Post by lazarus on May 21, 2006 10:58:42 GMT -5
GROWING UP WITH ‘1,600 SIBLINGS’ HELPED MOLD CHIEFS ROOKIE
Croyle’s always stood out in crowd
QB learned leadership on a ranch his father started to help out troubled kids
By ELIZABETH MERRILL
The Kansas City Star
Big John Croyle is the one with the soothing Alabama drawl and the stories. He’ll tell you about the man who picked a woman in a trailer over his three boys. The parents who pulled into the driveway and dumped children off like yesterday’s garbage. At Big John’s ranch, there was always room for another place at the table and never time to mope. Never a bad day, that’s the family saying.
Brodie Croyle was 5 when a kid named Joey showed up at the Big Oak Ranch with nothing but the clothes on his back.
“Brodie ran to his room, got all his underwear and G.I. Joe pajamas,” John Croyle says. “He said, ‘You don’t have any clothes. Take mine.’ That boy is 24 years old now, and they’re still friends.
“That’s more important than any touchdown he’ll ever throw.”
Oh, the touchdowns are important, too. Without them, in a place like Alabama, Brodie Croyle is a humanitarian with a Ringo Starr haircut, a God-fearing, country-music-listening boy who loves his mama and his sister and finishes his sentences with “yes ma’am” and “sir.”
He’s not at the front of an autograph line with 4,000 people waiting. True story — after every football game at Alabama, Croyle walked out to his truck and found notes, pictures and phone numbers on his windshield from lovestruck women. Thirty-seven was the record in one day.
That usually solicited an aw-shucks grin from Croyle, but rarely embarrassment. For 23 years, Big John’s son has had people watching him, whether it was the hardened eyes of the boys at Big Oak or the scrutinizing glare of a football-crazed state.
Now Croyle is alone. He walks in the huddle on a steamy afternoon in Kansas City, the first full-scale minicamp of his rookie season. At 6 feet 2 and 206 pounds, he looks small. Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham is yelling, for the love of God, for the defense to GET THE BALL.
Croyle tugs on his shiny new red helmet, takes the snap, and misfires in a swarm of traffic. He slaps his hands together. It’s not a bad day.
“I like his demeanor,” Chiefs coach Herm Edwards says. “There’s always a prototypical quarterback and a way they should look. But they come in all shapes and sizes …”
Edwards points to his head.
“And he has it right here. That’s the key.”
John Brodie Croyle got his first bike when he was 2, and Big John and his wife, Tee, were getting ready to put training wheels on it. First, Big John wanted to try something. They sat the bike on a grassy hill and plopped their only son on it.
Brodie had this look on his face. It said, “OK, let’s go.”
“We pushed him down the hill,” Big John says. “The first time, he fell. The second time, he didn’t. I told my wife, ‘I don’t know much, but that ain’t normal.’
“He’s always been able to do anything he put his mind to.”
Big John Croyle was a hard-nosed defensive end at Alabama, a second-team All-American for Bear Bryant in 1973. He could’ve played pro ball, but something knocked him off course one summer in college. Working at a camp, John met a kid whose mother was a prostitute. The little boy collected the money and knocked on the door to tell her when the next customer had arrived.
That inspired the elder Croyle to start Big Oak Ranch, a home for abandoned and abused boys that eventually grew into a separate home for girls. Nestled in the cedars of northeast Alabama, far away from the Saturday screams in Tuscaloosa, the ranch, in some form, has been home for the Croyles’ extended family for more than 30 years.
The boys’ ranch sits on 143 acres in Southside, Ala., and has nine residential homes, a swimming pool and gymnasium. It’s where fathers drop off their sons for good and kids wander in for a meal and a bath. Until his senior year of high school, Brodie was up at 6 a.m. to tend to the horses and chickens and lived on the ranch with hundreds of boys he called brothers.
