Alabama won its third BCS title in four years last season, solidifying the Crimson Tide as the most dominant program of the current era. If you're a current Alabama player, however, you can be forgiven for feeling like you missed out on the celebratory reverie. "After the national championship game, we had a team meeting," Saban said at the Nike Coach of the Year Clinic this summer. "I told them they were not the national champions. 'Some of you played on the national championship team, but you are not the national champions.' I went on to tell them what this team does will only be defined by what they could do from this point on."

In Saban's world, you become -- and remain -- a champion by fighting against complacency and measuring yourself against one goal: perfection. And as great as Alabama was, they were not perfect; Heisman trophy-winner Johnny Manziel, quarterback for Texas A&M, saw to that last season by delivering the Crimson Tide their only loss.

"Each year we go through our schedule and decide which team we have to beat to compete for the conference championship," Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart said this summer. "We have to decide what we have to do to defeat that team." This summer, the television screens in Alabama's weight rooms replayed the loss to the Aggies on an endless loop; it's a pretty good bet the focus of Alabama's offseason was on Texas A&M and Manziel.

Manziel dominated the offseason coverage, but he gained his status through the incredible things he did on the field, not least of all against Alabama. Manziel molded Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin's system in his image, into a kind of streetball air raid, where the offense's uptempo no-huddle and wide-open formations were merged with Manziel's improvisational savvy. Before the game in Tuscaloosa, a reporter asked if Manziel reminded Saban of Tim Tebow or Cam Newton.

Saban said he didn't, and instead said Manziel reminded him of a different sort of quarterback. "I've been around longer than most, and most of our players can't relate to this, but this guy reminds me of Doug Flutie," Saban said. "I played against him a long time ago, but he was a really good player and a really good competitor, and that's who this guy reminds me of."

Suffice to say that as much as Saban, Smart and the rest of Alabama's coaches and players are concerned with Texas A&M as a whole, their concern can really be condensed into one very specific issue: Nick Saban has a Johnny Football problem, one he's been working all offseason to solve. And to find the answer to his current problem, Saban might be looking to his past.

* * *

In 1994, the Cleveland Browns under head coach Bill Belichick went 11-5 during the season, tacking on an additional win in the playoffs over the Patriots. But they lost three times that season to the Pittsburgh Steelers, including a loss to them in the divisional round of the playoffs. Belichick and his defensive coordinator at the time, Nick Saban, could not stop Pittsburgh's offense, especially from one-back sets. "Pittsburgh would run 'Seattle' on us, four streaks. Then they would run two streaks and two out routes, which I call the 'Pole' route from two-by-two," Saban recalled recently. "Because we could not defend this, we could not play three-deep [zone], so when you can't play three-deep zone, what do you do next? We'll play Cover 1 [man-to-man coverage]. But here's the problem with Cover 1: If their men are better than your men, you can't play Cover 1, because they've got someone you can't match up with."

This was a concern, but had Pittsburgh purely been a throwing team, it wouldn't have been much of one. The Steelers were not, however, purely a passing team. In 1994, the Steelers led the NFL in rushing, something Belichick and Saban were brutally aware of. "So now we can't run Cover 1, and these guys can run the ball," Saban said. "We lost to the [Steelers] three times. And you know why? We could not play eight-man fronts against them to stop the run, because they would wear us out throwing it."

The question was how to find a way to get an extra defender in the box without playing a true, pure mano-a-mano defense. As Saban put it, "How can we play Cover 1 and Cover 3 at the same time, so we can do both and one would complement the other?"

* * *

No game exists in a vacuum, and this year's matchup between Texas A&M and Alabama on Sept. 14 will be no different. The first quarter will be in some sense the fifth quarter of the last one, with both coaching staffs looking to the film of last year's game for clues.

Alabama began last year's game against the Aggies using a defense Saban has long used against spread passing teams, which dates back to his days against the Browns, when they faced the Houston Oilers' run-and-shoot attack. Saban has had a basic model for defending spread passing teams, one he developed with Browns coach Bill Belichick to defend the vaunted Oilers triggerman Warren Moon, and which was further refined for modern spread offenses for the 2009 BCS National Championship against Texas, a game Alabama won 37-21.

Although Alabama is known for running a 3-4 defense -- meaning three defensive linemen and four linebackers -- that doesn't quite describe the practical reality on the field. "We are a 3-4 defense. That does not mean we play the 3-4 all the time," Smart has said. "Last year, we ran the 3-4 front 25 percent of the time. The rest of the time we played 4-3."

The reason for the shift is that offenses have been changing, so Saban must change with them. Saban's 3-4 was designed as a run-stuffing defense for traditional attacks, but teams like Texas A&M are far more likely to spread the field. "When we play a two-back team, we are in a 3-4 defense. Georgia and LSU are two-back offenses," said Smart. "If a team is a one-back offense with three or four wide receivers in the set, we match their personnel and play nickel or dime. When we play nickel or dime, we play very little 3-4 defense out of it; we are in the 4-3 front."

And, when facing one of these spread attacks, Saban likes to adjust his pass coverages as well. As he explained a few years ago, "when you're playing a passing team, you always have a better chance with split safeties," meaning coverages with two deep safeties. Against spread offenses, the blueprint has thus been straightforward: four down linemen, two deep safeties, and his corners rolled up on the outside receivers. With this mixture, Saban's defenses have suffocated team after team: the attacking four-man line pressuring the quarterback, the cornerbacks rolled up to take away the quick screens, and a two-deep safety look from which Alabama can mix and match coverages to confuse the quarterback.

And the run? Against teams like Texas, Alabama has been able to stuff it by giving its defensive linemen and inside linebackers responsibility for extra gaps based on the offense's blocking schemes.

This tried and true scheme is what Alabama began the game with against Texas A&M last season, ostensibly a Big 12 spread team that was about to learn what big-league SEC football was all about. Alabama's defense didn't work.

En route to Texas A&M's delirious 20-0 start, head coach Kevin Sumlin and then-offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury preyed on the weakest aspect of Saban's established anti-spread scheme: its linebackers and nickel cornerbacks.

On the second play of its first drive, Texas A&M hurries to the line. Kingsbury (now the head coach at Texas Tech) calls a packaged play, which is effectively two plays in one. A&M's offensive line blocks an inside run to the left while the receivers, specifically inside receiver Ryan Swope, run a quick stick passing concept.

On the play, it's Manziel's job to decide whether to throw the ball to Swope or hand it off to his running back, Ben Malena, all depending on the alignment and movement of Alabama linebacker C.J. Mosley.

Because Mosley cheats his alignment inside for the run -- the direct result of Alabama keeping two safeties deep -- Swope is open and Manziel hits him for the first down. It's a simple play, but Saban and Smart quickly realize they can't continually give Manziel freebies on the outside, so they rapidly adjust to cover each of A&M's receivers. This too does not work, not as much because of scheme. Because of, well, Johnny Football.

Three plays later, on second and seven, Alabama lines up with a similar alignment. But when A&M's receivers take off down the field, Alabama's defenders run with them, opening up a massive running lane for Manziel to dart through, at which point he blasts past Mosley and stiff-arms Deion Belue, gaining 29 yards to the Alabama 14. Texas A&M would score three plays later.

The cat-and-mouse gem continues. On the following Alabama possession, A.J. McCarron throws an ugly interception. Saban and Smart are nevertheless ready. They have a plan to bait the young freshman quarterback into a potential game-changing mistake, just the kind of mistake they've forced in so many games before.

On first and 10 from the Alabama 41, Texas A&M aligns in the same formation as the earlier packaged pass to Swope. Alabama shows the exact same look -- at first. Just before the snap, Alabama safety Vinnie Sunseri shifts in to take away the hand-off to Malena while cornerback Dee Milliner slides inside of Swope to take away -- and possibly intercept -- the quick pass. Instead, Sumlin and Manziel are already on to their counter to Alabama's counter.

Because of Sunseri's and Milliner's inside alignments, Alabama safety Robert Lester slides down to cover receiver Kenric McNeal in the slot. Manziel dashes to the right as if he is running a speed option play, only to drop back and hit McNeal streaking past Lester down the seam.

A&M quickly scores another touchdown. By this point Alabama's defensive plan is out the window. On their next possession, Saban and Smart throw up their hands and bring an all-out blitz on third down, only for Manziel to easily escape for a 32-yard run, leading to another A&M score making it 20-0, Aggies.

Alabama recovers, as its offense finds life and defense changes tactics.

"There are times in a game when you must deny the ball. It is like basketball. If you want to get the ball back at the end of a game, you cannot play a two-three zone defense," Saban said this summer. Alabama would concede nothing: "You have to get on them and deny the ball. In football, you cannot deny the ball playing zone coverage."

Out are the anti-spread tactics that Saban had designed to stop the Oilers and the Texas Longhorns, the kind of complex, hybrid defenses he developed with Belichick. In is the mano-a-mano football he learned while coaching under Jerry Glanville with the Oilers.

"Sometimes you've got to be able to play middle-of-the-field coverage to get an extra guy in the box," Saban has explained in past lectures. In other words, said Saban, "You have to have some guts and play press."

In the second half, Alabama clamps down, challenges the Aggie receivers, challenges the Aggie run game, and, most of all, challenges Manziel. And Alabama gets back in the game, so it works, until it doesn't.

The Johnny Manziel who Alabama faced is not the same Johnny Manziel that Florida and LSU had beaten: a talented but raw player who wasn't able to consistently hit passes in tight windows.

Instead Manziel comes into his own as he hits several key second-half passes to Swope, until, finally, he beats Alabama mano-a-mano. Johnny Football is better than Alabama's men. In the fourth quarter with just under nine minutes remaining, Texas A&M lines up in an empty, no-back set. Alabama plays straight-up man-to-man coverage, with a single safety deep; because Manziel is such a threat to run, they need the extra defender in the box and can't put two safeties deep. The call for A&M is "8," in which the outside receivers to the trips side run slants while the innermost receiver, Malcome Kennedy, runs a corner route. Kennedy beats Dee Milliner -- who would be picked ninth in the 2013 NFL Draft -- and Manziel lofts a perfectly placed pass over Kennedy's outside shoulder. Alabama will still have opportunities to win, but that touchdown proves to be the ballgame.

* * *

Had the coaches not been named Saban and Belichick, it's likely that the Steelers beating the Browns three times that year would have been the end of the story. But instead those two coaches devised a new tactic called "Rip/Liz Match," though neither got to put it to much use in Cleveland. Saban left to coach Michigan State, while Belichick was fired from Cleveland after failing to make the playoffs. But each has used Rip/Liz Match on his subsequent championship teams, and there's a chance it could be Saban's answer for Johnny Football.

Rip/Liz Match is a pattern-matching adjustment to a traditional three-deep zone, which means that the zone defenders essentially play man-to-man coverage after the receivers have run the called pass pattern.  Below is an image from Saban's playbook on Rip/Liz:

The insight behind Rip/Liz is that when offenses -- like the Steelers in 1994 -- want to defeat three-deep zone, they run the tight end and slot receivers down the seams, but if they want to defeat Cover 1 man, they run picks and crossing routes. Rip/Liz match therefore gives the offense precisely what it doesn't want to see. To oversimplify, they do this because when the inside receivers run vertical, those nickel defenders and linebackers run vertical with them, but if they quickly break outside to the flat or inside on a cross, those linebackers and nickelbacks, rather than chasing the receivers across the field, pass them on and drop to their zones and match up to the offense's other receivers.

"If [the receivers] run vertical, it looks like Cover 1 man coverage," Smart said this summer. "It is unless the receivers start to cross, then it becomes zone. We play zone until the offense tries to run four vertical patterns down the field." And the most important benefit is the defense can now add an extra defender to the box to stop the run -- or spy the quarterback.

* * *

Texas A&M and Manziel present Saban with precisely the dilemma he faced from the Steelers: How do you stop a spread passing team that can really run the ball? Rip/Liz Match -- coupled with a heavy emphasis on making sure Alabama's pass rush remains disciplined to keep Manziel in the pocket -- seems like a ready-made answer for Alabama to address the problems Texas A&M presents. Alabama certainly played much better on defense after that first quarter, and Rip/Liz would not have given Manziel the clear one-on-one matchups to hit Swope and Kennedy late in the game.

But maybe Rip/Liz isn't the answer. It was in Alabama's playbook last season, and they still lost. Instead, maybe Saban and his defensive coordinator, like Belichick and Saban himself back in 1994, must react by devising some modern tactic as they face this modern problem.

Right now, at every level of football, defensive coaches have been racking their brains trying to find a way to stop the onslaught of deadly dual-threat quarterbacks, particularly those captaining uptempo, spread attacks. With Manziel and Texas A&M, Saban is facing an acute version of the problem NFL, college and high school defenses are also facing.

It's no understatement to say that almost the entire defensive coaching world, including at the very highest levels, want to see very badly what Saban has in store for Texas A&M and Johnny Manziel. If anyone can figure out how to stop these offenses, it must be the best defensive coach in the game, Nick Saban. And what if he can't? What then?

Can Saban solve his Johnny Football problem? Inquiring minds want to know.

Players come to the US Open lugging baggage, mental baggage, that is, the kind packed with memories and urgent needs, with apprehensions and expectations, with barely acknowledged terrors and stubborn belief.  As porters of their own histories, the top guys - those few with a legitimate shot at the title - step onto the court buoyed or depleted by the recent past,  or determined to avenge it or hoping to forget it.

Like it or not, that past is inseparable from the present, thanks to a rankings system that operates on a 52-week rolling scale causing players to lose points unless they maintain or better their results from the previous year and assuring that a  player's most constant opponent is himself.

But a year is a dauntingly long time in a sport blighted by myriad pitfalls that range from unfavorable draws to finger blisters and windy weather. Consequently, as the 2013 US Open began, circumstances bore scant resemblance to the way things were at the start of the Open the year before. Back then, Novak Djokovic was the defending champion, Roger Federer was the world No. 1, Andy Murray had never won a Grand Slam, and Rafael Nadal was at home in Mallorca, nursing damaged knees and watching the event on television.

As this year's Open got underway, Djokovic was No. 1, Federer was No. 7,  Murray had two Slam trophies on his mantelpiece, one of which signified his status as the US Open's defending champion, and Nadal, fully recovered, was undefeated for the year on hard courts where he was producing the most aggressive tennis he'd ever played.

Anyone who knew anything about tennis would have told you the trophy was destined to be lifted by one of these four men. This was an eminently safe assumption given that, with the exception of Juan Martin del Potro's victory at the 2009 US Open, they'd collectively won 33 of the last 34 Grand Slams, a staggering affirmation of unyielding dominance, especially when you consider that the previous grouping of 34 Slams was won by 18 different players.

THE CONTENDERS

FEDERER

Of the 34 most recent Slams, Federer won precisely half, which is why he was still counted as one of the so-called Big Four despite the precipitous drop of his ranking to its lowest point since his historic run began 10 years ago. Federer is a five-time US Open champion, but his last victory came in 2008 and if he doesn't snag another title this time out, it will be the first time in those 10 stellar years that he hasn't won at least one Slam. This season has been one of startling losses and frustrations extreme enough to gnaw at a previously unshakable faith in himself that bordered on arrogance, and it was disconcerting to hear him talk about lacking confidence and to hear reporters insinuate it might be time for him to retire. But Federer was still proud and sufficiently presumptive to insist not only that he'll keep on playing but that he'll win more Slams.  This tournament would go a long way toward determining whether, at age 32, he's still the viable contender he claims to be or if, in the biting phrase of the commentator Mary Carillo, he's simply "pathologically optimistic."

MURRAY

When Andy Murray reached the 2012 US Open final he'd already been to four Slam finals, losing them all in a manner that left him looking curiously bewildered and ineffectual. Each defeat added to the crushing burden of pressure that accrued to him as the only highly ranked player in Great Britain, the tennis-fixated nation where the sport began and where no man had won a Grand Slam since 1936 when the much-vaunted Fred Perry took home the last of his three Wimbledon trophies. Murray's multiple defeats gave rise to mass indignation in the British press, expressed in countless articles bearing cloying headlines like one that read, "Will Andy Murray ever give the nation the victory it craves?"

For half a dozen years that question had been the elephant in any room that happened to contain reporters and Andy Murray. He had dealt with it gracefully, wisely concealing his true feelings about it until his two Slam titles abated that cumbersome craving, at least temporarily, and he became willing, for the first time, to tell reporters how that question made him feel, "Every day you get asked, ‘When are you going to win Wimbledon?'," he recalled. "'Why have you not won a Grand Slam?' And every question makes you doubt yourself more ... It does make you feel a bit like a loser."

You can see why, when Murray won the US Open, defeating Novak Djokovic in the final, no one was more relieved than he was, with the arguable exceptions of his girlfriend and his mother. He beat Djokovic again in 2013, when he finally triumphed at Wimbledon, a victory so longed for he could not believe he'd actually attained it. Even after receiving congratulations from the queen and visiting with the prime minister, he would wake in the middle of the night and, uncertain he'd prevailed, put on a video of the last desperate points he'd played. "I had to keep watching the end of the match," he told an ESPN reporter, "to make sure it was real."

As defending champion at the 2013 Open, Murray faced a new sort of pressure; having spent the first part of his tennis life proving he has what it takes, he's fated to spend the rest of it trying to top his own achievements.

DJOKOVIC

When Djokovic won the US Open in 2011 it was his third major win in a year in which he would ultimately go 70-6 and compile one of the more impressive seasons in tennis history. "Djokovic is playing superior to the rest," said Nadal's coach, his uncle Toni, "I hope it does not last forever."

And of course it didn't. Tennis is a game of inches, and suddenly, possibly for no particular reason other than that Djokovic is human, balls that once landed smack on the lines were sailing just beyond them. At the start of the 2013 Open he hadn't won a title since April when he defeated Nadal in Monte Carlo on clay, a telling prelude, or so he assumed, to achieving his goal for the year, which - as he declared repeatedly - was to win the French Open, the only Grand Slam title he lacked. A win at the French would add his name to the list of seven players  - Nadal and Federer among them - who'd won the Career Grand Slam, which results from having the skill and versatility to win at least once at all four Slams: the Australian Open and the US Open, which are played on hard courts, Wimbledon, which is played on grass, and the French Open, played on clay.

But at the French, he lost to Nadal in a ferociously contested five-set semifinal, and then went down in the Wimbledon final to Murray with minimal opposition. For most players, making the finals at successive Grand Slams would constitute a banner season, but for Djokovic, losing at those finals was a harsh disappointment made worse by commentators who pose questions he'd rather not answer. "What have you been working on?" one of them asked, "Some of your shots weren't working as well as they once were..."

Djokovic had been ranked No. 1 for the better part of two years. But he needed to win the Open or he'd likely lose that ranking to his nemesis Nadal - the person he'd least like to attain it. The Open was his last opportunity to turn around an unexpectedly demoralizing year in which he's learned that being successful doesn't feel all that great when you used to be dominant.

NADAL

The big story of the summer was the unanticipated resurgence of Rafael Nadal, clay court master, longtime kryptonite to Roger Federer and arguably the most tenacious competitor in any sport, one whose game was described by Andre Agassi's former coach Brad Gilbert as "an education in pain." Nadal's seven months of rehabilitation from knee tendinitis and a torn patella tendon made for an anxious and difficult time during which he tried not to dwell on the possibility that he might never again play at a high level. He returned to the game in February 2013, looking and feeling apprehensive even as he reached the final in the first tournament he entered. But he lost to Horacio Zeballos, an Argentine journeyman ranked No. 73 who, early in the day, had tweeted that he was about to play a match against "God" and, by sundown, had pulled off an upset that shocked everyone but Nadal.

But from then on, Nadal would furnish a different sort of shock as he made the finals of all but one of the next nine tournaments he played, winning seven and establishing a record number of wins for a male player at a single Grand Slam with his eighth victory at the French Open a few days after his 27th birthday.

But most surprising was his undefeated record at the three hard-court Masters events he played, including back-to-back wins at the tournaments immediately preceding the Open, a feat regarded as nearly impossible and accomplished only by three other players: Pat Rafter, Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick.

As the Open began, Nadal had a winning record against every other seeded player and, with one exception, against every player in the draw he'd played more than once. He was deemed the man to beat, and even Djokovic was saying Nadal had been the best player of the year. What remained to be determined was whether he had peaked too soon, or whether his astonishing roster of wins was the harbinger of what would be a victory all the more momentous for being so unlikely.

WEEK ONE

A Grand Slam is effectively two tournaments neatly divided into week one and week two. The first week begins with 128 men; by the start of the second week, 112 are gone and 16 remain.

In the early rounds, watching seeded players progress through the draw can be equivalent to observing an armored tank move through a forest of saplings, cutting them down one by one in maneuvers generally devoid of drama or resistance.  There are exceptions, of course, as there were at the most recent major, Wimbledon, where Steve Darcis from Belgium unceremoniously ousted Nadal in the first round, while Federer lost in the second round to Sergiy Stakhovsky of the Ukraine. These players, ranked, respectively No.'s 135 and 116, and not exactly household names outside their respective countries, had played the matches of their lives, surprising their storied opponents nearly as much as they surprised themselves.

Still, more often than not, the top guys subdue lower ranked opponents with an amalgam of physical skill and mental toughness that manifest in measurable entities like serving percentages, and ratios of winners to errors. But their greatest advantage derives from the amorphous composite of achievement and legend known as the "aura," which results in a monumental intimidation factor that effectively puts most highly ranked players up a break or two before they step onto the court.

Given these unalterable imbalances, the early matches that matter most are those with the potential to eliminate two sorts of players: the few with a shot at the title or the equally few with a genuine chance of derailing them. Djokovic had what John McEnroe termed the best early round draw for any player in nearly 20 years, but, if the seedings held, he was slated for two tricky matches down the line: a quarterfinal with Juan Martin del Potro, the Argentine who nearly beat him in the semifinal at Wimbledon; and a semifinal encounter with Andy Murray, who'd defeated him at last year's Open and for the recent Wimbledon title.

Nadal also had two possible pitfalls in the offing: a fourth round match against the American John Isner and a feverishly anticipated quarterfinal that would be the 32nd chapter in his illustrious rivalry with Roger Federer whom he had played - and defeated - at every Grand Slam except the US Open.

ROUND TWO

Juan Martin del Potro, the only man at the Open, aside from the Big Four, with a serious chance to win the title, is a sweet-natured, somewhat phlegmatic fellow who, at 6'6 has tremendous reach, a mighty serve and a hard, flat, stinging forehand. When he won the Open at the age of 20 back in 2009, he became the only player other than Nadal to beat Federer in a Grand Slam final, a coup that, going into the match, seemed infeasible to pretty much everyone, including del Potro. Theirs was a battle between men of wildly differing natures, as could be deduced from a glance at each man's player's box: Federer's boasted, among others,  Gwen Stefani, Gavin Rossdale and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue who had assumed the role of Federer's personal style adviser, while del Potro's box contained his coach, his physical trainer, a friend and a dozen empty seats.

The victory established del Potro as No. 5 in the world and, in the minds of many, as the player most likely to be the next No. 1.  But a disastrous wrist injury soon took him out of the game. There was surgery, followed by an impossibly slow healing process. He returned a year later, visibly uncertain and ranked No. 257.

Now, he had worked his way back to No. 6 in the world, and was about to play his childhood idol, the 32-year-old Lleyton Hewitt, one of the most spirited competitors in the sport's history, whose signature exhortation - a  raspy, shouted "Come on!" - has been adopted by countless players. But in recent years, Hewitt seemed to have had more surgeries than wins and when he looked at his draw and saw del Potro was his second round opponent he didn't bother looking any further.

Hewitt was the youngest player ever to attain the No. 1 ranking, which he did in 2001, at the age of 20. He held it for 80 weeks, the 10th most all time, but his fortunes had long since plummeted. This was evidenced several years ago, after he lost a late night match at what is now the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California. As all losers must, he came to the press room to answer questions. Seated behind a table and a microphone he waited for the usual gaggle of reporters though it soon became clear the gaggle would be comprised only of me and a PR guy for the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals). We each asked a question or two, and Hewitt answered, and we all tried to act as if the situation was perfectly normal when, in fact, it was perfectly demeaning. Then Hewitt left thinking god knows what, and you could only hope that his staunchly matter-of-fact nature protected him from potentially disturbing ruminations on the fleetingness of fame and power.

