#BERNIEORBUST PROVES ONE THING — WHITE LIBERALS FEEL ENTITLED TO IDEOLOGICAL PURITY
The mostly white Bernie supporters ‘protesting’ the DNC and turning on their idol shows the privilege they enjoy, especially while minorities are targeted this election.

link: http://contemptor.com/2016/07/25/bernieorbust-proves-one-thing-white-liberals-feel-entitled-to-ideological-purity/

Justin Baragona July 25, 2016

While there was a hope that Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton earlier this month and his promise to help her defeat Donald Trump was going to quell any tension at this week’s Democratic National Convention, that all came crashing down over the weekend with the release of leaked DNC emails. In what is looking more and more like a coordinated effort by Russia to negatively impact the Democrats’ chances in November, Bernie supporters found new outrage over the critical comments outgoing DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz had for Sanders’ campaign.

Therefore, we’ve been treated to marches and ‘protests’ by #BernieOrBust dead-enders the past couple of days, culminating with them booing — yes, booing — Bernie Sanders when he said told them in a Monday afternoon speech that they need to unite and vote for Hillary to defeat Trump. The Vermont Senator had to interrupt them and tell that that “this is the real world we live in” when they chanted “We want Bernie!” in response to his call for a Democratic win this fall.

Of course, the WikiLeaks thing is just being used as an excuse for the #StillSanders folks to demand Bernie be coronated at the convention despite his falling 4 million votes and hundreds of pledged delegates short in the primary. These voters, who are generally under 40 and a vast majority of whom are white, were coming to Philly no matter what. And their plan was to disrupt the convention, make it clear that they think the system is rigged, and that Hillary Clinton stole the primary from the right heir.

But what are they really, truly fighting for? Over the past few months, Hillary has embraced many of Bernie’s policy positions. She’s turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She’s pushed forth a debt-free college education plan and moved left on healthcare, calling for a public option and a reduction in age to receive Medicare. She wants to increase the minimum wage to at least $12 an hour.

Beyond that, Bernie scored major concessions with the party’s platform, getting pretty much everything he wanted included. Sure, there were some minor quibbles, but the Democratic platform is by far the most progressive one the party has run on. There’s even going to be further discussions about changing the primaries and perhaps altering the superdelegate system.

But, that is apparently not enough. While a racist demagogue who is cozying up with a Russian autocrat and outwardly saying he will change this country to a fascist state is leading in the polls, these special snowflakes are throwing temper tantrums in Philadelphia’s streets because their guy didn’t win. And why didn’t he win? Because he never made inroads with black voters, leading to large losses in the South and Mid-Atlantic states.

And this is the point I am getting to. White liberals are revealing their privilege to the world for all to see right now. Their demands for ideological purity, specific causes to be placed front and center and only perfectly liberal candidates are the demands one can only make if they aren’t placed at risk during an election. The fact is, black, Hispanic, Muslim and LGBT voters don’t have the luxury of holding out for the perfect like these progressives do.

For minorities, especially those who have historically been marginalized and are demonized by the far-right to rally conservative votes, civil rights trump everything else. Sure, many would probably love to push a candidate further on certain issues, but when it comes down to it, they will vote for the Democrat because they need to protect the civil rights gains of the past several decades.

This is something we’ve seen for a while, too. In 2010, progressives bitched that President Obama was just too centrist and trying to appease Republicans, spending all of his time trying to pass healthcare reform. Therefore, Democrats lost the House — which they had just gained back in 2006 — during the Tea Party takeover. In 2014, upset at the number of moderate incumbents and candidates on the slate, they sat out again, allowing the GOP to retake the Senate and gain even more seats in the House. All the while, Republicans made more and more gains in state and local legislatures and executive branches.

And it is this sort of all-or-nothing, my way or the highway, I’ll take my ball and go home approach that makes it impossible for the Democratic Party to make sustainable gains. There is a certain core group of voters who feel that unless the United States immediately embraces someone who will make the country one large Portlandia, then they’ll stick it to the party, by either not showing up or making it clear that they’re going third-party.

The thing is, this ain’t you supporting your favorite indy band, pointing out how much you can’t stand mainstream music. This isn’t you only going to the art house to see Jim Jarmusch films. This is the future of this country, and how non-white, non-heterosexual people will be treated going forward. If you declare yourself as being fully for social justice, then you have no choice but to vote Hillary in November. Otherwise, you ain’t nuthin’ but a Trumpkin.

As Maine Goes
Governor Paul LePage is a preview of a President Donald Trump.

Gabrielle Gurley

Anthony Marple, director of Maine’s $2.6 billion Medicaid program, was called into an abrupt meeting just a week after Governor Paul LePage took office in January 2011. There, Marple was fired and ordered to leave immediately. He asked to send out a few emails cancelling some speaking engagements. Sorry, he was told, his state email account had already been closed.

Marple was a widely respected public official. His sin? The day before his firing, he had testified before the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee that Medicaid spending from the state’s general fund had been virtually flat or decreasing in each of the years since 2006, despite increasing enrollments due to the recession. This contradicted LePage’s campaign narrative of runaway state spending by the “bloated establishment in Augusta.” So Marple had to go.

Marple’s ouster was doubly surprising, because he had been working with legislators of both parties to create a Medicaid managed care program that stood to save the state millions of dollars—very much in line with LePage’s own fiscal goals. But some health-industry lobbyists opposed the idea, which was likely to squeeze their profits. To succeed Marple, LePage promoted a MaineCare program management director whose new boss, Mary Mayhew, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, was a lobbyist, and former Maine Hospital Association vice president for state and federal government relations, policy development, and advocacy.

Other Republican governors have cut budgets and services, demonized holdover public officials, and given tax breaks to the rich. What makes LePage an outlier, even among current GOP governors, is the combination of his personal slash-and-burn style, off-with-their-heads retribution against perceived enemies, and policy incoherence that often undermines the goals he professes and harms the constituents he purports to serve. In this respect, LePage is a state-level preview of Donald Trump.

“Just think of Paul LePage on steroids with a big bank account and then you’ve got Donald Trump,” Maine Attorney General Janet Mills said to cheers at the 2016 Maine Democratic Convention in Portland in May. “I shudder for my country. The Trump-LePage method of government is intentional stalemate, paralysis, and oligarchy.”

Maine is a microcosm of the havoc that a right-wing populist can wreak on a state. For the past six years, to the delight of Tea Party activists who helped put him in office, he has tacked hard right, dramatically slashing income taxes and aid to cities and towns, removing thousands of people from public assistance, and picking fights with state lawmakers in both parties.

Where moderate conservatives used coded language to castigate minorities, immigrants, and others, LePage’s rants about everyone from President Barack Obama to Maine icons like writer Stephen King get ugly fast. Many Mainers are tired of LePage. But big, enthusiastic crowds still cheer on the governor as they did when LePage attended a June rally for the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

LePage’s personal vindictiveness is legendary—more Trump. Over the next several months following Marple’s abrupt dismissal, MaineCare’s medical director got fired by phone while on vacation. The heads of the child and family services, adult mental health services, adult cognitive and physical disabilities, and elder service departments, as well as several other senior officials, all lost their jobs. A similar purge took place at the Department of Environmental Protection, where an industry lobbyist moved into the top slot.

LePage has not stopped at firing government officials. He’s even used his clout to prevent political adversaries from getting private employment. In March 2015, Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves, who was term-limited, applied for a full-time, $120,000 position as the president of Good Will-Hinckley, an educational private nonprofit for nontraditional Maine students. The 126-year-old organization runs Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, a public charter high school, and other programs in the town of Fairfield in south-central Maine. Eves’s chief of staff headed the charter high school’s board, which raised some eyebrows. But the board unanimously agreed to hire Eves, who is a human services professional.

LePage resolved to block the appointment. “Although he is employed as a family therapist, I have seen first hand that his skills in conflict resolution leadership negotiation and reconciliation are sadly deficient,” he wrote in a letter to the nonprofit board. LePage, a charter school supporter, was also upset that Eves, a charter school opponent, was in the mix at all.

Shortly afterward, the governor delivered the coup de grace: a threat to withhold $530,000 in state funding, which would have jeopardized another $2 million in foundation monies, unless Good-Will Hinckley withdrew their job offer. The board capitulated. Eves filed a civil suit in U.S. District Court in Portland, arguing that his constitutional rights had been violated. A federal judge ruled that LePage had immunity. The case is on appeal.

In 2013, LePage barred former State Senator Troy Jackson from press conferences and ceremonial events at the state house. After Jackson gave the Democratic response to his budget proposal, LePage told reporters, “Senator Jackson claims to be for the people, but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline.” LePage added, “People like Troy Jackson, they ought to go back in the woods and cut trees and let somebody with a brain come down here and do some work.”

“I have had better men than the governor say worse things about me,” Jackson says. “That’s the way it is when you’re a working-class person: You’ve always got these people in power saying shit.”

ASKING LEPAGE TO EXPLAIN HIS decision not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is like listening to a student serve up a dizzying array of figures, assertions, and corrections, to bolster an untenable position. In a telephone interview, he says that because Maine expanded its Medicaid rolls in the early 2000s, the state is not currently eligible for the 90 percent to 100 percent of matching federal funds that other states receive. The federal government would only pay 60 percent of the Medicaid costs, and the state 40 percent, if Maine opted into expansion, he insists.

What LePage does not say is that while Maine would also receive a reduced federal match for some Medicaid recipients, the state would receive a 100 percent match (90 percent in later years) for other new enrollees. An April 2015 Maine Health Access Foundation report found that Maine would see total net estimated savings of $26.7 million if the state opted into the program.

LePage’s decision to opt out has sparked almost universal criticism, but he brushes it off. “There are givers and there are takers …” the governor begins. The reporter interrupts, suggesting that Medicaid is not a spa treatment but a roster of basic health options for people who don’t have any others.

Maine is the only state in the country that failed to increase the percentage of people that have health insurance since Obamacare passed in 2010, according to a 2015 Maine Center for Economic Policy report: About 134,000 people did not have access to health insurance.
Maine is the only state in the country that failed to increase the percentage of people that have health insurance since Obamacare passed in 2010, according to a 2015 Maine Center for Economic Policy report: About 134,000 people did not have access to health insurance. The state also lost out on thousands of health care–sector jobs.

According a 2014 HealthAffairs Blog report, more than 34,000 additional people could have been insured if Maine had expanded Medicaid coverage. The study estimated that since 2014 between 31 and 157 deaths could be linked to the failure to expand Medicaid.

LePage continues to slash other benefits. In June, the governor threatened to end Maine’s administration of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps), since the federal government would not allow Maine to prohibit recipients from buying sugar-sweetened beverages and candy. “The Obama administration goes to great lengths to police the menus of K-12 cafeterias, but looks the other way as billions of dollars finance a steady diet of Mars bars and Mountain Dew,” LePage wrote in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

If LePage carries out his threat, more than 195,000 people would lose food stamps. Last year, federal officials complained that Maine had the country’s worst processing times for food stamps and had to speed things up or lose some federal dollars. Moreover, LePage officials had also implemented new rules that denied food stamps to nearly 9,000 childless adults who have $5,000 or more in cash and other assets, like boats or motorcycles.

The Bangor Daily News recently reported that Maine had accumulated $110 million in federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF): State officials did not spend the money on children and families as specified under federal law. Instead, they shifted some of the funding to programs for the elderly and disabled. The number of families receiving these dollars also declined as new state eligibility changes forced thousands of people off the program Meanwhile, one in four Maine children goes hungry.

LePage prides himself on getting “able-bodied” people off welfare and pursuing other strategies to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in state and federal programs. However, a federal study found that of 3,600 cases of possible Medicaid fraud examined by state investigators over the past three years, only 16 cases have been turned over to the state attorney general for further action.

Jill Duson, a Portland city councilor and the city’s first African American mayor, headed the Maine Bureau for Rehabilitation Services for six years until she lost her job in 2011 when the governor decided not to reappoint certain categories of bureaucrats. “Government maintains the safety net for people who are down on their luck,” says Duson whose family was on welfare when she was a child. “I reject this need to paint people with this broad brush as though they are all ne’er-do-wells who don’t want to work and are lying around eating bonbons and watching soap operas.”

