Eat My Schwartz Read online

  Not that my mom is the stereotypical kvelling, smothering, Yiddish-spouting, loving-but-guilt-tripping mother from a Woody Allen movie. A lawyer who kept her own name when she got married, she’s all about independence, encouragement, and living life to the fullest. I mention that she kept her maiden name only because, according to family legend, that is something that confused me as a little kid. I didn’t know that most married women took their husband’s names. When I was about five I discovered that the kid next door had parents with the same last name. I came home completely shocked. My mom still laughs about it.

  But now that I think about it, there were little lessons about family and independence buried in that humorous event. I’m not sure if my five-year-old self understood this at the time, but this name thing with my mom was proof in a way that there are many different kinds of families, and that you can be very much part of a family and still be yourself.

  Of course, I was lucky to have the full support of my parents when it came to playing football. They both loved the game and were the ones who bought our annual season tickets to UCLA games at the Rose Bowl.

  I was also lucky—genetically blessed, really—to be bigger than pretty much everyone. I was 6'4" in ninth grade. I like to joke that my size comes from a childhood that included an excess of matzo ball soup, latkes, and tons of white rice. But of course my brother’s similar physique suggests that genetics had plenty to do with it.

  Anyway, every high school football team wants that kind of size. You see big guys all the time in America. I suppose you could say we have become a super-sized nation. But many big men lack muscle, cardiovascular strength, and coordination. Thanks to my love for baseball and basketball, I could move, I had balance, I was athletic.

  I entered ninth grade fully expecting to play football. In fact, at the end of eighth grade I filled out a form saying I wanted to play. But being a bit clueless about things, and focused on baseball, I didn’t even realize that training for high school football started with summer drills. So when I showed up for school, a similar scenario to the one my dad experienced played out: my math teacher was the JV coach and he took one look at me and said, “Are you planning on playing football?”

  Of course I said yes. But there was a steep learning curve for me; I had missed the whole preseason and my body, though fit for baseball, was hardly ready to do battle on the football field. So I started playing with the JV squad and I made it into about two plays the entire season.

  Ninth grade was pretty crazy. Not only did I play high school football, basketball, and baseball, but I still attended L.A.’s Hebrew High School once a week. After a while, I asked my mom to let me give it up—there are just so many hours in the day.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of being Jewish. I think that attending a Jewish nursery school and taking years of Hebrew lessons helped me develop into the person I am today. Learning to read a totally alien language like Hebrew was cool, and it took discipline and focus. Plus I’ve always thought that discussing Bible stories is kind of like morality or philosophy classes for kids. You learn about right and wrong, about justice and injustice. I like how Judaism focuses on the positive. You do things not out of fear of something bad happening to you, but because you want to do good for its own sake.

  But there’s a joke that Hebrew school has wrecked more than a few careers of young Jewish athletes, and after becoming a Bar Mitzvah—the ancient Jewish ceremony when thirteen-year-old boys embrace adulthood—I stayed active in my synagogue for two years, attending Hebrew High. But while religion is a part of my family’s life, it’s not the be all and end all. When I got to high school and the work and sports commitments piled up, I asked my mom if I could just dial it back a little. She said if I got straight A’s I could move on. There was only one thing to do: I got straight A’s.

  * * *

  The other extracurricular activity that took up a lot of my time, besides sports, was a speech therapy class. I was a stutterer growing up. I didn’t stumble on every word, but I had a noticeable stammer at times. My earliest memory of stuttering was being sent to speech therapy in elementary school. But I guess those sessions didn’t work very well, so fortunately my parents found a wonderful private speech pathologist, Dr. Suzi Fosnot. I started seeing her privately twice a week for about ten years. It was great to have her support and guidance. Living with a mild disorder can be very hard on a kid. It certainly made me tougher—I was determined to say what I wanted to say. But it was not easy seeing the discomfort and even mockery on the faces of people as I struggled to communicate. I felt inadequate. There were kids who teased me and made jokes about my speech impediment. I got picked on for it. Even in my senior yearbook some people wrote thoughtless, insensitive messages. They’d write “S-s-s-so long” and stuff like that. They probably thought they were being funny, but that hurt. I guess these days that would be considered bullying. To me, it was just something I had to work through.

  Having a stutter also taught me who my real friends were. I don’t have that many close childhood friends that I’ve remained tight with. I had three buddies in elementary school, and we hung out after class, playing sports and video games. One of my pals Steve Nirenberg, who years later was a groomsman at my wedding, never mentioned my stutter, not even once. That was really important to me.

  I owe so much to Dr. Fosnot, who I still keep in touch with. When I first met with her for an evaluation, she told my parents she wasn’t sure if I would ever beat my stutter—that’s how bad it was.