Coming onto the court to face del Potro, Hewitt had long since lost whatever he had to lose, but this only made him more committed and happier than ever to be playing in the world's biggest arena, the 23,000 seat Arthur Ashe Stadium. "I was hankering to get out on this court again," he would later tell reporters, "and put on a show."

Which he did, and when he defeated a sluggish del Potro the only person happier than he was would have been Djokovic, for whom Hewitt had performed the helpful service of dispensing with a player presumed to pose a major impediment to his ambitions.

Hewitt would go out of the Open in the Round of 16, losing to 31-year-old Russian Mikhail Youzhny, a former No. 8 with a bulldog's face who was actually Dr. Youzhny, having received a Ph.D. in philosophy after authoring a thesis about tennis players and how to beat them. Despite this apparent seriousness of purpose, Youzhny was best-known for having become a YouTube sensation when he responded to losing a match by hitting his head with his racquet until he bled, proving in the process that, generally speaking, fame is more easily acquired by being weird than by playing tennis.

The Hewitt/Youzhny match was a war between two wily veterans, playing smart, old-school tennis, thinking ahead a shot or two, placing serves, making the other guy uncomfortable. Hewitt was up 5-2 in the fifth set, but he tightened up when serving for the match, and Youzhny broke him and went on to win. Hewitt left the court knowing he may never have another chance to go deep in a major again.

ROUND THREE

It's no secret that American tennis has ceased to be the vibrant, pride-inducing spectacle it was from 1920 to 2003.

It's no secret that American tennis has ceased to be the vibrant, pride-inducing spectacle it was from 1920 to 2003 when men like Bill Tilden, Don Budge, Pancho Gonzales, Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras led the roster of iconic, tough-minded players. For 50 of those 83 years Americans loomed over the sport and either held or shared the No. 1 ranking.

This summer, when John Isner's ranking dipped below No. 20 for a week or two, it meant there was no American male in the top 20 for the first time since 1973. Even when Isner reclaimed a top 20 berth, only one other American - the chronically uninspiring Sam Querrey - was ranked above No. 85, marking an epic and embarrassing tumble from grace for a country that, in 1979, had claimed seven of the top 10 players, among them the legendary Connors, McEnroe and Ashe.

For the last several years, each time the Open rolls around, a storyline trumpeted in the ever-hopeful American press is whether this will be the Major at which champion-deprived fans will witness the overdue breakthrough of Isner, an amiable, somewhat unwieldy, North Carolinian who, at 6'10, plays what is called Big Man Tennis, a term implying there is an entity called Little Man Tennis, which, of course, there isn't.

Isner is known primarily for having won the longest match in tennis history, a sweaty extravaganza lasting 11 hours and five minutes played over three days and occasioned equally by a massive serve (Isner's strength) and a pitiably weak service return (his glaring weakness).

The hype preceding Isner at the Open is ramped up by the fact that he always plays well in the run-up tournaments, which, with one exception, are contested in the U.S. where he can feed off the crowd support he needs and craves.

No crowd is more fervid or demonstrative than the US Open crowd. This is especially true at the night sessions, where the feistiness for which New Yorkers pride themselves grows exponentially with the prodigious intake of beer, wine, champagne and the Honey Deuce, a concoction of Grey Goose vodka, lemonade and raspberry liqueur, topped off with three honeydew melon balls on a stick (to represent three tennis balls) and is to the Open what mint juleps are to the Kentucky Derby.

In such matches, a crowd sufficiently tanked or engaged or put off or enthused transmutes into a third entity endowed with a unique capacity to embolden or aggravate the two hyped up, edgy guys slugging it out in their presence.  Knowing how to utilize the crowd is a gift in itself. Jimmy Connors, who had that gift and took pains to hone it, refers to crowds as "my partner."  Their support, he once said, is like having "somebody out there with me, helping me along the way."

The crowd had been an unexpectedly consequential factor in Isner's second round match against the determinedly flamboyant Frenchman Gael Monfils, who insists he would rather entertain the crowd than win. More often than not, that is precisely how things pan out, and, even if it satisfies Monfils, it's dispiriting to see such a gifted athlete mugging and chatting to the crowd and hurling racquets into the air and reflexively opting for being loved over being admired.

Monfils captivated the night crowd in Louis Armstrong Stadium almost from the first ball. As they cheered him they took on the distinction of being the first crowd at the US Open to favor a non-American over an American player though, considering the unparalleled appeal of players like Bjorn Borg and Rafael Nadal, it seems fair to ask what took them so long.

Isner was justifiably rattled, but managed to hold it together and win the match in four tight sets, though later, at his presser, he made no bones about the fact that the crowd response had been "disappointing."

In Round 3, he played Philipp Kohlschreiber, a German with few weaknesses in his game who stands a full foot shorter than Isner.  The match threatened to be a case of déjà vu all over again since last year, in the same third round, it was Kohlschreiber who had taken Isner out of the Open. Isner, by his own account, was seeking "revenge," and he must known there was no way the crowd would abandon him this time out, since Kohlschreiber is a player with a slightly sour mien and the charisma of a dinner napkin. Indeed, after Kohlschreiber won the first set, the tennis writer Steve Tignor tweeted: Crowd is shockingly anti-German so far.

Isner was down two sets to one when, in the fourth set, he broke Kohlschreiber's serve to go up 6-5. Before stepping up to serve for the set, he engaged in some uncharacteristic cheerleading, wagging his forefinger at the crowd, pumping his arms to rile them up, cupping a hand over one ear to bring forth still louder chants of USA! USA! Even in the moment, it seemed like too much celebration too soon, and, in fact, Isner was broken and went on to lose the ensuing tiebreak and the match. Afterwards, he would say of his efforts to stir the crowd what any casual observer could have told him. "I used too much energy, and I shouldn't have done that. It was stupid on my part."

With Isner out, the task of upholding the woefully frayed banner of American male singles tennis was left to the previously unheralded and largely unknown Tim Smyczek, a 25-year-old from Milwaukee. But Smyczek lost his next match to Marcel Granollers, a Spanish player whose success has come almost exclusively in doubles.

***

Federer's fourth round match was scheduled for the evening, a bonus for a player who was 22-1 in night matches at the Open.

In an interview two nights earlier, Federer had spoken about his opponent, the 22nd ranked Spaniard Tommy Robredo, who had missed most of the previous year because of injury. He's a good player, Federer allowed, adding he'd beaten Robredo each of the 10 times they've played. Clearly, he was thinking ahead to that prospective quarterfinal with Nadal. Still, his dismissive remarks about Robredo, once ranked as high as No. 7, seemed a bit cavalier, especially in retrospect when Federer had played poorly from the opening game, sailing a backhand long, getting passed twice when coming to the net, and bungling two forehands to get broken.  Later, he would say he had "self-destructed" but it was also true that Robredo had played bold, inspired tennis as he finished him off in straight sets.

Federer was far from the only person to assume he'd be meeting Nadal in the quarters, though the odds on this much desired clash of the titans might have seemed rather low to anyone who had considered Federer's slow but steadily devolving results at the Open. He won it five times from 2004 to 2008, lost in the finals in ‘09 and lost in the semis in 2010 and 2011 both times to Djokovic and, in both cases, bizarrely, after holding match points. One year ago he lost in the quarters, marking a downfall that had about it the absolute precision that used to characterize his forehand.

he seemed like a condemned prisoner heading off to serve a life sentence.

After losing the match, Federer looked desolate as he trudged the several hundred yards that separate the Louis Armstrong Stadium from the locker room. Surrounded by security men, he seemed like a condemned prisoner heading off to serve a life sentence. And in a sense he was, since, from here on, he might well be consigned to live as one of those perpetually wistful individuals who populate the pricier boxes at the Open - those fading actors and athletes and politicians whose seasons of achievement are behind them.

Watching him, you had to wonder if he sometimes wished he'd retired after winning his 17th major at Wimbledon in 2012, the victory that restored his No. 1 ranking and enabled him to go on to clock a record 302 weeks in that exalted position. There is a certain nobility in going out on such a high, but Federer had squandered that option and, judging from the stricken expression on his face, he must have known it.

QUARTERFINALS

A notable aspect of the quarterfinals was that three of the eight men contesting them  -  Robredo, Youzhny and world No. 4 David Ferrer  - had already celebrated their 30th birthday. Another anomaly was that four of the eight had a one-handed backhand, a throwback to an earlier time that, in this era of the power game, was widely, if erroneously, assumed to have the usefulness of a dead battery.

It took Djokovic four sets to dispense with Youzhny, but it was difficult to gauge precisely what that said about the state of his game. In the early rounds, observers bent on talking up his chances had heaped praise on him for beating players who were middling at best and, had any of them defeated him, would have pulled off one of the most stunning upsets ever. Djokovic had coasted to the semis, but there was no way to know for sure if this was because he was now playing dominating tennis, or if he simply had the good fortune to face three opponents in a row - Youzhny included - who came to him thoroughly depleted after five-set standoffs in the previous round.

Nadal's opponent in the quarters was his countryman Robredo, whose response to his decisive, unanticipated victory over Federer was expressed in words not often heard from tennis players: "I'm delighted," he had said.  Robredo had been on the tour for 15 years, and was often overlooked even when he played superior tennis and, possibly for that reason, he had grown increasingly aloof and touchy. Some years ago, when I was about to interview him, several reporters warned me to not to ask him anything about Nadal who, by then, at the age of 23, was both the sun and the cloud hanging over every other Spanish player and emphatically not a favorite subject of Tommy Robredo. But in the last year, when he and Nadal were both coming back from extended injury, they had spent hours practicing together and had bonded over shared and difficult situations.

But Nadal, who is sentimental enough to have seen "Phantom of the Opera" seven times, does not waste as much as a minute on the court indulging his more tender feelings. He took Robredo out in a merciless thrashing that was pretty operatic in itself, during which he hit his 97th forehand winner of the tournament while his suddenly subdued countryman won only four games in three sets.

The most consequential quarterfinal was played by the defending champion, world No. 2 Andy Murray, and Stanislas Wawrinka, the No. 2 Swiss player, and No. 9 in the world, who had pulled off an emphatic upset of Murray at the 2010 Open.

Wawrinka had spent his career as "that other Swiss player." He never seemed to mind, though his feelings about his overall position in the game became apparent three years ago when he determined he had just five more years to make an impact on tennis and must rid himself of all distractions, two of which turned out to be his wife of less than two years and their baby daughter.

"Stan told me he had new priorities," his wife told the press. "He packed his bags and moved into a hotel.  There would have been another solution, if he had spoken to me about it,"

Ultimately, this stratagem failed, domestic bliss was restored and Wawrinka settled on a more effective method for making his mark, namely, to hire a new coach, Magnus Norman, a former player from Sweden who runs the assertively titled Good to Great Tennis Academy.

Murray also had made a coaching change that proved beneficial when he began working nearly two years ago with the insistently taciturn Ivan Lendl who, like Murray, had lost four Grand Slam finals before winning one and, unlike Murray, had gone on to win seven more. Under Lendl's tutelage, Murray reached the finals of the last four Slams he played, and defeated Djokovic to secure his two Slam titles.

With del Potro gone, he was regarded as the only player with enough game to derail Djokovic. Consequently, many of those cheering for him were Nadal fans hoping, should their man reached the final, that his opponent would be Murray rather than Djokovic, given that Murray posed a lesser threat and is much nicer.

Murray had never before had the opportunity to defend a Grand Slam title. Were he to win the Open again, he had a shot, for the first time, at the No. 1 ranking. But he looked dull and flat in the early rounds and clearly hampered by a hangover from his Wimbledon victory, which had called on every bit of his mind and body and spirit. ESPN had chosen him as the subject of one their overwrought TV essays all of which have the same evident subtext  - who says we aren't sensitive? - is a question no one was asking. The Murray piece began with a tremulous "What happens to the dreamer when the dream comes true?"  It's hardly a mystery. What happens is this: he gets tired.

Wawrinka was nervous at the start of the match, but he was patient and by the end of the first set he was whacking winners into the corners while Murray was reduced to smashing his racket in frustration. By the end of the second set Murray was screaming. By the end of the third set Murray had been freed to board the earliest possible flight to Heathrow Airport, his second speedy exit of the day, and to return, accompanied by his longtime girlfriend, to their house and dog in Surrey. The next morning, a headline in the Mail Online typified the contempt that had seeped back into Murray-related stories:  "Gloomy Andy beats hasty retreat back to London after title defense in Big Apple turns rotten."

Apparently memory is in short supply in Murray's homeland, where, mere weeks ago, he was a hero and speculation abounded as to when he would be knighted.

SEMIFINALS

WAWRINKA v.  DJOKOVIC

Wawrinka had come close to beating Djokovic at the 2013 Australian Open, the first Slam of the year, where he'd played at the heightened level he'd often seemed capable of, but had never attained. When he lost in a grinding brawl that ended 12-10 in the fifth set, he retreated to his hotel room and refused to emerge for three days.

But his beat down of Andy Murray had boosted his confidence. He strode onto the court seeming to believe he could win and broke a discombobulated Djokovic three times to seize the first set. Theirs was to be a strange match, lasting four hours and five minutes, and marked by some exhilarating patches of play as both players aimed for and defended the corners. But there was also a code violation for Djokovic after he received coaching from the stands and a ball abuse warning for Wawrinka, who was leading two sets to one in the fourth set when he took a medical timeout for a strained muscle that would impede his previously flowing movement. Once injured, he was fated to lose, though in the fifth set he battled valiantly, saving five break points to win an epic 21-minute, 30-point game, but Djokovic was undeterred and went on to win the match and a berth in the final.

Later, both men would say, rightly, that Wawrinka had been the better player and as he left the court, the crowd stood and gave him an ovation. He turned back to wave and take in the scene, and it was a lovely moment for a player who had yet to garner a fair share of praise.

"Even if I lost," he said, "I was still happy to hear all the cheering. It's something quite amazing for me."

GASQUET v. NADAL

Nadal's semifinal opponent was the Frenchman Richard Gasquet, whose style of play has historically been more aesthetic than effective. Yet lately, he's been challenging the most damning knock on him: that, despite his prodigious gifts, he's terminally hindered by a deficit of guts and heart. But he's been holding the No. 9 ranking, and, for the first time since 2007 he'd made the semis of a Grand Slam, having defeated two tough players along the way, each in the fifth set where he's customarily folded.

Gasquet became infamous in 2009 when he tested positive for a miniscule amount of cocaine. He was suspended but reinstated after convincing an anti-doping tribunal that the cocaine found on him had come from a girl he'd French-kissed in a Miami club where she was doing some lines. To some, this explanation was titillating; for most it was improbable. But Nadal had known and liked Gasquet since they were little kids and, during the suspension, he stood by him, always insisting Gasquet was innocent, "Rafa supported me more than anyone," Gasquet said later. "I'll never forget what he's done for me."

Another thing Gasquet has not forgotten was his sole win over Nadal, which came when they were both 13. Asked by a reporter about that match of 14 years ago, Nadal, who has absolute recall for the most arcane details of plays and scores, said yes, of course he remembered it. "It was 6-4," he said, "in the third."

Nadal beat Gasquet in straight sets, but his play was more conservative and had less flair than at any previous point in the tournament. Going into the final, he was 21-0 for the season on hard courts, and the betting favored him over Djokovic by a slight margin. Still, there was reason to wonder if he'd been abruptly deserted by the magic that had settled on him like a cloak throughout the summer.

FINAL: DJOKOVIC v NADAL

In a sense the 2013 US Open final began at the end of the 2012 Australian Open, where Nadal and Djokovic locked horns while contesting their most epic Slam final. Djokovic won it in a 5 hour, 53 minute feral encounter that was the longest grand Slam Final ever played and a clash so comprehensive and grueling that during the trophy presentation they could no longer stand and had to be supplied with chairs and bottles of water.

After that loss, the men in Nadal's camp worried about his state of mind. The match had been his seventh straight loss to Djokovic in finals since the start of 2011, and his third straight loss to him in Slam finals. Anyone who had watched Nadal over the years could see that this unprecedented string of defeats to a single player had robbed him of a measure of his leonine fight and belief. In May 2011, after Djokovic had done what no one had ever done by beating him in successive matches on clay, Nadal had gone into the French Open, where he was the five-time champion, shaken and downcast and saying tersely that he wasn't "obligated" to win the tournament, though in fact he did win it, two weeks later.

But after the loss in Melbourne, Nadal was unexpectedly upbeat. The match, he said, had shown him how to beat Djokovic, and while that seemed unduly hopeful at the time, since then he'd gone 5-1 against him, 4-1 in finals, and 1-0 in Slams.  Perhaps the main understanding he'd gained was that while he had forced his other opponents to make adjustments to his type of play, Djokovic had developed into the one player who required Nadal not simply to do things better - as he always sought to do - but to adjust, and do things differently, an intriguing challenge for a player who loved the day-in, day-out process of tennis and thrived on finding answers to adversity.

Their rivalry was unlike that of Nadal and Federer, which is underpinned by a comradeship and civility.

Their rivalry was unlike that of Nadal and Federer, which is underpinned, once a given match ends, by a comradeship and civility most poignantly expressed when Nadal put a comforting arm around the weeping Federer after defeating him in 2009 at the Australian Open. But that genuine warmth did not factor into his relationship with Djokovic, who had always seemed to resent and envy Nadal's success, his charisma, his popularity. As for Nadal, as much as he had detested getting beaten seven times running, what he may have liked even less was Djokovic's behavior in victory: the celebratory chest beating, banshee screams and strutting shirtless around the court while Nadal sat nearby slumped and disconsolate.

In 2007, when Djokovic began to be a force in tennis, he was hailed as the breath of fresh air the sport needed and his derisive on-court imitations of other players - Nadal in particular - were cited as evidence of a sparkling personality. "If you can call that personality," Pete Sampras said.

Djokovic became for many a troubling figure, known to have made use of the CVAC Pod, (Cyclic Variations in Adaptive Training) a performance-enhancing pressure chamber deemed by the World Anti-Doping Association to be "not in the spirit of sport." This past year, at Wimbledon, he wore specially made kicks embellished with "pimples" on their sides, a no-slip aid specifically banned in the tournament's rules and, during a match in Madrid earlier in the year, even his fans were jolted when he castigated the crowd in his native Serbian after they had the temerity to cheer for his opponent. The words he shouted "Sada cete da mi lizete kurac, mamu vam jebem, sacete kurac da mi lizete," translate into "Now you'll lick my c***, I'll fuck your mothers, you're gonna lick my c*** now" a charming recitation that explains why, when Djokovic is playing, it sometimes seems silly to refer to tennis as "the gentleman's sport."

In August, at the Montreal Masters he had celebrated his wins by donning an Afro wig and dancing on court to Daft Punk's Get Lucky, demonstrating yet again that he is as eager for approval as he is for the spotlight, which is to say, he's as insecure as he is narcissistic. Weeks later, at the Open, he unveiled a newly sober persona that had materialized so suddenly it seemed less a change of heart than a change of plan.

For Nadal, who is reticent and often uneasy in his on-court interviews, the spotlight was something to be dealt with, not something he craved. Nor was he preoccupied with image; he was who he was, and it didn't matter to him if people laughed when he engaged in his pre-match rituals like arranging two water bottles just so in front of his chair. Unlike other players who go off to distant tennis academies in their early teens, Nadal had remained at home with his family, where he was always dearly loved but never worshipped as Djokovic seems to have been in his own family and, apparently, still is if we are to judge from Papa Djokovic's recent remark that his son is "a global miracle."

Nadal's athletic gifts had been apparent from an early age but he was told from childhood that just because he can hit a ball over a net he should never think he was better than anyone else. This year, asked when he realized he was special he had said he really didn't believe he was special, and what struck the interviewer was that he meant it.

This season Nadal had gone 24-1 against top 10 players, but that one loss was to Djokovic, and though he led him 21-15 overall, he went into the final 6-11 against him on hard courts. They had played two US Open finals before; Nadal won the first in 2010; Djokovic beat him the following year. This match was to be the zero sum encounter that would break that tie and determine which man will have won two majors this year. When the match ended, one of them would likely be the year-end No. 1 and would have bested the only player who could challenge him consistently.

THE MATCH

Djokovic came out strong in the first set but soon seemed mired in an inexplicable absence of urgency while Nadal's play, rife with power and guile, was as explosive as it was exacting. Nadal's racquet charged through the air with the whip and sting of a sword. He was like a tiger waiting for the right moment to pounce, and when it came he took small, light steps to meet the ball, then planted his feet and, as he drew back his racquet, you could feel the winner coming even before he powered the ball into a corner for the break that would give him the first set in forty-two minutes.

But he went to his chair convinced he could not conceivably maintain this initial, phenomenal level, and as the second set unfolded, that assumption proved to be prophecy.

Nadal was serving at 2-3 when Djokovic hit a drop shot to set up break point. The ensuing 54-stroke rally was a chess game, a boxing match, a duel which sent them dashing and scrambling side to side, and by the time Nadal ended it with a backhand whacked into the net, he had run 472 feet and Djokovic had run 424 feet on that single point.

Wild cheers erupted, though Nadal did not seem to hear them as he readied himself to receive serve. But Djokovic raised his arms triumphantly above his head and walked toward the stands, his eyes searching the crowd, as if seeking praise for a victory not yet won. Nadal broke back in the next game; then Djokovic broke him again, taking the set 6-3, leveling the match, and cementing the shift in momentum.

It was one set all, but Djokovic was ascendant and unhesitating as he broke Nadal's serve at love in the first game of the third set, winning his third game in a row with mounting certitude and lethal forehands. Serving at 0-2, Nadal faced another break point but he hunkered down, stony-faced, refusing to countenance defeat, propelled by his thirst for battle and his monumental force of will. Now they were embroiled in a deadly contest, a joust of savage grandeur in which points were visceral and volcanic and every shot was accompanied by a primal grunt and had the pitiless aspect of a punch to the gut. It was tennis as scorched earth policy, a quest for dominance whose ultimate point was not merely to defeat the other but to break him, destroy him, wipe him out.

Had Djokovic gotten that second break, he would have been cruising toward the propitious advantage of two sets to one. But he faltered at the end of a lengthy rally, sending a shot long and two games later, when Nadal broke him for 3 games all, he was soon yelling at his camp, looking around, flustered and negative, knowing he'd had a chance to place his foot firmly on Nadal's throat and blown it with a single, wayward backhand.

At 4-all, Nadal was down 0-40, and Djokovic had three break points. Had he converted one of them, he would have served for the third set, but Nadal saved them all, one with a shot into the corner so risky and bold it was almost impertinent, another by firing his first and only ace of the match. The next game was steeped in desperate, scorching intensity, and when Nadal broke Djokovic's serve and took a set he should never have won, he knelt at the baseline, eyes fixed on the court, pumping his left fist again and again. Behind him, in his player's box, his sister Maribel and his girlfriend Xisca rose to their feet, eyes wide, as if unable to believe the razor's edge escapes they had witnessed. Xisca clasped a hand over her mouth; Maribel held a hand to her forehead. Then, radiant and relieved and ecstatic, they looked over at Nadal and shouted Vamos! Vamos! Vamos!

In the fourth set, Nadal bore down with fierce, unapologetic force that attested to his ravenous appetite for the game, the challenge, the competition. As the victory grew nearer, Djokovic's shoulders slumped and his eyes dulled, and he seemed to have concluded that Nadal, the man he had beaten so vociferously in the past, had roused himself and gone on to attain an unheard of level that was insurmountable.

The crowd also knew they were witnessing something remarkable, something far more than mere athleticism or brute strength or stamina. One year ago, at the close of the 2012 Open, Rafael Nadal was sitting on his couch, texting congratulations to the winner. In defiance of all logic and likelihood he had gone from there to where he was as the 2013 final concluded. Having won his 13th Grand Slam, he collapsed onto the court, and lay there sobbing as the crowd stood in praise of a man who had played fearless, slashing tennis and, before their eyes, secured his place at the uttermost pinnacle of his sport alongside the only other men who had earned the right to be there: Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and Rod Laver.

Watching Nadal, some thought they were witnessing a dream coming true. They weren't. He had never presumed to dream anything like this.

The play call surprised nobody on the University of New Hampshire sideline. Not the head coach, not the quarterback, and definitely not the receiver who eventually found himself celebrating in the end zone.

