Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • FA L L 2 0 1 7 56 INTRODUCTION Millions of fans tie their identities to their football teams' successes. Montanans, too, take football seriously at all levels, from Pop Warner to high school contests played under Friday night lights, to the raucous weekenders at the Univer- sity of Montana and Montana State. Football is so rooted here we almost take it for granted. To scores of folks, football is family time or an escape from everyday life. Deeper still, there is a special pride Montanans hold when one of their own reaches the pinnacle of the sport and earns a spot in the National Football League. Indeed, sparse populations produce big loves, and to send someone to the biggest stage from the smallest of population centers is extraordinary. e franchise is often irrelevant, for Montanans will cheer on a kid from Cut Bank or Choteau or Missoula, no matter if he is a Denver Bronco, Seattle Seahawk or Carolina Panther. "It's going to be a small book, I'm sure," was the typical response from folks when I mentioned to them that I was researching and writing a book about Montana's NFL connections. But that's not the situation. Indeed, Montana's connections to the NFL are extensive, includ- ing a player on the earliest Green Bay Packers team (Butte-born Jack McAuliffe), a player on the first San Francisco 49ers squad of 1964 (running back Earl "Pruney" Parsons, who was born in Helena), one on the first Oakland Raiders team of 1964 (guard Wayne Hawkins, born in Fort Peck) and one of the most dominant offensive linemen of the 1940s (Anaconda-born Francis Cope, who earned all-decade honors as a New York Giant). For purposes of concision, the book includes only players who were born in Montana, raised in Montana, or attended high school or college in Montana and then went on to play in the National Football League. Players who elected to settle in Montana after retirement are not included. Players from Montana who have gone on to establish themselves in the NFL lack any semblance of entitlement and take nothing for granted. Football has taught Montana kids to fight for what they want, and the sport has taken some talented, dedicated athletes further in life. Football has been good to them—and they have represented us through football. "e Montana kid is going to give you something that a kid 1,000 miles away may not," said Bill Kollar, a graduate of Montana who played several years in the NFL and is currently employed as defensive line coach for the Denver Broncos. "I never saw any sense of entitlement from Montana kids. ey know they represent their state, their college institu- tion and their family, and that's the bedrock of the success. It's a deep relationship." "e mentality is different here than in the Dakotas, or Idaho," said Holien, "and the mental- ity of what it takes to make it, to succeed, is dif- ferent here. In the mid-1960s, if you were scout- ing or even living in a place like Spokane, when you looked at Montana, you figured the places in Montana just weren't good for producing football players. Back then there was such a disparity between levels of play at Montana colleges and elsewhere, but even someone like Mike Tilleman had a great career." e profiles contained in this book emphasize the joys and struggles, challenges and hurdles, comforts and delights of reaching the NFL and representing the state of Montana at the highest level of the sport. e unpleasant truths haven't been dodged in the conversations, and the book examines the hotbed controversies and persistent concerns surrounding the safety of current play- ers and the responsibility of the league to assist former ones. Greater knowledge of head injuries and their effect on deceased stars such as Junior Seau forced a re-examination of the sport. In- deed, football is under assault because of its concussions, domestic violence, player discipline, Colin Kapernick's political stance and the escalating perception of some that it's too costly to watch and too dangerous to play. Still, there is an incredible number of people who love football and see it and its better values as timeless and universal. Perhaps they are more interested in the three hours of action of the game itself than thorny issues of player safety, activism and misbehav- ior—all will, ultimately, be forgiven. e sport faced a crisis in 1905, when at least eighteen people died while playing. President eodore Roosevelt stepped in, encouraging safety changes and the forward pass. ere's no reason to think the NFL won't adapt and sustain itself in time for its one-hundredth season in 2019. Indeed, no matter its risks, football's rewards are undeniably allur- ing. "When I played, there was a 70 percent chance of a player end- ing up broke, physically disabled and divorced," said Stevensville na- tive Joe Cummings, who played linebacker in the NFL from 1996 to 1999. "If I asked you, would you want to take a job where you would end up broke, disabled and divorced, and it would only last until you were twenty-eight, would you want the job? Probably not. But what if I told you that that job was playing in the NFL, and getting to be on ESPN, etc.? e draw to be on that stage is still too big." "If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell were searching a that has yet to be colonized by an NFL franchise, he These are excerpts from the book published by The History Press, 2017. by BRIAN D'AMBROSIO

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