T-Jack Feels You

Tarvaris Jackson hasn’t arrived yet. While the clouds unburden themselves above the Vikings quarterback’s Orlando condo, a media storm is brewing in Minnesota. But T–Jack is neither here nor there; after his morning workout at Disney’s Wide World of Sports campus, he stopped to get a haircut. He wants to clean up before tomorrow’s television interview on ESPN, when he’ll be asked about the absurd possibility of backing up Brett Favre. Favre—Football Jesus himself—just text-messaged the Packers that he’s considering coming out of retirement, if necessary with someone other than Green Bay.

Jackson’s roommate, Chad Lucas, a receiver with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who caught Jackson’s passes at Alabama State, answers the door. Jackson and Lucas are staying here while attending strength-and-conditioning coach Tom Shaw’s workouts at the Disney facility. It’s a small condo with undecorated walls, and if it weren’t for the Lexus and the Escalade parked in front, it could be a dorm room set up for summer camp. There’s an iron resting on an ironing board just off the small kitchen.

T–Jack is sitting on the couch in baggy shorts and a gray T-shirt with Shaw’s logo emblazoned on its front. Even sitting down, he looks like a quarterback. He is tall and lean (he’s listed at six-two, 232) with sharp, Kanye West cheekbones. He’s got an orthodontist working on his Tom Brady smile—up close, you can see the clear plastic retainer, which he removes at one point to gobble a handful of magnesium caplets and at another to eat some pickle slices he’s retrieved from the fridge. In the otherwise bare room, a hand-me-down television set is tuned to a Law & Order rerun. At the moment, Jackson is tapping on his laptop, tooling around his alma mater’s social networking website.

I ask if he’s on Facebook. “Nah,” he says softly, in his thick Alabama accent. “There was too much going on—had to get off it.” He looks up. “Still on Myspace though.” (Music: Wayne, T.I., Dro, Cassidy. Movies: All the Fridays, 300. Heroes: “I’m so proud of me.”)

So has he heard the Favre talk?

“Yeah, I’ve heard it,” he says.

Jackson seems to be trying to shrug it off—why worry about something he can’t control? As several people, including Jackson himself, will tell me in the course of reporting this story, he’s a “competitor.” He’s not supposed to sweat situations beyond his control, even though it’s inevitable that as a twenty-five-year-old in his first job out of college he does. A sports junkie himself, he’s constantly watching SportsCenter and logging on to espn.com for the latest. (As we speak, Lucas looks up from the computer and tells him, “Kevin Jones just signed with Chicago.”) He understands that it’s the commentariat’s job to have an opinion, especially if it’s inflammatory enough to generate additional opinions. “But they don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “A lot of these people haven’t played football. They have to understand that it’s a process to being an NFL player, especially at quarterback.”

Jackson has watched other players go through similar tempests. He mentions Tony Romo, the young Dallas quarterback (like Jackson, a QB who went to a small Division I-AA school) who roiled the sports entertainmentsphere last winter when, on his bye week before a playoff game, he took his girlfriend, Jessica Simpson, on vacation to Mexico. “They say [on TV] he’s doing all this stuff when he hasn’t backed it up on the field,” Jackson says. He lifts both arms in an easy shrug. “Like, OK, this guy’s been in the league for five years and started for two. And he’s been in the Pro Bowl twice and to the playoffs twice.” It’s a competitive league, he reminds me, filled with players making similar salaries focused on the same goal. “You ain’t going to the Super Bowl every year,” he says.

Jackson seems unusually self-aware and sincere in a profession where a “competitor” is supposed to ignore contextual concerns. But in a strange way the ongoing Favre melodrama may be the perfect framing device for T–Jack’s summer of discontent. The third week of July, the Packers filed tampering charges with the league office, accusing Vikings offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, who was Favre’s quarterback coach in Green Bay before joining Brad Childress’ staff in Minnesota, of talking to Favre. A week later, Bob McGinn, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote that the Packers had discovered “repeated” calls from Favre’s Packer–owned cell phone to both Bevell and Childress. However, it wasn’t known whether anyone from the Vikings called Favre.

You could argue that Favre’s interest in Jackson’s job—on a team many experts predict will make the playoffs—demonstrates how much the Vikings believe in Jackson. The Vikes surprised most NFL draftniks by trading up to select him with the last pick in the second round of the 2006 draft. Before last season, management released veteran quarterback Brad Johnson and reinforced their commitment to Jackson by rounding out their roster with Brooks Bollinger and Kelly Holcomb (“career backups” is the polite term). Jackson missed four games with injuries and threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Yet, despite widespread skepticism, he started twelve games, going 8–0 as a starter and completing 65 percent of his passes during the Vikes’ last seven, and the team nearly made the playoffs in spite of an awful beginning.