On Nov. 4, 2000, UNH was in trouble. But after falling behind 31-3, on the road, to undefeated, soon-to-be No. 1 ranked 1-AA (now FCS) power Delaware in front of nearly 22,000 fans, the Wildcats mounted a comeback. By late in the fourth quarter, they'd pulled within a touchdown, and again had driven deep into Blue Hens territory.

Then the offense stalled. It was fourth-and-19. A field goal was worthless and options were limited; Delaware knew UNH had to throw the ball. Sean McDonnell, in his second year as UNH head coach, asked offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, 36, what he wanted to do. After hearing an unconventional answer, McDonnell replied, "Fine. Run it."

"We didn't have anything else," McDonnell says now.

UNH's quarterback, Ryan Day, knew which play Kelly had in mind. The Wildcats had practiced it before. "I dropped the ball to a back, he lateraled it back to one of the receivers," Day recalls.

The problem was, as The Boston Globe's Allen Lessels later wrote, "in practice, the first pass always went to tailback Stephan Lewis or Imion Powell. On this day, however, Lewis had left the game with an ankle injury. Powell had stayed home with his wife, who was due to deliver a baby."

Kelly was unfazed. During a timeout, he summoned receiver Brian Mallette. According to Lessels, here's how the ensuing exchange went:

"If I send you in, can you do it?" Kelly asked.

"Yep," Mallette said.

Now, down by seven to the No. 2 team in the nation with less than six minutes left, on fourth-and-19 on their opponent's 23-yard line, Kelly decided to run the hook and ladder with a player who had never even practiced the play before. Amazingly, but in hindsight not too surprisingly, the sandlot staple worked. Day hit Mallette, who pitched the ball to receiver Kamau Peterson. After almost losing the ball, he pulled it in and sprinted across the goal line. Peterson, who spent a decade in the Canadian Football League, says today that, "We knew how open it was going to be." He might be stretching the truth a little, but then again, maybe not.

The extra point tied the score at 31, and UNH ended up winning, 45-44, in overtime. Kelly's audacious call still makes the gravel-voiced McDonnell, who remains the head coach at UNH, smile. "It was unbelievable when we did it," he says from his office. "Unbelievable. We were both out of our minds."

Thirteen years later, on a sweltering September afternoon, Ryan Day jogs off a practice field in Chestnut Hill, Mass. He stops to chat on a corner of artificial turf inside Boston College's Alumni Stadium, which has a seating capacity five times that of UNH's home field, 8,000 seat Cowell Stadium. Now the offensive coordinator at BC, the 34-year-old former quarterback is a long way from his New Hampshire days.

Still, the win at Delaware is fresh in his memory. The comeback wouldn't have been possible without Kelly, who wasn't afraid to take chances. In that era, Day described UNH as a football "laboratory." Kelly was its chemist, tinkering and tinkering until his formula was perfect.

* * *

UNH's all-in-one field house sits at the top of a hill on the edge of the Durham campus. One wall of the Paul Sweet Oval, the facility's indoor track, has a tiny football coaches box built into it. The makeshift wooden structure is only accessible by first climbing a ladder, then perilously shuffling across a catwalk. It overlooks tiny Cowell Stadium.

Buried in the basement, underneath the indoor track, Lundholm Gymnasium, and Swasey Indoor Pool, was Kelly's football laboratory. In reality, it was just a small office. But it's where he honed an offense that was, in the words of record-breaking former UNH receiver David Ball, "his baby."

If you've watched college football at all over the last few years, you're probably familiar with Kelly's work. Starting in 2007, he spent six seasons at the University of Oregon, where his dizzyingly fast squads ran an assortment of trick plays and scored points at a historic rate. In Kelly's four years as head coach (he was the offensive coordinator in '07 and '08), the Ducks finished 46-7 and made it to four BCS bowls, including the 2010-11 BCS National Championship Game. Then, last January, he became the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. So far, the Eagles are averaging 462 yards per game, best in the NFL. If they ever stop turning the ball over, and their defense gets it together ...

But long before his performance at Oregon earned him the nickname "Big Balls Chip," the iconoclast, Kelly spent 14 years as an assistant football coach at a school much better known for its hockey team. And that suited him just fine. He was in his home state, working at his alma mater, collaborating with coaches he'd known for years. Kelly may not have realized it at the time, but UNH was the optimal incubator for his creativity. He felt comfortable and had freedom to try new things. McDonnell, Kelly's longtime friend, says, "He was given a long leash here." In the coaching world, that's no small privilege.

Even as the UNH offense transformed into a record-breaking juggernaut and Kelly's reputation grew, he didn't immediately chase after bigger jobs. It's not that he wasn't pursued: He just didn't feel the need to leave. "I don't think Chip was looking for that special place," McDonnell says. "He was looking for the right place." And until Kelly found it, he was staying put.

* * *

In reality, the Granite State had always been his home. Born on Nov. 25, 1963, in the town of Dover, Charles "Chip" Kelly was one of four brothers. Their parents, Paul and Jean, raised the family in Manchester. By the time he attended Manchester Central High School, he had already become a versatile athlete. A right wing and center on two state championship-winning hockey teams, he also ran the second leg of a champion 4x100m relay team and played quarterback.

Bob Leonard coached Kelly in both track and football. In 1981, Kelly’s senior year at Central, the Little Green won the Class L state outdoor track championship. Early in the meet, Leonard says, Kelly approached him and said, "Coach, this one’s over." And it was. That day, the Little Green dominated. For Kelly, confidence was never a problem. He wasn’t very big — maybe 5'9, Leonard recalls — but in addition to being a track star, he was one of the best QBs in the state.

Central played its home games at Gill Stadium, a now-100-year-old structure that back then had a baseball diamond running through the middle of its natural grass field. Leonard’s philosophy toward coaching Kelly, a scrambler, was this: "Here’s the ball. Go play."

He’s not exaggerating, either. On Halloween night in 1980, Kelly led the Little Green to a 14-6 upset of Trinity. With the score tied at six in the fourth quarter — he’d already capped a 99-yard scoring drive earlier in the game with an 8-yard touchdown run — Kelly took command again, scoring on a sneak to give his team the win. A few weeks later, in its regular-season finale, Central beat Keene, 19-6. "Central, who seems to have a tradition of playing extremely well once the Division 1 race is decided (and Central isn’t involved)," wrote a reporter in the Nashua Telegraph "again showed superb play last night as two backs raced for over 100 yards each." Kelly was one of them, picking up 102 yards on 12 carries. The first of his two touchdowns that evening came on a 61-yard run. For his efforts that season, he was chosen to play in the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl. (The annual summer All-Star game, between New Hampshire and Vermont, features the states’ best seniors.)

In 1981, Kelly graduated from Central. "Some people walk to work," his yearbook quote reads, "others take their lunch." His choice revealed an aversion to the expected, as most of his classmates selected pseudo-meaningful motivational quotes culled from pop music and anthologies of wisdom. And as anyone who has heard a version of the intentionally absurd expression knows, walking to work and taking your lunch are not mutually exclusive. Kelly was clever enough to know that your choices need not confine you, but whatever they were, hard work and the ability to figure things out were part of the equation.

It’s unclear whether his classmates got the joke. Even as a teenager, Kelly was inscrutable. However, just as his opponents have since learned, he probably didn’t mind that his signals were difficult to decode.

* * *

Soon, Kelly headed to UNH, where he walked on to the football team. He played defensive back for four seasons, and eventually ended up coaching at Manchester Central, the ideal place to begin his career. He was the kind of precocious young assistant kids loved. "You couldn’t help but be excited by him," says Sean Feren, who played for Kelly at Central. He changed up the offense weekly, even calling plays like the occasional halfback pass, prompting Feren to think, Wow, OK, I guess he trusts us.

Of course, things didn’t always go smoothly. Leonard, who by then was an assistant working with the defense, says he once told him, "If you go three-and-out again, I’ll kill you." After tough losses, Kelly would run two miles home while his black Ford Escort sat idle in the stadium parking lot. "I don’t know when the guy slept," Feren says.

At the time, Sean McDonnell was an assistant at Boston University. One day, Central head coach Fred Cole and Kelly drove down to BU for a casual meeting. McDonnell, who in the early '80s coached at Central rival Manchester West, remembers their chat lasting all afternoon. "My first impression was, 'Boy, this guy’s like a sponge,'" McDonnell says of Kelly, who eventually earned his physical education degree at UNH in 1990. "He’s gonna soak everything up. And he did."

A few years later, McDonnell was an assistant at Columbia University. When a position opened up, he recommended Kelly’s name to head coach Ray Tellier. "We brought him down for an interview and he knocked it dead," McDonnell says. Kelly only spent two years in New York City though. In 1991 and 1992, respectively, McDonnell and Kelly got hired at UNH, where they’d each played for former head coach Bill Bowes.

Over the next decade, both worked their way up the ladder. McDonnell became the offensive coordinator in 1994. Kelly, first the running backs and then the offensive line coach, served one year as defensive coordinator for Johns Hopkins in 1993 before returning to UNH and the offensive side of the scrimmage line. He was just in time to devise a zone-blocking scheme for star Jerry Azumah. From 1995 through 1998, the speedy back raised the profile of UNH football as he rushed for what was then an FCS record 6,193 yards. There was nothing very fancy about UNH’s approach; they pounded the ball down teams’ throats.

But after the 1998 season, Bowes retired, and in the spring of 1999, the Chicago Bears drafted Azumah. McDonnell took over as head coach, and Kelly became his offensive coordinator. Things were about to change. That August, at media day, McDonnell told reporters, "The thing that has to change this season — and you guys know this — we better be able to pass the ball."

* * *

In one of the first speeches to the offense, Kelly explained his philosophy. "We want to run 80 plays offensively," Kamau Peterson recalls Kelly saying. "If we don’t get to 80 plays, we’ve failed." Remember, this was 1999, long before the proliferation of the lightning fast no-huddle offense.

Brian Barbato, now an assistant coach at UNH, also played for Kelly then. During his senior year at nearby Exeter High School, Barbato’s team ran the old-school Straight-T offense and threw the ball about a dozen times a game. When the lineman got to UNH in 1999, he was, well, overwhelmed. "I was playing center, in the shotgun," he remembers, "saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second.’" He ended up redshirting his freshman season to catch up.

Ryan Day, a Manchester kid who played high school ball at Central, had been a family friend of Kelly’s for years. The quarterback says that when Kelly got in his face at an early practice, he knew the honeymoon was over. But it was clear right away Kelly wasn’t just a screamer. On Kelly’s first day as offensive coordinator, he taught Day how to quickly determine whether a defense was in an "over" or an "under" alignment. Until that point, Day hadn’t figured it out. "He had a great way of simplifying things for you," Day says. Kelly explained that all his quarterback had to do was find the one player, the "shade," whose alignment changed the configuration of the defense to either the strong or the weak side. "He says, ‘Ryan, all you have to do is find the shade. If the shade’s strong, it’s under, if the shade is weak, it’s over.’"

He knew he didn’t have a huge arm or much speed. But Kelly helped him make quicker on-field decisions. In 2000, Day, a junior, led the Wildcats to a 6-5 record. During the epic win over Delaware, he completed 37 of 65 passes for 426 yards and four touchdowns, including a 53-yard bomb to Randal Williams that sent the game to overtime.

Day spent hours in the Kelly’s office, watching tape and discussing strategy. "He would throw the kitchen sink at me every week," says Day, who graduated in 2001 as UNH’s career leader in touchdowns (53) and completion percentage (59.9). "I used to love it." His grade point average, he adds, always rose after football season ended.

For Kelly, class was always in session. "Some guys were going on spring break, and he was going to Wake Forest and Clemson," Day says. Kelly used his vacations to visit other football programs, picking the brains of coaches, observing closely and borrowing liberally. "I got this from Nevada, we’re going to call it Nevada," David Ball remembers Kelly saying at practice after one fact-finding mission. "Here’s the signal, we’re gonna dress it up. We can run it five ways …"

Sure, Kelly made stops at schools like Georgia Tech and Auburn, but preferred programs whose limitations forced them to be creative. "He was never going to Ohio State," Barbato says. "They’re a big FBS school, they have better players than you do. He was going to the Utahs" — in other words — "the teams that were overachieving."

But for all of Kelly’s ingenuity, UNH wasn’t exactly a powerhouse — at least not right away — something impatient Eagle fans might keep in mind. In his first five years as offensive coordinator, the Wildcats finished with a winning record only once. McDonnell says he and Kelly, old buddies, used to argue about the direction of the offense. "You gotta slow down, Chip," McDonnell would tell Kelly. "We’re not good enough defensively. His whole thing was, ‘We’ll score 60.’" Neither realized one day soon that they’d actually have the players to make that happen.

* * *

Barre is a two-Dunkin’ Donuts town in Central Vermont, geographically next to the capital, Montpelier, and in spirit, far away from the more crunchy parts of the state. It's home to massive granite quarries, not posh ski resorts, and working class heroes, not slacker snowboarders. This is where David Ball grew up. In 2002, he graduated from the local high school, Spaulding, where he recently returned to coach and teach P.E.

When he arrives in the gray building’s lobby on a rainy morning in early September, a plastic stabilizing cast prevents him from shaking hands. Chip Kelly is responsible. In July, Ball’s cell phone lit up with a text message. It was from Kelly, and the coach asked if Ball, who’d had short stints in the NFL and CFL, was in shape and ready to catch a few footballs. Ball said yes, and after the two hammered out a few logistical details, Kelly wrote back, "Get out here and ball out. No pun intended. LOL."

Unfortunately, while in training camp with Philadelphia, the receiver mangled his right pinky during a drill. In order to catch the ball after the injury, he had to invert his right hand awkwardly. The damage — a dislocation, torn ligaments and multiple fractures — required surgery. Now he has two pins in his finger. "It was like a bomb went off in it," he says, pointing to his thickly gauze-wrapped pinky.

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The team cut Ball in early August, ending a dream that was still alive only because Kelly is now an NFL head coach. At 29, Ball knows he may never get another shot. The consolation, if there is one, is that "his guy" has become a star. "I’m going to watch UNH-style football for the rest of my life," Ball says from his office, which is brimming with VHS game tapes. In a corner sits a pair of Nike shower sandals on which "No. 83," his number in his short time with the Eagles, is written in black marker. "That brings a big smile to my face," he says.

What is rarely mentioned in the standard Kelly biography is that if Ball didn’t end up at UNH, there is a chance Kelly may not be where he is today. Ball had a stellar high school career, but nobody was knocking down his door. He was, after all, from a small town in Vermont, a state not exactly known for the quality of its high school football. Even after spending a post-graduate year at Worcester (Mass.) Academy, where the three-sport star was named the school’s athlete of the year, Ball remained unwanted by a major college program. With few other options, Ball decided to enroll at UNH, and managed to walk on to the football team in the summer of 2003. "I love UNH. I bleed blue," Ball says. "But I fell into their lap."

On the first day of preseason practice, the freshman receiver retrieved a stray football by hopping a four-and-a-half-foot fence from a standing position (Ball still holds Vermont’s schoolboy high jump record). Kelly saw that and became instantly enamored with his new prospect. Ball managed to put together a decent rookie season, catching 38 passes and scoring four touchdowns for the 5-7 Wildcats, but he felt overmatched. "I came out of high school football not really knowing the difference between man and zone defense," he says. "So going into Chip Kelly’s offense, I was deer in the headlights, jaw dropped, cotton-mouthed every time I had to go out and try to pick up on all those damn signals."

If Ball’s arrival was fortuitous, then what happened next, to put it bluntly, was an act of fate. Ricky Santos is well aware of that fact. In the summer of 2004, he started practice as UNH’s fourth-string quarterback. But by the time September rolled around, the third-stringer had quit and the second-stringer had gotten hurt. Just like that, Santos was the backup. Early in the season opener — against defending national champion Delaware, no less — the starter, senior Mike Granieri, tore up his knee. Santos, a scared redshirt freshman from Bellingham, Mass., entered the game and promptly led his team to a 24-21 victory. He even hit Ball for the winning touchdown. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

That season, Santos threw for 3,318 yards and 31 touchdowns. More importantly, UNH finished 10-3 and made the playoffs for the first time in a decade. Yet Kelly, Santos now says, was tough on him. In his early days as a starter, he now admits to avoiding the coach’s office. "The first couple years, I wasn’t in there as much as I’d liked because I was intimidated by Chip," says Santos, who’s now an assistant coach at UNH. "He was so hard on some of the young guys, I just didn’t want to get the extra film work because I was going to get yelled at."

Ball, on the other hand, felt that it was his duty to loosen Kelly up. Once, on Valentine’s Day, which happened to fall in the middle of vomit-inducing morning workouts inside UNH’s stuffy indoor track, the receiver left a note and six candy hearts under Kelly’s office door. When the coach emerged, Ball says, he looked like he had been up almost all night. "You always seem to amaze me," he deadpanned. Ball hoped that at least for a moment, he had managed to get Kelly to stop thinking about football.

I would walk by him and I knew damn well in his mind there’s, like, a film session going on.

"There were times I would walk by him and I knew damn well in his mind there’s, like, a film session going on, there’s plays being run," Ball says. "You know, some people took that as him being standoffish. But he’s not." The two had an understanding. "He had a relationship with football," Ball says. "I can relate in a sense."

But Kelly was far from humorless. In November 2005, a nationally televised playoff game against Colgate was delayed by insufferably long commercial breaks. During one extended pause, says former UNH tight end Sean Lynch, Kelly huddled up the offense and, lisp and all, started talking like Lou Holtz. The impression, Lynch says, even included "Holtz" asking, "What’s Chip Kelly gonna run next?" He didn’t know it yet, but soon Holtz and every other football analyst in the country would be expressing that same sentiment.

* * *

With Santos and Ball on board, the offense took off as Kelly finally had the players to execute his innovative approach. Ball finished his UNH career with an FCS-record 58 receiving touchdowns, topping NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice’s mark of 50. In 2006, Santos won the Walter Payton Award, which is given annually to the best offensive player in FCS football, and the quarterback’s name still dots the FCS record book. He’s fourth all time in passing yards (13,212), third in touchdown passes (123), and — this one surely still pleases Kelly — first in total plays (2,140).

In his final four years as a coordinator at UNH, Kelly’s unit averaged nearly 36 points per game, and starting in 2004, the Wildcats have made the postseason nine straight seasons.

Naturally, success brought suitors. Both the University of Connecticut and the New York Giants reportedly wanted Kelly to join them as an assistant, and he said no to both. Still, he’d come a long way. Only a few years before, in the late '90s, he was receiving and turning down offers to be a head coach at the likes of Plymouth State University, a Division III school about 70 miles northwest of UNH. "I always say to people that Chip made a big mistake," jokes Plymouth’s former athletic director Steve Bamford, "I offered him [$42,500]."

Like others in the Canon of Football Coaches, Kelly has his own mythology. If Nick Saban is a dictator, Rex Ryan a goofball and Bill Belichick is a genius, then Kelly is a mad scientist, the man who devised football’s best offense at a hockey school. But he likely doesn’t think about it like that. He simply knew how good he had it at UNH. In a profession that offers few chances to cash in, that is rare. "He turned down jobs because he wasn’t going to get that, what’s the word?" McDonnell says, pausing. "Autonomy."

Finally, Kelly relented. In January 2007, Oregon offensive coordinator Gary Crowton, a former UNH assistant who Kelly had flown out to visit the year before, left for Louisiana State University. With a vacancy to fill, Ducks head coach Mike Bellotti, who’d previously made stops at Cal State Hayward and Chico State, pushed for Kelly. At one point, McDonnell says, Kelly asked Bellotti why he’d hire a 1-AA assistant. "Well," Bellotti supposedly responded, "they hired me and I was a Division II assistant coach."

Throughout the excruciatingly long interview process, Kelly kept McDonnell updated. "It’s getting close," he said. "It’s tough." At that point, McDonnell says, "We knew." Then, in early February, Kelly signed a two-year contract worth $200,000 annually. "The way I look at it," Kelly told reporters at the time, "[Bellotti] offered me a full scholarship and I accepted."

In 2008, after a big senior season, Santos began his professional career. He signed with the Kansas City Chiefs as an undrafted free agent, but was cut and bounced around the Canadian Football League for the next few years before joining the UNH coaching staff this past March. He still raves about Kelly’s tenure in Durham. "I’m sure he went to these Division I programs [to visit] and was saying, ‘They should be doing it more like we do it,’" Santos says. "I’m sure he kept it to himself. But he probably thought like that."

But without Santos and Ball, would Kelly have made it this far?

"That is the age-old question right here," Santos says. "Most likely, but you never know. All that success helped him get the interview at Oregon. Let’s be honest. But why did we have that success? He put us in that position. Chicken or the egg?"

Asked the same question, Ball pauses briefly, and says, "Wow."

Then, after thinking about it for a few moments, he offers this:

"I think that his climb was so fast that I can say I cherish the fact that I was a big piece of that. But I also see the product and know that it was a matter of time. You know what I mean?"

* * *

When Ball arrived at the Eagles training camp this summer, a new teammate approached him and confessed that he found Kelly to be intimidating. Ball’s advice was pretty simple: When you see him, start a conversation. "I need a few months for that," the player said. "I can’t just approach him." But Ball says Kelly hasn’t changed. He’s still the same coach he was at UNH.

Due to his finger injury, Ball’s stay at Eagles camp was brief. But, he says, if that was his last chance at cracking an NFL roster, then he’s fine with it. Kelly — "My guy," Ball calls him — was his coach again. It couldn’t get much better than that. After all, playing for Kelly at UNH was, and likely always will be, the highlight of his football career.

In 2007, Ball, an undrafted rookie, was briefly a member of the Chicago Bears’ practice squad. He never actually played in a game for the Bears, but was allowed to watch from the sideline in sweats. One Sunday, long after the nervous excitement of training camp had worn off, he suffered a minor existential crisis.

"I don’t remember who we were playing," Ball says, "but I was just like, ‘This is hard for me to watch. This is just so different.’"

The plodding Bears offense made him yawn uncontrollably. He wasn’t even tired, but all he wanted to do was go to sleep.

Football without Chip Kelly had rendered him hopelessly bored.

BOSTON -- Who owns an athlete’s legacy? It’s a simple question with a complex answer, made more complicated by the number of people invested in telling the story. There are teammates, contemporaries, the athlete themselves, not to mention the city where they played. But as they exit the arena, the observers are left to write the history.

Bill Russell never allowed anyone else to take ownership of his life story, and he certainly never let Boston define him. From the moment he appeared on the national stage, he was determined to be viewed as a man first and an athlete second. He was the ultimate individualist and the perfect team player. For that he was called bitter, angry and even a racist.

Yet Russell never allowed those voices to narrate his life. From "Second Wind" through "Russell Rules," he has insisted on writing his own story. This left him few friends, but far more admirers.

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It helps that Russell’s career is unassailable. He is the greatest winner in team sports, with a history that includes two NCAA titles, a gold medal and 11 championships in 13 seasons. Russell is the reason the Celtics mystique exists. Everyone from Havlicek to Cowens to Bird to Pierce has simply carried on the tradition in their own manner. You can try to debate this any way you like and you will lose. No one ever won as much as Bill Russell.

It was the rest of Russell’s life that made him so compelling. Consider the eclectic list of people who were present for the long-awaited statue unveiling at Boston’s City Hall on Friday. The NBA was represented by several Hall of Famers, including Charles Barkley, Bill Walton and Clyde Drexler. Ex-Celtics like Sam Jones and JoJo White were in attendance. Commissioner David Stern and his deputy Adam Silver also made the trip.

But Russell’s basketball cohorts were only a small part of a dais that also included mayor Tom Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick. Actress Alfre Woodard gave a moving speech about civil rights, and Bill Withers and Johnny Mathis performed a song about Russell’s father Charlie, who remains his son’s greatest influence. Bill Russell has lived a life in full apart from the competition, and he has insisted that both are given equal weight by history.

During a 30-minute speech that touched on everything from the meaning of friendship and the value of education to the time he promised his father he’d win the All-Star MVP just to prove a point, Russell repeatedly said that he was embarrassed by the statue and that he didn’t know what this was all about. It was classic Russell. We came to honor him and he wanted to know why we were making a fuss.