They played football together and roughed up the head man’s son. Some nights, Brodie came home covered in scratches from the kids throwing him in the briars. “Who did it?” John would ask. Brodie would never snitch.
When Croyle interviewed with the Chiefs, he was asked how many siblings he had. Croyle said somewhere around 1,600.
“Anything and everything I do is because of the ranch,” he says, “even football-wise. Learning how to be a leader, learning how to handle people, that’s all from the ranch. I grew up with so many different types of people that I know how to handle the guys that need a little pushing to get ’em going and I know the guys you just kind of pat on the butt and say, ‘Let’s go.’
“I didn’t really look at it as discipline. It was more of a way of life for me.”
Croyle was a natural at baseball — he had scouts after him — but football was always his love. That’s the way it is in Alabama. He went to tiny Westbrook Christian, led his team to the state championship game as a freshman and was shattering state records as a sophomore.
Every major college wanted him by opening night of his senior year, when he planted his leg and took a massive hit that tore his knee. It was the first of a litany of injuries that battered his body but solidified his resolve.
Croyle was sitting up at 3 a.m. the night of the knee injury when his father asked if he was OK.
“Yessir,” Brodie said.
“What are you thinking?” John asked.
“Well, it gives me 4 1/2 months to get ready.”
Tee Croyle is the one in the family who can read people like the back of an old Southern romance novel, and from the start, something didn’t sit right with Brodie’s mama and University of Alabama coach Dennis Franchione.
For starters, Franchione ran an option-based offense, something that didn’t exactly fit the skills of a rocket-armed kid who threw for 528 yards in one game. The threat of NCAA sanctions was looming, too. Brodie made crimson hearts go pitter-patter when he picked the Tide, but he stepped into a program hit with NCAA probation, three coaching changes and three new offenses.
Then came the hard-core, bone-jarring pain. Croyle played his sophomore year with cracked ribs, a separated rib and a dislocated shoulder with a torn labrum. He took a hit that split open his chin and probably dislocated his jaw. A couple of years later, Croyle’s jaw still pops from the blow.
“He continued to get up,” Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Dave Rader says. “He continued to play ball when he took some hard hits. Mentally, I really don’t ever recall him being out of a game. His mental toughness even exceeds his physical toughness.”
Big John taught Brodie that toughness. He never thought about quitting, even after another knee injury ended his junior year. He never thought about sitting when he struggled to breathe in the huddle because of his injuries.
“I was always told, if I ever don’t get up from a game, my season had better be done,” Croyle says. “I think that’s just the old Bear Bryant-play-hurt-and-don’t-say-anything-about-it. That’s just the way I was raised, I guess.”
Playing behind the youngest line in the Southeastern Conference, Croyle’s quick release and ability to read defenses got him out of some jams. But Alabama’s program seemed doomed from Croyle’s start. First there was Franchione’s departure, then Mike Price’s scandal and quick exit.
When Mike Shula came in May 2003, it was too late for spring practice, and the Tide had a summer to learn another new offense. Croyle mastered it, then taught his teammates.
With a battered Brodie, Alabama went 4-9 in 2003. He still threw for 2,303 yards. Senior year, with his injuries finally behind him, Croyle led the Tide to a 10-2 record and threw 190 passes without an interception.
“With his composure and leadership in the huddle with those young guys, he kept them all together,” Rader says. “In the last minute of the game, our guys all wanted him to have the ball in his hands.
“He had some difficult moments, and when we got here, I don’t think our team was as strong emotionally as it was when he was a senior. Some guys weren’t totally sold on playing for a team that had been through three coaches and been through probation and sanctions and things like that. You look back on it, and you become stronger over it. And I think he became stronger from it, too. Because of the strength of his character, he helped us make it through it.”
In one week in Kansas City, Croyle has been approached by roughly 10 die-hards, the ones who know his picture from the draft or a message board. There are no screaming women, no embarrassing propositions, no hype.
