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Boston College’s Ryan living dream he and his brother shared
By KENT BABBThe Kansas City Star
The boys had been in a car accident. It wasn’t good. That’s all they knew.
“I look back,” Ryan says, “and I knew they were dead. It was that kind of accident. I swore they were gone.”
Ryan is the father of three sons, all football players. Seven years ago, two were in a serious car crash — a Jetta colliding head-on with a military fuel truck. Matt Ryan was in the passenger seat. His brother, Michael — who goes by Motts — was driving.
Motts, the eldest, was the backup quarterback at Pennsylvania’s Widener University. Matt was the star sophomore passer at the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.
Motts had the technique; Matt had the build that would take him to Boston College and make him a star. They all knew Matt had the brighter future on a football field. Motts was fine with that. Still, he loved to play. He was going to be the starter at Widener in a year. All he had to do was wait his turn.
Then the call came, the one that told Mike Ryan to get to the hospital.
He hurried in with his wife, Bernie, and found the boys in a hospital room. Matt was sitting on a chair, his ankle and foot bandaged. Around the partition lay Motts, whose right elbow had been crushed and his head gashed.
They were OK, doctors told Mike. But Motts wouldn’t be a football player anymore. His arm wouldn’t be the same.
Matt Ryan became one of the nation’s best quarterbacks at Boston College. He’s around 6 feet 5 with a powerful right arm. Saturday, he could be one of the top five players selected in the NFL draft. He probably will sign a contract that will pay him millions to play the game all three of Mike Ryan’s boys played in their backyard in Exton, Pa.
A year or so after the crash, Matt was riding with his mother to a game. Matt had been quiet for a long time. He had been quiet for months. Then, a few miles from the Penn Charter campus, he finally had something to say: Why?
Why had football been taken from his brother but not him? Why was he getting all this attention and hearing all this talk about the future, when Motts was sitting around, making attempt after failed attempt to play again, trying to stay close to a game that suddenly had no more use for him?
“Growing up,” Motts says now, “football is your life. Just like that, I was done. It just kind of is what it is.”
•••
The Ryan boys were outside again, getting into who knows what. Maybe throwing the ball. Or yelling about who was stronger or faster. Or terrorizing the youngest brother, John.
On many days, they were playing the role of NFL quarterback. Matt was Brett Favre, and Motts was, well, Brett Favre. They wanted to be like the Green Bay Packers star, making the big throw in the impossible situation.
They threw the ball, one trying to outdo the other. Motts had developed almost perfect form, flawless footwork and a tight spiral. But Matt, three years younger, was showing the same knack and making the same throws — and still growing.
“Every time he looks at me,” Mike Ryan says of his 6-foot eldest son, “he gets angry that Matt is 6-5. He just needed a little bit of that.”
Sometimes Motts and Matt ganged up on John, who was three years younger than Matt. He was too small to run with the big boys, so they playfully bullied him.
The older brothers were close. Matt went to Motts’ games, and Motts went to Matt’s games. Motts walked on at Widener, a Division III school, when Matt was a sophomore at Penn Charter. He was supposed to take over as starter after a year on the bench.
“I was pretty content,” Motts says now. “It was lined up pretty good.”
Motts came home one weekend to celebrate Matt’s 16th birthday, in May 2001. The brothers planned a golf outing, and they jumped into Motts’ Jetta for the drive to the course.
Motts slowed the car near the course entrance and flashed on the left-turn signal. The driver of the car behind them was not paying attention. That car crashed into the back of the Jetta, pushing it into oncoming traffic. The Army fuel truck plowed into the Jetta. That’s all Motts remembers.
Motts woke up hours later, his mother standing over his hospital bed and his right arm in a sling. He had the first of six surgeries to repair his shattered elbow.
Matt Ryan went home that night and stayed up late with his older sister, Kate. They talked into the wee hours about how Matt had thought his brother was dead. They talked about fate, and how no one accounts for things like this when planning the future.
“He was shaken up,” Kate says.
A week later, Mike Ryan called the junkyard where the Jetta had been towed. He asked the manager whether anything could be salvaged. The manager’s response reminded Mike how close his boys had come to dying in that crash.
“The guy said, ‘There’s nothing here. There’s nothing left of this thing,’ ” Mike Ryan says. “That was a strange feeling, to have him tell me that.”
•••
Motts held a football and lifted his right hand to his shoulder. He tried to throw, but his elbow wouldn’t whip forward the way it once could.
The bones in his elbow never healed properly, and the result of multiple surgeries was Motts could not extend his arm. Even now, Motts says, he has about 70-percent range of motion in his right elbow.
But doctors’ prognoses be damned, Motts wanted to play football. When quarterback no longer was an option, he tried moving to defensive back and running back. He even tried coaching. Motts tried for three years, but nothing made him feel as close to the team as he had playing quarterback.
“He thought it was going to work,” says Bill Zwaan, Motts’ coach at Widener. “He finally got enough bad news from the doctors that he said, ‘OK, I’ve got to give this up.’ ”
Matt, meanwhile, watched his brother’s struggle. He felt guilty about continuing to play when his brother could not. He admitted that to his mother one day, and Bernie Ryan called Motts. Matt and Motts met in a room and were honest with each other for the first time about the accident.
Matt told his brother he couldn’t stand playing football, knowing Motts couldn’t do the same. That’s when Motts told his brother he shouldn’t feel guilty. In fact, Motts needed Matt to play. Watching his brother was the only thing that made Motts feel connected to the game, the way he once had.
“He might be living a little bit of his career through Matty now,” says Brian McCloskey, Matt Ryan’s coach at Penn Charter. “And Matty is maybe like, ‘Hey, I’m going and doing this for the family.’ It’s kind of like they’re in it together.”
Motts is 26 now, and he manages the construction of vacation homes along the New Jersey coastline. His flexible schedule allowed him to travel to Boston to watch his younger brother’s college games. He saw Matt throw the winning touchdown pass against Virginia Tech last year, the one that started conversations about Matt’s NFL chances. He saw Matt complete a career at Boston College in which he was 25-7 as a starter and was last year’s Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year.
Matt is expected to be drafted among the top 10, likely going to the Atlanta Falcons or Baltimore Ravens, or maybe even the Chiefs.
He will be in New York, where the draft will take place, and he invited Motts to be there with him. Motts says he wouldn’t miss it.
“Growing up with Matt, we would just play all the time, acting like we were one of those NFL quarterbacks. It really is just a dream; crazy how Matt is actually one of those guys now,” Motts says. “For me, there’s no better enjoyment than watching Matt just go out there and compete and play and have success.
“We always just tried to be perfect. It seems like Matt has done well.”