Outdoor Adventures 
The Family That Played Together
It isn’t every day that South Texas produces an NFL quarterback, let alone two, let alone two who are brothers. For their athletic feats, Ty and Koy Detmer have one man to thank: their father, a high school coaching whiz everyone calls Sonny.
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But as much as the Eagles say they love Ty Detmer, it’s unlikely he’ll be in Philadelphia next year. Beginning with the loss to the Cowboys, the team’s 1997 season has become a meltdown. Through no real fault of his own (one columnist in Philly described his treatment as “terribly unfair”), Ty had to fight with Rodney Peete for the job in training camp, was relieved by Peete twice early in the season, was benched for two weeks, then put back in charge for a big game against the 49ers. Finally, with the team all but eliminated from playoff contention, Rhodes gave the reins to Bobby Hoying, a second-year player who is considered the Eagles’ future. (Koy, should he stay, is expected to challenge or back up Hoying.) Through it all, Ty hadn’t been brilliant, but he hadn’t been bad either—the offense was rated first in the league, as it had been last year, and Ty was the ninth-best passer in the NFC, down from fourth in 1996. An inconsistent offensive line and a horrifying special teams unit were the reasons the team wasn’t winning. Betty jokes that it’s her fault—she’s always praying that Ty won’t get hurt, and he can’t get hurt sitting on the bench. Sonny is already looking ahead to Ty’s next team. “Ty needs somebody to just say that he’s gonna be the guy,” Sonny says. “He can play. He wins big games. So Philadelphia served a real good purpose for him. But football has kinda become a job for him this year.”
Ty, of course, is Mr. Circumspect. One of his favorite expressions is “It’s hard to say.” Is he getting a raw deal from the Eagles? “It’s hard to say.” Did he have something to prove this year after struggling late last season? “It’s hard to say.” Maybe it’s true that Ty Detmer can’t be an NFL player—he’s too genial. Where’s the flamboyance, the narcissism, the petulance? Ty has never been a show-me-the-money guy—his base salary is only $700,000 at a time when quarterbacks who have accomplished less than he has (Elvis Grbac, Scott Mitchell, Gus Frerotte) make $20 mil-lion over four or five years. After Ty won the Heisman as a junior, he returned for his senior year—almost unheard of. And though an observant Mormon, he has never used his piety for media fodder. Ty is the anti-Deion, an aw-shucks team player whose demeanor masks a cutthroat competitiveness. He may not stand tall in the pocket in the literal sense, but he does so with his leadership, his stubbornness, and the way he lives his life.
“That’s what I appreciate about him so much,” says Sonny, the man who helped shape him. “He doesn’t look, talk, or act like a tough guy, but this guy is tough. You know that goin’ in, he’s got to be, because he’s not gonna get all the opportunities to make mistakes and have time to mature and have time to learn—like Brett Favre got all the time in the world to mature. And he made mistakes and they patted him on the back and said, ‘You’ll do better next time.’ For Ty it was, ‘Well, if you don’t win this one, this could be the end of your career.’ Why wouldn’t you root for a guy who is an average guy to go in there and do super things? Why wouldn’t you be rootin’ for a guy like that to make it?”
Last October, in one of Sonny’s final home games, the Mission fans saw another characteristic night of Detmer football. No one was surprised when the Eagles won the toss and chose to kick off to the Pharr—San Juan—Alamo Bears; high school football fans have grown accustomed to teams opening the game with a defensive statement, knowing that when the second half begins, the ball will be theirs. But the Bears were plenty surprised when Mission started things off with an onside kick. Sonny Detmer’s maverick coaching philosophy kept the Bears off balance all night in what turned into a 47—0 romp. Mission went for it on fourth and thirteen, punted before Pharr—San Juan—Alamo had all its men on the field, and of course, passed, passed, and passed again.
Only three things happen when you throw a pass, Darrell Royal famously said, and two of them are bad. This is not so in a Sonny Detmer offense. At its most maximalist, there are seven things that can happen: the two bad ones (incompletion, interception), plus successful plays to the first receiver, the second receiver, the third receiver, the fourth receiver, and the fifth receiver. Those are much better odds.
In the age of the run and shoot, West Coast offenses, and God forbid, major aerial thrusts at UT and A&M, Detmer looks like a prophet. He jokes that as a former wideout himself, he’s simply inclined to throw the ball, but really he does it to entertain, to make things tough on run-oriented defenses, and in Mission’s case, because his team wasn’t built for brute force—at 185 to 210 pounds the offensive linemen were no bigger than . . . well, Ty Detmer. Oh, yeah, and he does it because it works.
“These places want to win,” Detmer says. “They’re not having little picnic dinners after the game is over. They’re intense about football down here. They know that the weight room is open from five o’clock until eight o’clock at night, and if they see a kid out on the street [at that time], they want to know why he’s not in there.”
Every Friday during football season Detmer addressed a group of local businessmen over lunch, and on the day of the game against the Bears, his hands covered in purple salve from treating an injured horse, he had to apologize for the previous week’s loss. He was then barraged with friendly but demanding questions about the quarterback situation, the defense, and the long-ball passing game. “You’d think this was an NFL team,” joked one of the participants. “Barry Switzer doesn’t get this much abuse.”
At Mission Detmer had almost as many assistants as Switzer—thirteen, including a former NFL assistant coach as the defensive coordinator. Detmer himself was the offensive coordinator, and he chose to call the plays from the press box rather than the sidelines. In the box at the Bears game, he was totally placid, peering over formations and drinking a Dr Pepper per quarter as his assistants yelled, squawked, cheered, and cursed over the militarylike din of headsets and microphones. “You guys ready to go?” he had asked his squad, all peach fuzz, pimples, and pads, before the game. The system was in place; the team was prepared to play. From consistency comes greatness, with no need for a fire-and-brimstone speech (“How many of those can you give?” Detmer asks). At halftime the coach worked his way back to the locker room, stopping to chat with a few fans before setting up in front of a marker board to diagram a few adjustments.
“People try to make coaching a lot harder than it is,” says Detmer, who has been known to be relaxed enough on game days to take a nap. Though that might actually be work: “Seeing the plays on the inside of his eyelids” is how Betty describes his rest. He has logged his share of sixteen-hour days, but he knows there’s more to life than football. “When he’s late getting home,” says Betty, “it’s not because he’s at the field house. Usually he has stopped off to check a cow or a horse or see a guy about hay.” Detmer owns horses and cattle and works them on some nearby land he leases. He can sometimes be found riding one of the horses around the groves near his house, the dogs in tow. “I have a great life,” he says.
One can’t help but think that whatever Sonny does next will have something to do with the thing that drove him around Texas all those years and landed him in Mission. “Football has been so much fun, and it’s been so good to me. Everything that I have ever gotten or ever had happen to me has been because of football. If it weren’t for football, I would just be an average person, doin’ an average deal, but I’ve been made into something a little more special than I really am. I’ve had a good life ’cause of football. A lot of people have special feelings for me because I have two boys that are in the NFL and I’ve been a good coach in high school in Texas. I never wanted to be anything else. I never wanted to do anything else.”
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