I've never really felt good enough for him. My dad was an intimidating hard ass football coach and the Easter mentality meant that we were supposed to always be tough as nails, show no weakness, and never get taken out of game for being hurt. This “Easter Mentality” is the name that all the other coaches and kids in sports called us because the Easter family was such a tough nosed football family and the reputation was that football was our lives and we would play through any pain. There was also the “Easter Mentality” stereo type that I had to live up to. I guess I got to the point then where I just didn't care and realized the only way to fill adequate to fill the Easter family shoes was to play football. I was tired of teachers and even Principal Monroe comparing me to my brother and asking me why I wasn't as good of a student as my older brother. I won't lie I look back now and always felt like I had something to prove to my dad and trying to fill my older brothers football shoes. When he speaks again, his voice is a stew of pride and guilt: “He was my type of guy.” On the mantel behind him is a picture of Zac sitting in the back of a pickup, cradling the ten-point buck. pauses, takes a heavy breath, and shrugs. He was the kind of guy I like on defense.” “Of all the boys, he was the one who wouldn't show pain, who'd be fearless.… He'd throw his head into anything. “Zac was a thumper,” his father says, standing in the family kitchen. “He was there to do some damage.” He had a lot to live up to, and he wasn't born with what he needed, so in high school he secretly began taking prohormones, a steroid-like supplement banned in many sports. “He was out there to fuck people up,” says Myles Jr. Zac was shorter and slower, but he was the toughest son of a bitch on the field. Zac's elder brother, Myles Jr., was taller, faster, talented enough to earn a college football scholarship and a spot in his high school's sports hall of fame. Zac loved Brett Favre-he had the same swagger. The Easters were a Minnesota Vikings family, but early on Zac defected and chose the Green Bay Packers. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, they'd sneak up to the overhead track at Simpson College's century-old gym and listen to their dad's halftime pep talks. They'd come to practice every day and hang off to the side with the kickers. “I was getting to the point where I loved it more than the kids did back in high school.” Not that the boys didn't love it, too. He never made his boys play football-it was more like it was just assumed. Before Zac was born, Myles took a job as defensive coordinator at Simpson College, a Division III school in Indianola, Iowa, a town of 11,000 known for an annual hot-air-balloon festival. He and Brenda got together in 1982, soon after his football career ended, and they married two years later, which meant she was now married to football, too. talks about his own football career, there's a joyful worship of the sport's violent side: “I just wanted to knock the fuck out of somebody.” He was a safety at Drake University, a small school in Des Moines. He was perfect for the one thing that mattered most in the Easter family: football. Zac was fearless, certain of his invincibility, confident he could push his limits to the very edge yet always stay in control. “GODDAMMIT!” his dad, Myles Sr., would yell from the porch as he shot by. He'd fly through the woods, build jumps and hurdle over them. As a teenager he graduated to the family's Honda Recon ATV, his first taste of real adrenaline and real recklessness. The Easter family's acreage was off a dirt road, surrounded by cornfields, just east of where The Bridges of Madison County was filmed, and Zac and his brothers would go on hikes to the creek, bringing along an artillery of Black Cat fireworks to blow up minnows and bullfrogs. He was Tom Sawyer reborn: unleashed, unbound midwestern middle-class American boy. As he got older, the blast radius got bigger. Faulty wiring? It turned out Zac was taking swings at the bulbs with a baseball bat. One winter, the family couldn't figure out why the lightbulbs on the Christmas tree kept bursting. He went through four of those unbreakable steel Tonka dump trucks-broke the first three and disassembled the fourth, trying to figure out how it worked. He was a sweet, curious kid, and seemingly programmed to destroy.
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