According to Duson, the LePage administration began to push for more cuts that state lawmakers started resisting. So administration officials turned to rule changes that did not require legislative approval, such as revamping eligibility requirements for certain services like home day care for disabled people. Legislators responded by crafting new rules to prevent LePage’s changes from taking effect.

Lewiston pharmacist Abdifatah Ahmed, a Somali immigrant, says that LePage “selectively targeted” immigrants by removing people from the state health insurance system without notice. Some individuals did not know that they had lost health-care coverage until they tried to fill a prescription or visit a doctor, according to Ahmed.

LePage denies targeting immigrants. He claims that the problem is asylum seekers who tap into services that they are not eligible for. “You’ve got to do the homework,” he says. “People come up from Texas, from Alabama … Georgia … New Jersey, New York. They are just on the verge of being deported and come in [and] claim political asylum because our safety net is very, very liberal.”

The governor’s poor health and human-services record extends to public health crises like the opioid epidemic. Maine has had one of the highest increases in the rate of drug overdose deaths in the U.S., nearly 30 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

W.C. Fields is credited with the observation that if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. In the midst a serious public health crisis, LePage has urged Mainers to shoot drug dealers, suggested guillotining convicted traffickers, and complained that drug dealers from New York and Connecticut with racially suggestive names like “D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty” come to Maine to sell heroin and get white girls pregnant before they head home. He has claimed that remarks like these are designed to force lawmakers and federal officials to act.

Yet LePage’s most irresponsible public remarks on the public health crisis came at a Lewiston town hall forum in May. He announced that a student at Portland’s Deering High School had overdosed on opioids, been revived with overdose antidote naloxone, and sent back to class—three times in one week.

His comments, which sent Portland residents and state lawmakers into an uproar, occurred shortly after state lawmakers had overturned the governor’s veto of a bill designed to increase the availability of the overdose antidote naloxone.
His comments, which sent Portland residents and state lawmakers into an uproar, occurred shortly after state lawmakers had overturned the governor’s veto of a bill designed to increase the availability of the overdose antidote naloxone. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” LePage wrote is his veto message. The controversy festered until the Portland police chief found out that the incident did not involve a student and happened at another location with “Deering” in the name.

LePage says that he had “misunderstood” and apologized. “The point is I have corrected that,” he says. When he is so inclined, apologizing is something that LePage does regularly.

THE ELDEST OF 18 CHILDREN of French Canadian parents, LePage fled an abusive father at age 11 and ended up homeless on the streets of Lewiston, a south-central Maine city. He overcame his stark childhood, thanks to a succession of mentors who took him in and steered him through high school and college.

LePage, 67, and his wife, Ann, have five grown children. In a rarity for a state first lady, she recently took up a serving job in Boothbay Harbor, where they own a home, to save money to buy a car. Her husband earns $70,000 annually, the lowest salary of any governor in the country.

Portland Press Herald columnist Alan Caron, a Franco-American who was also raised in poverty, wrote in February, that even if they become successful, some people who grow up in dire straits never get over it. “In a few rare instances, the two qualities of success and rage combine in one person who should never have access to power. That, to me, is the Paul LePage story.”

LePage first got elected in a classic Maine five-way race in 2010, the year of Obama’s first midterm election and a generally terrible year for Democrats. Mostly, however, LePage benefited from a quirk of Maine politics. A high proportion of Maine voters, 36.7 percent, are unenrolled. Unlike in most states, independent candidates have a real shot at winning in Maine. Multi-candidate races are a regular feature of Maine gubernatorial elections, which do not have runoffs, so a plurality of the vote is all it takes to win.

In 2010, LePage won nearly 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race that featured one Democrat and three independents. (No Maine governor has been elected to his first term by a majority of votes in the last 40 years, according to the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, which aims to institute a runoff system for state and federal officeholders. That question goes before voters in November.)

In 2014, Michael Michaud, a Democratic U.S. representative and former paper mill worker who represented the rural Second Congressional District (northern Maine), and independent Elliot Cutler, an attorney and businessman who came in second to LePage in 2010, ran against LePage. Cutler resisted calls to exit a second race he couldn’t win.

In another echo of Trump, even though LePage was well to the right of many Maine Republicans, GOP elites got in line. In 2010 and 2014, the moderate “ladies of Maine,” U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (who retired in 2013), endorsed LePage and raised money for him. Despite many unpopular policies, LePage also managed to keep the loyalty of most GOP state legislators.

The Democrats miscalculated LePage’s electoral strength, believing that he had an electoral ceiling of 40 percent, roughly matching his 2010 numbers. The party also came up short on understanding voters’ economic insecurities and in getting out the vote. In 2014, LePage got more than 295,000 votes, 48 percent of all ballots cast, the most for any Maine gubernatorial candidate in history.

To appreciate LePage’s appeal, it helps to understand Maine’s economy and political geography. To oversimplify, Maine divides very roughly into two zones. Portland, plus a coastal and a few university towns, forms the core of liberal Maine. Sparsely populated northern Maine, comprising the vast majority of the state’s land mass, tends to be culturally conservative but sometimes economically populist. Progressives can get elected statewide, but so can conservatives.

LePage scratched the veneer off Maine pragmatism by tapping into regional and socioeconomic resentments. The everywhere-else-versus-the-south divide is real: Portland and the south may be the economic engines of Maine, but rural interests drive state politics.

LePage took Maine class warfare to new heights, dialing up the tensions between the conservative, poorer rural regions, especially in the north, that have been hardest hit by the decline of manufacturing and the wealthier, southern and coastal areas, including greater Portland.

Social issues like marriage equality, integrating immigrants, and improving public assistance services that have energized many southern Mainers have less resonance in rural areas. LePage took Maine class warfare to new heights, dialing up the tensions between the conservative, poorer rural regions, especially in the north, that have been hardest hit by the decline of manufacturing and the wealthier, southern and coastal areas, including greater Portland.

LePage knocks Portland and southern Maine as “northern Massachusetts”—that is, a region full of rich people, socialists, immigrants, welfare recipients, and other unappealing types found in or near urban areas. (The moniker is no compliment, given New England’s love-hate relationship with the Bay State.)

The resentment that gets stoked against immigrants, asylum seekers, and welfare recipients, is fueled in part by the belief that these groups are mostly people of color, even though 95 percent of Maine’s 1.3 million people (and nearly 80 percent of Portland’s 67,000 people) are white. African Americans are a scant 1.2 percent of the population; foreign-born people make up another 3.5 percent.

LePage won the northern Maine counties big, ranging from nearly 11 percentage points over Michaud in Penobscot County to 23 percentage points in Piscataquis County, the state’s least populous place.

But the governor also improved significantly on his numbers in southern Maine. Well-to-do Portland suburban towns went strongly for LePage. An analysis of the 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial races by the Maine People’s Alliance found that LePage’s vote totals increased by nearly 50 percent from 2010 to 2014 in Portland suburbs like Scarborough (median household income: $78,359). In Gorham (median income household income: $74,563), another Portland suburb, LePage’s vote totals increased by an astounding 84 percent. LePage also improved his vote totals by nearly 50 percent in Lewiston (median household income: $36,969).

Both LePage and Trump have flummoxed the American intelligentsia with nonsensical solutions to major policy challenges; they have demonized swaths of people by stoking their supporters’ fears and prejudices.

Trump’s primary victories gave him de facto control of the Republican Party—as LePage’s did with the Maine GOP. Both LePage and Trump have flummoxed the American intelligentsia with nonsensical solutions to major policy challenges; they have demonized swaths of people by stoking their supporters’ fears and prejudices. They are impervious to the fallout because neither man sees a serious downside to having the news media distribute their talking points for free. If anything, Mainers understand better than anyone else that LePage’s success in Maine means that it is possible for Donald Trump to be elected president of the United States.

MAINE’S DEPRESSED ECONOMY WOULD be a challenge for any governor, and LePage is widely criticized for both unrealistic schemes and bungled opportunities. Most of the state is far from the major transportation routes into Boston, the region’s economic hub. Maine has the highest median age in the United States (43.5 years) and the highest percentage of residents 65 and older (nearly 20 percent). Jobs are scarce, so many young people leave.

In 2011, LePage signed the largest tax cut in Maine history, most of which went to the well-off. The cut deprived localities of funds they needed for development, and failed to attract new investment. The much-touted benefits for moderate-income taxpayers proved illusory. With no viable plan to replace the lost tax revenues, the governor moved in 2013 to eliminate state aid to cities and towns, known in Maine as revenue-sharing.

Under Maine law, 5 percent of sales and income tax revenues go to municipalities. Since the recession, aid to cities and towns had taken hits as governors steered that money to the state’s general fund to make up losses from his tax cut. The Legislature acquiesced on some cuts, but staved off LePage’s harsh proposal.

The result was both cuts in services and other increased taxes. Several Republican mayors, including one of his staunchest allies, Robert Macdonald of Lewiston, called him out on the decision. Localities sought to make up the losses with municipal property tax hikes, hitting the very people the income tax cuts were supposed to help—moderate-income taxpayers. “For most people like myself making who are making $10,000, $20,000 to $30,000 a year, the $15 to $16 I got back didn’t help me when I paid my [property tax increase] bill of $100 to $200,” says Jackson, the former Democratic state senator, a logger who lives in Allagash, near the Canadian border.

The Pine Tree State is 90 percent forest, the highest percentage in the United States. “If we can’t make a living off the land, our forests will struggle,” LePage says. “We are not Microsoft and Facebook; we don’t attract those people—they go to Massachusetts.”

But in the past several years, five of the state’s eleven major paper mills have closed, with the loss of more than 1,500 jobs. “In rural Maine, it is still the Great Recession, if not a little worse, because of the mill closures,” says Ben Chin, political engagement director for the Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive advocacy group based in Lewiston.

With consumption down and manufacturing going elsewhere, the paper industry is in freefall. But not according to LePage. “These are all industries that are growing,” he says. “Tissues have not gone away, napkins have not gone away,” LePage says. “Nobody wants plastic, so they are going back to the old days of wax paper.”

Major controversy surrounds a proposal for a “North Woods” national park which could inject some new tourist dollars into the state. (Tourism, one of Maine’s largest industries, had a record-setting year in 2015, with $5.6 billion in spending.) But LePage and other opponents believe that federal regulations that come with the national park designation would intrude on residents’ lives, bringing traffic and other impacts the region could not handle.

Neighboring states like Massachusetts that have lost manufacturing jobs have established programs to provide grants, tax incentives, and other assistance to former mill cities and other distressed areas. Maine has no comparable framework. There have been no moves in that direction under LePage, leaving the Maine congressional delegation to plead for and get what amounts to a multi-agency, U.S. Department of Commerce–led economic-development SWAT team to parachute in and come up with a viable way forward for the state forest-products sector.

Lewiston, the second-largest city in Maine, about 45 minutes north of Portland, has been doing better than many places. The former textile mill city of about 36,500 people has assets in health care (two major hospitals), higher education (Bates College), and back-office operations (L.L. Bean and TD Bank). But where Lewiston was once able to fund future improvements through its slice of revenue-sharing, its current borrowing strategies focus on basic maintenance needs like roads and new fire and police vehicles. In fiscal 2016, Lewiston should have received $6.3 million in statutory state aid; the city actually received $2.6 million, a roughly 40 percent cut.

A good chunk of the city’s million and a half square feet of mill space is underutilized. Lisbon Street, in the city center, is mostly deserted on weekday afternoons, with an adult bookstore and a few shops that meet the needs of central and east African immigrants on one end, and a yoga studio and cafes at the other, with a few dusty, vacant storefronts in between. Rental housing in the city center and the adjoining neighborhoods is dilapidated, and the city has yet to capitalize on attracting Portlanders, especially those residents facing rising rents in a booming city. “People don’t want to live here,” says Chin of the Maine People’s Alliance.

