Les Carpenter
Yahoosports.com
NEW YORK – The photograph is static; a moment new to history but already distant in time. Splashed across the wall, deep down a corridor inside the NFL's offices, David Tyree is trapped in jumbo color, with Rodney Harrison forever on his shoulder, a football on his helmet held there with his gloved hand and a determination to never let it go.
The man on the wall stands before himself in real life. It's been five years now and there are probably ways Tyree would rather walk to his work cubicle than past an 8-foot picture of the instant he became famous. He never thought his life was about this thing everyone calls "The Greatest Catch in Super Bowl History." He didn't even know he had pinned the ball to his head until he was asked in the postgame media conference.
People are always asking him to pose with a football on his head. And so there are shots of him standing in empty stadiums or on the top of the Empire State Building with a bashful smile on his face and a ball pressed against his skull. But in posing this way he is imitating the picture on the wall. He never felt the ball on his helmet when he was making The Greatest Catch in Super Bowl History. He pretends and pantomimes the play – greatness he will never fully grasp – because he knows that's what the person with the camera wants him to do.
For a long time he smiled at the questions about the catch while thinking to himself, "OK, let's get through this." His wife, Leilah, used to look at the pictures and the highlights of the catch and see not a ball on a helmet but the man with whom she has seven children.
"I hope they will see him in the entirety of him," she says.
His world now is with the men who were like him, those retiring from football or who have already left. He tells them about benefits most of them don't know they have and the opportunities to get degrees and places to find jobs. He travels to team facilities, stepping into locker rooms, shaking players' hands. They know who he is, of course, because who doesn't know about the man on the wall? And so David Tyree has come to think of the catch as a very good thing. A moment trapped for eternity is always a better introduction than a business card.
View Full Article