This summer the hyperbole nearly reached Randy Moss–era levels. Sports Illustrated’s football guru Dr. Z extolled the Vikings’ assets: Star running back Adrian Peterson is coming off a record-breaking rookie season, the interior lines on both sides of the ball are savvy and gigantic, and the Purple’s answer to the decade-long absence of an edge pass rusher was to boldly trade a number-one draft pick for the league’s 2007 sack king, former Kansas City defensive end Jared Allen. Dr. Z, who picked the Vikings to win the Super Bowl, had only one reservation—the “question mark” at quarterback. Nevertheless he wrote, “There aren’t many situations better for a young quarterback than this one Jackson now finds himself in.”

Oh, really? Despite a painful legacy that includes infamous milestones instantly recognizable even in shorthand—0–4, 1998, and 41–zip—Minnesota fans are pathologically optimistic and thus susceptible to massive comedowns. Especially at certain times of the year—the beginning of training camp, early December if there’s still a chance the Vikes can make the playoffs—they are prone to a desperate overcompensation that makes them lurch between insufferable and pathetic. Unlike, say, the chronically surprised Twins fan, most Purple faithful are terminally quick to believe the hype. This summer, in the comment sections on both national and local blogs, you could read Vikings fans’ fervent attempts to talk themselves into faith in T–Jack. Typical was this startribune.com posting from one larsonkmh: “T–Jack doesn’t have to be a hall of fame QB to help this team win, we have a good team of talented players on both sides of the ball. Have some faith Vikings fans. Favre is not the answer. He’s a whiny crybaby who can’t live without the spotlight. Pathetic! Go Vikes!!!”

But as Favregate gathered momentum, you could hear fans hedge in real time, posting comments to the effect that it might be a good idea for Tarvaris to sit behind a Hall of Fame quarterback for a year. And then, seemingly channeling the collective id as only Sid Hartman can, Our Close Personal Demagogue offered this headline in the Star Tribune: If Vikings Got Favre, They’d Get a Stadium.

Vikings management, for its part, treated the tampering charges the way our presidential candidates handle their daily faux controversies: with obfuscation and near-autistic repetition. Childress has stayed on message: “Tarvaris is our starting quarterback.”

(In early August, the NFL ruled against the tampering charges. As this story went to press, the Packers traded Favre out of the NFC North to the New York Jets.)

Quarterback coach Kevin Rogers says Jackson has shown steady improvement and is ready to take another step forward this year. Rogers concedes that it hasn’t been easy for the young man. He compares mastering the Vikings’ West Coast offense to learning a new language and says most young quarterbacks have the same learning curve, which peaks in the third year. “When they first start hearing about an NFL offense, they think, ‘My God, am I smart enough to learn this stuff?’ But now Tarvaris is thinking, ‘Man, it really wasn’t that hard. Why was it so hard in the beginning?’ ”

Rich Gannon played quarterback for the Vikes from 1987 until 1992 and was named the league’s MVP with Oakland in 2002. He still lives in Minnesota and this spring was brought in to counsel Jackson. Gannon tells me, “I told Tarvaris, ‘As soon as you think you’ve arrived in this league, they’re going to start looking to replace you.’ That’s just the way it is.” According to Gannon, that’s what makes the great ones—Favre, Brady, Peyton Manning—great: They have a never-ending, obsessive-compulsive desire to prove they’re the best. In any case, Gannon believes that Jackson—with two excellent running backs behind him, a solid run defense, and an improved pass defense—is in an ideal situation. Gannon says he told T–Jack, “ ‘You have a chance to win eleven, twelve games. And you don’t have to throw for 400 yards every week to do it.’

“It’s just like anything else,” Gannon says. “You start out as an apprentice, and pretty soon you’re field operations manager.”

In the workplace, there are two types of employees: The first does better when the expectations are low—in football terms when he’s, say, the surprise second-round draft pick out of a little D I-AA school nobody’s heard of. The latter excels when the pressure is on—for instance, a second-round draft pick who’s been groomed to lead a veteran team to the playoffs in a year when new-stadium talk has been revived.

Which type is Jackson?

Jackson and Reggie Barlow, his coach at Alabama State, are from Ridgecrest, a neighborhood in West Montgomery. (“I wouldn’t exactly call it a suburb,” Barlow says when I ask. “More like a low-income neighborhood.”) Barlow, who played eight years in the NFL as a receiver before coming to Alabama State in 2005, has known about Jackson since he was a youngster. According to Barlow, “Tarvaris has been The Man since seventh grade.”