LePage has also made questionable decisions in the renewable-energy sector. Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company, left Maine in 2013 and took its proposed $120 million floating offshore wind turbine pilot project to Scotland after LePage persuaded the legislature to set aside a go-ahead from the Maine Public Utilities Commission in favor of a University of Maine–led consortium. The episode saddled Maine with a reputation for regulatory instability presided over by an unpredictable chief executive. Statoil was “a real big black eye” for the Maine economy, says Senate Minority Leader Justin Alfond.

An unusual bipartisan coalition of clean energy organizations, environmental groups, and utility companies supported a proposal that would have required power companies to purchase electricity from small and commercial-sized solar-energy systems, a move that would have integrated smaller systems into the electricity grid; expanded residential, community, and commercial solar-power usage; and created more jobs. LePage vetoed the bill, arguing that it would raise electric rates. An override fell short.

The solar sector is booming in New England, but Maine is currently last in solar job creation. “[LePage] is not willing to look at renewables as part of the growth portfolio in the state, or transition workers into these jobs,” says Mark Eves, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

Maine is the only New England state, and one of just nine others nationwide, that has yet to recover the jobs it lost during the recession.
Maine is the only New England state, and one of just nine others nationwide, that has yet to recover the jobs it lost during the recession. There are 23,000 fewer people working today than in December 2007. LePage likes to trumpet the state’s low unemployment rate—3.5 percent in May 2016, dropping from 4.5 percent the previous May—but the low rate has been attributed to decline in the number of people in the labor force.

“I DO NOT WANT TO SEE the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. … Surely we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory,” said Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine in her Declaration of Conscience speech on the U.S. Senate floor in 1950. The first woman to serve in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate was one of the few Republicans to stand up to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

For many, Smith is a heroine of traditional Maine political culture. The state had largely been immune to the bitter partisanship that has divided states like Wisconsin and Kansas and has brought Washington to a standstill. With LePage, the antithesis of Smith, Maine has been sucked into the maelstrom of contemporary American politics.

LePage distracted fearful, white middle- and working-class voters by giving them minorities, immigrants, asylum-seekers, drug dealers, and welfare recipients to blame for the state’s, and their own, economic misfortunes. Meanwhile, upper-middle-class and business conservatives preoccupied with improving their own lot took comfort in his promises to lower income tax rates and chip away at state regulations.

Today, Paul LePage is happy to hitch his star to Donald Trump’s. The symbiosis between the two men was on full display in late June when Trump held a rally in Bangor. “You know, many people say we’re a lot alike,” LePage told the crowd. (But LePage, a Trump delegate, plans to skip the 2016 Republican Convention and will only attend if Trump wants him there. He took a pass in 2012, too.)

What distinguishes both LePage and Trump from moderate Republican conservatives is a coarse, hard-driving business mindset that is a temperamental mismatch with state government, and a white-hot loathing of the public sector and the people who work there. The two men share a disrespect for the separation of powers, civil rights and liberties, and other basic precepts of American government. The combination of those traits with a willingness to use gross stereotypes and jaw-dropping inanities that pit groups of Americans against each other is the surest sign yet that the Republican Party has unleashed the four horsemen that Margaret Chase Smith feared.

LePage and Trump are ready to dismantle as much of the traditional framework of government as they can get away with. LePage already has driven out many of the best and the brightest from state government and has decimated programs. There is little in LePage’s tenure as governor to suggest that he takes the long view on improving socioeconomic conditions for low- and middle-income Mainers. Trump, like LePage, floats getting rid of the government agencies like U.S. Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency among others; trots out the shibboleths of waste, fraud, and abuse in government; and sprouts nostalgia about past American greatness. But Trump, like his friend in Maine, fails to demonstrate that he knows how government is designed to work (as opposed to the private sector) or how his proposals would affect the lives of the working men and women he professes to care so much about.

LePage has waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation in the Maine legislature that has little to do with consensus-building and everything to do with LePage’s belief that Maine should be run like a business, and a cutthroat one at that, a goal that succeeded in uniting Democrats and Republicans, at least to pass budgets to keep the state running and to find common cause on some other issues. Whether Trump would work similar magic on Congress is an open question. “[LePage] gets attention, but he doesn’t get a lot of results,” says Eves. “That is the real story here of what a Trump legacy would look like.”

Both LePage and Trump toy with stereotypes that most people keep to themselves. That’s a plus for those who see politicians saying what an ordinary person won’t as being leadership.
Both LePage and Trump toy with stereotypes that most people keep to themselves. That’s a plus for those who see politicians saying what an ordinary person won’t as being leadership. Dismissing this reporter’s suggestion that singling out certain groups of Americans is not a hallmark of leadership, LePage points to Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. “There are countries that have presidents that don’t insult them, they just kill them,” he says. “[Trump] hasn’t done that.”

LePage does not appear to believe that a president should represent all Americans anyway. “I will tell you that your president is not in tune with my culture,” LePage says, referring to President Obama. “Donald Trump is in tune with my culture; maybe not your culture.”

Embedded in the demonization campaign is a savvy media and public-relations “look-here-not-there” strategy. “When nicer doesn’t work, you have to get attention,” LePage says. “[Trump] got hundreds of millions of dollars of free press through the primaries and he is the presumptive candidate now.” A recent Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy study bears LePage out: The intense pre-primary news media coverage of Trump in the country’s eight leading news outlets alone was worth an estimated $55 million, according to the report.

Just as Trump’s daily barrages of free-form observations on the world divert attention from his inconsistent and dangerous policies, LePage’s nonstop dramas have diverted attention from Maine’s deep-seated problems. But that is not the same as being out of control. “The fact that LePage is perceived as not having skills shows how good his skills are,” says Mike Tipping, the communications director for the Maine People’s Alliance and a Bangor Daily News political columnist. “The number of issues he has flip-flopped on, the number of lies he tells on any given day, shows the political management that he has been able to do. The kind of things that blow up as issues [are ones] that rebound to his favor.” One might say the same about Trump.

“I FEEL I AM LIKE A PICASSO,” LePage tells this reporter. “The people will never appreciate me until I am dead.” (It is hard to resist thinking of a cubist Picasso painting, with its disjointed legs and arms.)

LePage ticks off several accomplishments, including the welfare-to-work strategies; paying off state Medicaid debts to hospitals; a new drug-addiction treatment facility, part of multimillion-dollar drug treatment and enforcement legislation; and interest-free and low- interest loans for students (that he worked on with one of his longtime critics, Senate Minority Leader Alfond.)

In his book, As Maine Went: Governor Paul LePage and the Tea Party Takeover of Maine, Tipping described a series of 2013 meetings that LePage held with members of a “sovereign citizens” anti-government group. The men who met with LePage wanted then–House Speaker Eves and Alfond (then the Senate president) arrested and charged with high treason. The subject of “hanging” the two men came up. (Tipping says that LePage later backtracked from a threat to sue him over the book.)

“I was blown away by the amount of time that the governor had been spending with these people,” says Alfond. “The idea that there were people out there who wanted me [hanged] and [to] essentially kill me, what do you tell your wife and your children when they are asking you about it?”

Since 2014, LePage’s popularity has plummeted. A recent Morning Consult poll ranked him as one of the least-popular governors in the country. Most Mainers today consider LePage an embarrassment. During the legislative session that ended in April, state lawmakers overrode nearly 70 percent of LePage vetoes. LePage enjoys vetoing bills so much that he named his new dog Veto.

LePage is term-limited and leaves office in 2018. His next goal is the U.S. Senate, which means he has to dislodge U.S. Senator Angus King, a well-liked independent former governor who caucuses with the Democrats. King plans to run for re-election. Imagining LePage defeating King is improbable. If Trump should be elected president, LePage would fit nicely in a Trump cabinet.

“Welcome to Maine: The Way Life Should Be,” says the blue and white highway sign on Interstate 95 just past the Piscataqua River Bridge connecting New Hampshire to Maine. It takes on new meaning in the LePage era. A state that took pride in its pragmatic politics is now helmed by a master of right-wing populism.

“What has struck me is how widespread the embarrassment is,” says Caron, the Maine Sunday Telegram columnist. “There is almost a sense of resignation, like, OK, we have to put up with him for a couple of more years, and then we’ll go back to being Maine.”

How Quarterbacks Are Made
By Robert Klemko

http://mmqb.si.com/0mmqb/2016/05/11/nfl-draft-quarterbacks-how-modern-qbs-are-made-jared-goff-carson-wentz

The MMQB examined the youth football careers and family backgrounds of the 15 QBs taken in this year’s NFL draft (a record number), and found several key life experiences that appear to be predictors of success. Often, the men who play the position aren’t natural born leaders

Two high school quarterbacks from opposite ends of the country met for the first time in July 2012, during the summer before their senior seasons. One, a golden-haired jokester in Blues Brothers spectacles, the son of an ex-Major League Baseball player turned firefighter, was coming off a heartbreaking championship loss at the Oakland Coliseum to close out his junior year in California. The other, a brown-haired boy with green eyes and a chiseled jaw, the son of a former college football player, was a year removed from winning a state championship in Virginia.

They crossed paths during the final round of Elite 11, the foremost quarterback competition for high schoolers on the recruiting trail. Organizers of the annual QB combine remember Jared Goff and Christian Hackenberg as natural leaders with ‘live’ arms. Both finished among the top six out of some 2,000 hopefuls who either tried out or submitted film, and each would each go on to have success as college passers—Goff at Cal, and Hackenberg at Penn State—before being selected two rounds apart during this year’s NFL draft.

Goff and Hackenberg are gifted athletes who successfully navigated the world of major college football and turned pro. They are both 6-foot-4, upwards of 200 pounds, can make virtually every throw and possess the unquantifiable traits that often define their position.

“His greatest asset is the fact that he stays pretty composed even in the most adverse situations,” says Goff’s father, Jerry, a former catcher for the Expos, Pirates, and Astros. “I was not nearly that mentally strong when I played. I was a mess.”

“I think Christian had some advantages,” says Hackenberg’s father, Erick, a former letterman at Virginia whose own father was a high school coaching legend. “Just because of genetics and because of the wiring. It’s who he is.”

Intangibles. We talk about them the most when we talk about quarterbacks. Yet we rarely discuss where they come from, or how a passer goes about acquiring them. For many quarterbacks who end up in the NFL, this grooming process often begins all the way back in Pop Warner. But how, exactly, do you raise and mold a quarterback? And what traits make QBs rise and fall in the eyes of NFL decision-makers?

For answers, The MMQB examined the youth football careers and family backgrounds of the 15 quarterbacks who were drafted in 2016 (a record number). They are not all coach’s sons, nor are they all sons of ex-athletes. And while a certain basic requirement for arm strength unites them today, it didn’t link them when they were first handed a football as kids.

After consulting with experts in the field of training and evaluating quarterbacks, and after interviewing more than two dozen parents and coaches of these newly minted NFL passers, we identified several key life experiences that appear to be predictors of success:

• 13 of the 15 quarterbacks grew up in homes that were valued near or above the median home value in their respective state, according to public records and online real estate figures. Seven families lived in homes that were more than double the median values: Goff, Hackenberg, Carson Wentz, Connor Cook, Jeff Driskel, Kevin Hogan and Jake Rudock.

• 13 of the 15 quarterbacks in the 2016 draft spent their early childhoods in two-parent homes. (Of note, a majority of the 30 parents hold four-year college degrees.)

• On average, the 15 quarterbacks taken in the 2016 draft began playing the position at age 9, with only two having taken up the position in high school.

• At some point before high school graduation, with many paying significant fees or traveling great distances to do so, 12 of the 15 received varying degrees of individual instruction from a QB coach who was not a parent or a team-affiliated coach; 12 of the quarterbacks also participated in offseason 7-on-7 football during their high school careers.

These 15 passers have undoubtedly met the very high bar for work ethic and talent set by the NFL. But those two traits alone don’t explain the entire landscape.

During the summer when Goff and Hackenberg first met, Christian had grown tired of his father’s advice on the minutiae of quarterbacking. Hour-long workouts between father and son descended into “20 minutes of work and 40 minutes of arguing,” as Erick puts it. So the father flew with his son to meet QB guru Skip Stitzell in Fayette, Mo., where Christian would spend a weekend with the coach under his father’s watchful eyes. Stitzell became part of a network of coaches that now includes ex-NFL players Trent Dilfer and Jordan Palmer, to whom Erick could also turn when he wasn’t getting his point across to Christian.

