Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Pac Blog Choose Blog Choose Blog What the heck was Jake Plummer thinking? Meet the walk-on who is Stanford's only quarterback in spring practice.
How did Willie Taggart's departure affect Devon Williams' recruitment? The best games of next year's opening weekend. Brown to USC. Caesars Sportsbook to feature Peyton Manning and family in new commercials.
How the Broncos absolutely demolished the Cowboys' top-tier offense. Broncos injury report: Pat Surtain did not practice Wednesday.
Broncos will wear orange Color Rush uniforms vs. Error Please enter an email address. Success Thanks for signing up. Please check your email for a confirmation. Error Something went wrong. It is a fall weekend in , and in a few minutes he'll be playing a pro-am handball match.
From his rumpled blue sports bag he pulls out a Ziploc bag full of white pellets, tosses two into his mouth and takes a swig of beer from a red plastic cup. Properly jazzed, Plummer hops onto the court and engages in a spirited warmup, leaping and raising his knees high and smacking his hands together.
He is wearing a faded white T-shirt that says wonder bread, cutoff gray sweatpants, thick gray sweat socks and a grungy white headband. His hair is long and stringy, his beard robust.
He looks as if he just wandered off the Appalachian Trail. Until he starts throwing, that is. Right-, then lefthanded, Plummer fires the small, hard rubber ball against the front wall of the court, loosening up his arm.
The ball detonates with remarkable violence. Watching him, lean and agile and powerful at 6' 2" and about pounds, it's hard not to conclude that, at 35, Jake Plummer could still be a damn good NFL quarterback. In an hour Plummer will leave the court drenched in sweat and on his third T-shirt, grinning like a man at his own wedding and high-fiving his teammate. In 12 hours he will be at a bar with odd handball players, acting as host and designated driver as they regale one another with tales of kick serves and back-wall shots and lives lived in translucent byfoot glass boxes.
And in 30 hours Plummer will be at his modest summer lake house outside Coeur d'Alene, with his dogs and his wife and his infant son, and he will be drinking a Molson and talking about why he left the NFL. But that is all to come.
For now, let's go back to the last thing most Denver fans remember about Jake Plummer. Screw it, thought Plummer, I'm going to win this thing. It was the last game of the season, against the lowly 49ers, and he had been summoned from the Broncos' sideline.
Only a month earlier coach Mike Shanahan had benched Plummer, a year veteran, in favor of a strong-armed but immature rookie, Jay Cutler. The team, which had been , faltered. At first Plummer, who'd been an All-Pro only a season earlier, had been angry about the demotion.
Ever the optimist, though, he soon noticed a silver lining. Suddenly he could simply revel in the grandeur of the game, in the sights and smells of the stadium. He spent pregame warmups playing football golf with fellow backup Preston Parsons. He ate hot dogs at halftime, joked with fans. For 14 years he'd started every game for his college and pro teams, other than the first few of his freshman and rookie seasons.
So now he could finally breathe in the world. Then, in the second quarter of the 49ers game, Cutler was sidelined by a crushing hit. So here was Shanahan, calling in Plummer. Shanahan, who had questioned Plummer's work ethic even though he was one of the team's best-conditioned players, who had ignored warnings by other players not to switch quarterbacks.
What's more, though Shanahan didn't know it, Plummer had made up his mind to retire after the season. So how can you blame Plummer for doing what he did next—for going out on the field and trying to win the damn thing? And the first guy to pick him up was me. I was running alongside him. I was so psyched. I was running around, shouting at the other team, 'Jake the F Snake is back!
Parsons remembers the electricity, the stirrings of another Plummer comeback. With a chance to extend the Broncos' lead, Plummer says, "I rolled out to my left, made a guy miss and was like, Ah, there goes Javon Walker, and I just heaved a Hail Mary. With that, the magic was bottled. Shanahan put Cutler back in, but not before trying to chastise Plummer, who walked past, ignoring his coach.
Quarterbacks coach Pat McPherson then walked over. And that's how Plummer's football career ended, some would say fittingly: with a desperation pass picked off. A few months later he retired, having achieved a regular-season record as the Broncos' starter.
His former agent, Leigh Steinberg, applauded the move. The courage is in choosing family and dignity over artificially extending a career just for the money. We should laud Jake Plummer for standing up for the best in American values. Others saw it differently. Bryant of the The Gazette in Colorado Springs. Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News went further. What is a hero? Who decides who qualifies as one? Growing up, Jake Plummer had a hero—two of them, actually. The third of three boys, Jake was included in every game his brothers, Eric and Brett, played, be it football, basketball or some contest improvised on the spot.
To this day the trio Brett is three years older than Eric, who is three years older than Jake cannot gather without competing; when they went backpacking in the Sierras last fall, they played Frisbee golf at 10, feet. Steve Plummer worked as a lumber wholesaler while his wife, Marilyn, taught at the two-room schoolhouse. Steve and Marilyn split when Jake was eight years old but remain good friends.