Tarvaris and an older sister were raised in Ridgecrest by his mom, who worked at the Hyundai manufacturing plant in town. It was a tough neighborhood, home to gang activity, but as an athlete, he and his teammates stayed out of trouble. “I don’t think it was scary for me because I grew up there,” he says. “But it’s nothing like Minnesota, that’s for sure.” He starred on the football and baseball teams at Belling Rath Middle School, leading the football team to a ninth-grade conference championship before enrolling at Sidney Lanier High School.

Even at the middle school level, football in Alabama is a serious affair. “It’s big,” Jackson says. “But Coach Barlow is stretching the facts a little bit—I didn’t play until ninth grade.” Jackson wanted to be a baseball player—he pitched and played shortstop at “the Grath,” and his favorite baseball player was Andruw Jones, then a young center fielder for Atlanta. But the offensive coordinator at Lanier, Richard Moncrief, a former quarterback at Clemson University, decided that in high school, Jackson should concentrate on the pigskin.

Bart Starr was a quarterback for Lanier High in the 1950s, which won five state championships between 1920 and 1966, sending its best players on to Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama. But by the late ’90s, the Poets (seriously, their official nickname) were struggling, finishing 3–6 the two seasons before Jackson came aboard in 1998. Moncrief says, “This group [which included Jackson’s best friend, star running back Keldrick Williams] brought their hunger and passion and zest for winning over to Lanier, and in one season we went from a 3–6 team to a state semifinalist.”

Moncrief remembers the first time he saw Jackson throw a football. He says, “I went home and told my wife, ‘Baby, I hope I don’t mess him up.’ He had a cannon.” And the kid didn’t excel only on offense. “He was a fierce competitor,” Moncrief says. “We would line him up at safety and he would crush receivers coming over the middle. We had to keep him off defense in practice.” Later, Auburn University and Alabama were interested in converting him into an outside linebacker or defensive end.

Moncrief became Jackson’s guru. “I never remember him wanting to go pro,” he says, “but I would put it in his head all the time. ‘Hey, man, you’re big, you’re strong, you’ve got a gun. I think you can make it.’ ” For his part, Jackson says that playing professionally—either baseball or football—was all he ever wanted to do, and he believed that to reach the NFL he would have to first play quarterback in the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference. Ironically, college scouts visiting Lanier at the time were more interested in his friend Williams. “That’s how it’s always been,” Jackson says today. “When Adrian [Peterson] came [to the Vikings], you know, and he was doing what he was doing, I was, like, ‘This is how it’s been my whole life.’ It’s a familiar role for me—in the background, just working all the time, trying to get better.”

Arkansas and Louisiana State were the only SEC schools that recruited him to play quarterback, and Jackson decided on Arkansas. There he would be overshadowed by the freakishly athletic Matt Jones, an Arkansas kid who would star both as a forward on the Razorbacks’ basketball team and its football quarterback and eventually go on to play wide receiver for Jacksonville in the NFL. Frustrated sitting on the bench behind Jones, Jackson decided to return to Montgomery and play for Alabama State.

He told me he regretted leaving the SEC because he believed it offered the best chance to get noticed and move on to the next level, but coming home was exciting. For one thing, his boy Williams was transferring to Alabama State from the University of Tennessee. Plus State provided the comforts of home. “It was like high school again,” Jackson recalls. “My mom was there. All my friends could see me play.”

Barlow took a job at Alabama State as quarterback coach in 2005, during Jackson’s junior year. “When I played, I played with a chip on my shoulder—always wanted to go up against the kids at the big schools in all-star games,” Barlow says. “But Tarvaris, he was beyond that. He was just interested in learning the little things he would need as a pro—how to check down, how to raise the ball up in his delivery.” And, during his senior season, NFL scouts came to see him play. “All thirty-two teams were interested,” Barlow says.

At one point that year, Jackson turned to Moncrief and swore he was going to take care of his mom. “You hear guys say that all the time,” Moncrief says. “But with him, you could really see it. I looked in his eye, and there was never a doubt.”

OK, so based on Jackson’s curriculum vitae, including his two seasons in the NFL, what are the chances he can lead the Vikes to the playoffs?
Tom Shaw, the former Patriots strength-and-conditioning coach, has had Jackson at his Orlando camp the past three off-seasons. For six weeks, Shaw put T–Jack through the same drills on the same eerily perfect Disney–brand Bermuda grass he has inflicted on Tom Brady, Peyton and Eli Manning, Donovan McNabb, and Phillip Rivers. “Nobody is as strong as he is,” Shaw says of Jackson. “He benched 405 four times the other day. He ran a 4.53 in the forty.” Athletically, Shaw insists, “the kid’s a freak of nature.” And Shaw believes that Jackson is capable of more than simply “managing the game” à la Trent Dilfer or Brad Johnson. “He wants to win going downfield with the ball.”