“I had to figure out how to be the smart 40-year-old and outsmart the 16-year-old,” Erick says. “I would use them at times when we were bucking heads and say, ‘Hey can you give Christian a call? He doesn’t have to know we talked.’ ”

Jerry Goff, the former baseball player, didn’t build a Rolodex of quarterbacking minds to set his son on the right trajectory. He more or less did it with an initial conversation. When Jared took up football at age 7, a friend of Jerry’s coached the team while Jerry resolved to watch practice from a distance. On the first day, the coach placed the tall-for-his-age Jared on the offensive line and had him place his hand in the dirt. It would be the first and last time that Jared Goff assumed a three-point stance. Jerry told his friend after practice, “He’s not a lineman.”

Many of the 15 quarterbacks selected in the 2016 draft have benefited from factors such as parental involvement, family wealth, individual instruction and offseason competition—or some combination that increased opportunity not only for personal growth, but also to be noticed by coaches and scouts along the way. It begs two obvious questions: How much do these factors separate NFL draftees from the rest of the crop? And who is being left out?

The Best Friends

At Michigan State’s pro day on March 16, Chris Cook paced nervously behind a row of bleachers assembled in the middle of Spartans’ indoor practice facility. An imposing man with a broad smile, Chris had played tight end at Indiana from 1982-84 and now works as a district sales manager for a German-based engineering firm. On this particular day, his other job was to stress over his son’s impending performance in front of representatives from all 32 NFL teams. At one point, he interrupted a conversation to corral renowned QB guru George Whitfield with a question: “Will Connor have sweat towels out there?”

“Yeah,” said Whitfield, who deals with more quarterback dads than most college head coaches. “Four or five.”

Chris’s involvement in his son’s affairs and his outsized, sometimes abrasive personality were noted by several NFL evaluators as potential red flags for Connor Cook, who fell to the Raiders in the fourth round. After the Michigan State QB was drafted, screenshots of aggressive and homophobic tweets apparently published years ago by Connor’s father surfaced in media reports and provided a public glimpse of what teams had known for months. According to a source close to the Spartans’ program, Chris called coach Mark Dantonio at the beginning of last season and expressed concern that the team’s decision to not make Connor a captain would damage his draft stock.

In 2012, when Connor was a redshirt freshman, Chris led the charge after Dantonio initially denied their request to work with an outside QB coach. The Cooks were willing to pay for private tutoring with Whitfield, but Dantonio wouldn’t budge. (Many coaches don’t want outside influences to alter a player’s mechanics.) “He won’t let him go,” Chris says, “so we’re saying, ‘What the hell? What the hell?’ We kept pressing.”

Dantonio eventually relented prior to the 2013 season, and Connor earned the starting job early that year. He would go on to win 35 games over the three seasons as the starter. Chris, who describes his son as his best friend, was there every step of the way. He was an assistant coach on Connor’s first tackle football team, when the head coach tabbed the fourth-grader to be the starting quarterback in a run-heavy offense. When Connor was in seventh grade, Chris took him to Raw Talent Sports, about 15 miles south of Cleveland, so Connor could play 7-on-7 in the offseason. Soon, Connor was bringing teammates to work on timing.

Chris and his wife, Donna, a former basketball player at the University of Cincinnati, paid for Connor to join Raw Talent on bus tours to one-day camps across the Big 10, from South Bend to Ann Arbor to Columbus. “I don’t think Connor would have ended up at Michigan State without that camp tour. Nobody had heard of him,” says Raw Talent owner Mark Harris, a former cornerback at Kent State who sells himself as a certified strength and speed specialist. “Connor’s parents are crazy. They’re very supportive. I love them to death. They were about helping all these kids out, not just their own.”

Connor participated in the national underclassmen combine, as well as the Las Vegas Elite 11 regional tryout in 2010. He declined to go further with Elite 11 so he could attend Michigan State’s camp. He did all this despite having never appeared in a playoff game at Walsh Jesuit in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio (he came within one game of qualifying during his senior season).

So what do we know about Connor Cook?

On a team his father helped coach, he was tabbed as a quarterback at a young age, in an offense that did not emphasize passing. Nevertheless, he got the opportunity to direct an offense and an early reputation as the signal caller, as a leader. Having grown up in a home more than four times the value of the median home in Ohio, Connor and his sister, Jackie, were born into a family with ample resources. (Jackie also trained at Raw Talent and went on to play basketball at Old Dominion.) Those resources were channeled by a father who was invested in Connor’s athletic success and knowledgeable about the recruiting process, and bolstered by a mother who could logistically, financially and emotionally help support the family’s ambitions.

“When you have two parents and you have wealth and you have structure, you have more access and you’re exposed to more things,” Whitfield says. “Then you know when to get on that circuit. To know when to get some highlight tapes—you need an institution behind you.

“Really, truly, you could have a working-class family and many have made it out, but when you just peek around the league at some of your star quarterbacks, they were raised to be CEOs, and rightfully so. That’s not a knock.”

Connor was exposed to individual instruction at a young age, and began stacking up reps in offseason competitive scenarios as early as middle school. The instruction didn’t come in his backyard either; it was a 45-minute drive away.

“A lot of it comes down to resources,” says Bruce Feldman, author of The QB: The Making of the Modern Quarterback. “The position is so nuanced, you don’t have guys showing up in college with very little experience and having success at quarterback like you see with other positions. Rarely do guys all of a sudden become quarterbacks.

“At the same time, I remember Oliver Luck telling me, you can’t force it on the kid. If they don’t really love it, they’re not going to be doing the extra work and doing all the stuff that it takes to be really, really good.”

Born of opportunity, nurtured by advocacy and kept alive by ample resources, a young quarterback’s ambition often snowballs. The intangibles are rarely innate. You become a quarterback in that heightened sense of the word—in the way that Brady, Manning and Rodgers are quarterbacks—through an accumulation of experiences.

“I think what really happens is confidence,” says Dr. Kevin Elko, a sports psychologist who has spent the past several months interviewing QB prospects for the Eagles. “A lot of people think that confidence is a gene and that it’s sort of an emotion, but the real answer is a choice that someone modeled and helped you practice.”

In this survey, we encountered a father from Modesto, Calif., who drove his son 90 minutes every weekend to work with a preferred quarterbacks coach in the Bay Area. There was also a mom from Deltona, Fla., with a look reserved only for coaches that could burn through a brick wall. But first, let’s examine two quarterbacks from the 2016 draft who don’t seem to fit the mold of a modern NFL upbringing.

The Outliers

“There are some 5- or 6-year-olds running around tackling each other, getting into stuff right now. Some of them have a 10-lane highway to become a quarterback, and some of them have a rope bridge. They don’t even know.”

— George Whitfield

Cardale Jones was born at the beginning of a rope bridge.

The youngest of six children, Jones was raised by a single mother and says he’s never met his father. He and his siblings grew up bouncing from home to home in East Cleveland, eviction notices decorating their trail. Despite this nomadic lifestyle, Cardale never moved far from Glenville High, where his youth team practiced not far from one of the city’s powerhouses. The coach of that team? Ted Ginn Sr., the father of NFL wide receiver Ted Ginn Jr.

When he was 8, Cardale was a tall, bony kid playing offensive and defensive line for the Glenville Titans. He often walked around the outskirts Glenville High’s practice on the way to his own practices, and was soon noticed by Ginn Sr. “Get the ball and throw it,” the high school coach told him one day. “You look like a quarterback…”

Says Ginn Sr.: “He’d throw it and I’d say ‘You can’t throw. Go on somewhere.’ So he’d smile, laugh and every day he’d come back. And he did it everyday just to come by for me to tell him what he couldn’t do.”

The practice paid off, and soon enough, Cardale Jones would stand out for his prodigious arm strength. (He has been known to throw a ball 65 yards while kneeling.) As a freshman in high school, Jones was tabbed by Ginn Sr. to play quarterback for the first time. The coach had obtained a certain level of autonomy in personnel choices, thanks in part to the fruits of his labor; since 2006, Glenville has sent a dozen players to the NFL, including ’06 first-round pick Donte Whitner.

“He didn’t get the early start that a lot of guys in the NFL get,” Ginn Sr. says of Jones. “I figured he could overcome that with God-given talent. Even when he was eight or nine, he could throw the ball and it was bigger than his hands.”

In January 2008, early in Cardale’s high school career, his mother, Florence, was arrested for and later pled guilty to drug possession charges. Cardale sought refuge with Michelle Nash, a Cleveland woman who first mentored and then became the quarterback’s nonlegal guardian. Nash brought structure and discipline to Cardale’s life; Ginn Sr. brought resources. In the offseason he played 7-on-7 and threw footballs to NFL wideouts, including Ginn Jr. The coach connected the pupil with numerous throwing coaches and speed coaches, including Mark Harris at Raw Talent, who asked his church to sponsor kids who couldn’t pay for his services. It was Ginn Sr. who inspired Harris to start the bus tour that got Cook noticed by Michigan State. For 20 years, Glenville has done its own tour of the Big 10, while also occasionally playing out-of-state schools on national TV.

After graduation, Jones needed a year at Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to qualify academically for college; he enrolled at Ohio State on a full scholarship in January 2012. After three turbulent seasons at Ohio State in which he tossed just 269 passes but also won a national championship to close out the 2015 season, Jones was a fourth-round pick of the Bills.

Currently, Ginn Sr. is working on another project: A big-bodied, 6-foot-4 high school sophomore who plays basketball, but not football … yet. Says Ginn Sr., “He’s a millionaire and doesn’t even realize it.”

In North Dakota, they don’t share Ginn’s optimistic appraisal of high schoolers. In 2011, the year Carson Wentz graduated from Century High School in Bismark, there were two Division I recruits in the entire state, making it a boom year. The offensive lineman from Fargo signed with Missouri, and the defensive end from Wahpeton signed with Toledo. Wentz, who was drafted No. 2 overall by the Eagles, didn’t have a Division I offer.

Wentz had been groomed to be Century High’s quarterback since he was in the fifth grade: his throwing ability, leadership and football cognition made him a standout. “He always had that workman mentality that he wanted to get better every day of every practice,” says Nick Walker, former Dickinson State quarterback and Carson’s QB coach in high school. “The other thing is his intelligence was off the charts in terms of what you could give him. He was so smart, but his work ethic and leadership set him apart.”

Wentz’s model? His father was an all-conference linebacker at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Still, playing high school ball in North Dakota presented mountainous challenges. Hopping in a car for a tour of college camps was unrealistic, and there was no access to offseason football, but the biggest hindrance was a shoulder injury that Wentz suffered as a varsity baseball pitcher that prevented him from playing quarterback during his junior season. He played wide receiver and defensive back until finally getting the opportunity to start under center full-time as a senior. He capitalized, earning North Dakota 3A Player of the Year honors in 2010. He landed at North Dakota State and started winning national championships, passing for 5,115 yards in his season-and-a-half as the starter (he broke his wrist six games into his senior season).

For Carson Wentz, there was no offseason football in his formative years. No camps. No powerhouse high school program or influence-wielding coach. He didn’t have multiple college offers, which gives the quarterback an opportunity to pick the offense best suited to his skills and ambitions. It shouldn’t have worked out for Wentz, but it did. He refused to let his circumstances dictate what was possible, and his prodigious arm led the way.

“It was very clear to us, even at a young age, that he could make every throw we could ask him to make,” Walker says. “And that’s something that has carried him. He’s a leader, of course, and he can put the football wherever he wants.”

The Advocates

What all of these quarterbacks have in common—even the outliers in this study—is empowerment. Along the way, their efforts were first validated by parents or guardians, and then by multiple people whom each athlete respected in a football sense. From California to Louisiana, parents of quarterbacks who make it this far are often described by people using the same words: devoted, intense, and very supportive. The high school coach of former Memphis quarterback Paxton Lynch, a first-round pick of the Broncos, describes David and Stacie Lynch as having been “very involved.”

