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In the cliché-filled world that is professional sports, Andrew Street Tate is a breath of fresh air, a guy who can find a way to fit square pegs into round holes.
The guy who make his first start at quarterback for the Ottawa Redblacks in Montreal on Sunday is a guy who won’t settle for the blacks and whites of life. Why do that when you can explore further and find the colour?
With the 32-year-old Tate, there’s no B.S., nothing fake.
You need to know the background, where he comes from. Then you begin to understand. He plays a game he loves with a middle linebacker mentality, sort of the way he approaches life.
“I play the game pissed off, I always have,” Tate says. “As a child, I saw these guys smashing each other, killing each other, talking s–t to each other. I just thought that was the way the game was played.”
At the age of 20, Tate practically owned Iowa. He was that big in the state.
The Life of Drew Tate is an incredible story, with an exclamation mark provided by his ability to be real. Live, love, laugh … that’s who and what Drew Tate is. The delivery, though, is anything but conventional.
Let’s go back to 2005 and the Capital One Bowl, Tate’s Iowa Hawkeyes facing the Wisconsin Badgers. A 56-yard touchdown heave by Tate to little-used receiver Warren Holloway on the game’s final play gave Iowa a 30-25 win. It was Holloway’s first college touchdown.
Said Tate: “(Holloway) finishes his collegiate career with the best play in the history of Iowa football. He was such a good person. He’d had a lot of bad luck. He worked hard, never talked.
“The play changed my life. Iowa’s got the Hawks and they have corn, that’s it. I never had to pay for alcohol or food, I never had to pay for anything. That’s a lot given to a 20-year-old, especially in my case, an immature 20-year-old.”
Let’s backtrack a few years. Tate’s mom, Martha, and dad, Luke, divorced when he was 18 months old. Later, Martha started dating Dick Olin, a legendary local high school football coach. They later married.
Said Tate, an All-American baseball player in high school: “I’m playing football because of (Olin). When I was a child, I wanted to be a baseball player: more money, no hits, all the good stuff. But, when Dick came into our lives, I fell in love with football, everything about it. I was ball boy, water boy, from second grade all the way to the ninth grade, when I started playing. I’d go to practice, then sit in his office with him and watch film.”
Tate was never the biggest kid. Even now the Redblacks list him as six feet tall and 190 pounds, both maybe a stretch.
Said Tate: “No one in my family was big and people would say, ‘You don’t need to play football, you’re not big enough.’ That made me want to play football even more.
“I didn’t want to play quarterback, I wanted to hit people. Whenever I was playing football in the front yard and I was on defence, I imagined I was Ronnie Lott. When I was on offence, I imagined I was Barry Sanders or Bo Jackson. I wanted to be a running back, a safety or a middle linebacker. I think I cried when they moved me to quarterback.”
Tate figured out doing this sports thing for a living may not be bad way to go: “They would show Marcus Allen driving up in a Lamborghini with girls and stuff like that. I was like, ‘God, that’s all I want to do. I want to play football, I want to have girls in my Lamborghini.’ ”
Drew Tate warms up during Redblacks practice at TD Place stadium on Wednesday. Julie Oliver/Postmedia
After college, Tate was with the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams for a week. His QB coach there, Doug Nussmeier, put in a call to Eric Tillman, then general manager of the Canadian Football League’s Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Soon after, Tate set out on the nearly-16-hour drive from Iowa City to Regina.
“When I got north of Minneapolis, I wanted to turn around,” he said. “I was still caught up in, ‘I’m good enough to play in the f—ing States.’ I decided to go.
“I pulled into Regina and again I thought, ‘No, this just ain’t for me. I’d rather go be a P.E. teacher in Houston.’ My mom talked me into staying. I get into Regina. They open up a door in the dorm; there’s a twin bed, no TV, nothing. I’m talking a jail cell 8X8, maybe 9X9. I was thinking, ‘No, this isn’t for me.’ I call and say, ‘This is ridiculous, you all ain’t seeing what I’m seeing.’ My mom talked me into staying.”
He liked the Canadian game, he liked his head coach, Kent Austin. He learned stuff like timing, spacing and splits. The Roughriders won the Grey Cup in 2007.
Said Tate: “It was like, ‘Thank you, mom, for keeping me here, this is great.’ It was the first time of my life I was at the back of the line. It was a step back. But it was really the best thing that ever happened to me. I fell back in love with the game. Yeah, it was a job, but it felt way more like a job in college than it feels like in the CFL.”