Life was lived by certain rules, passed down and enforced by Marilyn's mother, Hazel Sounders, the matriarch of the family: Judge people by their deeds, not their appearance or status. Treasure friends and family. Look out for your own. Handball became the family game after Steve learned it at the lumber warehouse, which had a makeshift wood court that was shorter, narrower and lower than a regulation handball court.
Indoor handball is played on the same court as racquetball, with nearly identical rules. Soon he was good enough to win the C division at a local tournament, then the B, the A and finally, in , the Idaho state open championship.
All the Plummer boys were athletes. Brett ran track at Brown and held the school record in the meters. Eric was a safety in high school, then played club handball at Montana, making the national quarterfinals in and '91 despite being the only player on the team, which tells you all you need to know about both Eric's determination and the popularity of handball.
And Jake? He'd always been the little brother who got pushed around, though he had an intense competitive streak. When he was 11, in Pop Warner, he made more than 20 tackles in one game, becoming so wrapped up in the competition that between plays he burst into tears of excitement.
Years later Jake would send Snyder a pair of Florsheims. Six games into the '93 season Jake was starting as a true freshman for the Sun Devils, cocksure at 6' 2" and pounds. In '97 he and the team's other cult hero, a relentlessly attacking linebacker named Pat Tillman, led ASU to within seconds of a national title in the Rose Bowl.
Plummer became the golden boy of the football-mad Southwest. Handsome and charismatic, he seemed to embody the go-go spirit of the region. His legend only grew when he was drafted by the hometown Cardinals, and in his debut in the seventh game of the season he entered midway through the fourth quarter and led the team on a yard scoring drive, completing four of six passes for 89 yards.
The Cardinals lost in OT, but no one paid that much mind. Fans adored him, the media praised his poise, and Bill Walsh declared, "I see Jake having a Montana-like career, including the Super Bowls. No wonder he's a hermit. In June , before his rookie season with the Cardinals, Plummer pleaded no contest to misdemeanor disorderly conduct and was sentenced to two years' probation after four women at a Tempe nightclub accused him of groping them.
Plummer was the team's come-hell-or-high-water leader, always scrambling and throwing tons of interceptions but also guiding the Cardinals to their first playoff victory in 51 years. Tillman was the undersized ball-of-fury safety who laid out opponents as if they'd just snatched his mother's purse.
The two men were similar in many ways: Both shunned the spotlight, each was one of three brothers, both questioned authority and treated teammates like family. Even though he was older, Plummer at times felt as though Tillman were his big brother.
Tillman came to Plummer's football camp in Boise, Idaho, and spent nights cooking dinner at the home of Jake's Aunt Sue, all the while encouraging his friend to think critically.
Plummer respected how, when Tillman disagreed with someone, he would say, "That's f up. Why do you believe that? In the spring of Tillman quit football to join the Army. In January '04, after his first stint in Afghanistan, he returned to the U. That same month Eric Plummer entered a handball tournament in Seattle after a decade away from the game. He felt nervous, but then he heard fans chanting his name. He turned around to see Jake and Tillman, clapping and roaring. At the sight Eric teared up which he still does when he tells the story.
After the match the three men headed to a dark bar off Pike Place Market and stayed deep into the night drinking beers and solving the world's problems. It would be the last time either Jake or Eric saw Tillman. In April Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Two weeks later, at the funeral, Jake walked to the podium wearing a suit and, in honor of his friend, flip-flops. He had been mulling what to say for weeks, and though at the time he meant the words as a testimonial to his friend, in hindsight they hinted at the path Plummer would choose.
Is beauty a pretty face, a nice smile, flowing hair, nice skin? Not to me, it's not. To me beauty is living life to higher standards, stronger morals and ethics and believing in them, whether people tell you you're right or wrong. Beauty is not wasting a day. Beauty is noticing life's little intricacies and taking time out of your busy day to really enjoy those little intricacies.
Beauty is being real, being genuine, being pure with no facade—what you see is what you get. Beauty is expanding your mind, always seeking knowledge, not being content, always going after something and challenging yourself.
In closing, Plummer said, "I believe that to really honor Pat, we should all challenge ourselves. No more I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. Do it. As Pat would say, probably, 'Get off your ass and do it. Because that's what Pat did his whole life. We all have dreams. Jake Plummer's was to hold a handball tournament. Not some big-time sponsored tournament but the kind at which everyone hangs out and drinks beer and has a great time. So three years ago, after he retired, that's what he did.
It is Thursday, the day before the tournament, and Jake is posting fliers at a Days Inn. Wherever he goes, he walks in a semihurry, bent forward like a boy shouldering an overstuffed backpack, head jutting out. Today he's wearing cargo shorts, gray sneakers and a flannel shirt, which is pretty much what he always wears, unless it's cold, and then he wears cargo pants. He douses his sentences with "sweet," "man," "s" and "dude," enjoys playing the bongos a Saturday-night tournament tradition and becomes tremendously excited about seemingly mundane topics.
Here he is talking to a couple of handballers about massage therapy: "I'm doing Rolfing now. You ever do Rolfing? You gotta do it.
0コメント