You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Skip to Main Content Skip to Search. News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. Dow Jones. By Christopher Shea. Oh, man, they dig in with their elbow, really working it out. In part because of his appearance but mostly because of his demeanor, Plummer is able to live in relative anonymity.
One of his handball friends, Tye Barlow, tells how, a couple of years ago in Sandpoint, Plummer was volunteering for Meals on Wheels, and the organization ran into funding problems. The woman in charge put a hand on Plummer's shoulder. But keep track, and we'll pay you for your gas. She insisted. Again, Plummer assured her it was O.
You need the money. Dumbstruck, the woman appraised the scruffy man who'd been delivering food for months. So, yeah, Plummer's not big on announcing his celebrity.
Later in the tournament weekend, at a bar with a bunch of handballers, he is twice elbowed out of the way by a chubby guy in his 20s who is wearing a Tim Tebow Broncos jersey and is intent on getting to the bathroom.
Only at the end of the night, tipped off by his friends, does Fat Tebow come over and announce that he is a huuuge fan of Jake Plummer. Plummer smiles, accepts the compliment and then gives the kid grief for not wearing a Kyle Orton jersey.
Plummer's quest to be a regular guy is one reason he loves handball: No one in the sport treats him like a star. This was never more important to him than when he played in Denver, where he was relentlessly compared with Elway, who'd retired in after leading the Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowl titles.
Plummer signed with Denver as a free agent in , and surrounded by elite talent for the first time, he flourished, finishing the season with a career-best The following season he matched or surpassed a handful of Elway's passing records. But Plummer also did things Elway never did. Like flipping off a fan, getting into a traffic dispute with another driver, and berating a Denver gossip columnist for writing about his relationship with Kollette, whom he'd just begun dating.
Before the AFC Championship Game in '06 Plummer met the press with shoulder-length hair and a scraggly beard, wearing jeans and a white undershirt. Lincicome called him Jake the Flake, while others preferred Jake the Mistake. Fans on talk radio wondered whether, if the Broncos made the Super Bowl, Plummer would screw it up. Then again, while he was in Denver, Plummer also started that Alzheimer's foundation.
His grandfather Elwood Davis died of the disease. He went to the animal shelter to walk dogs. Upon leaving Denver, he wrote the shelter a personal check for 10 grand. Still, all that many fans saw was his public demeanor. His teammates certainly did.
I love the guy. I'd go to battle for the guy every day of the year. From the start, however, Shanahan and Plummer clashed. One wanted complete control; the other thrived only if not subject to it. I was like, We're beating someone by 21 points, how much more do you need to beat them by? Plummer needed an escape, and he found one when he began receiving letters that said, "We know about your dad. You should come down to the Denver Athletic Club and play handball.
There, a bunch of old-timers beat the crap out of him—which, of course, Plummer loved. I was the quarterback of the Denver F Broncos, and it didn't matter. It was great. When Broncos workouts rolled around and the team started running sprints, Plummer would coast in, not even breathing hard. Those same guys from the DAC now travel to Jake's tournament. So do another plus recreational players and a dozen or so of the best pros in the world.
Despite this, the tournament is exceedingly low-key. The day before it begins, there are no signs or fliers at the athletic club in Coeur d'Alene. Asked who is in charge, the club manager says simply, "Jake. This is not an exaggeration. Plummer actually runs his tournament. He lugs in groceries, wheels in kegs, sets the match schedule and brings Gatorade to the players.
Sometimes he does all this while cradling his four-month-old son, Roland, in one arm, though not like a football. Around him swirl old men in goggles, scarily fit women in spandex, and sweaty, unshaven guys with knee braces. Handball calls to mind seniors with sun-wrinkled backs swatting at balls on New York City and Miami blacktops, and there are plenty of those types, men with hands like shovels, creased and calloused.
The pros, however, are young and for the most part superbly conditioned. None make a real living off the sport—the only one on hand who tries is top-ranked Dave Chapman, and he runs clinics and sells DVDs. The game is top-heavy; while Plummer is one of the top players in the world, in terms of talent he is the equivalent of a Division III player competing against NBA stars. When it comes to enthusiasm, however, Plummer has few peers. Here he is at p.
Now he's at Court 3, pointing at a skinny blond guy with a buzz cut. When he started, someone gave him a pair of yellow work gloves, like you'd use for digging a ditch, and they'd fall off when he hit, so that's why he's always hitting with closed hands. Then Plummer is at the upstairs courts, watching the women's matches, telling everyone that they have to see this because the women are a-ma-zing. And now he's watching the pros and talking about the athleticism of the top guys.
When it's Jake's turn to play, he has a hard time switching modes. His first doubles match is on Saturday morning, when he is paired with a veteran pro named Danny Armijo, whose nickname is the Hand because of his preternatural ability to return shots. Armijo is something of a goofball and, at 48, a handball lifer, having turned pro at Single, with a mop of brown hair and a soul patch, he is known to call WPH founder Dave Vincent before tournaments and leave voice mails such as, Hey, this is Dan.