After two seasons spent on injured reserve and the Roughriders’ practice roster, Tate moved on to the Calgary Stampeders.
“Calgary was the most unique eight years of my life. It was something I needed personally,” Tate said. “Not playing, injuries … I’d never got hurt until my senior year of college. I didn’t know how to cope with injuries. It’ll grab you mentally and take you down. I hurt my moneymaker (it was later diagnosed as a UCL injury).”
Once again, after the 2013 season, his mom talked him out of leaving the CFL.
Said Tate: “I became so non-competitive, so complacent, it was just, ‘Whatever.’ Physically, mentally and emotionally, I was done, I was really done. But they kept me and kept paying me. I wasn’t going to willingly walk away from the money.”
In February, the Redblacks, looking for a veteran backup quarterback after Henry Burris retired and Trevor Harris moved up the pecking order, gave up a fifth-round draft pick in 2018 to acquire Tate.
“When I got the call in February to come here, I started feeling something in my blood that I hadn’t felt in a while,” Tate said. “It’s been really fun. This last camp, I haven’t had a camp like that since 2012.”
On Oct. 17 in Alabama, Tate will marry his fiancée, Nicole, who’s from Nova Scotia. Tate’s father will perform the ceremony. Appropriately, it’s a Tuesday. Explained Tate: “We really like the song, Going Up on a Tuesday.”
They met in 2014. Nicole was a flight attendant with Canadian North, working on a Stampeders charter from Montreal back to Calgary.
“I kept dinging her for Oreos,” Tate said. “I could tell she was annoyed. I asked for her number, she gave it to me. I find out later (Stampeders kicker) René Paredes also asked for her number. She gave him the pilot’s number. I don’t think I ever told René that story.”
The telling of that story is followed by Tate’s big I-love-life laugh. Beauty.
“It was a big spark, instantly,” Tate said. “I’m always a little standoffish. From I’m always one to question everything to really understand. I would never jump into water without finding out how deep it was. It was so good, I’m thinking, ‘It can’t be this good. There has to be something, she has to be hiding something. Does she have a kid? Does she have another boyfriend.’ There was nothing else, it was like, ‘Wow, I love you.’ ”
In Ottawa, Tate has been reunited with former teammate and pal Brad Sinopoli, and that brings on one of Tate’s best stories about hog hunting in Texas.
Over to you, Brad: “When I got there, they handed me a knife. It was midnight, I was completely out of my element. I was more frightened about snakes and things like that. There are a lot of thorns and prickly bushes. You follow the dogs. Wherever they go, you go. We’re down on our hands and knees, I’ve got thorns in my legs, I’m thinking, ‘What the hell are you getting me into?’ The dogs corral the hog, the guys go in and grab it, somebody comes in and finishes the job. I Go Pro’d the whole thing. My heart was going faster and faster.”
Hunting hogs, isn’t that inhumane? Not so, according to Tate.
“I’m not a hunter, I don’t kill anything except hogs,” he said. “All they do is procreate and destroy crops. Farmers will pay people to come in and get rid of them.
“There are a lot of ways you can kill them. Some guys shoot them from helicopters. We like to stick the blade in. You have searchers (hounds) and destroyers (bulldogs). They tag all the hounds and let them go. Then you send the destroyers in to go at the face. Somebody pulls the back legs so the hog goes down. Brad went in with the knife and blood shot right out (of the hog) and it was all over him. Those hogs make the loudest, worst noise you can imagine.”
Here’s the thing with Tate, who says he feels like a “parasite on Earth” and wants to take in as much as he can. Here’s what he says about himself.
“I love people, but it’s hit or miss,” he said. “I was raised to always give the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think like that anymore. I’ve seen people get taken advantage of. I see things differently, right or wrong.
“I think a lot, maybe I overthink. I get bored with status quo. You only live once. Enjoy life. Have fun. No regrets. I’ve said a lot of things, I’ve done a lot of things that I shouldn’t have done, but I’ve learned from those. I’m a fiery person. I wouldn’t be a good politician. I can’t lie. I don’t politic anything. To me, it either is or it ain’t. There is no in between. I’m not a big talker, I get tired of listening to people talk. I’m not from Missouri — that’s the Show Me State — you’ve got to show me something.”