“Stacie is like the rock of the family,” Allen Johnson says. “She’ll give you that look and let you know something ain’t right. I’m practically family, so I didn’t get the look, but I saw the look come at other coaches in other sports.”

Kevin Hogan, the former Stanford QB and fifth-round pick of the Chiefs, was once ferried by his parents from a summer basketball tournament in New Jersey to a 7-on-7 tournament his high school football team was playing in at the University of Virginia—all in the same weekend. “They were just very supportive of everything Kevin did,” said Joe Reyda, Kevin’s head coach at Gonzaga High in Washington D.C.

The Dolphins’ seventh-round selection, Brandon Doughty, is a local kid who grew up in Davie, Fla. In order to get on the recruiting radar, his father took him to camps as far away as Boston College and Ohio State. “I’m gonna be honest man, my dad’s my best friend,” says the former Western Kentucky quarterback. “I don’t even know why I remember this, but we were at N.C. State when Michael Jackson died, and I just remember exactly where we were. The recruiting stuff was a bonding time with me and my dad. It’s something I’ll hold dear to my heart for the rest of my life.”

Former N.C. State quarterback Jacoby Brissett’s single mother, Lisa Brown, could be heard cussing out head coach Jack Daniels from the stands during games at Dwyer High (Fla.) for any number of reasons, always in support of her son. The Patriots drafted him in the third round. “I didn’t really get to know her until 10th-grade year when she cussed me out for not putting her son in the game,” Daniels says with a laugh. “She’s a great lady, and a competitive lady.”

When 7-on-7 football was gaining national popularity, Jared Goff couldn’t find a league close to home, so his father helped him organize his own team that competed in the Bay Area. “It was his idea,” Jerry Goff says of his son. “It was just a great experience.”

The high school coach of Dak Prescott, the fourth-round selection of the Cowboys, described the quarterback’s single mother as having been “very involved” in Dak’s career despite raising three children on her own. “She knew football,” Haughton High (La.) coach Rodney Gion says of Peggy Prescott, who died in 2013 after battling colon cancer. “She would question us quite often on stuff. I can just remember seeing her in the store one day, and she said, ‘I don’t know about that offensive coordinator. That Cajun don’t know what he’s doing.’ She was phenomenal—the kind of woman you’d want on your side in a fight.”

Ken Mastrole, an ex-NFL and NFL Europe quarterback, runs the Mastrole Passing Academy in Florida. He worked with both Doughty and Detroit Lions rookie Jake Rudock in high school, and says there’s typically a clear distinction between the parents of successful quarterbacks and those who struggle to reach the upper echelon. “I get so many parents who are so pushy you can tell they want it more than the kid,” he says. “With the top quarterbacks, the parents are aggressive, but they put the kid in the right position to make his own decisions.”

The investment made in these quarterbacks by adults other than their parents often inspired the kids to further invest their own time and effort. For Wentz, that outside influence was Nick Walker, his position coach in high school whom he says was among the first to believe in his future as a quarterback. For Jones it was Ginn Sr., who recognized his potential long before he realized it himself. In West Palm Beach, Jacoby Brissett counted as one of his mentors former Super Bowl-winning head coach Bill Parcells, who lives in the area and is close with Brissett’s high school coach. Eleven of the 12 remaining quarterbacks, most of whom had more resources at their disposal, worked extensively with private QB coaches.

Former Indiana quarterback Nate Sudfeld had met former Cal head coach Roger Theder through Colin Kaepernick, who played at Nevada with Nate’s brother, Zach, now a Jets tight end. Nate became a client and protégé of Theder’s as a sophomore, according to Nate’s father. When he wasn’t in season or spending weekends playing travel basketball, Nate and his father drove the 80 miles from Modesto to the Berkeley area.

A month ago, Nate’s parents, Ralph and Michelle Sudfeld, were visiting Nate at Indiana. Driving through his college town for one of the last times, the quarterback felt nostalgic. “Dad, I’m thinking about all the times we got up at 6 a.m.,” he said, “and picked up another receiver off the team, and you drove us out to the Bay Area, and you dropped us off, and you sat there for about six hours. Then we get in the car and we have a two-hour drive home. As often as you did that, I have to thank you for that.”

Washington drafted Sudfeld in the sixth round.

Roger Theder, 76, coached for Cal, Stanford, San Jose State, the Colts and the Chargers before turning to private tutoring in the early 1990s. In 2011. he told the San Francisco Gate he was working with about 200 kids per year, with several passers travelling to see him from out of state. “Roger was a big deal to him,” Ralph says. “He wasn’t a parent or an immediate football coach, and that was big. Roger saw something in him and I just saw Nate blossom under him.”

Many have debated the value of so-called quarterback gurus for more than two decades, ever since people such as Theder got involved and created a cottage industry. Many college and pro coaches privately lament that quarterbacks are showing up to preseason camps heaving learned bad habits. Other coaches sing the praises of private coaches who can work with athletes during periods when NCAA and NFL rules bar teams from having contact.

It’s become standard for draft eligible quarterbacks to sign with agents who will pay for the athlete to work out with a coach of his choosing before the draft. And the fee will typically range anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000, depending on the prominence of the athlete. In some cases, the bigger the name, the less he pays. Often enough, though, the quarterback coach has had a relationship with the pupil long before the draft process.

One of the major benefits to youth quarterbacks is the progressive effect of empowerment, according to Dr. Elko, the sports psychologist. “All coaches are not created equal,” Dr. Elko says, “but the really good coach will show you how you’re better and convince you you’re better. That’s especially important for quarterbacks, because we know the best quarterbacks have a confidence that’s not really related to anything tangible. They just believe.”

The Pick

In 2012, Joe Banner was willing to go to any lengths to end the Browns’ monumental streak of bad quarterback play. With an eye toward the future, the team president commissioned a study to determine the best quarterback that would be available in the 2014 draft. That study, completed after Banner’s firing in early 2014, would cost the team over $100,000.

The criteria were purely analytical. For example, one measure defined completion percentage under pressure on one side of the field versus the other, and how it projected to the pros. Infamously, the Browns ignored the study and drafted Heisman winner Johnny Manziel over the recommended passer from Louisville, Teddy Bridgewater. (Since 2005, when the Browns drafted Akron QB Charlie Frye in the third round, 18 quarterbacks have started at least one game for Cleveland.)

Before Banner’s firing, quarterback intangibles had been discussed at length by the staff, but not factored into any sort of formula. Banner already knew what to look for. He was the Eagles’ team president in 1999, when Philadelphia selected Donovan McNabb with the second overall pick. He was the second of five quarterbacks drafted among the first 12 picks (Tim Couch, McNabb, Akili Smith, Daunte Culpepper and Cade McNown).

“We got down to a few guys that we really liked, and they were really close,” Banner says. “And what actually was the deciding factor was the closeness with his family, and the strength we thought he had from being surrounded by who we heard were good people.

“I think it would be difficult to articulate the amount of pressure you have to handle at the quarterback position to be successful, and I don’t think that just starts in the NFL. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to see that the stronger your family and your network, the more you’re able to deal with the ups and downs.”

For two high school quarterbacks who met in the summer of 2012, the downs and how they were handled were well documented before this year’s draft.

Hackenberg, one of the most polarizing prospects thanks to his declining performance after a head-coaching change in 2014, committed to Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal. While competing in the Elite 11 finals alongside Goff, Hackenberg doubled down on his commitment to the Nittany Lions, telling ESPN, “At the end of the day, if there’s football at Penn State, I’m going to be there.”

His words came less than a week before NCAA president Mark Emmert announced a four-year postseason ban for Penn State, 112 vacated wins and a $60 million fine.

His father, Erick, who watched his son grow from a 7-year-old rookie quarterback to the No. 1-ranked passer in the class of 2013, had stressed to Christian the importance of picking a school that he’d be happy attending even if he weren’t a football player. Throughout the recruiting process, Erick downplayed the importance of individual ranking and scouting service hype, stressing the value of the right fit. They believed they’d found that with Penn State’s new coach Bill O’Brien, who had coached Tom Brady in New England.

Then the sanctions were announced.

“Hearing that was like someone taking a knife and stabbing your heart,” Erick says. “I mean this is where your kid wants to be … when he decided what to do, he stood there and he had the tears coming down in his eyes and he goes, ‘Dad, we’re gonna make this work.’ That was a moment for me as a dad that I realized we did it the right way.”

Jared Goff wouldn’t hit his low until a year and a half after the Elite 11 camp, when first-year Cal coach Sonny Dykes sent out a freshman who had lost all of four games in his career at Marin Catholic to start at quarterback for a rebuilding program. Jared would keep his cool, even after being benched in the first quarter of an eventual 55-16 loss in the rain at Oregon. That first year Cal went 1-11, beating only Portland State.

After all of the wins and all of the reps in high school, he had been prepared to lead, and to do so early, earning the starting job after impressing coaches with his near-obsessive work ethic. He just never knew he was so well prepared to lose, too.

“It was a reality check that winning is not just like that,” Jared said after his pro day in March, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “It gave me a different perspective on things.”

Cal football improved almost as rapidly as Jared did over the next two seasons, finishing 5-7 in 2014 and 8-5 last year, with Goff tossing 43 touchdowns and 13 interceptions. He calls that humbling freshman season “one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

Says Jerry Goff, “Getting knocked down a peg or two is helpful. That in itself really made him the guy he is today. You’re going to make mistakes and you’ve got to figure out how to fix those mistakes and not compound them. You have to be able to bounce back from that adversity and to understand that things don’t come easy.”

Goff, of course, was drafted No. 1 overall by the Rams in advance of the team’s homecoming to Southern California. Hackenberg came off the board 50 picks later, in the second round to the New York Jets. Their ascension from Pop Warner passers to high school phenoms to future NFL starters was not ordained. It was forged during hours upon hours of film study, countless throws when nobody was watching and in moments of temerity few others can match. It was not a given, but it was guided.

Today, playing quarterback is a meritocracy within an aristocracy unlike any other position in football. NFL locker rooms are stocked with legacies of broken homes and rags-to-riches stories, and of athletes who discovered the game late and blossomed into pros. Such tales are rarely if ever told in the QB room. The amount of nuance involved in learning the position, the resources required, and the cachet associated with the word quarterback all but demands it

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-nfl-draft-goff-20160424-story.html

Jared Goff’s laid-back nature, blue-collar work ethic could be a first-class ticket to the top of NFL draft

Jared Goff shuffled in his stocking feet across the hardwood floor of his boyhood home and flopped back on an oversized leather couch in the living room. His beloved Golden State Warriors were on TV, he had called for a post-workout pizza, and his golden retriever Leo was shadowing him step for step.

The rare moment of calm — precisely a week before he could become the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft — was a welcome respite for Goff, the former California quarterback who since January has zigzagged across the country meeting with NFL teams.

As coachable as he is on the field, the 6-foot-4 Goff is patently uncoachable as a traveler. He hates getting shoehorned into economy class. Since a tortuous trip home from the scouting combine in middle seat 33B, he has taken to paying for his own upgrades.

“I was scheduled from Philly back to California on like a six-hour flight — in coach,” said Goff, 21. “I was like, upgrade. I didn’t even look at the price.”

Soon enough, the money won’t be an issue. When the NFL opens the draft Thursday at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, Goff will either be selected first by the Rams, or second by the Eagles, and immediately before or after North Dakota State quarterback Carson Wentz. Barring a bizarre twist, quarterbacks will go 1-2 in the draft for the third time in five years — something that had happened only four previous times since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.

Talk about upgrading: With Goff as the starting quarterback, Cal went from 1-11 in 2013, to 5-7 in 2014, to 8-5 last season, with a victory over Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl.

Goff’s Cal career had humble beginnings, even though he was the school’s first true freshman quarterback to start the opener since at least World War II. The Golden Bears’ lone victory in 2013 was a 37-30 win over Portland State, a jarring reality for a player who had lost a total of four games in four years at Marin Catholic High.

Something Goff quickly learned about being a leader: It comes easy when you’re winning. He had to learn how to lead as the losses piled up. That’s a badge of honor for him now, and enticing for NFL teams who know they will have to go through growing pains with a rookie quarterback.

