It was my old coach Jeff. I’d called him to see how he had dealt with leaving football. My own career is ending soon, and I wanted to see what it was like for him to leave the game he loved, the game he grew up with. The game he, like so many other people, watched with his older brothers, cheering on the Steelers and Chiefs during the first half and then going out and playing the second half in the backyard.
Jeff played football with his brothers until seventh grade, when he took his game to the gridiron. The season lasted just two games, but it must have been a great two games, because he never returned to the backyard.
Jeff went on to play high school football, along with a couple other sports, at a small single-A school in southwestern Pennsylvania. There were so few single-A schools that they had to play up a division, and Jeff got to play organized ball with his younger brother for three years.
"Just being able to play with him," he said. "That was great."
Funny story about that: When he was a junior, Jeff started at quarterback. When he was a senior, the team didn’t have a tailback, so Jeff moved there and his brother played quarterback. He was a Parade All-America at linebacker that year and got recruited by Division-1 schools like Stanford, Notre Dame and Penn State.
But Jeff’s recruiting experience wasn’t really about the football. He was a Mennonite farm boy from Pennsylvania, and this was the first time he had the chance to travel around the United States. He visited Stanford to see the sun set in the Pacific. He saw Notre Dame in the Midwest, mainly because they were playing UCLA, his favorite basketball team at the time. When it came time to choose, Jeff ended up staying close to family, close to those who first introduced him to the game. He went to play for Joe Paterno and the Penn State Nittany Lions, the same place that his two older brothers went.
Football became a year-round thing for the first time in his life. In high school, Jeff said he’d prepare maybe a few months before the season began. But in college, training began a month after the last season ended. He ended up transferring to West Virginia University, a little closer to his southwestern Pennsylvania roots, where he got the opportunity to play quarterback.
Jeff played all right in those two seasons, leading the Mountaineers to victory over the ninth-ranked Oklahoma Sooners in his first game as the starter. His biggest challenge was keeping up on schoolwork amid all the expectations and commitment.
"You really had to make sure you used your time extremely efficiently," Jeff said. It's tough on a young man coming from a high school, where you played with your little brother and your friends, to a college where "you’re a medium fish in a tank full of big fish." Even when you made the team, when you solidified your position, there was always someone breathing down your neck.
"Playin' in front of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 people and being judged, with your self-worth attached to how well you played," Jeff said. "As a young man … you had to figure out ways to convince yourself that that wasn't the case."
It helped that everyone on the team was supportive. Like a big family, they all looked out for one other. Everybody got along with everybody else, and eventually, they were like brothers.
Jeff played well enough at WVU to get invited to a combine. There were two at the time. He was paraded in front of everybody in his gray NFL shorts, shuffled through like a piece of meat. It was a process different from anything he'd ever experienced, but by the end, he’d done all right. Experts projected that the first quarterback selected would either be him or Boomer Esiason. Jeff ended up getting taken after Esiason, by the Giants, with the second pick of the third round.
"It's real frustrating," he said of the lead-up to the draft. "You just want to get drafted and move on to the next step in the process."
Jeff realized pretty quickly that the NFL was a lot different from college. There's no security in the pros, you weren't just competing for a position. You were competing for a job, a livelihood. There are bigger, faster, younger players coming into the league each year.
For Jeff, the toughest part was the mental aspect. There wasn't any schoolwork to distract you from the game; you were either in season, training to get in shape for the season, or in mini-camps and training camp preparing for the season as a team. And it was when that year-round season mentality began to take a physical toll that Jeff knew it was time to step back. His body couldn’t recover from the last season before the next one began. Then, his mental desire began to slip. And when you aren't prepared for the NFL, he said, you cheat everybody involved. The guy who grew up playing with his brothers and looking after his college teammates wasn't going to cheat his extended NFL family. So Jeff stepped away.
Jeff's last name is Hostetler. It's okay if you don't recognize it. Few, if any, of my friends in college do. They only know him by what I tell them, from the stories about my old coach. That old guy, who still has an NFL build, who challenged 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds to races and throwing contests and won all of them. The guy who called me slow, who threw footballs at my helmet while I tried, fruitlessly, to pick it up before practice. The guy huddling us up before the half to draw up a two-minute drill in the palm of his hand (we scored).
They don't know about how he was a Parade All-America, about his spot on WVU's all-time roster, his place in NFL history, or how he led the New York Giants to a Super Bowl victory in 1990.
And that's what a football career should be: The past, a fun thing you were pretty good at back in the day, not your defining characteristic. It's just a game. Sure, it can be transcendent, but that's for people outside the game who don't know the camaraderie of the locker room. Because that's what you miss. Not the flashbulbs and the rings. They're great, but you remember that time you caught a snapping turtle before practice and almost put it in one of your teammate's helmet, or put an "I’m gay and proud" sign on Howie Long's license plate and watched him drive around Los Angeles without noticing.
Sometimes I wonder about how I would answer the question, Who are you? Without fail, one of the first things that comes to mind, after my name, is that I play football. I had hoped to talk with Jeff about how he dealt with losing that part of his life, that part that defined him for so long, too. But we got so caught up talking about different pranks and old stories that I didn't even have time to ask him that question.
Jeff's a busy man now, running a real estate development company called Three Arrows Development Inc. The name comes from a passage in the Book of Psalms about kids being a blessing like arrows to a warrior. Jeff has three sons, hence the name Three Arrows.
When I was interviewing him, he was at the airport going somewhere, on business or vacation, I didn't ask. But he had to go before he could answer me. Now, thinking back on the story he told me about his life and his experience with football, I don't think he had to. He left football because his body couldn't take the punishment any more. He left, but football didn't leave him, because he never let football define who he was. Playing was always a just a game. What defined him was something deeper. It was the family. It was a brotherhood that was with him from his first day in the backyard until the last time he shut his locker.
And I think if he had answered me, he probably would have just smiled and given me a stock line about how it's just a game. You can't really explain what it is, what it's like to leave it. It's personal, and the experiences and memories are to be treasured but not displayed. Much like Jeff's ubiquitous moustache, it's a part of you. People can see it, and you can't hide it. So you just smile, and tell them it's just a game.
The decrepit roster with a losing mentality was broken down and rebuilt, better piece by better piece. Head coach Mike Shanahan has cut 150 players since he came in, and only one (Carlos Rogers) is starting for another team. Over the course of those two years, the Redskins grew up right before our eyes. 
