Derrick Brooks article from ESPN the Magazine

Great article about Derrick from ESPN the Mag. No dobut, Derrick is one of the classiest guys in all of sports.


Class Act
By David Fleming
ESPN The Magazine
Tuesday, September 2

Someone's out there, in the dark. And he's the only man who can calm Jon Gruden's fear. We're back in March, just six weeks after Gruden and the Bucs won Super Bowl XXXVII, and the coach can't sleep. After the celebrations, the parades and even a seat next to Dave Letterman, Gruden is already haunted by doubt. No one can repeat in today's NFL, he thinks. Look at your team, all fat and happy, lying around enjoying its success. Your guys are like big, ripe tomatoes, just ready to be picked. And so Gruden rises in the middle of the night and drives to the team's practice facility, where, after an hour of work, he meets up with strength coach Garrett Giemont for a predawn run.

Before Giemont and Gruden leave to warm up for their jog, the head coach peers out his window at the deserted fields behind his office. At 4:45 a.m. in Tampa, the sky is inky and dark, the air thick and heavy with heat. Even the runways of the Tampa International Airport bordering the team's property are quiet and uninhabited. Gruden has looked out this window many times at this hour, and he's always found nothing. But this morning he spots something flashing across the field. Gruden cranes his neck, squinting as the figure passes again, gliding across the grass. The coach waits for the body to reach a light at the end of the field and when it does, Gruden instantly knows who it is. He stands up, shaking his head in disbelief, speechless until Giemont breaks his trance. "Well," Giemont asks, "who's out there?"

"Derrick Brooks," Gruden says, and the surprise makes him say it again. "Derrick Brooks."

Gruden couldn't have been too surprised. Brooks has always done his best work in the shadows. He gets far less pub than Ray Lewis, Brian Urlacher and LaVar Arrington. Even in Tampa, where he regularly wins team MVP, the Bucs' mouthpiece over the past eight years has been Pro Bowler Warren Sapp, whom Tampa Bay drafted 12th in the first round of the 1995 draft, 16 spots ahead of Brooks. But for all his bluster, even the great Sapp admits Brooks is the smooth bass line that drives the Bucs' top-ranked defense. "He's the best we've got," says Sapp. "I've been saying that for eight years, and no one believes me."

Believe him. Brooks has led the Bucs in tackles every year since 1998. This past season, after becoming the only linebacker in NFL history to return four picks for TDs in a single season, Brooks was named the NFL's Defensive Player of the Year. Couple that with the Walter Payton Man of the Year award he won in 2000 for his charity work, and it's obvious why Brooks, 30, has become the contemporary embodiment of that classic 1970s Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial: malicious between the chalk, magnanimous everywhere else. His name carries so much clout in Tampa that, if you mention to a cop you're in town working on a Brooks story, your rental car won't get towed. What the locals know is that there is much more to Brooks than the deep voice, steely stare and scars crisscrossing his face because of a childhood car accident. During dinner in mid-August at a sports bar across from the Bucs facility, an hour passes before the first mention of football. Instead, there is talk of a master's degree in business communication that Brooks earned at Florida State; of his mortgage company, Freedom Financial, which helps low-income families obtain credit; his recent appointments to the FSU board of trustees and the NFLPA's Diversity Committee; and, of course, the Brooks Bunch, his charity that, over the past six years, has taken kids from Florida Boys & Girls clubs on extravagant educational trips. "Derrick's one of the premier leaders of all time in this league," says Gruden. "We all feed off him. Fans, owners, players, coaches -- all of us. What Derrick represents as a man is what I'd like to be."

What Gruden admires about Brooks isn't his dedication to his charities or, more important to the coach, to football. It's Brooks' dedication, period. His sheer drive and intensity. He's not too good to be true. He laughs when people make him out to be a saint. In fact, Brooks is far more driven than he is nice. Sometimes he feels cursed, as if he has an obsessive disorder that compels him to exhaust himself with every venture. The greatness -- as a linebacker, in business, with kids -- is a by-product of a personality that is so driven, he knows no other way but all out. He's not a sweetheart off the field and a maniac on it. He's just always intense and always focused and, as Gruden puts it, "intolerant of human error," no matter what he's doing. "I don't go from the Brooks Bunch and turn into some freakin' crazy man out there on the field," says Brooks. "I don't know how to approach anything that means a lot to me but to live it and breathe it and attack it."

Brooks didn't know he was like this about anything other than football and school until his junior year in college. His cousin was serving time at a prison work camp in Pensacola, and for months he'd been begging Brooks to visit. Eventually Brooks gave in just so his cousin would get off his back. Brooks even made teammates 'OMar Ellison and Corey Fuller go as well because he didn't want to be there alone.

Driving to the prison on an empty stretch of I-10 between Tallahassee and Pensacola, deep in the panhandle, the friends joked around like the carefree, insulated college stars they were. But once they were inside the cell block, everything changed. "It hit us hard," says Ellison, who was a wide receiver for the Chargers in the mid-1990s. "It took our breath away. We couldn't help but see ourselves in those young black faces."