Cal Coach Sonny Dykes, in his first season that year, stuck with Goff through all the turbulence. That included a 55-16 humiliation in a monsoon in Oregon, when the freshman lost two fumbles on Cal’s first three possessions and was benched with 2:57 left in the first quarter. Goff’s passing numbers: three for six for 11 yards.

With the benefit of time, Dykes can look back and see one of Goff’s best qualities was surfacing. The coach watched his young quarterback on the sideline and noticed that while Goff clearly wasn’t pleased with his performance, he didn’t look hopelessly rattled, either.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Dykes said. “Jared’s body language was a lot better than mine.”

Dykes said Goff has an uncommon ability to address problems and fix them.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a kid that’s had more of an ability to come up with a plan and work that plan,” he said.

During every extended break from football, Dykes said, Goff would pick two or three points of emphasis to work on, then spend that time addressing the weaknesses in his game.

After the 1-11 debacle, Goff’s primary focus was becoming a better and more vocal leader.

“I really just had to mature,” he said. “I was 18 years old and we hadn’t won any games, so it was hard.”

Meanwhile, Cal strength coach Damon Harrington sent a not-too-subtle reminder to his players, removing the stylish blue Cal workout clothes from their lockers and replacing them with cheap, logo-less gray gear. The players had to earn the right to get their stuff back, and that didn’t happen until just before the 2014 season began, meaning that particular blue-gray game lasted for months.

“It was the worst,” Jared said. “We would joke around like we were prison inmates.”

There was a lot of good-natured ribbing at Cal, and Goff was frequently on the receiving end, particularly when he started to get national attention.

“We knew J was going to be a high pick coming into this year,” receiver Bryce Treggs said. “So if he threw a bad ball, we were like, ‘That was a late-rounder! Undrafted ball!’ We’d always give him a hard time that way.”

What Goff has been working on the last three months — and part of that has been with Wentz in Irvine, because they’re represented by the same agency — is making the transition from the shotgun spread formation he ran at Cal to a more under-center, pro-style offense he’ll run in the NFL.

Helping Goff make that transition is Ted Tollner, the former USC coach whose son, Bruce, is one of the agents representing the two top quarterbacks.

“That’s where the emphasis was, trying to get the pure fundamentals,” the elder Tollner said of Goff, who had 43 touchdowns with 13 interceptions last season. “I said, ‘Here’s the things they want to see: Do you understand how your feet move and the rhythm that it takes? Do you have the right bend in your knees? Are your hands right? Are your eyes right? Are your shoulders right?’ So I started there with those kinds of basics. Jared just caught on — bam! — like that.”

Goff is highly competitive, yet doesn’t come across as overly intense or emotional. He’s more casual, closer to sleepy-eyed Eli Manning than everything-has-to-be-perfect Peyton. He’s also known for staying cool under pressure, and at 218 pounds, he looks like a broad-shouldered but lanky surfer who prefers to go with the flow.

“I think Jared is who he is and is successful to the point that he has been so far because he doesn’t have the prototypic Type-A mentality,” said his dad, Jerry, a former major league catcher who’s now a fireman stationed just across the 101 Freeway from San Francisco International Airport. Though he’s 52, he still has the boyish look he did as a baseball player and punter at Cal in the 1980s.

“He’s focused on the task, don’t get me wrong. But I can only compare it to myself. Before a game, I had to know where my socks were, my shoes were. If something was out of place, I’d lose my mind.”

Jared concedes his idea of picking out an outfit is grabbing a shirt off the floor, giving it a sniff, and pulling it on if it passes the smell test. One of his agents rolled his eyes when Goff showed up to talk to reporters at the combine and hadn’t combed his hair, failing to capitalize on the $80 haircut he had just gotten.

Goff takes pride in his ability to remain even-keeled and not focus on any given play, good or bad, but to keep moving forward.

“That’s what helped me be successful, is staying as calm as possible,” he said. “It doesn’t mean there weren’t times when I’d get everyone fired up and be loud and everything. But I wasn’t like Drew Brees doing the chants before the game.”

In that sense, Goff and his dad are a lot alike. While Jerry might have been meticulous about his clothes and equipment as a big league catcher, he’s easygoing and unassuming as a denizen of his firehouse in Millbrae, which looks more like a residential home than a typical station. He doesn’t volunteer that he’s the father of a star quarterback, yet he’s happy to talk about it if anyone should ask. His two shift-mates, who watched Jared grow up and went to his games whenever possible, are both off Thursday so as not to miss a minute of the draft.

Rams running backs: Todd Gurley is a young star, Tre Mason’s status is muddled
Rams running backs: Todd Gurley is a young star, Tre Mason’s status is muddled
Jerry and Nancy Goff, high school sweethearts, are the furthest thing from stage parents. They’re just excited to see their son begin the next chapter of his career, whether it’s with the Rams or Eagles, with the bonus of his possibly winding up in L.A., where Jared’s older sister, Lauren, attended UCLA and still resides.

Multiple people with knowledge of the situation say the NFL has asked the Rams to keep their quarterback choice quiet until the draft, thereby sustaining the drama. Jerry Goff said “he has a pretty good idea” where his son is headed, without revealing his preference, but that he doesn’t want to get his hopes too high before NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell reads Jared’s name.

Dykes said the Goff family is as “low-maintenance” as any he has encountered in his career as a coach.

“We threw that poor kid to the wolves his first year,” he said. “He just got teed-off on play after play, and nobody ever said a word. Mom and dad were never, ‘Hey, wait a minute, guys, what are y’all doing to my son?’ They were just supportive, exactly the kind of people you would want.

“I can remember we were having issues with one of our players,” Dykes continued. “I was like, ‘Look, I’ve had 15 conversations with you about an issue. I’ve never had one conversation with Jared Goff or his parents about an issue since he’s been here. . . . He’s going to be a first-round player, and you’re a walk-on.”

Part of that could be the blue-collar work ethic the elder Goff tried to instill in his son, one that Jerry leaned on during his journeyman career with the Montreal Expos, Pittsburgh Pirates and Houston Astros that spanned seven years.

“I was a decent player, but I made myself good enough to get to the big leagues because I worked hard,” Jerry said. “I know how hard it is to get to the level [in] whatever sport you are playing or whatever job you are doing; you need to work hard. Be a kid, go ride your bike, go fishing, just do it in moderation, and understand that there’s a time you need to work if you want to go to the level you want to get to.

“I didn’t project him being an NFL player or getting a scholarship to college, that was not in our wheelhouse at all. We just wanted him to have a good high school experience, compete as hard as you can compete, and let the chips fall where they may.”

Jared is quick to point out he wasn’t a coddled player in high school, and didn’t have anything handed to him. He might be one of the top two candidates for the No. 1 pick now, but he got only three scholarship offers, from Cal, Fresno State and Washington State. It’s his work ethic that got him this far.

Still, he occasionally has to throw his dad a brush-back pitch, lest he become an overbearing helicopter parent. The two had a brief phone call Thursday after Jared had returned from a quick trip to L.A., where he dined with Rams owner Stan Kroenke and team executive Kevin Demoff.

“Have you gotten a workout in today?” Jerry asked, unable to resist a nudge.

“Dad,” Jared said, raising his voice. “Stop!”

In truth, Goff doesn’t need the workout reminders. He adheres to his routine, and now has shifted his focus from a combine-related regimen of heavy weights and sprints to a preseason maintenance mode.

“The combine’s a great experience, and I’m sure everyone will tell you the same thing,” he said. “Cool experience, lots of fun, would never want to do it again.”

The past few months have been a whirlwind, filled with lots of heady experiences, and a few unexpected twists. For instance, he was scheduled to throw out the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game, and was excited to do so, but had to decline when the Rams called at the last minute because they wanted to meet with him in L.A.

“[The Rams] were joking with me about it right when I walked in,” he said. “They tossed me a baseball and said, ‘Hey, you want to go throw one real quick?'”

For this onetime coach flier, that’s a small sacrifice for a first-class payoff on the other end.

Follow Sam Farmer on Twitter @LATimesfarmer

Copyright © 2016, Los Angeles Times

Despite What You May Think, My NFL Career Was A Success

There were times — a good majority of my career — when I didn’t play well, but the ups and downs helped set me up in life.

By Joey Harrington

https://thecauldron.si.com/despite-what-you-may-think-my-nfl-career-was-a-success-179aeca1b1e7#.1igoljpjs

credit to Primetime for finding this.

Seven seasons have come and gone since I retired from the NFL. I went out on my terms, when I was ready. I fulfilled all I set out to do.

At least at the pro level.

If you find that curious, I’m going to explain what happened at every step in my career, and why—regardless of outside perceptions—I think it was a rousing success, but first let me let you in on a little secret: My biggest football dream growing up was to play in the Rose Bowl, not in the NFL.

Sadly, it’s the one thing I was never able to make happen.

I was 11 years old when my dad first took me to Pasadena. It was Bo Schembechler’s last game—Michigan vs. USC—and we’d arrived hours before kickoff. We walked around and looked at all the plaques on the wall outside the Rose Bowl—the ones that list all the previous MVPs.

That’s when I did the math.

“Dad, that one’s going to be me,” I said, looking at the still-empty space for the year 2000. “Right there. That one.”

When that year finally came around, my junior year at Oregon, I reminded him again before the annual Civil War game against Oregon State. We were going to Pasadena, I told him. I wound up throwing five picks in a 23–13 loss. Our shot at the Rose Bowl was gone.

Making that game was always my biggest football ambition. Not to improve my draft stock, not to be a pro football Hall of Famer. Play college football, go to the Rose Bowl, set myself up for success and life, and have fun. That was it.

When I came back for my senior year, we had the best regular season (to that point) in Oregon history, but were left out of the BCS championship game—which, of course, was held at the Rose Bowl that season. We felt we’d earned the right to play Miami, but were bypassed for Nebraska, which was behind us in the polls and hadn’t even played for its conference championship after being pounded by Colorado (which we would defeat in the Fiesta Bowl).

That was my final chance at a Rose Bowl dream, and it was taken from me.

The irony, though—and I’ve said this before, and a lot of my former teammates have given me grief for it—is the way the story played out couldn’t have been more perfect for Oregon. The whole country thought we should’ve been in that national title game, and the fact that we weren’t created some buzz. It drew in viewers that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. It created fans. By us playing in the Fiesta Bowl and winning in such blowout fashion, we not only made new temporary Ducks supporters, but kept a hell of a lot of them, as well.

Had we gone to the Rose Bowl and played that mighty Miami team, the fairy tale ending might have changed. We would’ve been up against a team that wound up having six guys drafted in the first round. We had one of the best draft years in Oregon history that season, and had six guys drafted total.

If we play that Miami team 10 times, I honestly think we win three of them—not unlike how Ohio State eventually beat them the following year. Had we played them and lost The national narrative may have changed, at least in the short term, but what we helped put in place for the long term still would have been there.

When I first got to Eugene in 1997, I was part of a rag-tag group of freshmen that, for whatever reason, ruffled a lot of feathers. We weren’t OK with being average, and we let everyone know it. When we talked about things like winning national championships and going to the Rose Bowl, people sort of dismissed us. That was fine by us.

Here was a bunch of two-and-three-star recruits who came in and—I think it’s fair to say—completely changed the program. To go from a six-win season in 1997 to being the first 11-win team in school history our senior year It was incredible, even if we ultimately came up short of our goal. Throughout that process, we experienced something few people ever have the chance to: building something successful, strong, and permanent.

Now, here’s my NFL story …

In 2002, the Detroit Lions selected me at No. 3 overall. The four years I spent there absolutely crushed me. By the time I left, I was a shell of the player I once was. Here’s an example of how broken things were by the end.

I remember walking into the office of then head coach Steve Mariucci and telling him, “I need you to give me permission to throw the ball down the field.” I’d never felt so down. At that point, I was just searching—grasping—for some kind of support.

“Why do you need permission” he asked.

“I’m afraid to make a mistake,” I said. “You tell me every day, if it’s close, check it down … and I’ve gotten into a rhythm where all I do is check it down, and I’m afraid to throw it down the field.”