  She encouraged me and taught me to slow down. She helped me get through my Bar Mitzvah speech. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Oscar-winning movie The King’s Speech, which is about England’s King George VI and his battle to overcome a stutter and deliver a speech declaring war on Germany in 1939. But when I saw that movie, it hit me where I lived. I was terrified at the idea of speaking in front of a huge crowd for my Bar Mitzvah. What if I started stuttering? It would be a totally embarrassing, uncomfortable nightmare in front of everyone I cared about. Dr. Fosnot had me draw lines after every four words to get me to pause, which is exactly what they do in the movie when the King gives his big radio speech. Of course there were some differences: the King was alone with his speech therapist speaking to millions of his subjects; I was in a room packed with over a hundred people, reminding myself to breathe and pause. I nailed it and didn’t stutter once.

  I used to get stuck at the start of sentences sometimes, and there were certain letters, like W’s and S’s and T’s and R’s, and their specific sounds that gave me trouble. Words that start with W are really common—what, where, why, when—we use those a lot. If you start your voice a little bit before you pronounce the W, it helps gets the W sound out cleaner. I know that’s a weird idea—starting your voice before you actually speak. But for me it meant relaxing, not feeling time pressure, and opening up my throat at the beginning of formulating a word.

  Learning techniques like that was important to me. And then—not unlike football—improving my speech was all about practicing and working on sounds and phrases, over and over and remembering to slow down. As I got older, I also just got more comfortable in my own skin. Probably the last technique I developed that really helped me get over the stuttering was learning to temper my emotions. When I got really excited or really angry, the stutter would flare up. So as I learned to maintain a more even keel about life and events around me, my ability to speak clearly and smoothly really took off.

  By the time I was a senior in high school, my stuttering had gone down to maybe a couple of times a day. And then, by the middle of my college career, it was almost completely gone. There are people that I met at college who didn’t know I stuttered, and unless they read this now, they still don’t.

  My stuttering still surfaces on occasion, but only very rarely. If there’s an upside to having a stutter, besides thickening my skin, it’s that I’m probably more empathetic to disorders of all kinds; I know how “being different”
with even the slightest abnormal condition can affect someone’s life.

  * * *

  Being on the Palisades High football team was a great experience. I played center on the basketball team, so I’d had my fair share of banging under the rim. But playing the line—and I played both sides of the line my junior and senior years, and I served as the long snapper in punting situations—was a whole new level of physicality. Rarely in sports does brute force—speed, momentum, and muscle—combine with such focus, finesse, and teamwork. In baseball, there’s the double play and the relay, but team coordination, when all the players are moving together, is rare. In basketball, there is a flow and spontaneity to the game. Sure, there are plays—pick and rolls, double screens, double teams, presses—but there is an improvisational quality to the game. Football has improvisational moments once a play develops, especially for QBs, running backs, and receivers. But each play begins with a carefully planned and orchestrated explosion of action and the imposition of one team’s physical will over the other that, other than rugby and Australian rules football, you don’t really get in any other team sport.

  When I started working out, I made another big discovery. Because I’d been a good pitcher in Little League, I thought I was in okay shape. But looking back on it now, I just shake my head. The muscle and conditioning I needed for football was a whole other level from where I was at. I spent the entire year—and almost all of my sophomore year—on the JV squad. When I did get the call to join the varsity at the end of the year, it was to play on the defensive line, which is the safest place to put someone with no experience—they just told me to tackle anyone with the ball and knock over anyone who got in my way.

  In my junior year we got a great new football coach, Jason Blatt. He was a no-nonsense guy and a straight shooter. He brought in Kelly Loftus as our offensive line coach. Kelly was a big influence on me and became a great friend of mine. He really pushed me hard starting my junior year. He and Coach Blatt came to me and said I had the potential to go far. I had the size and the athleticism that college football programs would be interested in. They shifted me to offensive tackle and started teaching me line skills and drills. That is when I really started to become a lineman.

  It was incredibly strenuous—a whole other level from what I’d been doing previously. But I found I enjoyed that, too—hitting the dummies, hitting my teammates in drills, developing quickness at the line, and focusing on my footwork.

  One of the teammates I met at Pali and who became a great friend and major influence on me was Duane “Duke” Manyweather, a six-foot, 300-pound half-Samoan dude. Duke and I anchored the line for Pali my junior year and, despite going our separate ways in college, we’ve always kept in touch and have anchored each other over the years. Duke is a true student of the game. He played for, and later coached at, Humboldt State. He has a degree in kinesiology, which is the study of the mechanics of body movements, and he has applied his knowledge to the science of football and conditioning. That education—and Duke’s friendship—has been a blessing over the years. But back in high school, having Duke a year ahead of me was a real inspiration. He was the only guy on the team who went to the next level.

  Probably my most important play in high school on the football field came in the final seconds of the last game of my junior year. We were driving down the field, trying to score the game-winning touchdown.

  There was time for one more play and the opposing team intercepted.

  I was so infuriated I took off after the cornerback, cutting across the field at an angle. I knew the game was over, but I did not want to give up a pick six on our last play of the game. I ran down the cornerback and tackled him on the 2-yard line. It was just one of those in-the-moment, super-competitive plays. And fortunately it was captured on videotape—just the kind of play any lineman would want for his highlight reel.

