Winning: From Walk-On to Captain, in Football and Life. Gary Brackett
a drainage ditch. We played football and baseball year-round. And here is the best part of growing up with four boys in a house: no need to recruit because you always have numbers for a game of two on two. We Bracketts had enough to field a game with just the brothers. Since I was the youngest, and Greg was the second oldest, we often ended up playing against Granville and Grant. Greg and I developed our own secret language for plays, used hand signals our brothers never could decipher, and were usually encouraging teammates.
This neighborhood was a more family-friendly place. Sometimes at night we would play late, and Dad would come outside and whistle. That whistle covered the whole projects, and reached clearly to the basketball courts where we so often spent our time. If we didn’t hear it, others did. Those who lived around us knew two things: if that whistle sounded, Granville Brackett expected his boys home. And he didn’t expect them sooner or later, he expected them to be there quick! Not now, but RIGHT now. So, that whistle was our family version of: “ThunderCats ThunderCats ThunderCats Ho!” At that sound, we dropped what we were doing, ended whatever game we were playing, and moved.
If we weren’t playing sports, we went around gathering up cardboard from curbs and dumpsters, using it to construct forts in the vacant lot across from our house. In these forts we pretended we were trapped in a forest and surrounded on all sides by enemies. We envisioned ourselves in foreign lands. But when it rained, we were right back in New Jersey and faced a problem our neighbors here in Glassboro struggled with: we were evicted. Was everything perfect in Glassboro? Not by a long shot. But things were better than Camden. And after all, we are always involved in accepting our own perceptions and realities. Sometimes we had to sell ourselves on the idea of our own life. Even though we knew it might rain, we still built the forts. And while those protective cardboard homes were still standing, we had some fun in them. Often, we must make and shape our own reality.
Ever since I can remember, I knew without a doubt that I wanted my reality to involve football. When I told people this around middle school they surely thought: who doesn’t? My attraction to the sport was borne out of a particular experience. In the seventh grade, the one and only Reggie White came to visit our school. He played for the beloved Philadelphia Eagles and was my favorite player. The day of his visit, the place buzzed with excitement.
“Reggie White is gonna be here.”
“Gary, you think he’ll sign autographs?”
“I don’t care about autographs. I just want to see how big he is!”
When Reggie spoke in the auditorium, he talked about why other players and coaches referred to him as “the minister of defense.” He talked about dreaming big and reaching for the clouds, because even if you miss you’ll be among the stars. When we kids looked up at Reggie, we thought that he probably didn’t have to reach too far for those stars. He was absolutely massive! But after hearing that speech I dreamed big. Our class talked about it afterwards and the teacher asked, “Gary, what do you want to do with your life?”
“I want to play in the NFL.”
The teacher grimaced subtly, “What else might you want to do?”
I did not budge or offer an alternative, but I also did not say what I thought next. I thought it might be disrespectful and get me in trouble. My mind burned with a singular thought: I will play in the NFL some day.
Too often in today’s world kids don’t know or care what they want to do with their lives. When I ask children today the questions my teacher posed to me, the kids who say “nothing” really scare me. Those kids will be the ones who get exactly what they planned for: Nothing! After all, people don’t usually plan to fail, but too often they fail to plan. No one wants to live check to check for most of his or her life. But many people do. In my opinion, your perspective on life often determines the amount of success you have in it. From early on, I set goals and worked methodically to achieve them. Sure there were roadblocks along the way and points where I strayed from the path, but I never forgot the path I was seeking and always hustled back to it.
I was taught these values, in large part, through the examples set for me by older brothers. As I started playing more sports, my reality began to revolve increasingly around my brothers Granville, Greg, and Grant. Each of them was athletically talented. Each played three sports in high school. Granville, the oldest, probably looked at us, his younger brothers, with a bit of annoyance. After all, his primary perception of us was as kids he had to baby-sit. Grant was closest to my own age, and so we were on many teams together. We had a unique bond due to this proximity in years. Like many siblings close in age, we competed against each other more than the others.
I looked up to Greg in particular because he played football. He was the stud running back who scored all the touchdowns. When he played defense, he made all the tackles. He was the kid others in high school wanted to be. He was magnetic. Every moment I spent with him, I felt like I was being given a gift. He was a popular kid, a bit more outgoing than the other brothers. We were all captains of our teams, but he was one of the guys who the coaches picked to captain as soon as they could. He had a powerful leadership quality. I remember asking him one day about how he got to be captain.
“Don’t lead by talking Gary. Words are meaningless without action. Knowledge doesn’t matter nearly as much as people say either. What are you going to do with information? You have to act on it! That’s what matters.”
Greg lived by those words. He was always the first one in the weight room at practice, pushed others in sprints, and volunteered for the toughest match-ups in basketball. He didn’t just talk the talk. He walked the walk in such a way that people wanted to follow him.
“Yo G Baby what you lookin’ at?”
My boy Cato brought me back to the present, “Just these old photos. Heading down to this big event, and thinking about some of the folks that got me to this point.”
“Yeah, it’s wild the folks who helped us get here.”
“Man, thinking about my brother Greg. He basically taught me how to play football.”
Cato teased me, “I thought you were a man…self-made!”
• • • • •
“Nah, nah, I ain’t self-made. To say that would be a lie and would disrespect everyone who helped get me to this seat on the plane. Without them, there is no way I’d be here. Sometimes you have to believe in someone else’s belief in you before your own belief kicks in.”
3
As Cato and I talked, photos from the AFC Championship came up on the screen. Cato looked at one of him and me holding the Lamar Hunt trophy, saying, “Unreal, huh? Coming back and beating them…I thought for sure they had our number somehow,” said Cato.
“Yeah,” I responded, “Feels even more special since we came back, but still lost those years before. Reminds me of something my father used to say, ‘If the mountain was smooth you wouldn’t be able to climb it.’”
“Well, G Baby, we got one more to climb this year.”
“Yeah, but it feels good to get past that particular peak.”
Dad often talked about the difficulties that plague us in life. Even though the rough patches on life’s mountain feel like obstacles, they give it shape and actually make the slopes possible to climb. The ability to overcome difficulties was something that Dad demanded, and something with which he had personal experience. From the time we were young, he required us to give effort rather than excuses. One thing he often said, “Gary, son, there is no such thing as a try.”
To demonstrate this fact when we were young, he would take a piece of paper in his hand, hold it out a bit beyond my wingspan, and say
“Try to grab it.”