He got up, went to his closet, grabbed a toothbrush, and started brushing his teeth. Then he walked towards the door, and said, “I have to go do some interviews. I’ll be back. If you want to come back later, we can talk.”

He just left.

That was at the very end, when things had all but collapsed around me. Mariucci was a good guy who was trying to save his job, but when one of my teammates went out and said I was the reason our coach got fired, it created a situation where I just imploded mentally. I couldn’t handle it.

This wasn’t football. This wasn’t team. This wasn’t fun.

Through the gentle nudging of general manager Matt Millen—who was, in my opinion, one of the only stand-up guys in that organization—I spent a lot of time with a sports psychologist, trying to figure out how to get my confidence back. In the NFL (and especially at the quarterback position), if you don’t have confidence, you’re done.

There are 100 guys out there who can throw a comeback route, and 100 more who can throw a post. But there are only a handful of quarterbacks who can have the route picked off, then come back and throw it again. Who can get knocked down or get hit in the teeth … and throw it again.

That, to me, is the difference between making it to the NFL, and being great in the NFL.

I’m sometimes asked if I was put in an unfair position in Detroit. My answer is always immediate and the same: No. Saying so implies I was the only one in that kind of a position. Welcome to the NFL. Pick a year, and I’ll give you five guys who were in the same type of spot I was. For all of my prior success—all the balls I had bounce my way through college—I wasn’t prepared to deal with it when things no longer went my way.

If we’re being honest, not a lot of people are.

Toward the end of my tenure in Detroit, Millen and I sat down and talked. He asked me flat out if I wanted to be there anymore. I told him I didn’t know. He’d just brought in Mike Martz—at the time one of the NFL’s most celebrated offensive gurus, just a few years removed from having helped take the Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf” to the Super Bowl. It was Millen’s belief that Mike could get me back on track. After Matt, I spoke with the new head coach, Rod Marinelli.

“Look, Rod,” I said. “If you want me to be here, I will be here, because I respect you, and I respect Matt. But with the exception of one or two guys in that locker room … the rest of them can go to hell.”

At that point, I felt like I’d given everything, had sacrificed for my teammates, and all they’d done was hang me out to dry. The day everything happened with Dre’ Bly—the scapegoat saga—only two people came up to me and said anything: One guy in the locker room, and the chef in the cafeteria.

My message to Rod was, “I’ll play for you. I respect the fact that you can sit down and have an honest conversation with me. But you need to know what’s happened up to this point.”

What I wanted, like any player does, was options. So when I met with Nick Saban—I remember this very clearly—we sat down at the dinner table and he said, “We traded a second-round pick for Daunte Culpepper. We’re going to trade a fifth-round pick for you. I don’t care what we’re paying him; I don’t care what were paying you. He’s going to get the first-team reps, you’re going to get the second-team reps. If he plays better than you, he’s going to play; if you play better than him, you’re going to play. Can you handle that”

I said, ‘‘That’s all I’ve been looking for.” After that, I told Matt I was going to Miami. I still talk to Matt Millen to this day. He’s a fantastic, wonderful guy. But it was time for both sides to part ways.

As it turns out, Miami was where I met the two guys I say were most like me—the coaches I felt most connected to in the league: Jason Garrett and Mike Mularkey. They were tremendous football minds and even better people. Before Miami, I was as low as I’d ever been mentally. I had to spend a good amount of time trying to get back to who I was, and those guys were instrumental in that.

Jason and Mike understood life in ways a lot of people don’t. They grasped the importance of putting in work on the football field, but they also understood where football fell on the totem pole of life. What they had was perspective. Looking back, I see it as one of the greatest gifts football has given me.

As for Saban, he and I actually had a really good relationship. Many people think of him as a little dictator, but we got along really well. He could be honest with me, and I would listen. After four years of having something said to my face and different things said behind closed doors, all I wanted was a coach who told me where I stood. Nick gave that to me.

Part of me thinks that had Nick stayed in Miami, and not left for Alabama, I’d have stayed there as well. There was a sense of stability about Saban’s stint in Miami. In another life, it might’ve been the place where I really regained my football footing. Sadly, this one had other ideas.

Thanksgiving Day, 2006. I’m with the Dolphins, and we’re back in Detroit to face the Lions. It was the most gratifying day of my NFL career.

213 yards. Three touchdowns. And, more importantly, a win.

Afterward, I stayed in Detroit and flew back to Portland to be with my family. On my ride to airport, I heard one of the sports-talk guys say, “Well, he only threw for 220 yards and three touchdowns … it’s not like he threw for 350.”

Even in victory, even though I knew I’d only thrown one pass in the fourth because we were beating them so badly, they found a way to try to bring me down.

So yeah, you can say that was a satisfying day. It’s impossible to quantify what a performance like that can do for a quarterback’s confidence. For the first time in what felt like ages, I’d proved to people—and to myself—that I could still play this game, and play it at a high level.

My reputation as a quarterback was never about my arm. I was never a fast runner, nor adept at throwing lasers into tight coverage. My strength lay in my ability to read a situation, process the information, and get the ball where it needed to go—all while getting my teammates to follow my lead.

So many times at Oregon we’d be down in the fourth, and I’d walk into that huddle and say, “Okay, let’s go win.” And no one doubted it. That’s who I was. That’s what I did. That’s what we did.

But the time during which I started playing better in Miami was also when I started asking myself: “What is this world I’m living in” Knowing I wasn’t defined by football had long been a kind of psychological cornerstone for me. I never felt football defined me. I was a good person—with many interests beyond the gridiron—who happened to play football.

Truth told, that feeling took away a little bit of that edge. As soon as football no longer defines you, the consequences of losing aren’t as dire. When I started to shift my mindset, and start believing in myself as a person and a player again, was when my motivation started to disintegrate. Football no longer was the centerpiece of my life.

So many guys play the game with a boulder-sized chip on their shoulder, where playing becomes a matter of life and death. For some of them, it is. This is their ticket. It’s all they know or care to know. I believe that, at a certain point, my overriding desire to keep life in perspective prevented me from taking that diehard approach.

I definitely had it when I was drafted, but as soon as you realize there’s something more important out there, you can only get kicked in the teeth so many times before you say, “You know what It’s been fun. Let’s go try something else.”

Then, I went to Atlanta.

Fortunately—or unfortunately … however you want to look at it—all I’d been through to that point in my career helped me prepare for the absolute mess that was the Falcons.

When I first got word of Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal, I was in central Oregon, about a week before training camp started. I turned on the TV and saw Vick getting taken away in handcuffs. The phone rang, and I picked up.

“Are you ready” the voice on the other end said.

I was ready. Or at least I thought I was.

That team had a head coach, Bobby Petrino, who was so ill-equipped to coach an NFL team, it was laughable. If anybody challenged him, or suggested something different, the person was cast away. It was an unhealthy environment from the get-go, and it wouldn’t get any better.

If you go back and look at the first four games of the 2007 season—my only one in Atlanta—I actually played really good football. There were a couple games in a row where I was putting up great numbers, but we couldn’t find a way to win. And as anyone who knows the NFL will tell you, when you lose, things change. Even if perception doesn’t match reality.

I get asked about Michael Vick a lot. Strange as it sounds, that relationship was one of the bright spots during my time with the Falcons. I really liked Mike, and was thrilled to see him turn his life around. If you were to meet him in passing, you’d probably say he’s a bit standoffish. Maybe even a little arrogant. But he had to be. For as much as I felt my life was bubbled, his life was ten times more chaotic—the pressure, the scrutiny, the endless questions—than most other players. If you actually took the time to sit down and talk to him, one on one, you knew he was a good person.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t root for Vick every time I saw him on the field. How many people, halfway through their career, and with as much baggage as he carried, can completely reinvent themselves like that Early on, he really was the last one out on the practice field—shoes untied and chin strap undone—and the first one out the door. To go from that to learning how to be a true professional and great locker room guy is hard to do, and I give the man a ton of credit. In the end, he truly became the person we all knew was there underneath the armored shell.

My last stop in the NFL was New Orleans.

Throughout my time in the league, I saw teammates enroll their kids in school, wherever we were playing, only to re-enroll them where they lived full time after winter break. When I had a family, I knew that wasn’t the life I wanted to give my kids. Part of what made my upbringing so great is I’m still friends with kids I went to grade school with. That’s my crew. If you’re moving from place to place, constantly picking up and setting down in other places, how can you build long-term relationships

When I signed with the Saints, we’d just had out first son. I went out to training camp, and my wife and son came out a week later. After the first round of cuts, I was told I was safe.

So we started unpacking. Two days later, I was cut. It’s the nature of the business. One of the things I’d come to learn about myself was how much I valued stability. Prior to that training camp, I told my wife, “The next time I get released, we’re going home. We’re going back to Oregon, we’re setting down roots, and we’re starting the next part of our life.”

There’s something special about being able to take your kids to their grandparents’ house, to have their aunts and uncles around the Thanksgiving table. For as much as this country loves the sport of football—and I include myself in that—there are thousands of things that are more important. I think we lose sight of that sometimes. In our race to win on the field, we forget about the human beings who make it all happen. About the people dealing with their own struggles, far away from the glam and glitz of the gridiron.

I found something more important, and I have absolutely no regrets.

Everyone says when you retire, you miss the locker room the most. The only place I feel that way about is Oregon. That’s the locker room I miss.

When I left college, there was still a purity to the game of football; a feeling of fun and camaraderie that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. I knew when I got to the NFL that it was going to be a business—sometimes even a brutal one—but hey, you got paid to play the game, right That sounded good to me.

What they don’t tell you is, because of that, all the things that made the game fun—the togetherness, the sense of shared purpose—disappear. Camaraderie gives way to a distrust of one’s own teammates. You no longer look at them as brothers in arms; you look at them like a guy who’s trying to take your job. That feeling of family, of everyone living the same lives, was gone. In its place came one of the coldest realities a human can know: having to grow up.

This manifested itself in numerous ways. You saw it in the relationships you had with the team’s medical staff. That trust you once had, that they’re looking out for your best interest, is subsumed by the fact that they’re working for someone who stands to benefit most from your being on the field.

This creates an environment where the majority of NFL players, if given the opportunity, will play in a game even if they’re advised not to. If they don’t, they might be putting their jobs at risk. It’s not like you can take a medical leave; the season—and the team—are built to move on without you, if they have to. It is the job of the coach and front office to win games. If they give someone else the opportunity to do the job you were doing, and if that player does it well, you may find yourself staring at a pink slip.

The approach is inherently shortsighted, at least when it comes to the welfare of the athletes. Even today, I wake up with bone spurs in my ankles, fewer ligaments in my shoulder, and disc issues in my back. And I got out relatively unscathed.

Did I know what I was getting into when I left college I can’t say I did. People told me, “Things are going to be different. The NFL is a business,” but I had no idea of the full magnitude of the difference. With the exception of maybe five guys on each team—those with contracts weighing heavily on the salary cap—most players are completely expendable. There’s no GM that says, “You know what He’s a good guy. I’m going to hang onto him,” if someone else out there can do your job for a fraction less.

Then there’s how players sometimes act because of what they’re asked to be on the field. The sport—its producers, players, and consumers—have come to expect a certain level of aggression. Everyone wants their players to be destructive on the field, but in order to sell Sunday product, it has to be manufactured from Monday through Saturday.

The expectations that your favorite player will be a monster on Sundays and a saint the rest of the week—well, that’s not how human nature really works. You’re going to be what you’ve trained to become. So it’s outright hypocritical for people to applaud and glorify the violent things someone does on the football field, only to be surprised and appalled at the reprehensible things they do off of it.

As for the rhetoric that comes from the NFL about player health and safety It’s all a bunch of crap. Roger Goodell has made no bones about his duty to “protect the shield.” That means protecting the brand—one that’s become one of the biggest cash cows anywhere in the world. If protecting players is at odds with that, so be it.

Everyone in the NFL has watched someone go in for surgery on Monday, and strap on the pads that Sunday. Everyone has either been hit so hard the world spins, or seen it happen to someone else. We’ve all been there. And the fact that we’re expected to go back in—at the risk of losing our jobs—creates a pretty lose-lose situation.