Croyle wears No. 4, which is about the spot he’d sit on any unofficial depth chart, somewhere between three and four. The Chiefs don’t often draft first-day quarterbacks — they’ve been burned by the likes of Todd Blackledge and Matt Blundin — but Croyle isn’t a gamble to Chiefs president/general manager Carl Peterson.
With veteran quarterback Trent Green almost 36, and backup Damon Huard tossing just one official pass in the last five seasons, Croyle and former CFL star Casey Printers represent the future, the yellow-jerseyed hope for a franchise that has lived off its offense.
“They’re two very good young prospects,” Peterson says. “Right now, it’s still early.”
On Saturday, Croyle walks past Peterson on the way to the locker room, and Peterson pats him on the back. The great thing about Croyle and Printers, the Chiefs say, is that they don’t have to play right now. They can learn and get stronger.
For Croyle, the strength questions are always there. Can a 206-pound quarterback play in the NFL? Can he stay healthy? They’re the same questions that dogged Green as an undersized quarterback coming out of Indiana and a veteran with knee issues before he came to Kansas City.
Green has gone to two Pro Bowls and started 80 straight games for the Chiefs.
“I don’t know if I was that calm (as a rookie),” Green says. “He really carries himself well. It probably comes from Alabama and playing in a lot of big games and the pressure that was there. … I just think he has a different calmness about him than I had at that stage of my career.”
On Friday mornings before home games, Big John used to drive 119 miles to Tuscaloosa to eat breakfast with his son at Cracker Barrel. They’d sit for 30 minutes reading the newspaper. Sometimes, they wouldn’t talk at all.
“I miss it, but he’s a man now,” John says.
A man who took his truck to Kansas City to bring a little bit of Alabama to the Heartland. A boy who pulled himself out of the briars and into the NFL.
“He’s in the NFL now, and it’s time to move on,” John says. “We’re not really sentimental.
“He plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, and he’s very loyal,” John says. “He’s committed to that organization. If you’re his friend, he’ll crawl in a ditch and be with you ’til the war’s over.”
To view the Web site of the Croyles’ Big Oak Ranch, go to www.bigoak.org
Croyle’s always stood out in crowd
QB learned leadership on a ranch his father started to help out troubled kids
By ELIZABETH MERRILL
The Kansas City Star
Big John Croyle is the one with the soothing Alabama drawl and the stories. He’ll tell you about the man who picked a woman in a trailer over his three boys. The parents who pulled into the driveway and dumped children off like yesterday’s garbage. At Big John’s ranch, there was always room for another place at the table and never time to mope. Never a bad day, that’s the family saying.
Brodie Croyle was 5 when a kid named Joey showed up at the Big Oak Ranch with nothing but the clothes on his back.
“Brodie ran to his room, got all his underwear and G.I. Joe pajamas,” John Croyle says. “He said, ‘You don’t have any clothes. Take mine.’ That boy is 24 years old now, and they’re still friends.
“That’s more important than any touchdown he’ll ever throw.”
Oh, the touchdowns are important, too. Without them, in a place like Alabama, Brodie Croyle is a humanitarian with a Ringo Starr haircut, a God-fearing, country-music-listening boy who loves his mama and his sister and finishes his sentences with “yes ma’am” and “sir.”
He’s not at the front of an autograph line with 4,000 people waiting. True story — after every football game at Alabama, Croyle walked out to his truck and found notes, pictures and phone numbers on his windshield from lovestruck women. Thirty-seven was the record in one day.
That usually solicited an aw-shucks grin from Croyle, but rarely embarrassment. For 23 years, Big John’s son has had people watching him, whether it was the hardened eyes of the boys at Big Oak or the scrutinizing glare of a football-crazed state.
Now Croyle is alone. He walks in the huddle on a steamy afternoon in Kansas City, the first full-scale minicamp of his rookie season. At 6 feet 2 and 206 pounds, he looks small. Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham is yelling, for the love of God, for the defense to GET THE BALL.