He added that statues reminded him of tombstones when they weren’t providing a target for pigeons. As is his style, he fought the idea until it was presented as a partnership with a program that provides grants to youth mentorships.

After the ceremony, I took a walk back through City Hall to the site of the statue. Gusty winds and a driving rain had moved the festivities indoors. The weather was now clear and already people were gathering by the statue, snapping cell phone pictures and admiring the work of local sculptor Ann Hirsch. A few hours earlier at the official unveiling, a man yelled, "We love ya Bill!" Another added, "Long overdue!"

Russell doesn’t need a statue to validate his legacy, but Boston needed it. The statue is a celebration of Russell’s life work, but it is also an eternal refutation our own unfortunate past. Its placement at City Hall is a statement in and of itself.

In 1976, a few yards away from where Russell’s statue now sits, a black city attorney named Theodore Landsmark was impaled with an American flag by a bunch of thugs at the height of the busing crisis. The photograph that accompanied the assault has stood for almost four decades as a symbol of old racist Boston. In its place is now a lasting monument to education, achievement and understanding.

His legacy long secure, Bill Russell has finally found a permanent home in Boston. That’s what this was all about.

I profiled Celtics team president Danny Ainge in the November issue of Boston Magazine, and even in a 4,000-word story, there were several anecdotes and nuggets that didn’t make the final cut. With the permission of the editors, here are a few other quotes and insights from Ainge.

On Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett:

"Paul and KG can’t carry a team right now to a championship through 82 games and multiple playoff series. But if they’re your third- and fourth-best players and you can pace them throughout the course of the season, and save them and have some fuel in the tank once playoffs come around, then you’re a pretty darn good team. We just weren’t able to do that. We’re not made that way. It was what we were trying to do, and last year we’ll never know because (Rajon) Rondo was a key part of that."

On Tanking:

"You have to be opportunistic. You have to put yourselves in position to succeed, but a lot of time, to put yourself in position to succeed, some people feel like you have to make painful decisions to be really bad. I think there’s danger in that."

On LeBron James:

"I don’t see LeBron James sitting out there coming up in the next year, two, three, four. I mean, he’s maybe a once in a lifetime player. Unfortunately for the rest of the league he’s still only in his 20s."

On his confidence:

"I don’t know if I have any more confidence than a lot of guys. I do have a fear of failure that drives me. I’m not afraid to play against Michael Jordan knowing he’s a better player. I’m not afraid of it, but I’m afraid of being embarrassed.

"I always used to think I was really a confident person until I met Larry (Bird). On the court. I’m every bit as confident as Larry in our jobs that we do now."

On his baseball career:

"I was planning on playing pro baseball. I had every intention of playing pro baseball. I was playing college basketball because I loved basketball. I knew I was a good basketball player but I guess I didn’t realize I would win college player of the year. I loved basketball and basketball was a great love. It just seemed logical that baseball is a longer career."

The standoff between the Celtics and Blue Jays could have served as a whole separate story. At one point, Ainge heard rumors that he was going to be traded to Atlanta, where he would play for Ted Turner’s Braves and Hawks. There was another rumor that involved Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, who had a piece of the Bulls.

"The stumbling block was always Red (Auerbach)," Ainge said. "He wouldn’t trade me."

On the subject of advanced stats and metrics, Ainge has always said that he’s something of a skeptic. Yet his assistant GM Mike Zarren is acknowledged as one of the leaders in the field. Here’s how Zarren explained their relationship:

"I started an unpaid intern doing only that and now I’m an assistant GM and my office is connected to his, so he must pay some attention to it. Danny is a guy who’s looking for every advantage he can possibly find, and he wants to know that whatever he’s looking at has some good basis. He’ll test it, and he’ll challenge it. If it stands up, then he’s very interested in it. If it doesn’t, he still may be interested in it, but he’ll also be interested in the next thing, whatever that is.

"Advanced stats is a huge category of stuff. There’s some things that he relies very heavily on and some things that he doesn’t rely on as much, probably correctly. He’s pretty sharp. He knows what’s going on."

MONDAY Rockets at Clippers

We’re already a little concerned about the Clips’ lack of depth inside, and it’s not like Dwight Howard and Omer Asik grabbed 68 rebounds in their first two games or anything. Considering how the rest of the Western Conference stacks up inside with Howard and Asik, Tim Duncan and the Grizzlies’ tower of power, this has the potential to be a major problem for the Clippers.

TUESDAY Pacers at Pistons

This will be an interesting test for the Pistons. Paul George is already doing Paul George things, so does Josh Smith check him? On the other end, can Roy Hibbert keep up with Andre Drummond?

WEDNESDAY Pelicans at Grizzlies

You’re Pierre the Pelican. You just had the worst entrance since the Goobledy Gooker debuted at the Survivor Series. You’ve made the Brooklyn Knight more tolerable. Pierre, you need some help. It’s nothing a night on Beale Street wouldn’t fix.

THURSDAY Clippers at Heat

The most exciting transition team in the West versus the best transition team in the world? Yes, please. If there aren’t 10 transition alley-oops by halftime, we’re going to be a little upset.

FRIDAY Cavaliers at 76ers

Andrew Bynum will finally suit up for a game in Philly. I’m sure the locals will welcome him back in the usual manner. And hey, how about those Sixers? If this keeps up, Sam Hinkie is going to trade Thad Young for the D-League rights to Ricky Davis.

Each week, we’ll rank a random collection of NBA players in some kind of a made-up category. This week: The Most Important Supporting Cast Players Who (Probably) Won’t Make an All-Star Team This Season.

*Note* This whole category is basically printed on Shane Battier’s business cards, making him ineligible under our completely arbitrary rules.

Andrew Bogut: Even in a weakened, beat up state, Bogut made the Dubs a completely different team during the postseason. They were 15 points better per 100 possessions when he was on the court as opposed to off, per Basketball Reference. If he can stay healthy throughout the season and make it to April in one piece, we’ll truly believe in the Warriors.

DeAndre Jordan: Doc Rivers has already made his intentions clear to play Jordan in the fourth quarter, even though that’s where his lack of offense and atrocious free throw shooting become even more glaring. The depth behind Jordan consists of Byron Mullens and Ryan Hollins, so Doc better be right and Jordan has to be ready to handle the responsibility.

Andrei Kirilenko: For all the fuss over Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, this may have been Billy King’s best acquisition. AK can fill in at both forward spots and bring defense and scoring off the bench while giving the Nets’ lineup multiple looks. Be wary, Eastern Conference.

Danny Granger: He’s three years removed from averaging 24 points a game, but Indiana doesn’t need that player. If the Pacers are going to continue up the ladder of life, they’ll need an offensive spark from the bench. Granger’s just the player to provide it, if he can ever get healthy.

Ray Allen: His per-minute numbers were consistent with his last seasons in Boston, so it’s not as if Allen struggled in his first year with Miami. But the hunch here is that Ray-Ray is primed for a big season. He’ll become even more vital if injuries hit the wing.

Cody Adams takes a drag off his cigarette, and looks over at Andy Smith.

"You scared yet?" he asks.

"Definitely scared," Smith tells him. "I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not."

"It's good to be scared," Adams says.

Adams and Smith stand in the fog in the middle of the 3,030 foot-long New River Gorge Bridge, in the dark blue of an October dawn in West Virginia, 876 feet above the water below. Adams is skinny, with a gray hoodie, a shaved head and camouflage pants. Smith wears his long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. He flashes a nervous smile through his beard. Both of them rode down from Pennsylvania with a group of 10 people. They drove six and a half hours to be here.

"This is definitely a BASE jump," Smith states, with a tense laugh.

"Yes. It is," Adams says, dryly.

Around them, the other BASE jumpers are setting up metal barricades, staircases and everything else they'll need to make Bridge Day work smoothly. Next to them is the flatbed truck that holds up the platform they'll jump from later. A photographer looks at the bucket he'll be standing in all day -- it'll swing out over the edge so he can get shots of jumpers coming right at him. His will be one of four cameras that capture every jump, generating about 25,000 images in six hours.

Smith has already looked over the side of the bridge 10 times. Adams puffs on his cigarette. This will be Adams's second BASE jump. It will be Smith's first.

Adams was here the year before he went to basic training at Ft. Sill. The first time he jumped from the bridge, in 2011, he threw his pilot chute before his feet flew over the edge. This year, he wants to do a backward somersault. A gainer.

"Kinda cold out here," Adams says, and lights another cigarette.

"I'm probably gonna be shitting my pants when I walk on to the platform," Smith says. He doesn't know what to expect. His life will change. At least, he thinks it will. He's talked to Adams about it. Adams mentions how nothing else in the world matters after your feet leave the platform, about how now he can't look at anything tall without thinking about what it would like to jump off it. Adams was afraid of heights before his first jump. "I was freaking the fuck out right now," he says.

Adams says it's hard to explain what happens. You have to do it to know, he says. Smith hasn't. Yet.

Two hours later, the cattle gates at either end of the bridge open, and the spectators stream through, heading toward the platform at the center. The ones that get a good spot, right on the railing, can see it all. They can look down and see the New River below, the frothy rapids so far away that they barely seem real. Train whistles echo through the gorge -- the engine and coal cars are so tiny that they seems like they belong under a Christmas tree. The people at the bottom are mere specks. There is a bull's-eye on the small beach made of chalk and a piece of carpeting. The people who lean out far enough can make out some of the arch of the bridge, or at least see some of the brown steel that's holding the whole thing up.

They're all here to see people jump.

This happens every third Saturday in October high up on the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayetteville, W.Va. Tens of thousands of people take advantage of the one day of the year where it's not only legal to walk across the bridge, the highest and longest arch span in the Western Hemisphere, but also to jump off it. Not everyone who wants to can; registration stops when the number of jumpers hits 450 or so, and you need to complete 100 skydives and pass a background check first. But it is, in effect, one of the only places in America where you can easily watch a BASE jump happen live, in person, and on schedule, every 20 seconds.

Every jumper has already weaved through a long line, a shorter version of what you'd wait in to ride a roller coaster. Everyone has had their gear checked then double-checked before each walks up a set of stairs on to the back of the flatbed. Once there, a guy scans the barcode on their ID badge, which includes a name, picture ... and emergency phone numbers and blood type. Then there's one more set of stairs. They walk to the end of a yellow platform about 10 feet above the roadway, surrounded on three sides by a throng of onlookers with camera phones. Some volunteers stand near the edge, looking over the side and letting jumpers know when the air below them is clear.

Some jump cautiously, holding their pilot chute firmly in their hand, then look over and leap, throwing their chute almost immediately. The small chute pulls the canopy open, unfurling with a snap, slowing their fall until all you can see is a colorful rectangle, drifting toward the bottom. Those are usually the first-timers. Or the second-timers.

Some run and jump. Some plant on the edge and push off. Others do backflips. Some curl into balls and spin, two, three, maybe even four times before leveling off. They wait to throw their chute. Some wait until they no longer hear the whoosh whoosh of the girders as they fall, pitching their pilot chute once the clear the bridge's massive arch. They know that if they do nothing, they'll hit the bottom in 8.8 seconds. Some people count to three before they pitch. Some count to four. A few count to five.

At the bottom, some swoop in and land in stride. Some hit the ankle-breaking rocks closer to shore and fall. Others choose to splash down in the water, where the New River is a couple hundred feet across and the landing is almost guaranteed to be softer. Immediately, rescue boats are on them, pulling them and their canopies out. They re-pack their rigs and catch a ride to the top to leap again.

when you see it, in person, the speed, the person falling, their arms and legs extended, it is poetry, shocking and beautiful.

Watching the first jump makes you gasp, because up until this point, you've only seen it in videos and movies and on TV. But when you see it, in person, the speed, the person falling, their arms and legs extended, it is poetry, shocking and beautiful.

And then the 10th person does it. Within two and a half minutes, if you've been watching every jumper, you've seen 10 people jump off a bridge. Within 20 minutes, you've seen 60 people leap over the side.

And so it is possible, in less than 45 minutes, to watch a hundred people jump off a bridge, effortlessly. It's desensitizing. You get picky. That guy didn't do as many backflips as he said he would. That guy pitched his pilot chute way too early. The other guy pitched it way too late. Bridge Day has a way of quickly making the amazing seem commonplace. Everybody is a critic. The spectators are experts.

Television news crews walk around, looking for stories. Everybody has one. Mark Seyfang of Cincinnati has to answer the most common question BASE jumpers get: Why are you jumping off a bridge? "Why? Because it's here," he says, sounding like George Mallory explaining why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest. Linda Hoehmann and Nick Giraldo are here from New Jersey. They're dating. They're jumping together. For the first time. "I'm very excited," she says. "My adrenaline's pumping." She's been squeezing her pilot chute in her hand for an hour. Mitch Harder, 50, of Mobile, Ala., drove up by himself. Once a chemical engineer, he's now a "professional career changer" making his 15th BASE jump. He looks up at the rain showers. "Could be worse," he says. Lonnie Bissonnette, a paraplegic from Canada, is jumping here today. In his wheelchair. For the second time. The Today show crew finds out and makes a beeline for him.

Bridge Day is the one day every year where BASE jumping does more than just show up, it puts on a show. It's a strange thing for a sport that's grown up cultivating a stealthy, run-through-the-bushes ethos where the best BASE jumpers not only have to land without being killed or maimed, but escape from police officers or rangers who are waiting on the ground, ready to file trespassing charges. Their gear used to be modified skydiving equipment, usually black, to make it harder to spot at night. Now, there are special canopies and rigs designed specifically for BASE jumping, available in any color you want. Clubs have sprouted up in places like Florida, Ohio, California and Canada. They're making videos and posting them to YouTube. At certain places, like the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the cliffs of Moab, Utah, it's now possible to BASE jump, legally, all year long. BASE jumping has turned from an oddity to a commodity, a once-private affair that's increasingly becoming a public one, possible in part because of what happens every third Saturday in October in West Virginia. Bridge Day is the BASE jumpers' day.

But they don't want just one day. They want every day.

* * *

Moe Viletto stands on the platform. He's a skinny little guy with a high-pitched voice and a smile that pulls his whole face upward. His gray, receding hair is long. He's at Bridge Day with 13 students that he's personally taught about the finer points of how to jump off a bridge, standing on the platform, saying a few words here, putting a supporting hand on a shoulder there. Moe won't take just anybody on. You have to show potential. You have to be passionate about it. One of his students went out and made 11 skydives the week before Bridge Day to get to the 100 required to jump. She glides off the platform, floats perfectly and then splashes down in the water, emerging with a smile on her face as a boat races to pick her up.

"There's the mainstream end of it," Viletto says about BASE jumping, "and Bridge Day helped to bring that about."

Bridge Day is BASE jumping's de facto national convention, and the epicenter is the Holiday Lodge in Oak Hill, W.Va., a hotel seven miles from the bridge with a lounge hooked on the side where it's still possible to smoke at the bar. Those who can't find rooms set up tents on the grass out back. Others sleep in their cars. Inside, the entire place is crawling with jumpers. The staff has moved the couches and tables out of the lobby to make room for them to pack their rigs. There's a small expo set up in a ballroom, with tables full of video equipment and specialized jumping rigs. It is loud. Nearly everybody is holding a can of beer. Jumpers wear their BASE rigs like backpacks. They greet each other with a hand slap and a fist bump. There is a no smoking sign out front. The area around the main entrance reeks of cigarettes. A dog runs through a hallway with no owner in sight. Every so often, somebody will walk by and the faint stench of pot will trail a second behind.

The night before Bridge Day, Viletto wears a T-shirt, just like everybody else. In a hotel full of people amped up on Red Bull and anticipation, he barely stands out. But after a bit, the people in the know see Moe hanging out, and they crowd around. They want to hear what he says. During a story about crashing his mountain bike years ago, Viletto pulls down the collar of his shirt to reveal his collarbone, which is still broken. It sticks out, stretching the skin around the base of his neck. "It's a joint now," he says. In a place where stories are the currency upon which credibility is traded, Moe Viletto is a rich man.

He starts telling stories about the old days, when jumpers leapt in secret and then ran from park rangers at the bottom of El Capitan, the 3,000-foot high rock formation in Yosemite National Park. Now, every jump at Bridge Day is broadcast, live-streamed on the Internet. "The thing that's good about it being televised is it's bringing it into the mainstream, making it more acceptable," says one of the guys who's standing around him.

"It's already there," Viletto says.

Moe Viletto

Viletto is 62 now, but he's made BASE jumping his whole life, living out of a Volkswagen at times because it was cheap and mobile, freeing up time and money for more jumps. He got his start while he was a parachute rigger at a drop zone in the early 1980s. He had just broken up with his girlfriend of 13 years. A friend decided they should go to Bridge Day. BASE jumping sounded risky. Viletto didn't care about the risks.

Bridge Day was a relatively new phenomenon then. It began because BASE jumping, the bridge's construction, and a bored coal miner all happened to converge during the late 1970s. The bridge itself opened in 1977, shortening the drive across the gorge, which used to wind down one side and up the other, from 45 minutes to 45 seconds. The railings were low, meant to protect out of control cars, not out of control people. The thought was that anybody who might want to jump probably didn't want to survive what the local sheriff would later call "a daggone tremendous fall."

A year later, in 1978, a photographer and skydiver named Carl Boenish filmed four men parachuting from El Capitan in California. The resulting footage, bought by ABC Sports but subpoenaed by the National Park Service over what they called "illegal hang gliding," lent credence to a sport Boenish would call BASE jumping, short for building, antenna, span and earth. More jumpers began to flock to El Cap, jumping and then running from Yosemite park rangers. Parachuting from something other from a plane started to morph from a one-off experience into an adventure sport. It was no longer a stunt. It was fun.

They're going to keep coming. Might as well try to make some money off of it.

Back in West Virginia, in August 1979, a coal mine foreman from Cowen, W.Va., named Burton Ervin made the first BASE jump from the railing of the New River Gorge Bridge. Some 200 people waited at the bottom, a few shining lights skyward to show him where to land. Word of Ervin's stunt spread and more jumpers showed up. They're going to keep coming, Ervin told the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce. Might as well try to make some money off of it.

Ervin was put in charge of the first Bridge Day in 1980. There were only five jumpers. One, a North Carolinian named Ken Hamilton, had his pilot chute become twisted in his main canopy, which made it hard to control his fall. He hit the rocks, knocked out almost all of his teeth and broke his jaw, but insisted to a Charleston Daily Mail reporter that jumping was still "safer than marriage." One of the guys who jumped after him shrugged. "These things happen," he said.

The organizers expected 8,000 spectators. More than 40,000 came to watch.

Boenish visited the New River Gorge Bridge in 1980, just months before the first Bridge Day. In 1983, he wrote about it in Skydiving Magazine. Before then, only a handful of jumpers came to West Virginia for the event. Afterward, more than 200 showed up.

The year Viletto first came to Bridge Day, 1982 he thinks, he came with a friend and rigged some skydiving parachutes to open more quickly. His friend jumped once, and only once, and then went on to become an insurance salesman. It took one jump for Viletto to decide that BASE jumping should be the focus of his life.

He started off leaping from buildings in Los Angeles, attracting the attention of both police and fellow BASE jumpers. He didn't care. If he died, so what? But other BASE jumpers in L.A. got upset from the added attention Viletto was bringing by being too visible and brash, putting security guards and building managers on alert, making it more difficult to sneak onto the roofs. Once, a fellow jumper grabbed Moe by the throat. "If you fuck up my playground," he said, "I'll kill you myself."

After a while, Viletto turned his death wish into what he calls his life wish. He lived to jump. In comparison, skydiving was less exciting. He loved to see the ground rushing up toward him. In an era when tiny video cameras didn't exist, the only way to re-live a leap was to do it again. At a time when some of the most prolific BASE jumpers were making 20 jumps a year, Viletto was making 100.

The more he jumped, the less reckless and more responsible he became. He started carrying a signed letter from his attorney, which said he didn't hold the owner of whatever he was jumping from responsible for what might happen. He also wanted to change other people's minds about the sport. "Early on, if you told people you did BASE," Viletto says, "they thought you were freebasing cocaine."

In the late '80s, Viletto was jumping from trees, cranes, external elevators and anything else he could find. He and a friend started the Fixed Object Journal, which was meant to encompass more than just BASE jumps. They wanted to promote the sport in a good light. "We're not really doing anything bad," he says like a little kid.

He'll tell you about the stunt jump he did in Drop Zone, a 1994 Wesley Snipes movie. He'll tell you how he earned $100,000 for that jump. He'll tell you about how he gave away all but $4,000. He'll tell you how he built some of the first BASE jumping rigs, then sold some of his designs. "I didn't want to compete anymore," he says. He'll tell you how he invented something called a parapack, a BASE jumping rig with enough storage space to pack in everything you'd need to be self-sufficient in the mountains. He once used it to camp for four days on El Cap, waiting for the weather to clear up enough before leaping from the side. Four days of patience for a few seconds of exhilaration.

Viletto knows how many BASE jumps he's made, but he won't say. "I didn't even get my BASE number," he says of the special number jumpers can apply for once they complete a leap from each of the four BASE objects. "Some young fuckin' punk got it for me, and it pissed me off. I don't need a number to make me someone or something."

At Bridge Day, Moe Viletto is in his own category. The rest of the jumpers fit mostly into two camps: Those who live the BASE life, and those who dabble in it. Many are skydivers who want to get in their one BASE jump. They want the experience. They want the video. They want the story. It's safe here. It's controlled.

And then there are many other BASE jumpers who couldn't care less about the jump, really. It's a little too crowded for them. Too controlled. Too mainstream. They're really here to meet other jumpers. They're here to talk to guys like Moe Viletto. And they're here for the party.

* * *

Barely anybody in the hotel lobby notices when Bertrand Cloutier pulls a cardboard box out of his backpack.

Cloutier is 59, and has the look of an aging rock star, with dirty blonde hair, an earring, gold necklaces and a black Bridge Day T-shirt with the sleeves removed. He's been skydiving for 40 years and BASE jumping for 24, and he's been jumping at Bridge Day for 22 of them. He speaks mostly in French, since he's here with a bunch of jumpers from Quebec, most wearing Canadian BASE Association T-shirts.

Cloutier pulls a smaller black plastic container from the box. He struggles to open it. There's a printed label on the front from the St. James' Cemetery and Crematorium in Toronto.

Cloutier pulls out a plastic bag of gray ashes. He opens his rig and unfolds part of his red and white canopy, then pours the ashes into the center. He keeps some in the bag, because he'd like to toss some from his hand when he jumps, too. He then folds the parachute back over.

Bertrand Cloutier packs ashes into his canopy.

The ashes are what remains of Mario Richard. Cloutier was there for Richard's first skydive in 1988, a 3,500-foot jump from a plane near Quebec City. He brought Richard to Bridge Day in 1991 for his first BASE jump. Richard was hooked.

Two months ago, while Richard and his wife were on vacation in Europe, it all ended. On August 19 in the Italian Dolomites, they both wore wingsuits, which allow jumpers to glide. His wife jumped first, then Richard. He didn't clear a cliff. He was 47. And now, Cloutier was bringing him back, back to West Virginia, at the place where it all began, at the place where he had made so many jumps, and now the place where Richard would spend eternity.

After he's re-packed his rig, Cloutier feels as if he needs to explain something. "The oldest fear, the most ancestral fear, is the fear to fall," he says through his thick French Canadian accent. "The oldest dream is the dream to fly. So in a short time, we trespass the fear and the dream. And for a short time, those two blend."

Across the lobby, Mitch Harder is on step 15 of the 26-step checklist he wrote to help him pack his own chute, to make sure it unfurls properly. A pro can pack one in 15 minutes. Harder has been at it for an hour, and probably has another hour to go. "Could be worse," he says.

As he packs, Jordan Zink lies on his stomach next to a stone fireplace with a flat-screen television above it. His friends are here to jump. He's not. Maybe next year. He came down from Ohio to see what it's all about. "You can die easily BASE jumping," Zink says. "If you're climbing a tower, you could fall off on the way up. You could hit a guy wire. You could have a bad opening. You could pull a 180, where the canopy opens and throws you back into the tower. But here? No. It's 876 feet. It's like the safest jump you can make."

Zink got here Thursday night for the videofest. It got wild. "Saw some boobs," he says, but then sighs. "More balls than boobs." Afterward, he drank until he got tired, wandered into somebody's room, found a space on the floor, and found an extra towel in the bathroom to use as a pillow. He needs a nap.