  * * *

  During that season, my father told my mother that, based on what he was hearing from coaches, he thought I had the talent and size to earn a football scholarship. My mom, who is a lawyer and not the kind of person who counts her chickens before they hatch (she is such a just-the-facts realist, it might be fair to say she won’t even mention the eggs in the roost), refused to even think about it.

  Right after my junior year, though, my mom had no choice. Big college programs started expressing serious interest, including some schools I was really into. Initially I had dreamed of going to UCLA. It was kind of in my blood, since my parents first met on campus and I went to pretty much every home game as a kid.

  So it was natural that I wanted to go there. I think the recruiters knew I was a fan, and that might have worked against me. After getting invited to a Bruins training camp, they really didn’t spend much effort recruiting me. Maybe they thought I was such a die-hard fan that they didn’t have to spend any time with me or show some love. Or maybe they thought I wasn’t a strong player. Or maybe someone on Karl Dorrell’s UCLA recruiting staff just dropped the ball. Whatever the reason, as the process went on, I never felt like they were very interested.

  At first I was upset that UCLA handled the process the way they did, but I started focusing on the other great programs wooing me. My two favorites were Arizona and Oregon, and there was plenty to love about both schools.

  The offers increased after I went to some of the football camps run by Nike, Scout, and other organizations that summer. That was where college coaches and recruiters could actually see me work out and do my thing. The most intimidating camp was at USC. I stepped onto the field and we had a no-pads full scrimmage filled with big-time players from major high school programs around the country, guys with bodies and reputations far more imposing than mine.

  The most fun and important camp for me was probably Stanford. Before that camp, I still thought baseball was the sport I would most likely pursue on a professional level. At Stanford, there was a split camp, with the first week focused on baseball and the second on football. That initial week was a real wake-up call for me. I got to compare my stuff with some of the best high school pitchers in California, and to pitch against some of the best hitters. The results were not great, and for the first time I realized I might not have what it takes to be a dominant pitcher at the next level. If I couldn’t take control at the collegiate level, well, the Major Leagues was not going to be an option.

  While that was a shock—I’d played baseball ever since my dad started coaching my T-ball team when I was five years old, and had really excelled at the younger levels—the football camp was a blast. There was no dedicated offensive line focus, so instead I got to play tight end and spend the days blocking and catching passes. I loved it. Having so much fun was a much needed antidote after discovering I wasn’t going to be the second coming of Cy Young.

  In my senior year, as I weighed my future, I decided to quit the basketball team. It was a tough thing to do—I loved playing hoops and supporting my teammates. But I was looking at playing football for major Division 1 programs, and I was getting some ratings that made me want to focus on getting better. Tom Lemming, the premier high school football recruiting analyst, called me one of the five best line recruits in California. I went on to earn first team honors for All-City and Westside, and Rivals.com listed me among the top forty linemen in the country. All these honors—which, by the way, were not being handed to me for basketball—made me a little cautious. I didn’t want to risk tearing up my legs on the hardwood, and I wanted to make sure I had the strength and skills to play college football, and to keep up my performance on the field, where I hadn’t given up a sack in those last two years.

  Actually, I was involved in two sacks, but they arose from me playing on the other side of the ball as a defensive tackle. I loved playing both ways. When you are in high school and you feel so strong, you just want to play. Or at least I did. It feels great to be involved on almost every play, plus you feel a little like a throwback, like the hard-nosed Jim Thorpe, the gridiron great, who used to play bo
th ways. I added to my sacks during my senior year with fifty-five tackles, including ten for a loss of yardage, three deflected passes, and one fumble recovery. Not that I’m counting or anything.

  My decision to go to Oregon was quite easy. These days the Oregon Ducks are a perennial national powerhouse, but that wasn’t quite the case when I arrived (although as the Ducks nation knows, 2000 and 2001 were pretty awesome seasons). But the choice for me was simple. Although I had great respect for Arizona coach Mike Stoops, Oregon felt like the place for me: a terrific college town with a great program and an offensive line coach, Neal Zoumboukos, I really connected with.

  A veteran coach with three sons of his own, Coach Zoumboukos was a guy I felt I could learn from and relate to. Under head coach Mike Bellotti, Coach Zoumboukos had built up a family atmosphere that exuded success and togetherness. The program felt comfortable, like a place I wanted to be. I visited a bunch of other schools, but none of them gave off that same vibe. The night before my letter of intent was due, I talked with my parents about my options one final time. Once again, when I added everything up, Oregon felt like the right place. It was close enough to home, and played in the ultra-competitive Pac-10, which would put me up against some of the most talented players in collegiate football. It seemed like the right place to grow and prove myself.

  The next day I woke up and faxed in my commitment letter. I didn’t make a big deal about it, and neither did my parents. But a few months later, right before I went off to Oregon, my parents threw a surprise party at El Torito, a West Coast chain that has always been one of our go-to Mexican joints in the neighborhood. I’ve probably eaten about a hundred fajitas there, especially their “ignited” fajitas dish, where they pour tequila on a steak, chicken, and shrimp combo and flambé it at your table. To a hungry high schooler, this was a sizzling bit of heaven.