On the drive back to Tallahassee, the car was silent. Then Brooks spoke. "What's happened to us?" he said. "We are dying off in the streets and in jails, and the people we believe in to fix this -- politicians, pastors, our fathers -- are not doing anything." As the conversation became more animated, they pulled off the road. And right there, on that dark highway, the three men pledged to "throw the rope back," to help those people the world had left behind.

The phrase meant something to Brooks, who never knew his biological father. The influences in his life -- his mother, Gerri Brooks, his stepfather, A.J. Mitchell, his grandmother Martha Brooks -- had always tossed the rope back to him. As a boy in Pensacola, Brooks split his evenings after school between the local Boys & Girls Club and his grandmother's. Martha's house was full of three things: love, wisdom and strangers. No one in need of a helping hand or a hot meal was turned away. Dinners made for five were stretched to feed a dozen, and family always ate last. That was Martha, and Brooks paid attention.

Mitchell, who married Gerri when Brooks was 6, transferred his respect for education in a more visceral way. When Brooks was in fifth grade, he brought home a report card with a "U" -- for unacceptable -- in citizenship. Afterward, Mitchell made an impromptu check on Brooks in class, and saw his stepson making jokes and shooting staples at the other kids. Mitchell stormed into the classroom, yanked Derrick to the front of the room and applied his belt to Derrick's backside. ("I didn't see it," says Derrick's wife, Carol, who was in a nearby classroom. "But lord, I heard it.") That was Mitchell, and Brooks paid attention. Even as a Parade All-America prep star with a 3.94 GPA, he refused to miss class on senior skip day.

"When you don't know your biological father, you have to take bits and pieces from the people in your life and create a father figure," says Ellison, who has a background similar to Brooks' and has known him since high school. "But you never fill that void. It might be nothing more than talking to someone about a girl or a bad grade. Deep down, that's what Derrick is giving to his Brooks Bunch."

So when Brooks (who has three kids of his own) speaks about giving the kids in his Bunch hope; when he talks about taking them on their first plane ride in 1997 because, as a kid, he "never had any reason to look up into the sky"; when he says he wants to give his Bunch a role model they can "see, touch and count on," he's talking about providing things that he's grateful to have received, even in small doses. When Mitchell died of cancer on Father's Day 1997, Brooks placed the very first Bucs hat he was ever given -- a tattered orange lid from the 1995 draft -- into his coffin. Martha passed a year-and-a-half later, just two months after seeing her only Bucs game, a 28-25 loss to Detroit. Brooks had these words engraved on her coffin: May the work I've done speak for me.

Much the same could be said of the six-foot, 235-pound Brooks, who performs the ordinary work of a linebacker with extraordinary smarts and speed. That combo allows him to go vertical, meaning he can cover almost twice as much real estate as other linebackers, thus preventing offenses from exploiting the two weaknesses of the Bucs' vaunted Cover 2 defense (page 76). Teams can't use tight ends to attack soft pockets because Brooks can stay with them in coverage. And while most teams replace slower linebackers with defensive backs on long passing downs, leaving them vulnerable against the run, Brooks never needs to be replaced. "Speed is my ultimate weapon," he says. "Then it's think quick, react quick, run fast and hit hard."

Like the time he hit Torry Holt so hard that the Rams wideout spit up blood. Or the game last December when Brooks administered a merciless beating -- 10 tackles before halftime -- to Falcons phenom Mike Vick, hunting down the allegedly untouchable QB as if Vick were running in marshmallow. "I love how everybody installs the Cover 2 nowadays, then sits around scratching their heads when it doesn't work like ours," says Bucs linebackers coach Joe Barry. "Our whole defense is structured around No.55. One reason why people are starting to acknowledge Derrick is because they're realizing you can duplicate a Cover 2, but you can't ever duplicate a Derrick Brooks."

That's obvious to the Brooks Bunch. They've visited Juilliard in New York City, Oprah's Harpo Studios in Chicago, the King Center in Atlanta, the Grand Canyon in Arizona and dozens of other locales. And then there was that trip to Africa in 2000: 19 kids on a 12-day tour. They ate ostrich eggs in Johannesburg. In Hoedspruit, their Land Rover was nearly trampled by an elephant. And during a bike ride near Cape Town, a baboon swooped down and snatched a student's backpack.

What stands out for Brooks, though, was a day spent on Robben Island, where former South African president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for most of 26 years. The tour guide explained that the 6'4'' Mandela was kept in a cell smaller than where the guard dogs slept. Moments like that help Brooks focus on the promise he made on I-10 nearly a decade ago. "I'm the message," he says. "As sad as it might be, the more people who pay attention to me as a football player, the more people I can reach. In the end, that's how I want to be judged. Not by how many Pro Bowls I made, but by how many people I threw the rope back to."

In Africa, the Brooks Bunch kids picked native names for themselves, and their choices spoke to the effect Brooks has had. There was Numbosa (beauty), Nombeko (respect), Rudo (love) and Jaja (God's gift). They chose a name for Brooks, too: Donkar Kamau.

It means humble, quiet warrior.

This article appears in the September 15 issue of ESPN The Magazine.