Croyle tugs on his shiny new red helmet, takes the snap, and misfires in a swarm of traffic. He slaps his hands together. It’s not a bad day.
“I like his demeanor,” Chiefs coach Herm Edwards says. “There’s always a prototypical quarterback and a way they should look. But they come in all shapes and sizes …”
Edwards points to his head.
“And he has it right here. That’s the key.”
John Brodie Croyle got his first bike when he was 2, and Big John and his wife, Tee, were getting ready to put training wheels on it. First, Big John wanted to try something. They sat the bike on a grassy hill and plopped their only son on it.
Brodie had this look on his face. It said, “OK, let’s go.”
“We pushed him down the hill,” Big John says. “The first time, he fell. The second time, he didn’t. I told my wife, ‘I don’t know much, but that ain’t normal.’
“He’s always been able to do anything he put his mind to.”
Big John Croyle was a hard-nosed defensive end at Alabama, a second-team All-American for Bear Bryant in 1973. He could’ve played pro ball, but something knocked him off course one summer in college. Working at a camp, John met a kid whose mother was a prostitute. The little boy collected the money and knocked on the door to tell her when the next customer had arrived.
That inspired the elder Croyle to start Big Oak Ranch, a home for abandoned and abused boys that eventually grew into a separate home for girls. Nestled in the cedars of northeast Alabama, far away from the Saturday screams in Tuscaloosa, the ranch, in some form, has been home for the Croyles’ extended family for more than 30 years.
The boys’ ranch sits on 143 acres in Southside, Ala., and has nine residential homes, a swimming pool and gymnasium. It’s where fathers drop off their sons for good and kids wander in for a meal and a bath. Until his senior year of high school, Brodie was up at 6 a.m. to tend to the horses and chickens and lived on the ranch with hundreds of boys he called brothers.
They played football together and roughed up the head man’s son. Some nights, Brodie came home covered in scratches from the kids throwing him in the briars. “Who did it?” John would ask. Brodie would never snitch.
When Croyle interviewed with the Chiefs, he was asked how many siblings he had. Croyle said somewhere around 1,600.
“Anything and everything I do is because of the ranch,” he says, “even football-wise. Learning how to be a leader, learning how to handle people, that’s all from the ranch. I grew up with so many different types of people that I know how to handle the guys that need a little pushing to get ’em going and I know the guys you just kind of pat on the butt and say, ‘Let’s go.’
“I didn’t really look at it as discipline. It was more of a way of life for me.”
Croyle was a natural at baseball — he had scouts after him — but football was always his love. That’s the way it is in Alabama. He went to tiny Westbrook Christian, led his team to the state championship game as a freshman and was shattering state records as a sophomore.
Every major college wanted him by opening night of his senior year, when he planted his leg and took a massive hit that tore his knee. It was the first of a litany of injuries that battered his body but solidified his resolve.
Croyle was sitting up at 3 a.m. the night of the knee injury when his father asked if he was OK.
“Yessir,” Brodie said.
“What are you thinking?” John asked.
“Well, it gives me 4 1/2 months to get ready.”
Tee Croyle is the one in the family who can read people like the back of an old Southern romance novel, and from the start, something didn’t sit right with Brodie’s mama and University of Alabama coach Dennis Franchione.
For starters, Franchione ran an option-based offense, something that didn’t exactly fit the skills of a rocket-armed kid who threw for 528 yards in one game. The threat of NCAA sanctions was looming, too. Brodie made crimson hearts go pitter-patter when he picked the Tide, but he stepped into a program hit with NCAA probation, three coaching changes and three new offenses.
Then came the hard-core, bone-jarring pain. Croyle played his sophomore year with cracked ribs, a separated rib and a dislocated shoulder with a torn labrum. He took a hit that split open his chin and probably dislocated his jaw. A couple of years later, Croyle’s jaw still pops from the blow.