A few minutes later, a long-haired, red-bearded guy named James comes walking up and dumps a spent canopy on to the floor next to the fireplace.

"I landed in a bush," he says.

James just jumped off something.

"Dude, there's all kinds of fuckin' thorns in there," James says to Zink, unfurling the lines and canopy. He jumped from a bridge, although he's not sure exactly where it was.

"I have no idea," says James. "I'm a little inebriated."

It was a 230-foot drop, he thinks, which would make it the lowest jump he's ever made. He's used to jumping off 1,000 foot tall television towers. He and some other guys have already made two jumps today. They got up at 6 a.m. He keeps giving details until he realizes an outsider may be in his midst. The story gets more vague. He decides not to give his last name.

James and Zink go to work, picking out branches and leaves and thorns out of the lines that connect the pack to the chute. Within 15 minutes, James has it packed and ready to go again.

"I'm just here to hang out, party, have fun and learn. And I'm away from work," Zink says. "The real world sucks."

A little while later, James and a group of others grab their rigs and quietly walk out of the hotel. They're off to jump from a tower. Someplace.

* * *

At 7 p.m. that night, nearly every BASE jumper is packed into a ballroom at the hotel. Jason Bell, the jump coordinator, asks the new base jumpers to raise their hands. "You're gonna be scared," he says, "but you're never going to be able to drive across another bridge without looking over the side."

Bell goes over everything a jumper needs to know for the next day. The New River is running a little low, so if you're going to land in the water, aim for the middle. Once you land, get away from the beach. Somebody is probably only a few seconds behind you.

He rattles off some statistics. There are more than 450 jumpers registered. Only 15 percent are first-timers. Only 12 percent are women.

If you get hurt, and have to ride in an ambulance, someone will cut off your badge. You're done jumping, Bell says. In the past, some people figured out that an ambulance ride was the fastest way to the top. Once they got there, they'd say they felt better, run out to the center of the bridge, and try to jump again.

Be nice to the park rangers and state police, he says. He's been working for eight years now to make BASE jumping legal not just once a year, but once a month. Bell is helping others prepare for a meeting with the West Virginia Division of Highways in a few weeks. They're going to ask them about jumping from the metal catwalk that runs underneath the bridge. It wouldn't interfere with traffic. And it'd attract jumpers year round. A lot of conversations that start with, "You know what they REALLY oughta do ..." end with talk about how cool it would be to jump legally here year-round. But it's a long shot. Still, as he talks about it, the meeting explodes in cheers and applause.

Then, to the list of no's. No cutting in line. No cussing. No nudity. No adult toys. "Yes, these have all happened," he says. And no "Rodriguez chants."

Bell doesn't elaborate, but he's referring to an incident in which Pepe Rodriguez of The Rodriguez Brothers' skydiving club stood on the platform about a decade ago and yelled out, "Who are the Rodriguez Brothers?" As he leaped, thousands of people who knew about the club and its exploits yelled out the correct answer: "Fuck the Rodriguez Brothers!" ESPN was there. Broadcasting live. By the time Pepe hit the beach, Bell had already ordered his badge be cut.

"there was tits, there was dildos, there was crazy fuckin' shit like you wouldn't believe. Now it's all 'family.'"

Onlookers enjoy the family-friendly environment.

"Now, CNN's out there," Moe Viletto says later to a group of jumpers in a circle around him. Bridge Day used to be different. "Before, there was tits, there was dildos, there was crazy fuckin' shit like you wouldn't believe. Now it's all ‘family.'"

For Moe Viletto, BASE jumping is supposed to be fun, not a cheap rush. It is not about making a video that you can upload to Facebook or Twitter. "We are the Me Generation. Me me me me me me me. I can't fuckin' stand it," he says. "Those are the ones that are fuckin' up the illegal sites. Those are the ones that are going to jail. Those are the ones that are dying. Which I have no problem with. You're gonna be an asshole? You're taking up space on the planet."

Death, whether you're an asshole or not, is part of the sport. When Carl Boenish died during a jump in Norway in 1984, Viletto was the one who ended up with his chute, still soaked in blood and gore. He crawled inside each cell, trying to figure out what went wrong. He thinks one of Boenish's deployment brakes, which slow the canopy's opening, broke, shooting him back into the face of a cliff. Death has come over and over again. "I have a phone book from 1971," Viletto says. "Almost every single letter in the alphabet has a dead person, a friend of mine, next to it."

It's safer now, and that's good. Viletto believes in safe. Over 33 years, only three people have died at Bridge Day, from drowning and from parachutes that opened way too late. The gear checks at Bridge Day are thorough. Almost every year, volunteers catch mistakes that might have been deadly.

Still, parachuting accidents have the perverse effect of bringing more people into the sport, Viletto says. The edginess is an attraction. "All the young punks want to impress their girlfriends, and that's what teenagers do." At one time, they saw it in dirt biking. They saw it in skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing. And some people see it in BASE jumping.

* * *

Donald Cripps has a motto: Guns, women and skydiving. Any one of them can kill you.

Donald Cripps, Bridge Day's oldest jumper.

He's been jumping since his days with the 82nd Airborne's pathfinder team in Korea.

On Saturday morning, Cripps walks up a set of stairs, a blue helmet on his head, a black pilot chute in his hand. A volunteer on the bridge in a red pullover vest scans his badge and checks his gear one last time. Then Cripps turns around and faces the crowd that's assembled behind him. "Hope you all have a nice day," he says, calmly and genuinely. He walks up one more flight of stairs to a platform that leans out over the edge of the gorge. He stands at the brink, raises his arm, and leaps.

Donald Cripps is 84 years old.

Later, he'll say he could have had a better jump. The platform was slick from rain showers earlier in the day. There were interviews. There was pressure. He knew the water in the New River, 876 feet below, would be cold. All of that was running through his mind. He slipped. He came out a little head down. His feet twisted up behind him. But he waited a few seconds. Then he threw his pilot chute. His blue canopy opened above him. Perfectly.

This is Cripps's third year jumping at Bridge Day, and he says he had better jumps at the last two. He's been jumping since his days with the 82nd Airborne's pathfinder team in Korea. After he left the military two decades later, he started skydiving again. For fun. He now has 3,570 jumps under his belt.

A couple years ago, some guys at his drop zone started talking about BASE jumping at Bridge Day. Sounds like something I could do, Cripps thought. His glaucoma makes long-distance drives too tough, so he flew up by himself from Pensacola, Fla. His knees are sore. But here he is, 84. The oldest jumper on the bridge.

Earlier in the morning, around 9:30, Cody Adams made his jump. As the last of the fog burned off, he faced the crowd and pushed off. No gainer. A minute later, he landed on the wrong side of the river, on the railroad tracks.

Two hours later, it's his friend Andy Smith's turn. "This is going to be so fucking awesome," he tells himself. Over and over, he raises his arms and fakes the throwing of his pilot chute, just like he will when he jumps. His hand shakes. He walks up to the platform. Viletto puts his hand on Smith's back. He jumps.

A few minutes later, a woman dressed in a blue sweatshirt and black helmet walks to the end of a yellow diving board, turns around, bends her knees and does a backflip. James, the guy who landed in the thorns the day before, walks to the end of the platform, pushes himself up into a handstand, then pushes himself out into the void. Every so often, a pneumatic catapult launches a jumper 20 feet into the air, over the side of the bridge.

The people who have jumped before go quickly. The first-timers hesitate. The volunteers on the platform tell them to walk to the edge and look down. They show them where to land. They tell them about the wind.

There are a few last instructions. Don't look down anymore. Keep your head up. Focus on the horizon. Have a nice jump.

Nobody walks down the stairs. They always go over the edge. They always jump.

Bertrand Cloutier goes to the edge. Next to him is Lonnie Bissonnette, the Canadian who was paralyzed in a skydiving accident. After an interview with the Today show, both go over the side, and a gray cloud of ashes bursts out when they release their canopies. Bissonnette makes a perfect landing in his wheelchair. His arms go up in victory. The cloud dissipates.

Once all of his students have jumped, Viletto makes the leap, quietly, indistinguishable from the others.

* * *

Back at the hotel on a rainy Saturday night, the lobby is now full of soggy canopies, unfurled to dry out. Mitch Harder is in the line for free beer. "Could be worse," he says when asked about his jump.

The post-jump meeting begins. There were 934 jumps. Only three people had to be taken out of the gorge in an ambulance this year, says Jason Bell. That's good. He points out Donald Cripps, who's sitting in the front row. He gets a round of applause. It's worth it to be here, Cripps says. It doesn't make him feel younger. It makes him feel accepted. "I'm around a group of people I have something in common with," he says. "If I was here with a big group of golfers, I'd feel out of place."

Viletto is walking through the meeting, looking for a seat, and sees Cripps in the front row. "That guy right there, the old man, makes me cry," he says. "Lonnie, coming in on his wheelchair. I watched him last year bounce on his wheels and do a face plant. This year, he stood it up."

Bell starts to give out prizes, and the meeting falls apart. The first person to pour a beer on someone else's head gets a pilot chute. It happens immediately. First person to get their eyebrow shaved gets a prize. Someone sprints from the back and leans over the table. Not to be outdone, a girl in the back stands on a chair and flashes the guys in the front. Not to be outdone, a guy in the back who had been dressed in a shockingly true-to-life Superman costume runs to the front, now completely naked. A blow-up doll is knocked around the room like a volleyball. Bell quickly whisks his kids away to another room.

The party has started. There's reason to celebrate. Everybody now has something in common.

"When there's three guys on a building, they're just as crazy as this mad group here," Viletto says. "We've got doctors and lawyers and junkies, we've got it all. We all get together, none of that shit matters. We're all on an even keel. Everybody's bag of water breaks the same."

They are all BASE jumpers now.

The room is full, and Moe walks across the front row. All the seats are taken.

Moe doesn't ask for a seat. Reflexively, people spring up. Sit here, Moe. No, sit here. He hesitates. He finally takes someone up on the offer, and before long, he's found a place between two jumpers, smiling and telling more stories. Moe Viletto, it seems, always finds a good place to land.

Each year, SB Nation polls its network of team bloggers in a referendum on the major league season that mirrors that of the Baseball Writers Association of America. But with one difference: ours is unfettered by any of the pretensions that warp the ballots of the columnists and beat writers who vote on those “real” awards. SB Nation’s informed outsiders have no illusions that they are acting as guardians of the game and redactors of its history. Rather, they have a much higher standard to answer to: The choices each of them makes will be scrutinized by a community that lives and dies with its chosen team in a way that makes terms like “loyalty” and “devotion” seem painfully inadequate and occasionally challenges accepted notions of good mental health. In other words, they can’t afford to appear to be poseurs, parvenus, dilettantes. The threat of judgment and ridicule enforces a thoroughgoing integrity that would wither the average American statesman.

What follows is the results of our annual poll in three categories: Best Player, Best Pitcher and Best Rookie in each league. In some cases our results will anticipate those of the BBWAA, while in others we will likely diverge from them. In either case, the voters are prepared to defend their decisions with the tenacity of bulldogs. Living day to day in the arena, they know it’s what’s expected of them — and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the last two seasons, one of the game’s dominant controversies has been whether Mike Trout (all-around excellent player) is more valuable than Miguel Cabrera (ultimate stationary masher). It wasn’t much of a conflict for our voters, who gave Trout a Nixon-McGovern-style landslide. Note also the strong showing by Oakland A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson, a strong threat on both offense and defense this year who was neglected by the establishment for both the All-Star Game bench and the Gold Glove awards.

The voting for NL Best Player presented no problems for our panel; they came close to unanimity when it came to making the final choice. A year ago, Andrew McCutchen parlayed a torrid midseason stretch into MVP consideration, but the Pirates’ second-half fade, a slide mirrored in McCutchen’s production, knocked him down to third place. This year the Pirates hung on and made the postseason for the first time since the Bonds-Bonilla-Drabek days and the center fielder was a big reason why, hitting .339/.441/.561 in the second half. Clayton Kershaw, whose extraordinary 1.83 ERA (his third straight ERA title) figures to snatch some first-place votes from the position players in the BBWAA balloting, barely registers here. Note the fifth-place showing for Joey Votto, whose high-OBP/low-RBI season was much derided in Cincinnati this summer. We’ll see if the professional pundits are as perceptive.

Max Scherzer takes our balloting going away, as he probably will the BBWAA voting. There were odd moments this season when an argument could have been constructed in favor of others, Yu Darvish, Chris Sale, Anibal Sanchez among them. In the end, even value metrics like WAR are no help to those that would prefer to construct a most-valuable pitcher narrative around something other than Scherzer’s league-leading 21 wins, are no help since the league leaders finished in an indistinguishable heap. In the final analysis, Scherzer was at least as good as any other pitcher on the circuit, and in this case the high win total isn’t a Bob Welch-LaMarr Hoyt-style red herring but a clue pointing to Scherzer’s mastery.

Legend has it that one elector in the 1820 presidential election purposely voted against James Monroe so that George Washington would remain the only president unanimously selected by the electoral college. We can only assume that the one voter who cast his ballot for Matt Harvey had the same sort of thing in mind where Clayton Kershaw was concerned.

At midseason there was some question as to whether the American League would produce a rookie worth voting for at the end of the year. Because of a combination of service-time manipulation and his own development at Triple-A, Wil Myers had only been up briefly. By the end of the year, the field was still weak, but the leader had clearly established himself.

The final controversial award on our ballot, Jose Fernandez of the Marlins seemed to have a lock on the award until Yasiel Puig came along in June and lit a fire under a Dodgers team that ultimately won its division. Perhaps if Puig had maintained his batting average in the .380s we might have had more of an argument, but a soft, injury-slowed September took some of the glow off of Puig’s debut, while Fernandez headed into the clubhouse with one of the best seasons by a rookie pitcher in the history of the game.

Ask anyone around the league what has caught their eye in the first week of the season, and it's a safe bet the first words out of their mouth will be "Anthony Davis," followed by long sighs. The long-winged bird of prey has arrived, and we’re not talking about Pierre the Pelican.

Barely a half-dozen games into his second season, Davis is putting on a nightly show for the rebranded New Orleans Pelicans. It’s not just the gaudy stats, although 23 points, 11.5 rebounds and 4.3 blocks tend to get your attention. Rather, it’s the way he plays: dominating stretches of the game with his soft touch, nimble athleticism and dontbringthatweakstuffinhere presence at the rim.

On Friday night against the Lakers, Davis reached back over his body to block a disbelieving Pau Gasol and then sprinted down the court and got fouled at the other basket. The whole play took a couple of seconds, but contained all of the jaw-dropping athleticism and court sense that makes fans giddy and opponents shake their heads.

Best of Sunday Shootaround

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In another sequence, Davis caught the ball above the free throw line, took one step to the dotted half circle and dunked from there. He eviscerated Gasol all night, swallowing up his shots and repeatedly beating him and the rest of the Lakers down the floor for dunks, en route to a career-high 32 points.

It's not like this is any great surprise. Davis entered the NBA fresh off a devastating season at Kentucky, where he controlled the college game from the opening tip. It was always going to happen. It was just a question of when.

As a rookie, Davis averaged a respectable 13.2 points and 8.5 rebounds while shooting over 50 percent from the field. It was a solid, if relatively unspectacular debut. He finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting to unanimous winner Damian Lillard despite posting a better PER, but no one really argued the decision too strenuously.

Perhaps that was because Davis' defensive impact didn't live up to his advanced billing. He blocked his share of shots, but New Orleans was a poor defensive team with him on the court. They weren't much better without him, which was an indictment of the whole roster.

Things are starting to change. With Jrue Holiday at the point, the Pelicans have someone to defend the ball, and with the addition of Tyreke Evans and a healthy Eric Gordon, they are more balanced offensively.

Early season small sample sizes abound, but New Orleans is ranked a respectable 11th in defensive rating and an equally-encouraging 11th on the offensive side, per Basketball Reference. Save for a dreadful 20-point loss to the Magic in their second game, they've also been competitive every night out and earned an impressive win in Memphis on Wednesday.

The Pelicans still have a long way to go. The depth is better, but still worrisome. Evans has been slow to adjust to his new role off the bench and Ryan Anderson's shooting and floor spacing are sorely missed. But, they are getting there, and thanks to Davis' emergence, they may be ahead of schedule.

Here are a few other pleasant developments from the first full week of the season:

PAUL GEORGE RISES AND THE PACERS TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS

When we last left the Pacers, they were on the wrong end of a rather incredible seven-game conference finals loss to the Miami Heat. It was incredible because no one really expected Indiana could keep up with Miami in a playoff series. Certainly few expected that George would be able to match LeBron James point-for-point and shot-for-shot like he did at times.

It was a massive leap forward for both the team and the player, and George was rewarded with a maximum contract extension in the offseason. Still, the prevailing wisdom was the Pacers would take a backseat to the Bulls once Derrick Rose returned to the court. They were good, obviously, but unless George took a massive leap into the superstar strata, they had probably reached their limit.

We might want to reconsider. George may not average 25-8-4 and shoot 40 percent from behind the arc for the entire season, but no one should be eager to put a cap on his potential after what he's shown in his first few seasons. The multi-talented hybrid forward has improved every year he's been in the league. The only stop left is legit star status.

The Pacers have followed his lead, winning their first six games while dispatching both the Pistons on the road and the Bulls at home. Both George and the Pacers have taken the essential lessons from their postseason baptism and applied them to the regular season. They have cracked the code on winning games. Double digit deficits in the second quarter disappear by the end of the third, and they are mastering the art of putting games away in crunch time.

The Pacers are also not in a mood to give ground back to Chicago. As George told NBA.com's Steve Aschburner:

"We want to step away from that shadow as the 'little brothers' of this division. Their success is the Michael Jordan era. This is a new age, this is a new team. It's ours till they take it."

GOLDEN STATE'S D

From Stephen Curry's otherworldly shooting to the untapped potential of Klay Thompson and Harrison Barnes, there is much to like about the Warriors this season. They play fast, bomb 3s and have a strong inside-out game with Curry and a slimmed-down David Lee. On pure aesthetic grounds, it's hard to top the Dubs for nightly entertainment.

That's all well and good. The Warriors have always been compulsively watchable, even as a guilty pleasure. What's different this season is their defensive chops.

It's really not that complicated, either. Andre Iguodala is one of the game's top perimeter defenders. Andrew Bogut is one of the league's premier rim protectors. Take those two talents and surround them with willing defenders and a sound scheme and the Warriors -- yes the Warriors -- have emerged as one of the top defensive squads in the league.

With so much depending on Bogut's health, it's futile to project where they might end up, but even without Curry on Friday, they battled the Spurs to the wire in a 76-74 defeat. It was a frustrating loss, made more so by some end-of-game miscues, but it was also encouraging. No way the Warriors hang in a game like that in the past. For now at least, the defense makes them a legit threat.

WELCOME BACK, KEVIN LOVE

The early season is full of obscure trivia, but none had as much resonance as the mark Kevin Love set when he averaged better than 26 points and 15 rebounds in his first five games. The only other player to do that in the last 15 years? Kevin Garnett, of course.

Long after his departure, KG still casts a very long shadow over the Timberwolves organization. Every mark, every number and every milestone has his name attached to it. Love and the Wolves thought they were ready to break out and write their own history last season, but injuries wrecked those plans. This year may be the one they get it right.

Love had another monster game on Friday with 32 points and 15 rebounds in a win over the Mavericks. He also had eight assists, which gives him 30 after six games. The numbers become a blur after a while, but no other power forward brings the array of skills that Love brings to the equation.

And now, a word about the Knicks.

One of the things that was so remarkable about last year's 54-win season was the relative absence of drama. Sure, J.R. Smith did weird things at times, but he saved his most aberrant behavior for the postseason. Yes, there were injuries up and down the lineup, but whenever a Rasheed Wallace or Kurt Thomas went down, there was a Kenyon Martin waiting to gobble up minutes and boards.

Despite all that, the Knicks were an often joyous crew that delighted in launching 3s and propelling Carmelo Anthony to superstar status. Even dour coach Mike Woodson got a makeover as the stern, yet pliable strategist who didn't mind running out weird lineups and reveling in the nonconformity.

Or so it appeared. Once the postseason began, Woodson shied away from the small-ball strengths that defined his team and insisted on playing a more conventional style against the massive Indiana Pacers. It was the classic old-school move for a team that should have been firmly planted in the modern era.

Still, it would be wrong to blame everything on Woodson, especially since Smith's redemption story ended in a clang of missed jumpers and screaming headlines. It's also not as if the Knicks were a smoke and mirrors act. With Melo playing at his best and Tyson Chandler holding down the paint, they were a good, albeit flawed, team that went about as far as they could reasonably expect go.

Reason and expectations don't always line up in owner James Dolan's worldview, however. He reportedly told his coaching staff he wanted a championship and he wanted it now. Nevermind that his team lacked depth or that the big offseason move was to bring in a 7-footer who doesn't rebound or play defense. This is Dolan's Knicks we're talking about.

It's unfortunate that Chandler broke his leg barely a week into the season, because there are few players who are more proud or more committed to their jobs than the 2012 Defensive Player of the Year. It was also unfortunate because the big man was mostly responsible for a defense that was just mediocre enough to keep them in games until the shots started falling.

With Chandler out of the lineup for 4-6 weeks, Woodson has turned to Andrea Bargnani to play, as he termed it, "serious minutes" at center. This has disaster written all over it. It's not as if the Knicks have the assets to go out and make a trade for a defensive big man either. The roster is top heavy and decidedly lacking in tradeable players outside of Iman Shumpert. They owe first-round picks in 2014 and 2016 and don't even have any second rounders to sweeten the pot.

Woodson and the Knicks have defied the doomsayers for a while now, and on his first night as a starter, Bargnani scored 25 points and even blocked five shots against the Bobcats. It took him 25 shots to get there, but hey, baby steps. This came on the heels of a closed door meeting convened by Melo after a home loss to the same Charlotte club, so credit them for making a statement.

The next month may define how this Knicks' season turns out. If it goes poorly, dysfunction and disarray may come with it.

MONDAY Grizzlies at Pacers

Grit and grind versus bump and bang. Let’s count the intriguing matchups: We have the reigning Defensive Player of the Year in Marc Gasol against Roy Hibbert, the presumptive challenger. There’s Zach Randolph and David West in a manly contest of players no one messes with, and if we’re lucky, maybe Tony Allen will check Paul George. First one to 72 points wins.

TUESDAY Wizards at Mavericks

It’s a light night for the Association, but we’re intrigued by what we’ve seen from the Mavs so far, particularly Monta Ellis, who is averaging 24 points a game and shooting about 50 percent. The perpetually maligned guard has found new life in Big D playing on a team that doesn’t require him to be the best player, but doesn’t actually mind if he plays like he is the main guy. Good on ‘ya Monta. Keep doing what you do.

WEDNESDAY Bucks at Magic

We like to spread the love around here, so we’ll sample one of the most obscure games on the stocked Wednesday night buffet. Rookie guard Victor Oladipo is worthy enough of our attention, as is 30 and 20 man Nikola Vučević. With those two, plus second-year forwards Maurice Harkless and Andrew Nicholson, the Magic are creeping up the League Pass watchability rankings.

THURSDAY Thunder at Warriors

While his timing may not be all the way back, Russell Westbrook has not eased himself back into the Thunder lineup. He’s still the same old Russ, and that’s a good thing for an OKC team that was looking a little stale without him on the court. This is shaping up as an interesting little showdown between the upstart Dubs and the established Thunder, who are in danger of getting lapped in the hyper-competitive conference.

FRIDAY Timberwolves at Nuggets

Last year, the Nuggets did what many of us thought the Wolves would do. That is, rip off 57 wins and emerge from a pack of middle rans and become something of a serious threat in the West. The Nuggets faltered in large measure because of a season-ending injury to Danilo Gallinari, which just shows how precarious contenting status can be in this league. The Wolves never got started, of course, but the early returns are encouraging. If there’s a sleeper in the West, it might be in Minnesota.

SATURDAY Nets at Clippers

After Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce left the court for what would be the final time as Celtics, Doc Rivers lamented, "You just want it to always be perfect for them, and as a coach you want to protect that." Things have turned out pretty close to perfectly for all three men, but this reunion figures to be tinged with sadness and regret for what they left behind.

