ESPN: YA Tittle: Awakening the Giant

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On a December morning, he's sitting in his usual spot on his couch, flipping through a photo album. His breathing is labored. There is fluid in his lungs. Waistline aside, Tittle doesn't look much different now than he did in his playing days: bald head, high cheekbones, blue eyes that glow from deep sockets, ears that have yet to be grown into. His skin is raw and flaky, and when he scratches a patch on his head, a familiar line of blood sometimes trickles down. He shares his large house with his full-time helper, a saint of a woman named Anna. His daughter, Dianne de Laet, sits nearest him, leaning in as he touches each yellowed picture.

"That's at Marshall High School!" Y.A. says, pointing to a shot of himself in a football uniform worn long ago, long sleeves and a leather helmet. That takes Y.A. back to his tiny hometown of Marshall, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Friday nights in the town square, where "I'd neck with a girl, if I was lucky." Brown pig sandwiches at Neely's barbecue. And football, always football. In 1943, he says, Marshall High traveled 200 miles to play Waco, ranked second in the state. The Mavericks pulled off the upset, and on the couch he recites the beginning of the newspaper story: "From the piney woods of East Texas came the challenging roar of the Marshall Mavericks, led by a tall, lanky redhead with a magical name: Yelberton Abraham Tittle."

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THEY SPEND THE afternoon on the back porch, staring at the lake. A breeze crosses through. Condensation from cold beer leaves rings on their table. Dianne studies her dad, hungry for flickers of memory, but he seems to be getting worse. Ten or so times each hour, he utters a version of this: "I grew up in Marshall, Texas. I went to Marshall High School -- the Marshall Mavericks. I went to LSU to play football so that I could be closer to my older brother Jack, who played at Tulane. He was my hero."

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A few minutes later, on the couch, he opens a dusty commemorative book celebrating the Giants. He turns each page slowly, back to front, present to past. Legends pass on the way to the middle of last century, to the era of Gifford, Huff and Tittle, a team of Hall of Famers known for losing championships as their peers on the Yankees -- with whom they shared a stadium, a city and many rounds of drinks -- became renowned for winning them. Y.A. stops at a black-and-white shot of a man standing alone on the field, covered in mud.

"That's me," he says.

It's from 1963. The same year in which Y.A., at age 37, set an NFL record with 36 touchdown passes. But he injured his knee early in the NFL title game against Chicago and threw five interceptions. It was his third straight loss in a championship game, and it effectively marked the end of his career. For years, he was the rare quarterback in the Hall of Fame without a title. It hurt. He always covered it up by poking fun at himself, making jokes about the weather during the championship games. But that last loss to the Bears was the worst day of his career: cold, bitter, violent. It marks him, even today. That game, he will never forget.

He turns to a page dedicated to the best performance of his career, against the ?Redskins in 1962, a game when he set a record with seven touchdown passes.

"I didn't know I was that good," he says.

Y.A. often talks about how he misses football. He misses the camaraderie, misses raising a vodka and saying, "We did it." The game was, as Dianne likes to say, his "emotional home," and in retirement in Atherton, he "was homesick for it." Y.A. and Minnette fought a lot during those early empty years, struggling to adapt to a new reality; Dianne once screamed at them so loud to stop arguing that she lost her voice. Y.A. spent the next few decades running an insurance company, giving speeches and informally advising quarterbacks. He developed real estate in the Bay Area and made a lot of money and traveled the world and bought houses around the country. He buried his older brother, his sister, his wife and one of his sons. As the voids in his life piled up, the party at Caddo Lake became more important. Dianne considered it noble that her father strived to host it each year the way he had once strived for a championship. Each party was a win. That's why she hates the blood picture too. The image of defeat that the world associates with her father does not resemble the man she grew up idolizing, the man she desperately hopes is still inside the current one, pining for what she calls one last "moment of victory."

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