And what do others think of him?
“Some people call him chill,” Redblacks head coach Rick Campbell said. “He’s from Texas, but he could be from Southern California. He’s a little bit like that.”
Sinopoli calls Tate “an independent guy. He doesn’t let things get to him. There are a lot of weird guys around here, myself included. He’s unique, but he’s a great guy. I love being around him.”
Tate has two years remaining on his CFL contract. When it’s time to move on from football, if his mom can’t talk him out of it, Tate plans to do Tate does: thinking outside the box. “I’ll be starting my own company, flipping houses, or being a farmer or fisherman or something like that. I’m not the kind of guy to go work for The Man, show up and do what he wants me to do. I have a bigger purpose.”
Drew Tate throws a pass in the Redblacks’ Sept. 9 game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In his first regular-season action as a Redblack, Tate was 8-for-13 for 114 yards. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
THE DREW TATE FILE
Age: 32
CFL teams: Saskatchewan, Calgary, Ottawa
Hometown: Baytown, Tex.
College: Iowa
Height: Six feet
Weight: 190 pounds
2017 season stats: eight completions in 13 attempts, 114 passing yards.
Career stats: 388-for-585 for 4,783 yards and 33 touchdowns
What a rush: In 2014, he rushed for 10 touchdowns as a Calgary Stampeder.
Mad about Mario
When Ottawa Redblacks players Drew Tate and Brad Sinopoli were teammates and roommates with the Calgary Stampeders, they often got mad at each other … over video games.
Nintendo 64 Mario Kart battles were heated, to say the least.
“We were fist-throwing, screaming and yelling-at-each-other gamers,” said Tate, who will start at quarterback for the Redblacks against the Alouettes in Montreal on Sunday. “We’d come home after practice and play for like six hours. It used to get pretty heated. We’d be saying, ‘Let’s go to bed at 9, but, at 2 a.m., we were still playing. We’d wake up mad. We wouldn’t talk to each other on the ride to the stadium.”
Sinopoli, now a Redblacks receiver, laughs when he remembers the battles.
“We would play The Beach (level) over and over,” he said. “We weren’t even playing different levels. We’d race at the same level for hours and hours. We were screaming at the TV, screaming at each other.”
查看原文...
The guy who make his first start at quarterback for the Ottawa Redblacks in Montreal on Sunday is a guy who won’t settle for the blacks and whites of life. Why do that when you can explore further and find the colour?
With the 32-year-old Tate, there’s no B.S., nothing fake.
You need to know the background, where he comes from. Then you begin to understand. He plays a game he loves with a middle linebacker mentality, sort of the way he approaches life.
“I play the game pissed off, I always have,” Tate says. “As a child, I saw these guys smashing each other, killing each other, talking s–t to each other. I just thought that was the way the game was played.”
At the age of 20, Tate practically owned Iowa. He was that big in the state.
The Life of Drew Tate is an incredible story, with an exclamation mark provided by his ability to be real. Live, love, laugh … that’s who and what Drew Tate is. The delivery, though, is anything but conventional.
Let’s go back to 2005 and the Capital One Bowl, Tate’s Iowa Hawkeyes facing the Wisconsin Badgers. A 56-yard touchdown heave by Tate to little-used receiver Warren Holloway on the game’s final play gave Iowa a 30-25 win. It was Holloway’s first college touchdown.
Said Tate: “(Holloway) finishes his collegiate career with the best play in the history of Iowa football. He was such a good person. He’d had a lot of bad luck. He worked hard, never talked.
“The play changed my life. Iowa’s got the Hawks and they have corn, that’s it. I never had to pay for alcohol or food, I never had to pay for anything. That’s a lot given to a 20-year-old, especially in my case, an immature 20-year-old.”
Let’s backtrack a few years. Tate’s mom, Martha, and dad, Luke, divorced when he was 18 months old. Later, Martha started dating Dick Olin, a legendary local high school football coach. They later married.
Said Tate, an All-American baseball player in high school: “I’m playing football because of (Olin). When I was a child, I wanted to be a baseball player: more money, no hits, all the good stuff. But, when Dick came into our lives, I fell in love with football, everything about it. I was ball boy, water boy, from second grade all the way to the ninth grade, when I started playing. I’d go to practice, then sit in his office with him and watch film.”
