Pat Tillman: A True American Hero
November 11, 2015
By Kyle Prudhomme
Pat Tillman wasn’t a household name when he played in the NFL. He didn’t draw the attention that the likes of J.J. Watt, Darrelle Revis and Clay Matthews garner these days for their defensive play. But he left a strong football career to become a U.S. hero.
After passing up NFL contracts worth millions of dollars, Tillman exchanged his football cleats for combat boots and paid the ultimate price by giving his life for his country.
Born in 1976 in Fremont, Calif., Tillman was a high-school football standout who landed a scholarship with the Arizona State Sun Devils.
At Arizona State, Tillman was a workhorse in both the classroom and on the gridiron, earning awards for academic excellence while also helping his team earn a bid for the Sun Bowl in 1997.
As a linebacker Tillman led the team that year with 93 tackles, 47 of which were unassisted. He was named the most valuable player for the Sun Devils. He was named Pac-10 defensive player of the year. He earned second-team All-American status. At the same time, his work in the classroom helped him graduate with a 3.84 GPA and a degree in marketing that took him just three years to obtain.
Tillman’s dreams of being a professional football player were fulfilled in 1998, when the Arizona Cardinals picked him with the 226th overall pick of the draft.
A major question mark that surrounded Tillman before the draft was the size needed to play the linebacker position in the NFL.
At 5 foot 11 and 204 pounds, Tillman was too small to play the position in the NFL, but the Cardinals had an idea for the hard-hitting middle man and moved him to safety.
He instantly excelled at the position and was on the rise as a defensive asset. During the 2000 season he set the Arizona Cardinals single-season record, recording 109 tackles.
The following off-season, the St. Louis Rams tried to lure Tillman from a place he had called home since his college days, offering him a contract worth $9 million, much more than he was making with Arizona. Tillman declined the offer, choosing loyalty to the team that drafted him.
After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Tillman faced another decision between loyalty and comfort and following the conclusion of the season Tillman declined a contract extension from the Cardinals worth $3.6 million in order to join the U.S. Army.
Alongside his brother Kevin, a professional baseball player with the Cleveland Indians, Tillman went through the intensity of basic training and the duo stood out in their class.
Together they became U.S Army Rangers, no easy task even for a couple of professional athletes. Physically the training is tough, but is nothing compared to the mental and emotional aspects of the Ranger Indoctrination Program (R.I.P for short).
As a Ranger Tillman was getting paid peanuts compared to what he would have while playing for Arizona. With a specialist rank (E-4), his pay was just over $1,600 a month before taxes.
Pat and his brother Kevin were assigned to the second battalion of the 75th Ranger regiment in Fort Lewis, Wash, with each of them serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On April 22, 2004, while on tour in Eastern Afghanistan, Pat Tillman was killed, with first reports saying his death was caused by enemy forces during an ambush but later reports determining that he had been killed by friendly fire.
During a national memorial on May 3, 2004, Tillman was deemed an American hero for his sacrifices, receiving the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.
As he wrote in a document titled “Decision” in 2002, “Sports embodied many of the qualities I deem meaningful … However, these last few years, and especially after recent events, I’ve come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is.”
Tillman’s role will never be defined by a seven-figure contract or career numbers on the field. His role as an American hero will forever be defined by the grace in which he declined the very thing a lot of us yearn for, giving his life in the process of protecting the country from all enemies foreign and domestic.
As we celebrate veterans today, let us remember such heroes as Pat Tillman who taught us that loyalty – to your team, to your country – is the most important trait somebody can carry.
Guy Montag • Nov 11, 2015 at 4:39 pm
The NFL have turned Pat Tillman into a lifeless patriotic icon, instead of celebrating his iconoclastic nature (e.g. the man who told a fellow Ranger in Iraq that “This war is so —-ing illegal!). Pat Tillman’s legacy is not all about glory. It’s about secrets, lies and death, too. The top leadership of the Army, Congress, and the Presidency (both Bush and Obama administrations) betrayed the Tillman family by their cover-up of Pat Tillman’s 2004 friendly-fire death and/or their whitewash of those responsible.
Today, the NFL exploits the death of Pat Tillman for propaganda(something he refused to do while alive), yet in 2008 they refused to help the Tillman family in their search for the truth. I guess the NFL figures they’ve put up a statue, had a jersey dedication, paid for the Tillman USO, fundraise for the Pat Tillman Foundation … time to move on. Ironically, during the 2009 Superbowl with the Arizona Cardinals (Pat Tillman’s team), playing the Steelers, he was barely a footnote.
Pat Tillman was enshrined as an icon while the man fell by the wayside. On this Veteran’s Day we should honor Pat Tillman’s memory by honoring the man, not the myth. The iconoclast, not the icon. As his mother said, “Pat would have wanted to be remembered as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”
If you want to learn about the real Pat Tillman, see the documentary “The Tillman Story,” read Mary Tillman’s book “Boots on the Ground by Dusk”(at blurb.com with preview), Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory,” or browse my Feral Firefighter posts
Guy Montag • Nov 11, 2015 at 4:06 pm
“As we celebrate veterans today, let us remember such heroes as Pat Tillman who taught us that loyalty – to your team, to your country – is the most important trait somebody can carry.”
Yeah, I’m big on loyalty. Too bad it’s not a two-way street (speaking as a former ABNR RGR who spent 8 years as a LRRP and the last 25 years as a firefighter). Here’s a few quotes from my Feral Firefighter blog on the subject:
“I was so ready, so eager to fight and now I pay, richly pay, for having fought. … I guess that’s what the world does to you. It makes you realize that honor and loyalty are traps with no reward.”
— James Webb, “A Sense of Honor” (1981)
“We felt it [the Iraq War] was illegal and unjust. ‘I’ll do my job,’ Pat told me one night before he left … ‘But I don’t think our role there is virtuous at all.’ … his feelings on the matter certainly dampened his enthusiasm about service” … ‘… at the time I felt that any absence would be tolerable due to the “cause” or whatever concept I deluded myself into believing I was standing for. I’m a fool.’”
— Marie Tillman , “The Letter ” (2012)
“For Mary Tillman, what the army did to her son made a mockery of everything he went to war for — honesty, integrity, the defence of the truth. ‘If you ask me if I trust our system now, the answer is I’m pretty disgusted by it. Unfortunately in our culture people survive more effectively through lies and deception and dishonourable behaviour than they do the reverse. And that’s very sad.’”
— Mick Brown, “Betrayal of an All-American Hero,” UK Guardian (Oct. 7, 2010)