My First Coach by Gary Myers

Author:Gary Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation / Football
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

RYAN FITZPATRICK

The Harvard Man

Mike Fitzpatrick pulled his car up in front of his son Ryan’s dorm at Harvard University to begin the process of moving him in for his freshman year at the finest college in the country.

Many universities with big-time football programs will house the freshmen athletes together, giving them a chance to bond, or place them in a location that makes it easier to get to practice every day. Harvard was different. Football players roomed with government majors who roomed with computer science students who roomed with premed students who roomed with future presidents.

One big, happy, very smart family.

It didn’t take long for Ryan Fitzpatrick, from Gilbert, Arizona, to understand that Harvard was a unique kind of place. He had lived with the football players for two weeks of summer training camp before moving into his assigned dormitory for the school year. He had been assigned to Grays, a dorm in Elm Yard, part of the famed Harvard Yard. It was a four-story building constructed in 1863.

His parents had come out to meet him once he was able to move into Grays.

As the Fitzpatricks unloaded his belongings and all things necessary to survive freshman year, a large van parked right behind them. It was the fall of 2001. Ryan immediately noticed Secret Service agents surrounding the van.

“What the heck is going on?” he said.

Ten months earlier, Al Gore, the vice president, had lost to George W. Bush in the most controversial presidential election in United States history, complete with hanging chads. Now the door of the van opened and Al and Tipper Gore and their freshman son, Albert Gore III, emerged.

Mike turned to Ryan and whispered, “We ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

Gore III walked onto the football team as a lineman. “He was on the team at least for one year,” Ryan said. “He wasn’t on the team very long.”

Ryan Fitzpatrick’s high school was 99 percent white and 85 percent Mormon (his family is not) and 0 percent children of a former vice president.

“You’re just thrown in with everybody else,” he said. “So that was one of the coolest parts for me. One of my roommates was from Newport Beach in California, but he had been going to a boarding school since he was eight. Another was from Madison, New Jersey, and he talked funny and had a big nose. There was another kid that was Indian. I grew up where everybody was the same. Then I went to Harvard and I said, ‘Oh my gosh. This is what the world is like. Holy crap.’ It was an eye-opening experience for me.”

The Ivy League produces a lot of politicians, lawyers, doctors, even dropouts who invent Facebook and just eggheads who go on to become the stars of whatever field they choose. NFL quarterbacks and other players? Well, not so much. Harvard has turned out eight presidents of the United States, but Fitzpatrick is its only quarterback.

It may not rival the Big 10 or the SEC, but that’s because student

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.