Archdeacon
$10 — got no takers.
“Yeah unfortunately they didn’t get any bids,” Hoecht said with a bit of a painful laugh when the snub was brought up. “I was a practice squad player and I don’t think there was a lot of demand for those back then.”
But wait!
Not even from his par- ents who live back in Can- ada now?
Or from the folks at Oakwood, where he was a football basketball star and his Rams jersey is now proudly displayed in the Lumberjacks football locker room?
what about out in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University, where he was the captain of the team and an All-ivy League defender?
“I know, I know,” the 6-foot-4, 310-pound defender chuckled. “What can I say? But I’m not throwing my parents or anybody else under the bus. They already did a lot to get me where I am.
“And hopefully this time someone will bid on the cleats.”
After all, the shoes come with quite a story.
An unlikely journey
Hoecht has one of the most inspiring tales in the NFL and it began right here.
Although he was born in Canada, his family moved to Oakwood when he was a preschooler,
“Living in Oakwood is the reason I started playing ball in the first place,” he said. “I’d see the guys playing varsity football and I dreamed of one day being in that locker room, too.
“And the next thing you know, life takes you down the road and you end up in the NFL.”
Although he didn’t bring it up, in between was quite an unlikely journey.
As a senior at Oakwood — after rushing for nearly 1,600 yards and 17 touch- downs as a 250-pound fullback, making 50 tackles on defense and averaging 12.6 points 6.8 rebounds a game as a basketball player — he was under-recruited by colleges.
At Brown, he gained 60 pounds and the team in sacks two years, but the Bears finished dead last in the Ivy League three straight years and then COVID shut down the campus months before the NFL draft.
Undaunted, he made tapes of his workouts and sent them to all 32 NFL teams. The Rams defensive line coach, Eric Henderson, was intrigued, watched every snap of Hoecht’s senior season and L.A. signed him as a free agent after the draft.
c w t e te am, Hoecht said he heard Rams defensive coordinator Bran- don Staley, the former Dayton Flyers quarterback who’s now the San Diego Chargers head coach, say something that resonated with him:
“He said, ‘Variety is the spice of life’ that’s pretty much how I’ve lived. And with football I’ve tried to do everything at full speed, too.”
His career ended up on the fast track, too. A year after the practice squad, he was an active member of the Super Bowl champions.
In the Rams’ 23-20 Super Bowl victory over Cincinnati last February, he drilled Ben
returner Trent Taylor on a punt return less than three minutes into the game.
If you go by depth-chart definition, he’s the backup to defensive lineman Aaron Donald — arguably the best player in football — but if you look closer you see he’s a
ehjack of all trades.
He’s on almost all special teams, has returned a kick 22 yards, strip-sacked a quarterback and then recovered the fumble, lined up at tight end and, lately, has been flirting with the outside linebacker position, as well.
while you see those bypassed cleats from two years ago belonged to a special breed of football player, it wasn’t so much about him, as it was the journey those purchased shoes could have helped take someone else on.
And that’s because of Pat Tillman.
Giving back
With his flowing blond
and a derring-do style, Tillman was a hard-hitting safety in the Arizona Cardinals secondary.
But after the 9/11 attacks, he finished out the 2001 NFL season then, at age 25, turned down a multi-million contract extension and became an Army Ranger who served several combat tours in Iraq and Afghan- istan.
Two years into his service, he was killed in Afghanistan in what turned out to be a fratricide incident.
He and his family were then further when his death became part of a manufactured narrative that
up a football. Initially, the military announced Tillman’s unit came under attack in a Taliban ambush in the moun- tains of the Khost Province near the Pakistan border and he had died leading his men into battle. A supine press then ran with that story.
Later, at the insistence of Tillman’s wife and mother — especially when a fellow soldier admitted no enemy troops were present — the Department of Defense finally opened an investi- gation, which was followed by a Congressional probe.
Eventually several other disturbing facts were discovered:
Tiillman’s uniform body armor had been burned by fellow soldiers.
His personal notebook went missing.
The Washington Post reported a doctor who examined the body said the wounds indicated he had been shot three times in the head by a weapon fired 10 yards away.
That to questions of motive.
Tillman’s wife and mother said he had become disillusioned with military bureaucracy had turned against the war and what it was doing to U.S. soldiers.
And it’s that last part, said Tillman’s wife, Marie, that leads to his true legacy and the real power of his mem- ory.
After her husband’s death, she received donations — some $5 and $10, some $1,000 — from people across the United States.
She and his family and friends started a foundation — www.ptf.org — that helps veterans and their families better their lives through education.
Some of the people who have become Tillman Scholars include:
■ Karl Holt, who like Tillman joined the military after 9/11, became a special forces medic and up breaking his back in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2009. Although severely injured, he treated 10 other soldiers before help arrived. After undergoing 32 surgeries, he got a scholarship, enrolled at the University of North Carolina and became a trauma surgeon.
■ Jonny Kim, who won the silver and bronze stars for bravery in Iraq, used the Tillman scholarship to help get his MD at Harvard and became a NASA astronaut candidate.
■ Adrian Kinsella won a Tillman scholarship, finished law school and put all his legal efforts into bringing his Afghan translator, Mohammed, who was threatened with death by the Taliban, to the United States. The Foundation joined the cause wrote letters to Congress and in 2014 Mohammed was brought to America.
■ Laura Move, the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the wife of a U.S. Marine, got a scholarship to study neuroscience, specifically traumatic brain injuries, work that would benefit soldiers and football players.
Hoecht will be honoring Pat Tillman again today, this time with a new artist-designed pair of cleats.
He said it’s efforts of organizations like The Foundation that make NFL players — including 27 other Rams and 16 of their coaches, as well as a total of 47 players in today’s Bengals-chiefs game at Paycor Stadium — want to take part in the My Cause My Cleats initiative:
“Football is one of sports were we’re on TV enough that we have a really good platform to get recognition out there for a lot of really good causes.
“The sport has done a lot for us and this is one way for us to give back to the community.”
Once again, Michael Hoecht is putting his best foot forward. And this time he needs someone to buy those shoes right off his feet.