can play in the National Football League.' He looks at me with those eyes of his and he goes, 'Really?'" Actually, Pat didn't need Bauer or anybody else to tell him he could play in the NFL; he'd already made that determination on his own. But he took Bauer's card and agreed to talk again in January after the Sun Devils' football season, and Pat's college career, had concluded.

Sun Devils fans had looked forward to 1997 with high hopes, even though Jake Plummer and five other star players had graduated the previous spring. When the season ended, ASU was 93, finishing the year with a win over Iowa in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, on December 31-an impressive record, but a distinct letdown after competing in the Rose Bowl for the national championship the previous year. Pat had performed brilliantly, regardless: he led the team with forty-seven una.s.sisted tackles, was credited with four sacks and three interceptions, and was voted the defensive player of the year in the Pac-10 Conference. Having attended cla.s.ses during the previous two summers, Pat had accrued enough credits to earn his bachelor's degree in just three and a half years, and in December 1997 he graduated summa c.u.m laude with a 3.84 grade point average. After receiving his diploma, he remained in Tempe in order to prepare for the NFL draft.

If he was considered a long shot for playing at the Division I-A college level after high school, even fewer people believed Tillman stood much chance of making it to the NFL. Athletes who manage to reach that rarefied stratum must survive a ruthless culling process: only 6 percent of the kids who play high-school football go on to play in college; and only about 1 percent of those college players advance to the NFL. Pat had never paid much heed to the odds, however, and his confidence in his own abilities remained undiminished.

Several of Pat's ASU teammates also aspired to play in the NFL. They spent the first months of 1998 training together in preparation for the annual NFL Scouting Combine, a weeklong event held every February at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, wherein the most promising NFL prospects undergo a battery of rigorous trials administered by NFL scouts, coaches, and general managers. Partic.i.p.ation in the combine was by invitation only, however, and when the invitations went out, Pat failed to receive one. The snub definitely bothered him, but other avenues of entry to the NFL remained open, and he used the brush-off as a goad.