K. C. Joyner is espn.com’s “Football Scientist.” A stat geek for whom the standard NFL numbers are inadequate, Joyner is sort of football’s counterpart to baseball’s Bill James. He watches reels of game tape from his couch in Orlando and compiles his own Moneyball–type metrics. Joyner’s two most important stats for quarterbacks are “bad decisions” and “yards per attempt,” the latter broken down into “short,” “medium,” “long,” and “bomb” categories. “Tarvaris’s ‘bad decision’ percentage was 2.3 percent,” Joyner says, ranking Jackson ahead of Favre, Peyton Manning, and Derek Anderson. Jackson rates even better with YPA, which accounts for pass interference penalties as well as traditional yardage. Jackson ranks number one overall on “medium” distance passes. “Those are often the toughest passes to complete because they’re down the field—eleven to nineteen yards,” Joyner explains. “And they’re in more traffic than any other type of pass.” T–Jack struggled with both the long and bomb passes, but Joyner points out that with the trade of the butterfingered Troy Williamson, the development of a more adroit Sidney Rice, and the free-agent signing of proven Bernard Berrian, Jackson will have better deep targets this season. “We can see why Childress is sticking with him,” Joyner says. He expects the Vikings to contend for the playoffs out of the NFC North.

On the other hand, Rich Gannon, who has worked with Jackson one-on-one, says, “I just don’t know if we’ve seen enough of his work yet to tell if this guy is a legitimate pro quarterback that the Vikings can count on for the next six to eight years. Can he stay healthy and play sixteen games? That’s the most important thing at that level—that you’re in there every week.” Favre and Brady, Gannon says, “are never out with a groin or a hammy.”

What about Jackson himself—does he believe he’s proved anything yet?

“Nah, definitely not,” he tells me. Jackson appreciates the declarations of confidence from the Minnesota coaches. He believes they’ve been straight with him, in contrast to how he feels he was treated when he was stuck behind Jones at Arkansas. “I hated being lied to,” he says.

Now Jackson wants to justify the Vikings’ confidence in him. Sometimes, admittedly, that desire can backfire. “Toward the end of last year, I was just going and playing,” he says. “I wasn’t out there thinking. When you’re thinking out there, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes.” Things like trying to save a bad play, making a foolish decision, and compounding the trouble. “That’s my problem—I try to save everything.”

In another line of work, that would be a curious response: worrying about trying too hard and thinking too much. Besides, isn’t the quarterback supposed to be the smartest guy on the field? Jackson is a quiet, thoughtful man, a player about whom his quarterback coach, Kevin Rogers, says, “I think he’s extremely bright—much deeper than your initial perception would give you.”

(Jackson’s center, Matt Birk, an eleven-year Vikings veteran and a player T–Jack refers to as “some kind of a damn genius,” talks about “mental toughness.” He means the ability to block out distractions like opinion-makers and overly emotional fans. “You just have to realize that none of that is your reality as a player,” Birk says. “Your reality is everybody has a job to do. You study the game plan, you work hard, you go out there and try to do your job.”)

Jackson isn’t there yet. Though he needs to be supremely confident to master his tasks, he hears the slights, even if they’re only on the Internet or ESPN. “I heard a guy on TV during my rookie year,” he recalls. “ ‘I haven’t seen enough of this Tarvaris Jackson kid.’ ” An innocuous comment, coming so early in the season. But, like most television punditry, it was needlessly declarative and infused with that histrionic flavor of skepticism epidemic to talking heads. To Jackson, it came off as an aggressive position, when an aggressive position was unnecessary. “I’m, like, ‘After two games?’ ”

T–Jack not only wears his concerns on his sleeve—his torso is covered with ink. Perhaps the tattoos are a way of conserving his competitive energy, ever-present visual reminders of concepts he doesn’t have to actively remember. His son’s birth date—9-14-07—is tattooed on his right pectoral. Malice Motivates Me is printed atop his shoulder blades. Running down his back is a creed he learned at Alabama State. He says he knows the whole thing by heart, then leans into my tape recorder to prove it:

This is the beginning of a new day
God has given us today to use as we will
We can waste it or use it for good
For what we do today is important
Because we exchange a day of our lives for it
We want to be good not bad, gain not loss, success but not failure
In order that we never regret the price we pay for it

Hey, Tarvaris Jackson cares. Likely even more than all of us pathological Vikings fans. As a fan himself, he understands that for most of us the NFL is a saga—an epic soap opera that continues from year to year. And though he professes, in that Twelve Step-ish way of the professional athlete, that “each year stands on its own legs,” that “you can’t judge a team by what it did last year,” he invites us to wonder what it’s like to be in his shoes.

“I know,” he says. “You beat somebody good, and then you come back and lose to somebody you think you should beat.” He pauses. “I understand. But imagine how we feel?”