I'm having trouble with my joints. While Armijo warms up, Plummer hurries around trying to locate a keg of beer because what kind of tournament would he be running if he didn't have beer for the competitors at a. Once the match starts, Plummer is everywhere. He dives and lunges and whales at the ball. He is quite good, but what's most striking is that while in the NFL he looked small and agile, here he looks large and at times awkward. This is more the fault of the sport than of Plummer; because handball requires quick lateral movement and broad court coverage, it's not a tall man's game.
Only one player over six feet has ever won a world title. Plummer and Armijo split the first two games with their opponents and prevail in a tight third-game tiebreaker that is transfixing. Indeed, handball can be a gorgeous game, full of impossible shots made over the shoulder, through the legs or in mid-pirouette, all delivered with either hand.
To watch the lower-level players, though, is to see the game for what it is: a difficult sport with a high barrier to entry, especially physically.
Those who play the sport know this but still hold out hope. Nearly everyone at the tournament wants handball to get big. Except Plummer. He wants to help the sport, is happy to lend it his name and money and hold this tournament and put up the players at his lake house, but one reason he loves handball is that it's not the NFL. And he may not be, but it feels that way. There's a community. To Plummer, the eternal sandlot player as a quarterback, sports are worth playing only if they're fun.
After retiring from the NFL, he approached handball seriously, aiming to go pro. He practiced hard, cut his hair, got the gear and, ultimately, became frustrated. Every couple of months he'd blow up on the court, then go back home, where Kollette would stare at him and say, "Why are you playing handball?
This continued until Plummer decided to stop caring so much. Football can still trigger that high for Plummer, but now it's in his role as volunteer assistant coach for Sandpoint High. In , after a dominant regular season, Sandpoint fell behind by three scores during the state championship, and Plummer saw his players' defeated adolescent faces.
So he began stalking the sideline, shouting, "Hey, get up! C'mon, you guys. You're going to miss this. The boys stared back at him blankly.
What are we going to miss? Plummer waved his arms, raised his voice. You feel it? We're coming back! But you have to believe. Let them know how you feel. Soon the whole bench was standing and yelling, and then the team was coming back. One score, two scores. And in the end Sandpoint came within a minute of pulling out a victory.
That it failed didn't matter to Plummer. Now the boys understood. Now they felt it. More common is the athlete who can't bring himself to cut the cord, whether he's graceful about it Jerry Rice or subjects his fans and teammates to a protracted, sometimes embarrassing ordeal Brett Favre.
Even those who leave when they should don't necessarily do so easily. Steinberg, who represented Plummer from till , considers him to be the exception. He was one of the most internally centered athletes I've ever met.
He had the perfect temperament for being a leader, because he was as close to an egoless major star as I've seen. Nate Jackson, who played tight end for the Broncos alongside Plummer for three years, says fans can't imagine how hard it is to maintain a sense of self in the NFL.
It's a weird little bubble. If you're smart and pay attention, you know it's bogus, and even then it's hard to move on. But Jake was able to maintain his own identity outside the game. True to form, Plummer turned down endorsements and wasn't the type to hold golf tournaments or sit for photo shoots. The only reason he sat for this story is to help promote handball. I've always done that.
I always will. Privately, Plummer's friends wondered if it wouldn't be the worst thing for him to go along with the Superstar Quarterback script once in a while, but that wasn't who he was. He got such a bad rap. They'll say he's a jerk, he flipped off fans. An beloved but antiquated photographic medium gets a second chance and becomes the intersection of photography and abstract expressionist painting. Post a Comment.
Bill Miller is a photographer based in New York. More images from his Broken Polaroids series can be seen here. The camera spit out 2 pictures at once and the gears ground over the center of this one. At first, most of the image was blue. I was discouraged and threw it into a drawer. Polaroids used to come up in a few minutes. Now, it takes weeks for it to be fully developed. Colors darken and sometimes change, usually for the better.
About 2 weeks later I pulled it out and most of the blue had turned orange with these streaks that looked like a topographic map of the desert. I must be some kind of genius, I thought. My back yard, Brooklyn "The camera is pretty indifferent to what I put in front of it though I insist on pointing it at things. I often think that if I traveled through time and photographed famous events throughout history, the camera would be totally apathetic to the gravity of the event.
In front of the camera: Cleopatra committing suicide. What the? Looks like grass on the moon. Stupid camera. The pizza, I mean. Prospect Park, Brooklyn "This picture allowed me to do a self-portrait in a way that I felt compelled to for many years but was too embarrassed, especially while my mother was still alive. It cannot detect intention. A broken camera knows nothing about our desires and transgressions.
It is an unreliable traveling companion. A silent witness. Group Birthday shot.
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