Yet for all the quips and qualms I might have about how the NFL is run, I can’t deny how much football has given me. And I’m not just talking about the financial aspect. There are things football can teach you that no other sport can. This is a game, after all, where another person can legally put their helmet into your sternum. You have a choice: Do I get up Or do I stay down It’s a lesson that simply can’t be replicated—physically—in other sports. Which is why I’m always so conflicted when I talk about the NFL. Because this game has given me so much. And for that, I love it.

At some point, I want my children to experience football. I think I do, anyway. In the end, I’d probably ultimately let them. After lots of discussion, of course—and honest ones—because the inherent risks in the game are real.

During my final preseason game with the Saints, I went flying headfirst to try and get a first down. I was doing my job. My helmet was smashed into the ground. When I looked up and saw the trainers, I asked them how they got there so fast. “Joey,” they said. “We’ve been here a couple minutes.” Concussions happen. Preseason, regular season, postseason. They happen.

After every game I’d go home and sit on the couch. Around 9 p.m.—like clockwork—I’d come down with a splitting headache. Was that getting my bell rung, or more the toll a career in football had taken I still don’t have an answer to that, though I often wonder.

Football is a lot of things to a lot of people. What it’s not, however, is the glorious gladiator life painted for people to see. It’s painful. It’s nerve-wracking. Left unchecked, it can be destructive to a lot of things in your life. But people are willing to get paid a lot of money for that sacrifice. In the end, it’s a choice we all have to make. I’m just glad I made the choices I made, and when I made them.

It’s interesting, being on the other side of things now, in the media, where you’re told to be critical of the guys who are out there playing. Having had time to watch games from the outside, or in the company of regular fans, it’s interesting how warped—for lack of a better word—people’s perception of success is. It seems like the belief is that, if you end your career as a Hall of Famer, you were automatically successful. If you don’t, then you weren’t.

To me, my career was a huge success. Not so much because of what I achieved or didn’t achieve, but in how it set me up for the rest of my life. In my mind, the only time you can view someone’s football career as a failure is if they didn’t use their success as a platform to better the world around them.

In 2003, I launched the Harrington Family Foundation. The goal of the organization is to find young leaders and give them the tools they need to develop that leadership. We give out “Community Quarterback” scholarships—four years, and to any four-year school in Oregon—to kids we view as future leaders of the state. We network on their behalf, introducing them to the people who can help further their dreams. The typical kid we work with isn’t a 4.0 student. The students I want Maybe they get a C in their English class, because it’s not their passion. But they have ideas. They have the ability to think critically. They can gather, and lead, in ways other kids can’t.

This is my passion, and it’s where I truly believe my NFL career was supposed to lead me to. As much as I love the game of football, if I’m truly living by the definition of what I view success to be, then I want to be—and need to be—involved with my kids’ lives in a way being in the media doesn’t allow.

My next goal To raise a family that’s cohesive. To be present in the lives of my wife and kids, so when they look back 20 years from now, they have fond memories of their dad and husband.

I was recently asked if I would give up everything I did professionally for a shot at the Rose Bowl. I won’t lie, I had to think about it pretty hard, but ultimately my answer was no. Not because football no longer means that much to me, but because it taught me what truly means the most.

Football—those experiences—shaped my life, and shaped the man I’ve become. It helped me create a solid financial footing, and opened doors that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. Even if the path wasn’t always what I predicted, football helped bring me where I am. And I love—truly love—where I am.

Rev. Sekou on Today’s Civil Rights Leaders: “I Take My Orders From Queer Women”

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32039-rev-sekou-on-today-s-civil-rights-leaders-i-take-my-orders-from-23-year-old-queer-women

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For three months, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou was on the ground in Ferguson, participating in daily protests and leading trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience. That work continues to this day: Sekou was arrested for the third time on Monday, July 13, while protesting the recent police shooting of Brandon Claxton in St. Louis.

The reverend, a St. Louis native, is a writer, filmmaker, organizer, and pastor. He began his ministry at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, where Michael Brown’s funeral was held last August.

Rev. Sekou’s frank discussions about black America’s fight for racial justice have gained him notoriety across the country.

“Martin Luther King ain’t coming back. Get over it,” said Rev. Sekou during a recent lecture at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon. “It won’t look like the civil rights movement. It’s angry. It’s profane. If you’re more concerned about young people using profanity than about the profane conditions they live in, there’s something wrong with you.”

When we heard that Rev. Sekou would be visiting the Seattle area in early July to keynote a Fellowship of Reconciliation conference, we asked him to visit the YES! office and share his experiences with the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and Baltimore.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation with Rev. Sekou.

YES!: Tell us about what you experienced during your time with the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. Who do you see leading the movement?

Sekou: In the last decade, particularly in the age of Obama, the vast majority of the black leadership has been the punditry class – those of us, and I am guilty of this, who are on television, who write books, who give lectures, but don’t necessarily experience on-the-ground direct confrontation with the state.

Now the leadership that is emerging are the folks who have been in the street, who have been tear-gassed. The leadership is black, poor, queer, women. It presents in a different way. It’s a revolutionary aesthetic. It’s black women, queer women, single mothers, poor black boys with records, kids with tattoos on their faces who sag their pants.

These folks embody intersectionality. Particularly in Ferguson, solidarity with Palestine was never a question. More than 250 Palestinians marched with us, and the local Palestinian solidarity committee was with us from day one.

And there is a suspicion of the state. As a result of that suspicion, a lot of folks have turned to cooperative models – talking about buying land, forms of entrepreneurship, a lot of discourse about self-healing – because there is such a disdain and distrust for the state.

It sounds like people are creating the kind of world they want and not waiting for the state to act. Is that what you’re seeing?

It hasn’t even been a year since the events in Ferguson, so we don’t know. And I am not a leader in this movement; I am a follower. I take my orders from 23-year-old queer women.

But when you look at Baltimore, people like Rev. Heber Brown III, the leaders of A Beautiful Struggle, and the leaders of The Algebra Project, they’ve begun looking at how we feed people. In the early days of the Freddie Gray rebellion, we saw one church – Reverend Eric King’s church – feed 2,000 people in one day. There’s been lots of self-care – which is part of the black liberation struggle that has always been about black self-determination, black self-respect, and black dignity.

This also may reflect a recognition that the state will never provide anything for us. Personally, I think the state is going to have to shake some of their resources loose, given the role it has played in the creation of poverty and the way it has maintained a certain form of hegemony over black lives.

Where do you see opportunity for things to shift in our society? Where could the movement make a real difference?

Some say that we need to move from protest to politics, we need to move from protest to power. That’s a false dichotomy.

There are real possibilities in the power of a militant, nonviolent civil disobedience that engages young people and folks who have felt alienated by traditional means of grievance-bearing – whether that be electoral politics, traditional civil rights organizations, or the mammoth nonprofit industrial complex.

If you look at Ferguson or Baltimore, most of the organizations that have emerged are new formations: Millennial Activists United, Hands Up United, Lost Voices, the Don’t Shoot Coalition. They have had no space inside a church, in the NAACP, or in the Urban League.

Paraphrasing Martin Luther King: Social movements set the climate. Elections, public policy, and legislation are thermometers. They measure it. We got two new black city council folks in Ferguson. They are not necessarily radicals, but they are there because of the people who have been in the street. There’s been a fight over a community civilian review board for the police in St. Louis, a 15-year struggle. We just passed it.

I think something has happened that can open a new radical space.

Ferguson is the longest rebellion against state violence in the history of the country. It’s secondary only to the Montgomery bus boycott, and six months longer than the Selma campaign. So that’s what we’re dealing with. And there isn’t one leader. It’s several leaders.

Why Ferguson? There is police violence against black folks happening all over the country.

Well I’m from St. Louis, and even I don’t know.

I think a couple things produced Ferguson. My family began to migrate to St. Louis in 1952 from Arkansas, fleeing the Jim Crow South and the arbitrary violence. A lot of black folks came from Arkansas and Mississippi. The highest number of lynching per capita took place in that part of the country. That’s something in the memory of people who have migrated to St. Louis.

They left Michael Brown’s body in the street for four and a half hours. That’s too much. It was right before school started, and there was a bouncy castle across the street from where he was lying. So there were 5-year-olds saying, “Mike’s laying in the street!”

They brought out police dogs before they brought an ambulance. They tried to put his body in the trunk of a car. The community was like, “You put that body in the trunk of a car and ain’t nobody leaving here alive.” So they put his body in an SUV. That was undignified.

And when young people tried to find answers, they were met with tanks and tear gas. It was too much.

If you look at the history of slave rebellions, a lot of them began after they buried a child. Adult slaves are like, “We can take it, but you can’t do this to our babies.” So I think that’s the difference, the high level of disrespect.

Do you see a role for the churches now?

We have a romantic view of the church. In Montgomery there are about 100 or so black churches – less than a dozen participated in the bus boycott. In Birmingham, there are upward of 500, and less than a dozen participated in the marches.

I think a church has a role to play, but this idea of the Church, with a big C, I think is obsolete. The young people in the street disturb our religious respectability and sensibility. Queer woman, single moms, pants sagging, tattoos – it disrupts the very character that the church presents to the world. I’m not terribly hopeful for the church. I think queer, black, poor women are the church’s salvation. They don’t need to get saved. The church needs to get saved.

I saw a brilliant story yesterday about a young African American Lutheran minister in a predominantly white church. After Charleston, she expected the service people to talk about the shooting. They didn’t. Nobody mentioned it. She said it was an epiphany for her about her place in that space and the indifference of this almost all-white church.

Martin Luther King has this famous statement that the most segregated hour in the country is on Sunday morning. That segregation comes out of the fact that, first, black folks were not allowed to worship with white folks. And second, our worship styles and traditions are different.

There’s a certain existential weaponry that we get from our music, our time together, our space. The church is where we matter. You might be scrubbing white folk’s floors all day long, but on Sunday morning you’re sister so and so. I’m not necessarily concerned about the segregation of churches. I prefer to worship with folks that worship the way I worship.

And this is me stealing Chris Crass’ line – he says that the task of white churches is not about how many people of color they have. It’s what blow are they striking at white supremacy.

Do you see a possibility of a common cause between poor black folks and poor white folks? Or does the movement have to be a separate thing?

I don’t know. I think in times of crisis people retreat to what they know. There’s definitely going to be more Balkanization. In our movement, there is a deep concern with black-only spaces because folks are trying to protect themselves and survive.

There has been some cross-racial organizing throughout history. Martin Luther King organized the poor peoples’ campaign, but when he was killed the campaign fell apart. You get a little of it with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Those coalitions are usually weak and don’t hold well.

What has emerged now is something that definitely looks different. There may be the potential of a multiracial alliance that’s black-led.

But this generation has experienced the disintegration of its community. Cornel West talks about the catastrophes visited on black communities, whether it be gentrification, the prison-industrial complex, the new Jim Crow, demonization of welfare mothers, the shredding of the welfare state, the fact that somebody black or brown dies every other day in America at the hands of the police, the exponential increase in access to weapons, or the limited access to education and health care.

You have millennials who saw at all of that and said: “We are going to love our way out.” Which echoes Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved: “Love your hands, love your flesh, ’cause out yonder, they don’t love your flesh.” That’s what we’re talking about. (Editor’s note: You can find the full passage here.)

One of the recent actions was black women, naked in San Francisco, presenting their bodies as living sacrifices. They were saying, “We love our flesh.” That’s a Beloved moment. This generation has made a commitment to love its way out.

What do you think is coming next?

I have no idea. They’ll keep killing us, and we are going to continue resisting. I know that.

A watershed moment in the history of the nation is taking down the American Swastika. That’s all it is – the Confederate flag is anti-American. It is a treasonous flag, and we were holding space for it because it represents the sensibility of a large swath of the country that is not just simply in the South.

That’s also what’s unique about this moment: Everything is up for debate. The conversation I’m hearing around this country is not about police reform, it’s about the very nature of policing. Do we honestly need them in our communities? There are folks developing programs so that the police are the last person you call – not the first.

I don’t know what comes next. I just know that the people are going to continue to resist, and it’s a great moment to be alive.
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