Tate was never the biggest kid. Even now the Redblacks list him as six feet tall and 190 pounds, both maybe a stretch.
Said Tate: “No one in my family was big and people would say, ‘You don’t need to play football, you’re not big enough.’ That made me want to play football even more.
“I didn’t want to play quarterback, I wanted to hit people. Whenever I was playing football in the front yard and I was on defence, I imagined I was Ronnie Lott. When I was on offence, I imagined I was Barry Sanders or Bo Jackson. I wanted to be a running back, a safety or a middle linebacker. I think I cried when they moved me to quarterback.”
Tate figured out doing this sports thing for a living may not be bad way to go: “They would show Marcus Allen driving up in a Lamborghini with girls and stuff like that. I was like, ‘God, that’s all I want to do. I want to play football, I want to have girls in my Lamborghini.’ ”
Drew Tate warms up during Redblacks practice at TD Place stadium on Wednesday. Julie Oliver/Postmedia
After college, Tate was with the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams for a week. His QB coach there, Doug Nussmeier, put in a call to Eric Tillman, then general manager of the Canadian Football League’s Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Soon after, Tate set out on the nearly-16-hour drive from Iowa City to Regina.
“When I got north of Minneapolis, I wanted to turn around,” he said. “I was still caught up in, ‘I’m good enough to play in the f—ing States.’ I decided to go.
“I pulled into Regina and again I thought, ‘No, this just ain’t for me. I’d rather go be a P.E. teacher in Houston.’ My mom talked me into staying. I get into Regina. They open up a door in the dorm; there’s a twin bed, no TV, nothing. I’m talking a jail cell 8X8, maybe 9X9. I was thinking, ‘No, this isn’t for me.’ I call and say, ‘This is ridiculous, you all ain’t seeing what I’m seeing.’ My mom talked me into staying.”
He liked the Canadian game, he liked his head coach, Kent Austin. He learned stuff like timing, spacing and splits. The Roughriders won the Grey Cup in 2007.
Said Tate: “It was like, ‘Thank you, mom, for keeping me here, this is great.’ It was the first time of my life I was at the back of the line. It was a step back. But it was really the best thing that ever happened to me. I fell back in love with the game. Yeah, it was a job, but it felt way more like a job in college than it feels like in the CFL.”
After two seasons spent on injured reserve and the Roughriders’ practice roster, Tate moved on to the Calgary Stampeders.
“Calgary was the most unique eight years of my life. It was something I needed personally,” Tate said. “Not playing, injuries … I’d never got hurt until my senior year of college. I didn’t know how to cope with injuries. It’ll grab you mentally and take you down. I hurt my moneymaker (it was later diagnosed as a UCL injury).”
Once again, after the 2013 season, his mom talked him out of leaving the CFL.
Said Tate: “I became so non-competitive, so complacent, it was just, ‘Whatever.’ Physically, mentally and emotionally, I was done, I was really done. But they kept me and kept paying me. I wasn’t going to willingly walk away from the money.”
In February, the Redblacks, looking for a veteran backup quarterback after Henry Burris retired and Trevor Harris moved up the pecking order, gave up a fifth-round draft pick in 2018 to acquire Tate.
“When I got the call in February to come here, I started feeling something in my blood that I hadn’t felt in a while,” Tate said. “It’s been really fun. This last camp, I haven’t had a camp like that since 2012.”
On Oct. 17 in Alabama, Tate will marry his fiancée, Nicole, who’s from Nova Scotia. Tate’s father will perform the ceremony. Appropriately, it’s a Tuesday. Explained Tate: “We really like the song, Going Up on a Tuesday.”
They met in 2014. Nicole was a flight attendant with Canadian North, working on a Stampeders charter from Montreal back to Calgary.
“I kept dinging her for Oreos,” Tate said. “I could tell she was annoyed. I asked for her number, she gave it to me. I find out later (Stampeders kicker) René Paredes also asked for her number. She gave him the pilot’s number. I don’t think I ever told René that story.”
The telling of that story is followed by Tate’s big I-love-life laugh. Beauty.
“It was a big spark, instantly,” Tate said. “I’m always a little standoffish. From I’m always one to question everything to really understand. I would never jump into water without finding out how deep it was. It was so good, I’m thinking, ‘It can’t be this good. There has to be something, she has to be hiding something. Does she have a kid? Does she have another boyfriend.’ There was nothing else, it was like, ‘Wow, I love you.’ ”
In Ottawa, Tate has been reunited with former teammate and pal Brad Sinopoli, and that brings on one of Tate’s best stories about hog hunting in Texas.