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one: This week: Top five victims of circumstances.

Paul Millsap: Slot the rugged throwback forward on a half-dozen teams, and he’d be the ultimate glue guy, Robert Horry without the heroic game-winners. Millsap has been solidly consistent since his first days in the league, routinely averaging 15-18 points and 8-10 rebounds with the Jazz, which earned him the occasional blog accolades and not much else. It’s not just the public that overlooks Millsap. Somehow, the Hawks got him for a two-year, $19 million deal this summer.

Thaddeus Young: Millsap’s Northeast doppelganger. The most shocking thing about Young is that he’s only 25 years old. The second most notable thing is that he completely reinvented himself from a wannabe floor-spacer into a mid-range maestro who does his work inside the arc and in transition. Put him on a good team and he’d be a perennial Sixth Man of the Year candidate.

Courtney Lee: The sixth-year guard is already on his fourth NBA team, and considering the Celtic' longrange rebuilding program, it wouldn’t be a shock to see him make it to a fifth at some point in the next year or two. Call Lee what you like: a tweener, a combo guard, a 3 and D wing, but his skillset looks a lot better on good teams than on poor ones. He's off to a nice start this season, which may make him an attractive trade candidate.

Wesley Matthews: Twenty-three-year-old undrafted rookies are not supposed to make much of an impact, but Matthews took over a starting job midway through his first season with the Jazz and parlayed that into a nice contract with the Blazers where he’s been one of the league’s most dependable players for the notoriously star-crossed franchise. If the Blazers can get back to the postseason, Matthews will get his due.

Corey Brewer: Unlike the rest of the players on the list, Brewer actually started his career as something of a building block as the seventh pick in the draft by the Wolves way back in 2007. It didn’t go well. But, a funny thing happened to him on the way to obscurity: after bouncing around from Dallas to Denver, he finally was put in the right position to take advantage of his skills. Now back for a second tour with Minnesota, Brewer is a key contributor on a dangerous squad and a role model for anyone whose career got off to a slow start.

He was born on fourth-and-long. Mom drank when she was pregnant with him. Traded sex for drugs while he was in diapers. State authorities dragged him out of a crack house closet when he was 4 years old. Threw Mom in prison. Dad? Dead before the kid met him.

Start most kids off like that, they're looking at 15 to 20 by the time they're 18. Unless they learn to catch a football in traffic or cut down a running back behind the line. That's what Ra'Shede Hageman learned to do, which opened another path — one he followed to the University of Minnesota — where he's a 23-year-old senior defensive tackle on the watch lists for this year's Outland Trophy, Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Chuck Bednarik Award. And that could lead to a first-round selection by the NFL. But his past could still outrun his future.

* * *

Saturday, Oct. 26, Ra'Shede trots down the darkened tunnel and onto the sun-drenched turf of TCF Bank Stadium, home of the Golden Gophers. He's huge. The program lists him at 6'6 and 311 pounds, but he's bigger in person. His bare calves ripple like the quadriceps of most men, his thighs scream power, and  his hands are thick as catcher's mitts. His shoulders and chest form a solid mass with only a slight paunch above his belt, the No. 99 stretched across his white jersey, front and back. He's topped by a large maroon helmet, his expression shielded by a tinted visor, scratched on the side.

This is the face of Minnesota football. His photo shines on the cover of the Gophers' 2013 media guide, a color shot with fists clenched in celebration, biceps flexed, his head tipped slightly back, but his expression invisible behind the dark visor of his helmet. He and the Gophers are up against long odds this afternoon: No. 21 Nebraska. Minnesota has not beaten Nebraska since 1960 ("A long time — you do the math," Ra'Shede says at the post-game press conference); in the last dozen meetings, the Cornhuskers have outscored the Gophers, 568-86. But the Gophers have won five of their seven games. Ra'Shede's having an excellent season, piling up tackles for a loss, sacks, hurries, pass deflections and blocked kicks. Against Northwestern, he even picked off a pass.

Ra'Shede and his teammates jog past the cheerleaders, the band, the television cameras. The fans, especially the students in the section surrounding the tunnel, greet them with enthusiasm. It's a perfect Minnesota autumn afternoon for collegiate football, crisp and sunny, a day ripe with possibilities.

* * *

they all say the same thing: great future, as long as he stays on track.

(USA Today Images)

Ra'Shede has all of the measurables. Benches 465 pounds, squats 500. OK, you might expect that for a guy as big and powerful as he is. Get this, though — the 6'6" 311-pound lineman also leaps 36 inches on his vertical, can windmill a dunk and clocks 1.57 seconds in the 10-yard dash. On Bruce Feldman's 2013 physical "Freaks List" for CBSSports, Hageman is No. 2 (behind only Jadeveon Clowney). After eight games, the Gopher often referred to as a "monster" and "beast" slid up on ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay's rankings from a projected third-round pick to the late first round. "He's got a tremendous future," Gophers' head coach Jerry Kill says. "He's a guy a lot of people will want to get their hands on, as long as he stays on track and does what he's asked to do here."

That's the refrain. Ask past coaches, current coaches, his parents, they all say the same thing: great future, as long as he stays on track.

He can't escape the caveat. Because what drives him could also destroy him.

Talk about two roads, that's the story of this kid's life. He's had false starts along both — fits and lurches down the one that ends for so many black American males born into impoverished, drug-addled families in early death or lifetime incarceration, and leaps and slips down the other toward athletic stardom, generous paydays and Sunday glory. Seems every step of the way he comes back to the fork, where he has to choose his path all over again.

That's where the anger is. All the hurt from having a crackhead for a mom, a dad who died when Ra'Shede was a toddler, of bouncing around foster homes, not having birthday parties like "normal" kids — all that is distilled into a fierce pilot light of anger in his belly. Only football licenses him to release his rage, a powerful force that he consummates in crunching hits. "When I'm on the football field, I always have that anger I had as a child," he says. "I don't want to talk to nobody. I'm ready to go all the way."

Off the field, his anger has cost him, flaring into altercations that could have sidetracked him, ending his career — or even his life — before it got started.

On a weekday morning, he shuffles slowly, as though nonchalant, through the wood-paneled halls of the Gophers' football complex. Clad in a maroon Golden Gophers hoodie and black sweats, he molds his bearded face into a blank expression. Some guys have emotion bubbling all over their features; Ra'Shede's doesn't give away anything, his expression hardly changing. He is playing the role of the elite athlete dutifully reporting to his next interview, but there's an ambiguity in his step, something markedly hesitant in the splayed gait of his Nike sneakers on the maroon carpet.

He's so big he was never small, not even when he was a child. Without his helmet, his head seems to have outgrown his ears, small stubs pushed to the sides. Ra'Shede's always been the tallest guy in the room and on the field. And he's acutely aware of his size, something he embraces, for better or worse. He picked the biggest number because it fits him. "I'm different, with my size, my background," he  explains. "I know wherever I go, I'm going to stick out. I'm not your typical human being because of where I've been."

* * *

The story started in Lansing, Mich., but his mom moved to Minnesota before he was old enough to form memories of the first place. When her addiction kept her from caring for Ra'Shede and his younger brother, Xavier, authorities placed the two boys into the state's foster care system. They bounced around to a dozen different homes. Ra'Shede finally thought he'd found his way out when they placed him in a "permanent" home, but then his new parents split up and he got dumped back into the system. "I missed that childhood I saw other kids having, birthdays, Christmas," he says. "I didn't have Christmas until I was adopted."

Enter Jill Coyle and Eric Hageman, two idealistic 20-somethings fresh out of the University of Minnesota law school, white newlyweds ready to start a family by adopting. They first saw Ra'Shede in a video where the 7-year-old said he wanted a family that would let him play football. Jill and Eric met him and Xavier, 5, soon afterward at Hennepin County's 1997 Christmas party for older foster children.

The social worker warned them: The boys had issues, learning disabilities. Ra'Shede's anger was labeled Oppositional Defiant Disorder and he had difficulty trusting others. But the boys needed a home, a family. Within two months, they had moved in with Jill and Eric. Their adoption was finalized by the end of 1998.

On the eve of the Nebraska game, the couple recounts Ra'Shede's childhood. Eric Hageman sits on the living room couch of their Minneapolis home. He's trim and bright-eyed in a light blue button-down Oxford. Jill sits on the other end of the couch, attractive with long brown hair and wearing fashionable leather boots. Their 6-year-old biological son lies on the couch between them, his head on Eric's thigh. A pair of dogs wrestle on the carpet nearby. Their other two biological children still at home (a boy, 11, and a girl, 8) busy themselves elsewhere in the red brick house across the street from Minnehaha Creek. Eric represents plaintiffs in personal injury cases. Jill is general counsel for a suburban school district. Their home has the feel of comfortable chaos.

"From the time we first adopted him, we envisioned he would be a Division I athlete."

Jill and Eric recognized the athlete in Ra'Shede immediately. For starters, he was tall and lanky, a head above his classmates. Faster and stronger, too. Able to perform backflips. Eric, who played cornerback for Dartmouth in the late ‘80s, saw something. "From the time we first adopted him, we envisioned he would be a Division I athlete," he says.

They signed him up for T-ball, football and basketball at the city park near their home. Other parents complained Ra'Shede was too big. Moms on the sideline grumbled they wanted to see his birth certificate. Jill and Eric placed him on teams with kids a year older. Ra'Shede still stood out as the biggest and best.

He dropped baseball after fourth grade, but in eighth grade had earned a spot on the high school's freshman basketball team and quarterbacked his youth football team — not that it was his natural position, it wasn't — but because he was the best athlete on the team, 6 feet and still growing. The high school football coaches scouted him - and discovered he was every bit as good as they heard he was.

It didn't take long for opponents to discover — and target — his Achilles' heel, the temper always throwing up that fork in the path before him. They hit Ra'Shede after the whistle, and threw dirty blocks. "He would always take the bait," says Eric.

School was no better. The suspensions started in second grade. Sitting in class didn't suit a kid like Ra'Shede with ADD, a modest IQ and all that anger simmering inside. He gravitated toward the troublemakers at the lily-white Catholic school. "Even before we came along, Ra'Shede struggled with making decisions," Jill says.

A predictable debate ensued, Jill taking the position that they should pull Ra'Shede from sports so he would concentrate on his schoolwork and improve his behavior; Eric countering that they couldn't take away the very thing that motivated him. The solution remained elusive.

By middle school, his issues became more complicated. He started to agonize over his skin. For many adopted kids, when they hit their mid-teens, the adoption story swings from, "You're special; we chose you," to "Your mom gave you away; she didn't want you," which translates to "I'm undesirable or undeserving or unlovable," and self-esteem spirals south. For black kids with white parents, it's even more complicated. His parents couldn't love away the difference in the color of his skin.

Jill and Eric transferred Ra'Shede to a public school with a more diverse student body so he could be around more kids that looked like him. His brother Xavier seemed to adjust smoothly, not as big and more content in the classroom. But for Ra'Shede, it seemed every time he looked at his mom or dad, their white faces reminded him he didn't fit in their family.

What does it mean to be a young black man? That wasn't a question he consciously articulated, but one that did haunt him. Eric couldn't show him, of course. Ra'Shede's own black father was gone. And black men like Michael Jordan and Will Smith — celebrity role models to his peers — didn't serve him. They hadn't come from where he did. "I was never like them (Jordan and Smith)," Ra'Shede says. "I was different, on my own path."

At Washburn High School, which straddled the city's economic divide, he felt the tug of the street, a world he glimpsed in the hip-hop lyrics and the sagging pants of classmates, but a world distant from the red brick colonial where he lived with his parents, who by now had children of their own that didn't look like Ra'Shede. He began hanging out and copped a street attitude. He mouthed off to teachers, skipped school, failed classes, played the tough guy, intimidating others with his size, sometimes taking them on. Girls were drawn to his swagger and he burnished that rep in the weight room, trying to impress them with how much he could bench in competition with his friends. Ra'Shede always won. In ninth grade he maxed out at 315 lbs. "I wanted to get their attention," Ra'Shede says. "I wanted people to think I was tough, basically because of being adopted."

Still, he couldn't find his place. He didn't blend with the street kids. Not in his Abercrombie shirts and new shoes. Not with 20 bucks in his pocket when they didn't have lunch money. He couldn't reconcile his upper-middle class status with theirs.

He also didn't fit with the other kids from affluent backgrounds — his skin was too black. And he didn't feel real kinship with his teammates — what did they know about having an addict mom and another who was an attorney? About a phantom dad and another, doting one? About so many foster homes you forgot your way to your bedroom and then living in a house your buddies envied?

So Ra'Shede turned on his parents. He blamed them for his situation. Resented them because other kids sometimes teased him about their white asses. He refused to be seen with them. At school conferences, he made his parents walk down the hall by themselves. In restaurants, he hung back until they sat down. Jill and Eric tried to accommodate their son, waiting for him after basketball games in the parking lot. They weathered his angry outbursts at home. But one public explosion terrified his mother.

Ra'Shede's sophomore year, Jill was driving him and a couple of teammates to football practice with his then 2-year-old sister and 2-week-old baby brother along for the ride. A car blew a stop sign and sideswiped their minivan. No one was hurt, but Ra'Shede was enraged. He burst from the van shouting at the man driving the other car, "You almost killed my baby brother." He terrified the man, who saw only an angry 6'6 black giant raging at him. Ra'Shede did not strike the stranger, but Jill worried about how his anger could menace others, and how their reaction could get him killed. This kid —their kid — was dangerous.

"We'd seen those outbursts at home when he challenged our authority," Eric says. "But seeing it out in the real world was scary. That's been there for him his whole life, trying to address the beast within."

The only place where the beast seemed at home was the football field, where he had license to lash out. Ra'Shede liked defense best, where he could crush opponents, but his coaches used him mostly on offense as a tight end, where he could use his strength and power both blocking and running after catching the ball. They recognized his unique talent, but through his freshmen and sophomore years, he only played sports for the hell of it, because it was fun. He did not know how good he might be.

Trouble brought him to Giovan Jenkins. They knew one another from the football team, where Jenkins was an assistant coach, but Hageman's academic and extracurricular screw-ups landed him in Jenkins' office in his other role as the disciplinarian, dean of ninth- and 10th-grade students. Jenkins had street cred, an African-American Washburn graduate who understood the challenges of being young and black. You're the one who's going to get busted because you're the biggest one around, the first one they'll notice, Jenkins told Ra'Shede. Stay away from trouble.

Jenkins believed in Ra'Shede. "I never really thought he would end up in a gang because of the support he had at home," Jenkins says. "He was raised right."

Ra'Shede respected Jenkins, but it wasn't as if he could just turn off the trouble, either. His anger could explode in an instant. Still, the more often he landed in Jenkins' office, the more he started to believe him. "He told me I wasn't like the other knuckleheads, that I had opportunities," Ra'Shede says. "‘Don't let your friends or other people decide who you are going to be,' he told me. Don't let them control my destiny. He made me realize I could do something with my life if I was able to overcome the obstacles."

* * *

Nebraska scores on its first two drives, but then the Minnesota defense buckles down. Midway through the second quarter, the Gophers trailing 10-7, Ra'Shede slides past a block and drops the quarterback. But there's a flag. The official saw his hand grip the QB's facemask. Instead of facing third-and-long, the Cornhuskers now have a first down 15 yards upfield. Anger replaces elation, but now it's channeled, focused, distilled and determined. Settling into his three-point stance, Ra'Shede knows he owes his team something to redeem himself. On the next play, he charges off the snap, bursts through the line and drops the quarterback before he can set up. The image on the stadium's big screen shows him flexing, his wrists at his waist.

Later in the quarter, with less than a minute remaining, Minnesota has gone up 17-10. Ra'Shede bulls past his blocker, wraps up the QB as he hurries an option pitch, and the ball sails past the running back out of bounds. Ra'Shede spreads his hands wide. He's made another big play. But there's another flag. Once again, the officials have caught him with his hands on the QB's facemask. The personal foul breathes new life into the Huskers' late drive, giving them the chance to tie the score or even take the lead going into halftime. That could hang on Ra'Shede.

But once again, he manages to turn his anger into his advantage. Thirty seconds later, Nebraska runs a screen pass. Ra'Shede doubles back and, with his quickness, catches the receiver from behind on the Minnesota 25, preventing what looked like it would be a big gain, maybe even six points. The play sets up third-and-11, and the best the Huskers can manage is a field goal. At halftime Minnesota still leads, 17-13.

* * *

Soon coaches from premier programs started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters.

The opportunities Jenkins saw in Ra'Shede became concrete when the University of Minnesota football coach Tim Brewster invited him to a prospects camp the summer after his sophomore year. Most of the other kids were a year older, but afterward Brewster, recognizing his potential, offered Ra'Shede a scholarship. That's when it hit Ra'Shede how good he was.

Soon coaches from premier programs — LSU, Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Nebraska — started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters promising him he'd catch 50 passes for them his freshman year. Yet none of that seemed possible. Ra'Shede knew he wasn't college material. He didn't have the grades. His test scores fell short. He had no ambition to study. The sweet talk of scholarships seemed more like a taunt, tantalizing him with something ultimately unattainable — offers more to be resented than pursued. He didn't want to reach out to accept their offer only to have it yanked away. He already knew how that felt.

So did someone else, his half-brother, Lazal Thompson, five years older. They had been separated when the state took custody of Ra'Shede and Xavier, but Lazal had found his younger brothers through the adoption agency shortly after Ra'Shede started high school. Lazal had not been placed with a stable family like Ra'Shede and Xavier. He had stayed in the system and taken the other path. By the time they reunited, Lazal, barely 20, already had fathered a couple of children and been in and out of jail for selling drugs.

He recognized Ra'Shede's confusion and attraction to the street, but also the opportunities he still had. Lazal drove his younger brother around the grimier areas of Minneapolis to erase the allure, pointing out the decay and desperation of thug life. "This is what you don't want to be around," Lazal told him. "You don't want to be a felon or fighting for no reason, joining a gang that doesn't care about you or locked up for domestic abuse."

What Lazal would have given to be able to go to school and play football like Ra'Shede. "But it's hard if you don't have the structure," he says. "You can't go to school when your clothes are dirty. You can't study at home when there's chaos. His parents gave him stability." He told Ra'Shede that. And, "Thank Jill and Eric for giving you the chance."

Gradually, his words sank in. Ra'Shede started to understand the perils of the street; the road to college became more appealing.

* * *

Jill and Eric knew football provided a backdoor route to a college education, something he would not pursue otherwise, given his academic stumbles and intellectual hurdles. But when they started researching the NCAA eligibility requirements, they realized that road included a steep climb. They hired a pair of tutors to work with him. They registered him for online classes to replace failing grades from his first two years of high school.

Ra'Shede accepted the challenge. He worked diligently with the tutors. He stayed after school to get help from teachers. He did the online coursework. He took the ACT test, over and over and over, banking each section he passed to boost his overall score. He sweated and agonized over his studies, gradually edging toward meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. Yet his fear of falling short and being humiliated by the public failure — the local papers and online ranking sites charted his prospects — offset his excitement about the possibility.

Football came so much easier. He started working out with a strength and conditioning coach, and he continued to tear it up on the field. Senior year, he caught 11 touchdown passes, earned All-State honors and was named the nation's No. 1 tight end prospect. But his anger sabotaged the season's grand finale, when his team played for the city championship.

The week before the big game, he exploded in the school cafeteria. Another student got in his face. Ra'Shede gave it back. The shouting escalated to shoving. And could have gotten worse — Ra'Shede far outsized the other kid — if Jenkins hadn't stepped between them ... Hey, hey, stop! Ra'Shede backed down and let Jenkins lead him out of the lunchroom.

Once he calmed, the remorse came. Ra'Shede wrote an apology to the other student. "He always wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't always do the right thing," Jill says. "He digs himself a hole, but crawls out of it."

His outburst resulted in a suspension from football; he couldn't play in the city championship game. The incident reminded everyone just how close to destruction his anger could take him.

* * *

Third quarter, Ra'Shede lets up after the quarterback releases a pass — and the Nebraska lineman Jeremiah Sirles, 6'6 and 310 pounds himself, decks Ra'Shede with a late hit, the very thing that can set him off.

He's used to opponents talking smack in the trenches. They know he has white parents and call him "Uncle Tom." They tell him he's garbage. That he's soft. In high school, he couldn't let it go. He yapped back. Got lured off his game. "Sometimes it goes deep," he says. "Like, ‘You're not going anywhere.' I want to yell and scream at them, but I have found other ways to be disruptive."

But he's not used to being dumped on his ass after the play. Sirles stands over him. A reflexive wave of tension rushes through those watching.

Then Sirles reaches out his hand. Ra'Shede takes it and lets Sirles hoist him up. Ra'Shede pats his shoulder pad and returns to the line. Another dangerous moment diffused. Another right turn.

* * *

Despite his suspension from the city championship game, Ra'Shede did play that January 2009 Under Armour All-American game in Orlando, Fla., and the colleges were still interested. Yet with national signing day approaching, he couldn't see himself in Gainesville or Columbus. He didn't feel right representing a tradition like Nebraska's, one he knew nothing about. He had offers from a dozen schools, but in the end, it came down to just one, Minnesota, because it allowed him to stay close to his parents, and Jenkins and Lazal and others who knew his story and stood by him. So on Feb. 4, 2009, he walked into the Washburn gym, past the media and cameras, donned a maroon cap with a gold "M" on it, and signed a letter declaring his intent to play at the University of Minnesota.

Inking his name did not decide Ra'Shede's fate. It only magnified his angst. After 18 months of tutors, online courses and retaking the ACT, he had moved much closer, but still fell just short of meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. He had to take the ACT test one more time in April before he managed to raise his score in the reading section high enough to clear the bar. Finally, he could exhale with relief and celebrate the fact he was headed to college. Now he just had to crack the Gophers' lineup. And stay on the path.

* * *

Coach Tim Brewster had recruited Hageman to play tight end, but one day during practice early on, while in line for reps with the receivers, Ra'Shede was distracted, watching the defensive line run its drill. The receivers coach had to shout at him when his turn came, but after practice, he told the D-line coach of Ra'Shede's interest, and Ra'Shede switched to defensive end. "Tight end was a high school thing, just beasting over kids and catching balls," he says. "On defense, you have to have that inner dog in you, which works for me with the aggression I have and the past that makes me a dominant lineman."

He thought he might see action the first game against Syracuse, but by the third quarter, he figured out that he was going to be redshirted for the 2009 season. There were too many other guys ahead of him at defensive end. He dressed for every game, but spent every minute on the sideline, just watching, another tease and frustration.

Tubby Smith, the Gophers' basketball coach, had scouted Ra'Shede at Washburn and attended the high school tournament game when Ra'Shede led his team to the state basketball championship. He invited Ra'Shede to walk on. He was tempted, but he couldn't. College already overwhelmed him. Practice, lifting, meetings, classes, study sessions. Living on his own. He couldn't do it. Couldn't squeeze basketball into his schedule; couldn't handle the distractions.

Oh, those distractions. The parties. The girls. He didn't think it was a problem until a girl told him she was pregnant and planned to have the baby. His one-night stand turned into another person. He was in shock. Scared. How would he tell his parents? How would he care for the child? "I'm too big to be working in a grocery store," he says. "I had to stay with football, keep working on that."

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Jill and Eric were concerned — here was another hole Ra'Shede had dug himself — but supportive, as always. They were ready with advice, acceptance and money, whatever he needed. The 2010 season, Ra'Shede's first, he played in eight games, made five tackles, but he landed in yet another ditch. He moved off campus and lived in a house with the other defensive linemen, a place nicknamed "The Zoo" for the parties they hosted. When the police crashed one, everybody ran. But not Ra'Shede, who was rarely one to back down from a confrontation. He was cited for hosting an "uncontrolled party" where minors consumed alcohol. He had to perform community service and endure the embarrassment of the incident going public.

Worse, The Zoo didn't exactly nurture academic rigor. He missed study sessions. Arrived late to class. Let his grades slide. Late that season, after Brewster had been fired, interim coach Jeff Horton told Ra'Shede to get serious about school and forget the last three weeks of the season. Technically, it wasn't a suspension, but the message was clear: His size, talent and potential couldn't save him if he didn't improve his grades.

