![]() Most of Tillman’s teammates had no idea the linebacker climbed the light tower. “At this point,” he told Tillman, “you just got to trust me.”Īs Snyder and Snow talked in Snow’s office, word of the photo began to spread throughout the ASU locker room. At that moment, Layden felt it, but he held his ground. Tillman wasn’t big - listed at just 5 feet 11, 206 pounds - but he had an intimidating presence. ![]() “You’re not going to write any of that are you?” Tillman asked. Upon release, his conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor, but most of this, if not all, was unknown publicly. Before arriving in Tempe to start college, he served 30 days in a juvenile detention facility and completed 250 hours of community service. Weeks later, Tillman was arrested and charged as a juvenile with felony assault. “Tell me more.”ĭuring his senior year at Leland High, Tillman had come to the aid of a friend in a fight outside a pizza parlor. “Yeah,” he said, according to the journalist. “His personality was like nothing I had ever experienced in a college athlete.”Īs the interview concluded, just to cover himself, Layden asked: “Is there anything else I need to know so as to not embarrass myself here? If I look around, am I going to find that you have been in trouble? Like, have you ever been in jail?” “I had been in the company of a lot of college football players, and Pat just completely knocked me off my feet with his straightforwardness,” Layden said. On Monday of ASU’s rivalry week - the Sun Devils still were in contention for a share of the Pac-10 title - he met Tillman, a hard-hitting linebacker known regionally but maybe not so well nationally. He had profiled quarterback Jake Plummer the previous season, so he was familiar with Tempe and ASU’s media relations staff. He just remembers wanting to do something different, something off the national-championship path. Not much later, the sportswriter jumped on a flight bound for Phoenix.Īll these years later, Layden’s not exactly sure why he decided to profile Pat Tillman. 1 Michigan’s 20-14 home win over rival Ohio State. In 1997, Tim Layden covered college football for Sports Illustrated, which meant he wrote a feature story nearly every week of the season. But even today, nearly 22 years after it was taken, this photo of Pat Tillman remains powerful. A man who was raised in California yet blossomed in Arizona, playing both for the Sun Devils and Arizona Cardinals before stepping away to serve his country. A snapshot of a man who’s had books written and documentaries made about his 27 years on Earth. “It really does seem to reveal something about Pat’s inner life,” Krakauer explained in an email to The Athletic. Army, Jon Krakauer would study the photo of Tillman in the light tower, looking for insight into his soul. While he wrote “Where Men Win Glory,” a national bestseller that examined Tillman and detailed his decision to leave professional football to join the U.S. The day the entire country - including ASU’s coaching staff and many of the linebacker’s teammates - discovered that Pat Tillman liked to climb to the highest point of Sun Devil Stadium just to sit and reflect, to get above all the noise.Įven today, 15 years after Tillman was killed while on military duty in Afghanistan, the photo remains memorable because of what it captures: The essence of a man who was not afraid to challenge himself, someone who was much deeper than what fans saw on the field, someone who craved something beyond the norm. ![]() It’s often said that every picture tells a story. “Pat’s sitting on that light standard,” Snyder said. In his sixth season in Tempe, Snyder pointed to a light tower above the stadium press box, 200 feet from the ground. From here, he could see all of Sun Devil Stadium. ![]() “Well, Coach, it’s Pat sitting,” Snow said. His feet rested on a rusted railing as he looked west, the football field far below him in the background. The senior linebacker was casually dressed in jeans, a beige buttondown and flip flops. He recognized Pat Tillman, recently honored as the Pac-10’s Defensive Player of the Year and as an Academic All-American. “Snow, what the hell is this?” Snyder asked. ![]()
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