“He continued to get up,” Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Dave Rader says. “He continued to play ball when he took some hard hits. Mentally, I really don’t ever recall him being out of a game. His mental toughness even exceeds his physical toughness.”
Big John taught Brodie that toughness. He never thought about quitting, even after another knee injury ended his junior year. He never thought about sitting when he struggled to breathe in the huddle because of his injuries.
“I was always told, if I ever don’t get up from a game, my season had better be done,” Croyle says. “I think that’s just the old Bear Bryant-play-hurt-and-don’t-say-anything-about-it. That’s just the way I was raised, I guess.”
Playing behind the youngest line in the Southeastern Conference, Croyle’s quick release and ability to read defenses got him out of some jams. But Alabama’s program seemed doomed from Croyle’s start. First there was Franchione’s departure, then Mike Price’s scandal and quick exit.
When Mike Shula came in May 2003, it was too late for spring practice, and the Tide had a summer to learn another new offense. Croyle mastered it, then taught his teammates.
With a battered Brodie, Alabama went 4-9 in 2003. He still threw for 2,303 yards. Senior year, with his injuries finally behind him, Croyle led the Tide to a 10-2 record and threw 190 passes without an interception.
“With his composure and leadership in the huddle with those young guys, he kept them all together,” Rader says. “In the last minute of the game, our guys all wanted him to have the ball in his hands.
“He had some difficult moments, and when we got here, I don’t think our team was as strong emotionally as it was when he was a senior. Some guys weren’t totally sold on playing for a team that had been through three coaches and been through probation and sanctions and things like that. You look back on it, and you become stronger over it. And I think he became stronger from it, too. Because of the strength of his character, he helped us make it through it.”
In one week in Kansas City, Croyle has been approached by roughly 10 die-hards, the ones who know his picture from the draft or a message board. There are no screaming women, no embarrassing propositions, no hype.
Croyle wears No. 4, which is about the spot he’d sit on any unofficial depth chart, somewhere between three and four. The Chiefs don’t often draft first-day quarterbacks — they’ve been burned by the likes of Todd Blackledge and Matt Blundin — but Croyle isn’t a gamble to Chiefs president/general manager Carl Peterson.
With veteran quarterback Trent Green almost 36, and backup Damon Huard tossing just one official pass in the last five seasons, Croyle and former CFL star Casey Printers represent the future, the yellow-jerseyed hope for a franchise that has lived off its offense.
“They’re two very good young prospects,” Peterson says. “Right now, it’s still early.”
On Saturday, Croyle walks past Peterson on the way to the locker room, and Peterson pats him on the back. The great thing about Croyle and Printers, the Chiefs say, is that they don’t have to play right now. They can learn and get stronger.
For Croyle, the strength questions are always there. Can a 206-pound quarterback play in the NFL? Can he stay healthy? They’re the same questions that dogged Green as an undersized quarterback coming out of Indiana and a veteran with knee issues before he came to Kansas City.
Green has gone to two Pro Bowls and started 80 straight games for the Chiefs.
“I don’t know if I was that calm (as a rookie),” Green says. “He really carries himself well. It probably comes from Alabama and playing in a lot of big games and the pressure that was there. … I just think he has a different calmness about him than I had at that stage of my career.”
On Friday mornings before home games, Big John used to drive 119 miles to Tuscaloosa to eat breakfast with his son at Cracker Barrel. They’d sit for 30 minutes reading the newspaper. Sometimes, they wouldn’t talk at all.
“I miss it, but he’s a man now,” John says.
A man who took his truck to Kansas City to bring a little bit of Alabama to the Heartland. A boy who pulled himself out of the briars and into the NFL.
“He’s in the NFL now, and it’s time to move on,” John says. “We’re not really sentimental.
“He plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, and he’s very loyal,” John says. “He’s committed to that organization. If you’re his friend, he’ll crawl in a ditch and be with you ’til the war’s over.”
To view the Web site of the Croyles’ Big Oak Ranch, go to www.bigoak.org