Boston College Athletics
The Whole Nine Yards
September 21, 1999 | Football
Sept. 21, 1999
Responsibility is an elusive quality. It can be so evenly distributed amongst a group that in the face of a crime or a sporting competition, the burden becomes nonexistent.
Unless you play football.
Especially when you hold a high profile position like quarterback, the responsibility of win versus lose, show versus blow, looms larger. But if your responsibility is only relegated to the gridiron, then you are just another quarterback. If that responsibility penetrates every aspect of your life then you are Boston College quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.
If his name sounds familiar to Bay State folks, it should. A high school standout, he follows in the footsteps of his older brother Matthew, a former BC and current Green Bay Packer quarterback, named starting QB his junior year after redshirting his freshman season and playing backup for a couple years.
Had not Matthew come to BC, Tim would not be here. His parents never forced Tim to buy a frequent flyer card with the Eagles. The Massachusetts native had the opportunity to proselyte into a prestigious Fighting Irishman. It would have been easier. That decision would have defrayed the post-commitment hate mail and harsh judgment from the local angry acting as pundits. But Tim stayed in his home state not so much because of duty, but of piety. A throwback from classical times, he wanted to play with his brother, in front of his family. The decision reflected local concerns as well. Division I scouts recruit few Massachusetts products and, as Tim noted, "I think that it is cool for guys to stick around and play for BC, play for the hometown because we are kind of a rarity."
So Tim attended BC, if he succumbed to anyone else's standards but his own, then he wouldn't be Tim.
First-year BC offensive coordinator Dana Bible explained Hasselbeck's coachability. "He is highly motivated, he takes very seriously this business about being a major college quarterback and he works at it."
No words, however, reverberate louder or stronger than his own. Tim Hasselbeck is his own harshest critic.
"My expectations for my performance, I think, exceed expectations that any coach has for me, that any fan has for me, or that my family has for me," he says. "I want to go out and be a good player. I want to put myself in the position that my brother is in now."
Having secured the starting job with redshirt freshman phenom Brian St. Pierre in waiting, Tim anticipates more success in the near future. "People said, 'Oh, you've been named the starting quarterback,' but that was never a goal of mine. That was never something that I aimed for. What I aimed for was to have a really good career here. So when I was named the starting quarterback that was not the end for me, to me that was just the beginning."
His starting nod debut Sept. 4 manifested into a 30-29 overtime win over the Baylor Bears on national TV. Admittedly, Tim's first start since high school, where he quarterbacked his Xaverian team in back-to-back Division I-B Massachusetts Super Bowl victories over Falmouth (1994) and Arlington (1995), was not stellar. But it was all Tim, and though clad in the same jersey number (7) as brother Matthew, Tim's performance was not a Hasselbeck highlight film.
"I cannot try to be anybody else," he says. "I am not going to try to do anything that Matthew tried to do or say things that he did or try to throw the ball like he did. We are just different people, different players. Everybody is, you know. I am somebody who likes to move around a little bit and that showed against Baylor." Hasselbeck's mobility and defensive gap radar yielded 36 rushing yards against the Bears with a long of 12.
"I am not going to try to do anything that Matthew tried to do or say things that he did or try to throw the ball like he did. We are just different people, different players. Everybody is, you know.?
Bible labels Hasselbeck a positive asset to the team. "He is as strong as he is highly motivated. He leads by example. Although he is inexperienced as far as playing, he brings a certain level of maturity to the offense.
"Football MATTERS to him."
It matters to Tim but it is not everything. Hasselbeck was one of 22 students to earn the 21st annual National Football Foundation Scholar-Athlete Award in 1996 while at Xaverian. At the Heights, he has served as an orientation leader for BC's First-Year Experience program.
"My motivation to do well at school and be involved in the campus is that someday football does end. When I look at my father - and he played nine years in the NFL, which was three times the average career - I realize you cannot do it forever. You have to be well-rounded because it is not going to last forever, and I have seen it firsthand."
During his 1998 spring break, Tim's global responsibility led him to the "Jamaica Experience" where he served as an Ignacio Volunteer. All semester long, students, through group activities and spiritual reflection, prepared for an intense week-long trip of complete immersion in the country's most impoverished areas. In Jamaica, they visited the House of the Destitute and Dying for people with profound disabilities, then worked in a form of schooling at a shanty town. Everyday delivered a new eye-opening activity.
"When you are from a situation like I am, from a loving family, and you come to a school like BC, it is kind of a perfect-world scenario," he says. "So to see that perspective, it makes you value what you have and how lucky anyone, who is even going to school here, how lucky they are, and how lucky we are to have the opportunity to play football here at BC.
"There are three-year-old kids in Jamaica that do not have shoes to put on their feet and do not have breakfast every morning or have electricity in their house. That is something that I did not see before. It really gives you a different perspective on life."
Although this son of an NFL tight end and brother of an NFL quarterback aspires to go pro someday or work with football in some manner, life over the goalposts will not escape him because he is true to himself and what matters.
After all, the term, "The Whole Nine Yards," so traditionally exhausted by the football community, actually originated in World War I, equating to the distance soldiers had to cover between trenches. Lesson: there is more to life than football.
And Tim Hasselbeck intends to go The Whole Nine Yards.
By Kara McGillicuddy