Over to you, Brad: “When I got there, they handed me a knife. It was midnight, I was completely out of my element. I was more frightened about snakes and things like that. There are a lot of thorns and prickly bushes. You follow the dogs. Wherever they go, you go. We’re down on our hands and knees, I’ve got thorns in my legs, I’m thinking, ‘What the hell are you getting me into?’ The dogs corral the hog, the guys go in and grab it, somebody comes in and finishes the job. I Go Pro’d the whole thing. My heart was going faster and faster.”
Hunting hogs, isn’t that inhumane? Not so, according to Tate.
“I’m not a hunter, I don’t kill anything except hogs,” he said. “All they do is procreate and destroy crops. Farmers will pay people to come in and get rid of them.
“There are a lot of ways you can kill them. Some guys shoot them from helicopters. We like to stick the blade in. You have searchers (hounds) and destroyers (bulldogs). They tag all the hounds and let them go. Then you send the destroyers in to go at the face. Somebody pulls the back legs so the hog goes down. Brad went in with the knife and blood shot right out (of the hog) and it was all over him. Those hogs make the loudest, worst noise you can imagine.”
Here’s the thing with Tate, who says he feels like a “parasite on Earth” and wants to take in as much as he can. Here’s what he says about himself.
“I love people, but it’s hit or miss,” he said. “I was raised to always give the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think like that anymore. I’ve seen people get taken advantage of. I see things differently, right or wrong.
“I think a lot, maybe I overthink. I get bored with status quo. You only live once. Enjoy life. Have fun. No regrets. I’ve said a lot of things, I’ve done a lot of things that I shouldn’t have done, but I’ve learned from those. I’m a fiery person. I wouldn’t be a good politician. I can’t lie. I don’t politic anything. To me, it either is or it ain’t. There is no in between. I’m not a big talker, I get tired of listening to people talk. I’m not from Missouri — that’s the Show Me State — you’ve got to show me something.”
And what do others think of him?
“Some people call him chill,” Redblacks head coach Rick Campbell said. “He’s from Texas, but he could be from Southern California. He’s a little bit like that.”
Sinopoli calls Tate “an independent guy. He doesn’t let things get to him. There are a lot of weird guys around here, myself included. He’s unique, but he’s a great guy. I love being around him.”
Tate has two years remaining on his CFL contract. When it’s time to move on from football, if his mom can’t talk him out of it, Tate plans to do Tate does: thinking outside the box. “I’ll be starting my own company, flipping houses, or being a farmer or fisherman or something like that. I’m not the kind of guy to go work for The Man, show up and do what he wants me to do. I have a bigger purpose.”
Drew Tate throws a pass in the Redblacks’ Sept. 9 game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In his first regular-season action as a Redblack, Tate was 8-for-13 for 114 yards. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
THE DREW TATE FILE
Age: 32
CFL teams: Saskatchewan, Calgary, Ottawa
Hometown: Baytown, Tex.
College: Iowa
Height: Six feet
Weight: 190 pounds
2017 season stats: eight completions in 13 attempts, 114 passing yards.
Career stats: 388-for-585 for 4,783 yards and 33 touchdowns
What a rush: In 2014, he rushed for 10 touchdowns as a Calgary Stampeder.
Mad about Mario
When Ottawa Redblacks players Drew Tate and Brad Sinopoli were teammates and roommates with the Calgary Stampeders, they often got mad at each other … over video games.
Nintendo 64 Mario Kart battles were heated, to say the least.
“We were fist-throwing, screaming and yelling-at-each-other gamers,” said Tate, who will start at quarterback for the Redblacks against the Alouettes in Montreal on Sunday. “We’d come home after practice and play for like six hours. It used to get pretty heated. We’d be saying, ‘Let’s go to bed at 9, but, at 2 a.m., we were still playing. We’d wake up mad. We wouldn’t talk to each other on the ride to the stadium.”
Sinopoli, now a Redblacks receiver, laughs when he remembers the battles.
“We would play The Beach (level) over and over,” he said. “We weren’t even playing different levels. We’d race at the same level for hours and hours. We were screaming at the TV, screaming at each other.”
查看原文...