New coach Jerry Kill underscored that point. It seemed half the team was academically ineligible and Kill intended to clean house. Three days after he arrived in December 2010, the new coach summoned the problem child, his parents and a couple of academic advisors to his office. Kill had done his homework, talking to Giovan Jenkins at Washburn, who convinced him to take a chance on Ra'Shede. One chance. Kill, about as subtle as a blacksmith, gave it to the kid straight. "You stole the university's money. That's going to change or you're gone. This is your last shot." He laid out the expectations: Ra'Shede would get to class on time, not miss study sessions, stay away from parties, move out of The Zoo and into student housing on campus.

Ra'Shede knew Coach Kill was serious. He had jettisoned other players, including Ra'Shede's friend, roommate and fellow defensive lineman, Jewhan Edwards. Edwards had led the Gophers in tackles for a loss and sacks, he had a year of eligibility remaining and NFL prospects, but he hadn't been willing to do things the new coach's way. And knew he was gone. One minute a DI football player with a future, the next, nothing but a washout with a past. If the new coach could dump the team leader in tackles, he wouldn't hesitate to boot Ra'Shede. That shook him.

"It was the first time I saw my life flash before me," he says. And he didn't like what he saw. By then, some of the kids he had run with in high school had landed behind bars or in graves, done in by drugs and violence. Without football, that could be his fate, too. "If I didn't get things right, I would become that statistic of somebody who went to college but didn't make it."

* * *

Five weeks after his meeting with Coach Kill, Ra'Shede became a father. His son Zion was born Feb. 4, 2011. Zion's mother let Ra'Shede visit only when she wasn't mad at him, which seemed to be very seldom. Still, he felt accountable to someone beyond himself. For the first time, perhaps, he started to understand a moment could have irreversible consequences.

In the spring semester, he got serious about school. He attended his tutoring sessions and made it to classes on time. He was never going to be a candidate for the dean's list, but he managed to keep his cumulative GPA above the required 2.0 mark.

In the fall of 2011, his sophomore year, he switched to defensive tackle, played in all 12 of the Gophers' games and made 13 tackles, flashing the promise inherent in his size. In the final game of the season, on a cold and rainy November day at TCF Bank Stadium, Ra'Shede sacked the Fighting Illini quarterback twice in the first half and forced a fumble that set up the Gophers' first touchdown in a 27-7 victory. "He hadn't had any sacks all season, but that game was a ‘Whoa, look at him' moment," Eric says.

The expectations mounted, but the path did not become any smoother. Coach Kill had to track Ra'Shede down when he did not show up for a mandatory study hall during finals week. Kill found him asleep in his dorm room and dragged him back to the football complex to go over flashcards with an assistant coach past midnight, until Ra'Shede knew the material well enough to pass his final. Not long afterward, he again found himself in the wrong place, though this time less innocently.

In the wee hours of May 10, 2012, Ra'Shede tried to break up a fight outside a campus bar, where some of his teammates tangled with a group of guys from the North Side that Ra'Shede had played hoops with. When the cops arrived, they confronted Ra'Shede, who stood in the thick of the melee. He snapped back. They locked him up. Within days, they dropped the charges of disorderly conduct, but not before the night hit Ra'Shede with another reminder of how close his anger put him to the edge. What if someone had pulled a knife? Or a gun? A bullet doesn't care how much you can bench.

* * *

Junior year, Ra'Shede showed Kill he hadn't squandered his faith. Number 99 earned a starting spot and came up with one big game after another. He recorded 35 tackles (20 solo) and six sacks. His breakout season earned him honorable mention All-Big Ten honors. Not bad for a kid recruited as a tight end who nearly was tossed out of the program. Amazing for a kid discovered in a crack house closet.

The expectations escalated after that. Ra'Shede's on everybody's watch list, pictured on the media guide, projected to go early in the draft, yet he is determined to rise to their level. This season he's watching more film on his own, analyzing his play and scouting opponents. He's resolved not to take any plays off, to come off the ball with more urgency. But he remains a work in progress. Despite his natural size, strength and power, he's still a newcomer to his position. "He's trying to understand when it's time to be a power player and when to use more finesse, coming off a block or on the pass rush," says Jeff Phelps, the Gophers' defensive line coach. "He's just beginning to learn those things and come into his own as a defensive lineman."

This year the big plays have been harder to come by because he's frequently double-teamed. That gets old, two 300-pound hogs in your face every play. He's had his share of personal fouls trying to compensate, like a play against Michigan when he meant to jam a guard in the throat, but his fist caught the guy's facemask and nearly snapped his head off.

Off the field, Ra'Shede speaks softly and can even appear docile. Teammates have called him a "gentle giant," and Phelps describes him as a "teddy bear." Bah, says his mother, who knows his temper as well as anyone. "He doesn't deal well with people getting in his face," Jill says. She remembers a time this past summer when they were in Manhattan and a homeless woman told them to get out of her way. The rest of his family moved aside. Not Ra'Shede. "He took her on," Jill says. "Why can't he just step around her like the rest of us? He's always got that trigger."

* * *

Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to.

Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to. Zion is 2 1/2 now. When his mom is communicating with Ra'Shede, he picks up Zion in St. Paul and brings him back to his dorm to watch television or play video games. "He's into ‘Caillou,'" Ra'Shede says. "And he's tall and lanky, like I was."

Ra'Shede is one class away from graduating with a youth studies major, which — given his background — could be his most amazing achievement, but an astronomy class stands between him and his degree. "Dumbest thing I ever did," he says. When he registered for the class, he thought it would be easy. It's not. "You've got to know math, physics, geology — and all those planets."

Hageman is trying to be a role model to other kids. He recently participated in a clinic at McRae Park, several blocks from the house where he grew up, where he played eighth-grade football himself, and next door to St. Joseph's Home for Children, one of the foster homes in which he lived. He laughed with the kids and encouraged them in a scrimmage. "He's a voice for a lot of African-American kids who are going through things he's gone through," his brother Lazal says.

* * *

Still third quarter, Minnesota has the ball on Nebraska's 1-yard line. Ra'Shede sits on the end of the heated team bench, his eyes on the big screen in the end zone. When Gopher quarterback Philip Nelson carries the ball across the goal line to put Minnesota up, 23-13, Ra'Shede pumps his right fist into the air. They could win this one.

Stranger things have happened in life. Ra'Shede knows that better than anyone does.

* * *

Eric pulls his cell phone from his pocket and plays a video of Ra'Shede's surprise interception against Northwestern. Ra'Shede had dropped back into coverage, a scheme the Gophers' defense uses sometimes to foil their opponents' plans to double-team him. Ra'Shede leaps, grabs the ball with one hand and runs 10 yards with it before he's bumped in the leg, stumbles and falls.

Ra'Shede watched the film with his teammates the next day. Phelps showed the play several times, so Ra'Shede could narrate his moves, point out how he switched the ball to his far hand to protect it. His linemates couldn't help teasing him about how easily he went down. Despite his boasting and their roasting, the clip highlights his extraordinary athleticism in leaping and snagging the ball.

That athleticism in a body his size has NFL written all over it. Ra'Shede hadn't dared think it possible earlier. He hadn't wanted to "overdream." Getting to college had been unlikely enough; staying there a major challenge. But now, deep into his final year at Minnesota, he risks having a dream. Weekend nights he stays away from the bars, sometimes walks by himself along the Mississippi River, which winds through the campus, his Beats by Dre pumping, and thinks. About where he's come from, where he's going, what's left to get there. He's come so far, gotten so close; he wants that next step.

Once the Gophers' season ends — he hopes with a bowl game of substance — he plans to go off to train. "I'm so hungry to go away and just starting training 100 percent for the Combine," he says. Someplace without any classes, without any study halls. Someplace where it's just him and his anger, channeled the right way, pushing his body to its limits. "That's like the ultimate vacation for me, to be by myself and train."

So much of what has defined him to this point are things he didn't have any control over. He had no choice about his birthparents, being taken from his mother, staying in foster homes, being placed in a white family. He had no say over his size or even what sport he pursued. That's why training for the Combine, the gateway to the NFL and final stop of his dream — he has no Plan B — holds such appeal. For that short time between the end of his college football career and his audition, he will be completely and wholly responsible for shaping his future, finally given the chance to direct his destiny.

* * *

Fourth quarter, the clock ticking down. The big screen scoreboard shows Minnesota leading improbably, 34-23. Nebraska has the ball. Ra'Shede had come out moments earlier when he got the wind knocked out of him. But now he's back in the game. Pressuring the quarterback — who puts up a pass that Minnesota picks off with only 16 seconds remaining.

In just seconds, the game will end, and the players will rush to the big M at the center of the field to rejoice in the school's first victory over Nebraska in 53 years. The student fans will spill over the walls and crowd around the players in a spontaneous celebration. But now, with 16 seconds remaining and victory certain, Ra'Shede skips off the field like a carefree kid.

And it looks like he's smiling.

Arron Afflalo hates to lose. The very thought consumes him. It bothers him at night and it frustrates him during the day. Winning to him is little more than a temporary solution. That doesn’t make Afflalo unique in the NBA. Nobody makes it to the league because they’re comfortable with losing.

Yet circumstances beyond their control can thrust players into difficult situations, like the one Afflalo is in with the Orlando Magic. For the first five years of his career, Afflalo was part of a steady winner in Denver. As part of the Dwight Howard trade, he has had to adjust to lowered expectations and the reality of a rebuilding process. He understands that, but does he accept it? No.

"I don’t think I will ever grow into accepting losing. It’s just not my makeup," Afflalo said after the Magic were crushed by the Celtics on Monday. "People can tell you to harness your frustration or it’s a process, and those things are very true, but day in and day out I’m just a person who doesn’t like to lose."

Scattered among teams like the Magic are veterans like Afflalo who are trying to make the best of their situations. He’s the player who sets an example, both on the court and off, for his younger teammates to emulate. It’s part of the game and a cruel one at that.

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Afflalo is in the prime of his career and playing excellent basketball. In the offseason he altered his diet and got in peak condition. Primed for a big season, he came into the weekend averaging better than 21 points a game while shooting over 50 percent from behind the arc. Known as a quintessential 3-and-D player, Afflalo has increased his rebounding percentage and playmaking numbers. Put him on a contender and he’d be a household name.

Just 28, Afflalo is not old in any conventional sense, not even by the standards of the NBA that fetishizes young players and potential more than experience and results. But on the Magic, he’s an elder statesman on a team where six of the Magic’s top nine rotation players are 24 years and younger.

"Sometimes that’s the reality of the situation," Afflalo said. "In my eyes, I expect to win no matter what team I’m on. I expect to be in the playoffs. I don’t care if I’m the first or eighth seed, I just expect to be there. Last year was a first for me and that was tough to handle. I don’t want to play basketball that way again."

It’s paramount for teams like the Magic to have veterans like Afflalo and Jameer Nelson around to show the young players what life is really like in the NBA. For years teams have tried to get away with simply letting the kids run wild and, unless there’s a Kevin Durant on hand, the results have generally been disastrous. The key is getting vets who 1) can still play and 2) handle their business like pros.

"We have a good mix where the young guys see veterans who have been there before and we have really good veterans who have a really good influence on our locker room," Magic coach Jacque Vaughn said. "Their approach to the game, how they carry themselves, has been great for our young guys to see. But our young guys have been able to play and it’s nothing like playing. You can’t duplicate that except by being on the floor."

No, you can’t. And that’s the trick. The veterans can help, but they can’t do so at the expense of the younger players who need time on the court to develop. While Afflalo, Nelson and Jason Maxiell all start, Vaughn has received solid contributions from second-year players Moe Harkless and Andrew Nicholson. Center Nikola Vucevic established himself last season as a double-double machine and rookie Victor Oladipo is getting quality minutes off the bench.

That’s the core of whatever the Magic will be in the future and, Monday night’s loss to the Celtics aside, they have been more competitive than last season thanks in large part to a defense that has tightened up considerably. That’s a huge part of the learning curve. While the focus is on the lottery for many fans and observers, there’s work to be done during the season and the draft is the furthest thing from veteran players’ minds.

Take Charlotte forward Al Jefferson, who has been part of multiple rebuilding projects throughout his career. Once he was part of the Celtics’ youth movement that bottomed out in 2006-07 with a 24-win team."I try to forget about it," Jefferson said when the Bobcats came through Boston. "It was a rebuilding year, that’s all I can say. It was a lot of long nights."

The specters of Durant and Greg Oden hung over the Celtics that season from start to finish. Everyone knew it, including the players who didn’t want to hear about losing games and ping pong balls.

"Professional guys don’t go out and play to lose," Jefferson said. "I know that for a fact. Everybody wants to win."

The Bobcats got Jefferson because he can score, but they also got him to help their young players improve. It’s not just about getting minutes and scoring points. Development has to take place at a team level, as well as a personal one.

"That’s one of the misnomers about player development," said Charlotte coach Steve Clifford. "People look at player development like a guy shoots better, or his ballhandling gets better. There are a lot of guys who have the talent to play in the league but they never grasp the team concept. Although their skills may get better, it doesn’t matter if they can’t function with the other four guys on the floor. To me it all goes together."

Jefferson helps make the Bobcats a functioning team and Clifford has been encouraged by what he has seen from the big man, who returned to the lineup after missing the first five games with a sprained ankle. It’s not just on the court, but behind the scenes as well. He likes how his team practices and prepares, which may not sound like much, but it’s actually an important first step in creating a culture.

"In this league, with your best players particularly, it’s a partnership," Clifford said. "These guys are pro players. They’re men, grown men. How well you practice, how hard you work is dictated much more by their outlook than how much impact a coach has on them. You have your role in setting a tone, but it’s the relationship you develop so they will embrace the work part of it. You’re relying on the better players in the locker room so they will set the tone."

Of course there’s nothing better than leading by example on the court and in games. In a win over the Celtics that put them at 4-4, Jefferson went for 22 and 11 and was the best player on the court.

"He's an elite low-post scorer," Clifford said. "He’s a much, much better defender than I had realized, but the thing that’s coming through now is his competitiveness. He badly wants to win."

Back in Orlando after the disappointing loss to the Celtics, Afflalo scored a career-high 36 points, making eight of 11 three-pointers on Wednesday in a win over the Bucks. Vaughn praised his player’s effort, calling it "courageous" after the Magic came out with low energy. It was a reminder to his young teammates about professionalism from a player who hates to lose.

Over the summer, Damian Lillard took a long look at his game. On the surface there was a lot to like about a season that saw him average 19 points and six assists en route to a unanimous Rookie of the Year selection. He was a precocious rookie who walked right into Portland’s starting lineup and took control with a veteran’s mastery of the pick and roll. But Lillard was looking deeper than raw numbers and highlights.

"I saw that I was pre-determining with a lot of things," Lillard said after a pregame workout in Boston. "I’m coming off to score this time, or I’m coming off to pass this time. I think now I’m better at coming off and making a read and feeling the game out. Last year I was like, man I got to make an impact. Just try to help win games. Now that I’ve got a year under my belt, now I understand what I need to do to make us a good team. I understand what I do to make myself effective. It all comes a lot easier this year."

Not all improvements are made in the gym. The step he felt like he had to make was more mental than physical. If last season was about working through situations, this year is about making things easier on himself and for his teammates.

"The game is a lot slower." Lillard said. "Last year was in a rush for me. I was using my speed and my quickness. Now it’s more change of pace. I don’t have to work as hard because now everything is slowing down and I see things faster than I would have last year."

It helps that Lillard has been with the Blazers’ core group of players for a full season. It also helps that GM Neil Olshey brought in reinforcements in the offseason to beef up a bench that was one of the worst in the league. Better depth means slightly fewer minutes, but it also means fewer difficult minutes.

"He’s a smart young man and a smart basketball player," Blazers coach Terry Stotts said. "Last year I think he did it out of sheer will and this year he’s taking more of a cerebral approach to it. He willed himself last year with the minutes he played and the level he played and the way he bounced back from a subpar game. He was criticized for his defense, which I think was not as deserving as it was built up. He gave good effort but he had to play a lot of minutes and he had to give a lot on the offensive end."

Not that there weren’t tangible things that Lillard sought to improve. He worked on his mid-range game and added a floater. He wanted to cut down on his turnovers, which he has done through the early part of the season, and also improve his efficiency. That last part is a work in progress, but while his field goal percentage is down, his three-point accuracy is up and he’s trying to take better shots within the flow of the system.

"Last year I was looking for my shot," he said. "Not in a selfish way, but I was trying to impact the game. Now I’m getting easier shots because I’m coming out and getting other guys going. My rhythm gets easier being more of a floor general to start the game and letting it come to me."

MONDAY Blazers at Nets

Is it too early to worry about the Nets? More specifically, at what point do we begin to worry seriously about Kevin Garnett? KG is barely shooting 30 percent and looking very much like a player who is on his last legs. Having lived through the last half-dozen KG years, there is never a good time to declare that Garnett has lost it. See: 2012, "I hear you all calling me old." Garnett will always get the benefit of the doubt from this corner, but concern? There’s always concern.

TUESDAY Hawks at Heat

The Eastern Conference is top heavy, weak at the bottom and larded with mediocrity in the middle. Somewhere in that mix are the Hawks, who boast an excellent player in Al Horford, a decent supporting cast and a top-10 offense and a better than average defense. There’s an opening here for Atlanta to emerge, but the Hawks are perpetually stuck in neutral.

WEDNESDAY Pacers at Knicks

It’s funny how things work out in this game. Chris Copeland was a cause celebre during last May’s playoff series, the fulcrum on whom all debates about Mike Woodson’s lineups revolved. Indiana gave him a nice chunk of change to be a floor-spacing big, but he has been buried behind Luis Scola in the rotation. At least there’s a reason he’s not playing.

THURSDAY Clippers at Thunder

Petition to have the Clippers play every Thursday night … oh wait, they already are.

FRIDAY Spurs at Grizzlies

Speaking of getting worried, the Grizzlies have been a shambles to start the season. Their offense is still stuck in a morass of poor shooting, spacing and lack of playmakers. But it’s their defense that’s been an even bigger problem, ranking in the lower fifth in points allowed and fouling way too much. There’s no room to take even a tiny step back in the West.

SATURDAY Blazers at Warriors

The Warriors are the best thing to happen to late night TV since Letterman started doing Stupid Human Tricks and becoming more than just a cult favorite. Should we take them seriously? Considering their lights out shooting, strong depth and top-five defense, a better question is, why aren’t you taking them seriously?

SUNDAY Suns at Magic

If you’re going to rebuild, play your young guys. If you’re going to play young guys, play fast on offense, sound on defense and let them learn from their mistakes. Basically, be more like the Suns and Magic.

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one. This week: Top five tanking teams.

Note: This is not about lottery positioning. This has nothing to do with losing games. This is about making the most of what many expect will be a lost season.

1. Phoenix: In the offseason, new GM Ryan McDonough traded every veteran he could and loaded up on draft picks and rookie contracts. He turned the team over to Eric Bledsoe and the results have been eye-opening. Bledsoe is thriving in first-year coach Jeff Hornacek’s free-flowing system and Markieff Morris been a revelation. McDonough is building something in the desert, but not at the expense of the long-range goal.

2. Orlando: There will be some bad nights of course, but the Magic are going about this the right way with six of their top nine rotation players under 24 years old. If the defense holds, this is a team that will catch a few people by surprise and continue to develop. It’s not just about getting that transcendent talent, it’s also about putting the right players around them. The Magic are figuring out what they have.

3. Boston: The best thing about the Celtics is that first-year coach Brad Stevens has been as advertised. He’s calm, cool and collected on the sidelines and is generating positive reviews from his players for his practice methods and gameplans. The C’s lack the top end development talent that Phoenix and Orlando have, so getting Stevens up to speed is the top priority this season. The most encouraging sign? A top-10 defense, emblematic of a team that plays hard and together.

4. Philadelphia: We all have jokes about the Sixers’ early-season success, but let’s be clear about one thing: There is no upside to losing 70 games. None. It’s demoralizing, horrible and can set a franchise back years. The Sixers have to be encouraged by rookie Michael-Carter Williams and the play of Evan Turner, who is turning himself into a potential trade possibility. That’s the idea. Those potential lottery picks at the end of the year are the bonus.

5. Charlotte: Steve Clifford has done a fine job with this Bobcats crew that for years lacked organization, direction and a clear purpose. Already he is getting solid production from Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and has the Cats playing an entertaining style. Given time and talent, Clifford can turn this thing around, but the talent has a long way to go.

After eight frustrating years, four controversial fights, 42 contentiously scored rounds, with over 500 punches landed from more than 1,800 thrown, after two grueling hours of opportunity under the spotlight, on Dec. 8, 2012, Juan Manuel Marquez finally landed the punch of a lifetime against Manny Pacquiao. It happened with just one second left in the sixth round of their mythic saga. Pacquiao charged forward to land one final blow before the bell, and instead added his own momentum to Marquez's immaculately-timed, coup de grace right-hand, which landed flush against Pacquiao's jaw. On TV, when the punch landed, Pacquiao's back was to the camera. The reverberations of the impact were only detectable through the sudden jolt of Pacquiao's wet hair on the back of his head.

But isn't this a staple of wrestling, meant to fool? Since the punch itself had landed with such comic book emphasis, the traction of the unfolding human drama, along with reality, became unhinged and, for an instant, suspended. In confusion and disbelief, many people watching around me in a New York bar laughed in horror. As Charlie Chaplin famously pointed out, from a distance, a man slipping on a banana peel or stumbling down a manhole is funny. It's something altogether different up close. And since Pacquiao had fallen face-first and remained motionless, almost fastened to the canvas, there were no cues.

Marquez was the first person in the world to understand the night was over. No matter how much anyone had paid to watch in the sellout crowd at the MGM Grand or the millions around the world watching on pay-per-view, they had to wait. We'd seen the punch; he'd thrown it. As the referee rushed over to the fallen man, time stood still, postcard-like, while Marquez gazed down at Pacquiao like an anxious, nervous kid staring at Christmas presents under a tree.

One of the oldest sayings in boxing, the first warning every aspiring fighter hears long before they've ever entered a ring, is that the most dangerous punch, the one to fear most, is the one you never see coming. While the cliché is certainly true at the start of a career, it rarely holds up toward the end. This is because almost none of the great fighters in history ever stopped after that punch — and the history of the sport suggests that few can ever escape it. Pacquiao, despite earning a reported $174 million since 2009 from boxing and endorsements deals, is no different.

Why? Because, of course, boxing's not so well kept dirty secret is that, financially, most fighters can never stop. No matter how outlandish a fortune they've earned inside the ring and out, most greats not only never get ahead, few can even manage getting out from under. They never put much distance between themselves and where they came from. With few exceptions, they all end up desperately needing one more payday. And then another. And then another. Most are forced to hang around so long their endings are consummated by the uglier, more sinister punch that they all saw coming a mile away. Joe Louis, at 37 years old, was never blindsided by the physical punches that Rocky Marciano landed to knock him helplessly out of the ring and the sport. No, the punch he never saw coming and what set him up for Marciano's right hand was debt — in his case, to the government. Louis owed the IRS $500,000 and had nowhere else to go and get it but back into the ring.

Nearly all the greats were forced to stick around for those last final beatings, the ones that did lasting damage to their souls as much as their brains. If "protect yourself at all times" is boxing's most vital rule to obey, surely the most devastating blow in the sport is the one you do see coming, the one you're simply helpless to escape its impact.

Why is it so many of boxing's greatest heroes — Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson — were forced to stare down this last tragic fate and await their inevitable descent into boxing's latest cautionary tale? In the so-called "red light district of sports," the only jungle where, as Don King's biographer Jack Newfield once pointed out, "the lions are afraid of the rats," why can so few great fighters walk away undamaged with any money in their pocket? Will Pacquiao be any different? And why, despite the millions, should we expect him to be? Maybe in the sport of boxing, "cautionary tale" is too generous a title for a fallen champion: They end up just another punchline.

For a minute there, Dec. 8, 2012 might have become boxing's equivalent of Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was killed. One second Pacquiao, the 21st century's most beloved fighter, was ahead on the scorecards and charging. The next he disappeared under Marquez's fist just as the bell tolled to end round six. At first, arrestingly, it wasn't clear just how far down Pacquiao might fall. The referee certainly saw enough of the damage up close that he never bothered to count. Then, it began to register on those watching ringside that they may have witnessed what amounted to a public execution in the ring. Pacquiao remained motionless, possibly lifeless, until his cornermen rushed the ring in tears, followed by a doctor. Marquez jogged away from his fallen opponent, fist aloft, leaping atop the opposite turnbuckle as the Las Vegas crowd detonated into hysteria, flexing his biceps in vindication for three previously contentious battles. Whatever battles Pacquiao had won in their three previous contests, Marquez had now, with perhaps fatal finality, won the war.

Death isn't without precedent in the ring. It happened again only recently, when boxer Francisco Leal died of a brain injury at the end of October. A week later, on Nov. 2, at Madison Square Garden, Magomed Abdusalamov's was so badly damaged after 10 rounds he suffered a blood clot in his brain that forced doctors to put him into a medically induced coma. Abdusalamov suffered a stroke soon after and, with the help of a machine, still fights to survive today from his hospital room.

But no one with Pacquiao's visibility has died, let alone in a fight of the magnitude he fought against Marquez, one broadcast around the world. The first widely televised ring death dates back to 1962, with Emile Griffith battering the life out of Benny Paret until he collapsed into a coma and died 10 days later. An even larger audience watched Duk Koo Kim endure 14 rounds of punishment from Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, only to succumb to brain injuries four days later. With reporters in press row parsing "lifeless" from dead in most of their ledes, it seemed possible that Pacquiao's name would be the latest name added to boxing's most sinister list.

"Yeah, he laid there too long for me," Freddie Roach told me this summer, back at his Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles. "He laid there too long for me not to move. I says to myself, ‘Is he fucking dead?'"

And Roach certainly wasn't alone in his reaction, based on the sound of Pacquiao's wife, Jinkee's, agonized screams from the front row in Vegas.

"I mean," Roach sighed, "it was scary. But, you know, he got up. He was fine. He talked to me clearly. You know, he knew what happened. And you know, that's part of life."

My first phone call after the fourth Pacquiao/Marquez fight was to filmmaker Leon Gast. Gast had been an extremely generous mentor and friend to me while making my first documentary about super bantamweight champion and Cuban defector Guillermo Rigondeaux, who had fought on one of Pacquiao's undercards in 2010. It was the first time I'd ever witnessed an entourage anything like the one that Pacquiao had following him around. It was said Pacquiao had an entire country behind him, but the sheer size of his mob convinced me he also carried a good portion of the entire Filipino population in tow (and on the payroll). Even then, Gast had pointed out that the entourage posed a far graver threat to Pacquiao's livelihood than any opponent in the ring. The Academy Award winning director of "When We Were Kings," a film on Muhammad Ali, a movie that culminated in the "The Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire, perhaps Ali's career-defining victory. Gast had been working for years on a Pacquiao documentary, similar in scope.  Of course, Gast's documentary and most others omit the aftermath, Ali cruelly silenced and imprisoned in his body by Parkinson's disease. The film offered a coda where people discussed the consequences of Ali's career on his health, but it didn't let you see it.

Gast, like the rest of the boxing public, had made no secret of the desire to see Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. square off in a fight destined to serve as Pacquiao's defining moment. A week later, I interviewed Leon at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., where he's currently at work cutting the Pacquiao documentary. I asked Leon if the fight that now likely won't happen, the fight that disappeared when Marquez sent Pacquiao to the canvas, Pacquiao vs. Mayweather, could have been our generation's version of Ali and Foreman in Zaire.

"Bigger," Leon corrected, shaking his head. "There's no question in my mind it would have been the biggest, most important fight since Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought in Madison Square Garden. I was there at that fight back in 1971. I know how big it was. The Fight of the Century doesn't begin to describe what the energy was like to actually be there that night. Forget the money people throw around, Pacquiao and Mayweather had that kind of potential for something important.

"But now we're crying over spilled milk. Floyd doesn't need it anymore and besides, I'm convinced [promoter] Bob Arum was never going to allow that fight to happen had Pacquiao survived Marquez or not. But Pacquiao sure might still need it."

That’s exactly how these guys get fucked up. God help us, here we go again.”

"So now you have to end the film with that fourth Marquez fight?" I asked. "Is that the ending for the film? Isn't that too much of downer?"

"Déja vu all over again," Leon laughed. "It's boxing. Muhammad Ali fought 14 times after Zaire. Fourteen times. And you know, that's exactly how these guys get fucked up. God help us, here we go again."

"Is the parallel that obvious?" I asked. "You see what's happening to Pacquiao as the same that happened to Muhammad Ali at the end?"

"Same old story. All of 'em on down. All the greatest — Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ali, Tyson. All their careers ended with them either broke, busted up, or both. Ali had nothing left after Berbick and Holmes. Why did he take those fights in the first place? Nothing left. It's criminal he was allowed to take those fights in the first place. A medical board gave him a license in the state he was in? Forget about it. Totally criminal. And you know something, he got lucky after they were over. That licensing deal he was offered that he got millions off of? Ali was lucky. Without that deal, Ali was bust. As a country, our track record with these guys isn't pretty. Look at the rest of 'em in boxing. Where do they all end up? I just hope that after Marquez, Pacquiao doesn't get seriously hurt in his next fight. Or the one after that. I mean, he's one more knockout loss away from just becoming another name, just another stepping stone for whoever is on the way up. And for all this guy has done in the sport? I mean, how ugly is that?"

"Can he ever stop?" I asked.

"Never," Gast laughed. "Never, never, never."

"Can he come back from that knockout against Marquez?"

"Who knows? You saw what happened to Pacquiao after Marquez laid him out. Freddie Roach thought he was dead. He wasn't dead, but they'll still bleed him dry. To come back from that kind of loss and fight against a young, tough kid like [Brandon] Rios? That's a very precarious move right there. Not for anybody making it happen, of course, but for Manny. But then he can never stop fighting. They never can. Too many bills and expenses. The lifestyle destroys them as much as any opponent. And everybody with their hand in Pacquiao's pocket knows he can't escape. You know, for them, the more in debt the better. He has to keep going."

"What are the expenses?" I asked.

"You name it," Leon laughed. "Where do we start?"

"From what I've heard? Taxes? Political campaigns? Women? Jinkee's political campaign? Gambling —"

"You left out the Church," Leon cut me off and moaned. "You have no idea what kind of tithe is going their way now that he's tried to clean up his act. Everybody's hand is out. Manny can't say no to anyone. The entourage. The charities. Lawsuits. Taxes. The fucking presidential run in the Philippines is coming up. Jesus. All those taxes on his real estate in Los Angeles and everything back in the Philippines. He has staff hired just to say no to people who come at him with open hands. Why do you think he has to keep borrowing those advances from Bob Arum? Even with all those massive pay-per-view paydays and he's borrowing money? Boxing is just such a ... it's a wretched sport."

And that was before Typhoon Haiyan. How many hands will be out now, and how can he refuse? Pacquiao has released a "statement to the people," saying he will "send help to those who need it most," and his adviser Michael Koncz told the Associated Press, "Absolutely, he is dedicating this fight to the victims of this."

Maybe if Pacquiao either dies or suffers permanent damage in the ring, fighting for his people, perhaps he'll end up even more bankable. Before all this is done, martyrdom might be the most convenient justification for the sum of far too many foul parts that surround Pacquiao's lasting legacy.

Pacquiao was born the fourth of six siblings on Dec. 17, 1978 in the town of Kibawae, in the Bukidnon province of the Philippines. Pacquiao ran away from home as a child, leaving the day he discovered life had gotten so desperate that his father had actually eaten the family dog. He lived off the streets, often slept in a cardboard box, and sold doughnuts for a nickel to survive. As a 14-year-old, Pacquiao moved to Manila and continued his fight out of poverty by turning to boxing. He had a solid amateur career, winning 60 of 64 fights. After the death of a close friend and fellow boxer, Pacquiao, at 16, still under 5 feet tall and several pounds under even the lightest weight permitted to compete as a professional, turned pro anyway. To make his 105-pound debut, Pacquiao later confessed to hiding weights in his pockets when he stepped on the scales. Nearly 10 years later, Pacquiao finally arrived in America. On Nov. 15, 2003, he knocked out future hall of famer Marco Antonio Barrera in the 11th round to begin one of the most mythic decades in the history of boxing.

In his next 20 fights, Pacquiao accumulated 10 world titles and became the first man ever to do so in an unprecedented eight weight divisions, from light-flyweight to junior-middleweight. He knocked out Mexican legend Erik Morales twice, avenged a draw against Marquez with two subsequent victories, retired Oscar De La Hoya on his stool, pulverized Ricky Hatton in two rounds, moved up in weight even further to batter Miguel Cotto into submission, sent Antonio Margarito to the hospital with a fractured orbital bone, then dispatched Shane Mosley and Marquez once more. The remarkable run finally ended with a highly controversial loss against Timothy Bradley in the summer of 2012.

Despite earning nearly $200 million during his brilliant career, Pacquiao always hemorrhaged money. Gary Andrew Poole's 2010 biography, "Pacman," laid out how Pacquiao's contracts were split: After his manager's took their 20-percent cut, his trainer Freddie Roach took 10 percent, strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza shaved off a few more points. There were also training camp expenses, tax bills in the U.S. and the Philippines, and his boundless, ever-growing entourage, all guzzling funds. According to a 2009 New York Times article by Greg Bishop, "Team Pacquiao has perfected the art of dysfunction. The entourage consists of trainers, assistants to the trainers, advisers, assistants to the advisers, cooks, dishwashers, car washers, publicists, gofers and security." For each fight, Pacquiao also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying his entourage to Las Vegas, buying hundreds of tickets, covering hotel rooms, and providing spending money. In the Times article, Michael Koncz, singled out Pacquiao's Achilles' heel: "The downfall of Pacquiao, if there is one, will be his kindness and generosity. At some point, I fear that's going to catch up to him." Beyond Pacquiao's generosity, he reportedly squandered millions from gambling. That doesn't even account for his fleet of cars and extensive property holdings, including houses, condos, apartments and such an intense desire to give his money away to the poor he had to hire people simply charged with the responsibility to apologize and prevent him from throwing money at all the open hands spread out before him.

I flew out to Houston to interview George Foreman, one of boxing's rare success stories. What was Big George's secret? After the success of his signature grill (the Times reported in 1999 that the George Foreman Grill had already earned him in excess of $150 million) and a second reign as heavyweight champion, Foreman is reportedly now worth nearly a quarter billion dollars. Yet, before we could start the interview, with a note of gentle caution, George's son, George V, asked me to avoid any slippery questions with dates and names. "His head's fine," George V smiled reassuringly, "Pop's just getting a little older is all."

Then George V's father strolled majestically into his living room in a gray suit wearing Crocs. His infomercial smile beamed hospitality until it broke into sudden concern, "Please folks, I jus' ask you, don't make me go back too far in my memory. I don't like to be reminded some of my best fights was 40 years ago."

"Why are you one of the few happy endings in this game?" I asked him.

"Boxing is the number one sport in every man's mind," George smiled. "Being champion of the world meant a lot to me. For a short period. You're up. You're famous. You're rich. Then you lose," Foreman laughed. "You lose a boxing match and you crawl into a hole and there's hardly anything that can get you out of that hole. Then you're on the verge of ‘I don't care anything about life.' I know what success is and failure is and success was short lived. Some of us had all kinds of riches, but that didn't mean we found any kind of happiness.  There's a loneliness to being the heavyweight champion."

"I know you came from a rough background," I began.

"What fighter didn't?" George snickered, glancing at his knuckles.

George was right. It was a poor man's game. Boxing has no middle class. You're either a millionaire or you need a second job. Whatever amount a fighter signs to fight for, no contract in sports bleeds more money in all directions faster than boxing. Don King used to ask many of his fighters to sign blank contracts. And they signed their lives away. Those same fighters would happily accept King's offer of $10,000 in cash up front against a million dollars next week. Most boxers have to keep going until the bones have been picked dry. Then, when they have nothing left, no place to go, they simply go back to where they came, with nothing.

It's not an accident Donald Trump names everything after himself. It betrays a central fact about the fundamental emptiness of the legacy that Trump will leave behind. Who else would ever name anything after him? Imagine how you'd feel about a society that did. What exactly has Trump achieved or owned that stands a chance of inspiring future generations to attach his name to anything? This is because outside of Trump's net financial worth, his ultimate value inspires nothing.

It's no different for fighters. The value of a boxer's legacy simply isn't determined by what he has; the greats are remembered for what they give of themselves.

This is the central difference between Pacquiao and Mayweather. No matter how much Mayweather out-earns Pacquiao financially, he can never buy his way out of the fact no great champion in history has been more willing to stink out a fight. Mayweather's legacy will be that he was one of the most exciting fighters in the history of boxing until he stepped into the ring. And none of Pacquiao's well-documented personal failings can erase how much of his life he risked and ultimately left behind inside the ropes. The easiest way to score a fight, as HBO announcer Max Kellerman once pointed out, is just to ask, "Who would I rather be?"

Pacquiao and Mayweather should have fought a trilogy by now, their battles as famous as those between Frazier and Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. For the general sports fan, no fight boxing has offered since Tyson left the sport has escaped the shadow of Pacquiao and Mayweather facing each other. For the boxing public, in many ways their respective careers seem like opposite sides of Tyson's. Pacquiao's ruthless style reminds us more than anyone else of Tyson pre-prison, and Mayweather's promotional genius owes a great debt to Tyson post-prison.

Could it still happen? Could the two still fight? And, more importantly, should it still happen? Mayweather's ultimate victory over his nemesis is that for the time being, he no longer needs the fight. Mayweather seems to be coasting his way toward career earnings of half a billion dollars before his contract with Showtime is up, but he should keep in mind how quickly Tyson blew through even more money than Mayweather has earned. Pacquiao, on the other hand, has a lot more uncertainty with his future and innumerably more bills to cover in his present.

Pacquiao's upcoming fight on Nov. 24, just before his 35th birthday, against Brandon Rios, only 27, offers some interesting parallels to the champions of the past. Joe Louis was 37 when he fought Rocky Marciano. Muhammad Ali was a couple years younger when he went up against George Foreman, and a year older when he fought Leon Spinks. Mike Tyson was a year older against Lennox Lewis. Roy Jones Jr. was the same age as Pacquiao when his career took a new, sad course after Antonio Tarver pulverized him in the second round of their rematch. "You got any excuses for tonight, Roy?" Tarver famously answered the referee's query about any questions before the fight. Six minutes later a groggy Roy had a doctor's flashlight in his eyes seeing whether he needed to go the hospital.

Yet for all the parallels between Pacquiao and the ghosts of legendary past boxing champions in the ring, the similarities may be infinitely more corrosive outside the ring. Louis, still mired in debt over back taxes, spent the end of his life in a cowboy hat, coked out of his head, working as a greeter in front of Caesar's Palace. Sonny Liston died nearby, alone, a week's worth of newspapers and sour milk piled up outside the door. Ali's career has left the "Louisville Lip" barely able to mumble out a discernable word. In Philly, Joe Frazier spent his last days sleeping out of the office of his gym. Leon Spinks cleaned toilets at the YMCA after his fighting days were over. Iran Barkley was discovered homeless, sleeping the nights away on a New York subway train. While an aging, rumored to be broke, Roy Jones Jr. flew to distant corners of the globe to get knocked out for whatever money his name could offer, Arturo Gatti was found dead hanging from his wife's purse strap. Tyson, finally having salvaged some vestige of financial solvency and domestic happiness for the first time since declaring bankruptcy after blowing well over $300 million in his fighting career, recently confessed to relapsing. Evander Holyfield, house in foreclosure, a veritable village of children from multiple mothers to support, fights on into his 50s. Most recently, Tommy Morrison died at 44, succumbing to AIDS, the disease he perversely dedicated his last years to insisting he did not have.

Ten minutes after I first met Freddie Roach in Hollywood in March of 2010, he matter-of-factly mentioned that Pacquiao was broke. Every boxing writer learns quickly that Roach loves to toss out juicy quotes, usually followed by a giggle and a, "Hey, but don't be an asshole and report that." I wasn't even there covering or asking about Pacquiao. But this quote? This was Pacquiao when all Floyd Mayweather could do to explain his dominance was hurl steroid accusations. I thought, even hoped, I'd misheard him. Given the toll boxing took on Roach's own health (he had lived with Parkinson's syndrome for many years at that point), it's not always easy to hear his thin voice over the racket in the gym. I thought maybe he'd referenced a prior injury Pacquiao had had — his hand or a rib was "broke" — but by Roach's sad expression, I knew I'd heard him correctly. Arguably the greatest fighter of the era, still at the top of his game, was already broke.

Arguably the greatest fighter of the era, still at the top of his game, was already broke.

Virgil Hill, former WBA light heavyweight and cruiserweight champion, walked into the gym. Nearly 50 years old, he still looked good. Then Roach said Virgil was training for a comeback himself. "Is he broke too?" I asked. Why else would he still be trying to fight? Roach shrugged his shoulders.

We stared at each other for a second until Roach was interrupted and asked for an autograph and a picture with a family from one of a constant stream of fans inundating his gym. Pacquiao's fame at this time, and by extension Roach's, was so enormous that Roach himself had a reality television show with HBO in the works. Crowds waited for hours in the parking lots satisfied with just a glimpse of Pacquiao exiting his sleek black Mercedes. Entire security details were engaged to navigate his arrival before adoring fans at Wild Card for sparring sessions. It was rare not to see celebrities or television crews at his gym hanging around for a piece of the action.

Virtually every profile and story written about Pacquiao celebrated how he was different, what he had, and what he could still accomplish. He could be more than a champion. He already was. He was an icon to an entire country, an actor, a basketball player, a singer, a politician voted to public office in a landslide. Becoming president of the Philippines wasn't out of the question. Yet few of them mentioned the cost, or what he didn't have, or what he was losing. Those stories weren't what people wanted to associate with a rags-to-riches feel-good story like Pacquiao's.

In recent years, Roach's fighters had run up a staggering number of victories and Roach himself had become, as the PR for his memoir announced, "the most famous white man in the Philippines." World champions were lining up to train with him, sing his praises, and get on the gravy train. And while Roach loved the action and attention, everyone appreciated that he was always generous with his good fortune in an unusually humble way. My hunch about that feature of Roach's kindness was that it betrayed an unusual trait, about him, mostly absent in the profession of boxing: Roach was the first to tell anyone that he wasn't sure how long any of this was going to last. But it sure was fun in the meantime. Even then, I wondered how the scene would change after Pacquiao hung around the fair too long.

"He's really broke?" I asked again.

When Roach noticed a few people had heard what he'd said to me, he spoke softer. "Sure. Those checks get split an awful lot of ways and he's living as if he gets to keep every cent before taxes and the split."

I tried to crunch the numbers on Pacquiao's reported earnings compared to what money he would have actually seen. In the two years prior, Pacquiao had laid waste to De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, and Miguel Cotto. All were eight-figure paydays that promised even bigger paydays the next time he fought. Nobody had seen anything like this in boxing since the zenith of Tyson's reign of terror.

Not long after, according to figures Pacquiao filed as a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, he was worth 1.35 billion Filipino pesos — about $31 million. That's less than 20 percent of what he had earned by 2009. Where'd that go? Since then, riding the wave as the world's most exciting and beloved fighter since Muhammad Ali, according to Forbes, he has earned at least another $50 million.

At what cost? How much remains? Fast forward to Pacquiao's life today. Back-to-back losses. Another training camp to prepare for another younger, dangerous opponent with an even more menacing, largely unspoken possibility hovering around him each and every day: This might be it. Even if he isn't shot, most likely his best days are surely behind him, his earning power virtually guaranteed to drop dramatically. And how much is left anyway — any of it? Or is he just a Ponzi scheme? As staggering a résumé as Pacquiao has put together — surely enough to measure as favorably as Mayweather's in many people's eyes — he's paid a far graver price for it, and there may be still more debt to accrue.

“Is this a lonely sport?” I asked Freddie Roach a few months ago.

"Yep," he glared.

"Is that a part of every fighter that they're alone?"

"Pretty much. Yeah. You know, you have the support around you as long as you're winning, but when you stop winning? They fucking go away. The thing is, my mother was very honest with me. What goes up must come down. That was reality. That struck me. That was reality."

"If something goes really wrong with Brandon Rios, are you willing to tell Pacquiao you want him to retire?"

Roach put his head down and looked around his gym at the photos of fighters on the wall, at the mirrors on the other side of the ring, the bags hanging near his front desk.

"You're only going to retire from the sport when you're ready," Roach shrugged, raising a cup of coffee to his lips with a trembling hand. After Roach's own boxing career had ended without earning more than $7,500 for a fight, he found work as a busboy and a telemarketer before reentering boxing as a trainer.

"You're not going to retire when someone tells you," he said. "Because Eddie Futch told me I needed to quit. I says, ‘Well, what's the old man telling me that for? He needs to quit.' I got angry. And, you know, I went against my mentor, my idol, the greatest guy probably ever I met in my life. But the thing was I was frustrated. I put everything into the sport that I have. I don't know how to do anything else. Boxing, I put my whole life into it, and I got nothing out of it. And here I am, 27 years old, him telling me to retire. I'm crying in his office thinking, ‘What the fuck am I going to do with my life?' I fought five more times. On my own. I lost four of the five — so he was right," Roach smiled.

"Did you see this day coming," I asked Roach. "When a fighter like Pacquiao walks into your gym that first day and asks you to train him. Do you ever think about how they'll end up?"

"I was on such a roll there for a while as a trainer," he said.  "I hadn't had a loss in, like, I had like 26 wins and one loss.

I thought for a moment. "And now your three big-name fighters, Amir Khan, Julio Caesar Chavez Jr., and Pacquiao all had major losses. Khan and Chavez Jr. left you after their losses. What happens after Pacquiao?"

"I've asked eight to 10 people to retire, in the middle of their careers," he said. "Or not in the middle, but somewhere along the way. I don't want anyone to end up like me, with a disease that I have to deal with every day of my life. Only one fighter I asked said ‘Yes.' Everyone else told me to either ‘Go fuck myself,' or ‘I'll get another trainer and go on.' I says, ‘That's what you'll have to do.' If I don't think you should fight anymore, I won't train them."

"It's hard to imagine this boxing gym without Pacquiao being a part of it," I said.

"Right now they say, I read in Ring Magazine, ‘Who's In' and ‘Who's Off.' I'm out right now," said Roach. "You lose a couple title shots and, you know, your big guys are getting a little older and maybe a bit further in their careers, maybe on the downside of their careers and now, you're trying to rebuild guys coming up, of course. But, I'm still doing the best I can. Right now, they think I'm out, but I'm doing my best to make my fighters the best they can be. That's the way it goes, you know? That's part of life."

"Time is a vandal," Jimmy Cannon once wrote. Joe Louis was Cannon's hero and he watched Rocky Marciano beat his hero into retirement. Louis was Ali's hero and, in 1980, Ali's hero was pushed in his wheelchair to Caesar's Palace to watch Ali's former sparring partner, Larry Holmes, brutalize him until Ali's trainer, Angelo Dundee, mercifully stopped the fight. Eight years later, in 1988, when Tyson fought an aging Holmes, Tyson's childhood hero, Ali, was there to whisper in Tyson's ear, "Get him for me." And Tyson did, knocking him out in four rounds. Seventeen years later, on June 11, 2005, at age 39, Tyson, two years after filing for bankruptcy, was fighting the unknown journeyman Kevin McBride. He quit on his stool in the seventh round and retired from the sport.

So it goes.

And on Nov. 23, when he fights Rios, Pacquiao has his own date with destiny as our era's most legendary, fading former-champion.

"You know you're finished," Cannon wrote of Louis. "You knew it first. You understand what happened to you better than anyone. You're the guy taking the punches. You share everything in the fight racket but the punches. You have no partners in pain."

After Nike signed Pacquiao to an endorsement deal, in a puzzling marketing decision, Pacquiao frequently wore a T-shirt in training camp that stated: "Manny Knows." It was never made clear what this knowledge was referring to. The meaning, like so much of boxing, was just left hanging there. At this point, I'm not even sure Pacquiao's millions of fans around the world want to know the answer to the most pressing question concerning Pacquiao's career and livelihood. The question itself is pretty obvious and it's the same one all the great fighters eventually have to answer both inside and outside the ring.

How much does he have left?