The most vilified athlete in Chicago sits behind his baby grand playing the theme from “The Sting,” followed shortly thereafter by a rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon.
“Fifth-grade piano lessons,” he says proudly as he heads toward his study, a running start helping him to slide across the wooden floor in his stocking feet.
If Cade McNown is not exactly holed up in this Lake Forest development of mostly empty-nesters, he is comfortably ensconced in a home of which Martha Stewart would be proud.
A candle burns softly in the kitchen, and Christmas ornaments have been laid out neatly on his dining room table by his girlfriend Heather Kozar as the two welcome the delivery of a tree.
He laughs at the thought of hiring a decorator, who brought him a lovely end table for $5,000 and a gorgeous pool table for $20,000 that he “simply had to have.” Not that he couldn’t afford it, mind you. “But I just can’t do it,” he says, shaking his head. “She’s saying, `But it really is a beautiful piece, Cade,’ and I’m like, `Now, why do I need a $5,000 end table?’ I’m not even sure what an end table is.”
He is proud of his new home, his recently finished basement with his less-than-$20,000 pool table next to the Ping-Pong table adjacent to the bar with granite counter. “I figured it would be good for resale value,” he says proudly, rubbing his hand across the granite. “I don’t drink, but you have to have a bar in your basement, right?”
Life is good down here in the basement. It’s good when you’re young and rich and an NFL quarterback.
McNown could be one of the characters in the “Real World,” the MTV documentary that puts seven hip, self-absorbed early-20-somethings in a finely appointed mansion then films their every move–except that at the end of the four-month show, they all go home to the real, real world.
McNown stays on, perpetually on camera and allowed to continue getting himself into trouble while incurring the wrath of everyone watching.
“The thing that bothers me is seeing things get repeated that are just wrong and people use that as a reference for everything,” says McNown. “Then people make it sound like I have a track record of being a jerk.”
“These things” are now referred to in shorthand by McNown as “the handicapped thing,” and “the thing with the kids,” and “the thing with the fans.”
At any given time it seems someone is reading a newspaper article about how McNown should be traded; or a radio caller is referring to him as a spoiled brat; or the television station that employs him is asking him how it feels to be named “Worst Athlete” in a poll of viewers.
In this week’s issue of Pro Football Weekly, Hub Arkush, a member of the Bears’ flagship radio team, likens McNown to the NFL’s poster child for underachievement and general brattiness, Ryan Leaf –not the first time that comparison has been made recently.
This burns McNown particularly. The Leaf part is bad enough. But more than that is the general unfairness he thinks has accompanied his Bears career since he first arrived to comparisons with Jim McMahon.
“I know I haven’t mooned fans and flipped people off,” McNown says. “I haven’t been discourteous to different people all the time. But people try and say I’m a brat.”
But McNown’s old friendstalk about his Fellowship of Christian Athletes involvement and his acts of generosity and charity. One friend tells you of the time last year that McNown, while staying in his L.A. apartment and waiting for the TV repairman while the friend was out, going out instead and buying him a new entertainment center.
McNown admits that it has been considerably tougher to make friends post-college. “When you come into college, you come in with a lot of guys, they’re the same age, you’re living together on the same floor, you have a roommate,” he says. “You go to the same classes, you’re at the same meals, you’re hanging out all the time, and in the pros, the only time you’re doing that is training camp.”
McNown’s problems began with his rookie training camp, when he arrived 12 days late after agreeing to a five-year, potentially $22 million contract including a $6.1 million signing bonus.
Soon he was being accused of blaming others for his own mistakes, a rap that still follows him. “I thought if they didn’t do something and I knew what to do, I was being helpful because that’s what I did in college.
“Here, it’s `Where does this guy get off telling me what to do?’ Well, I’m just trying to help. I want this team to do well. But I didn’t understand at the time. People here are more sensitive because every day you go out there, your job’s on the line. If you’re getting called out by a player saying `Hey, I thought you were going to run this,’ especially if you’re a guy who people look at as a fixture here, the reaction is `Hey, you don’t have anything to worry about, I do.’
“But people don’t say that to you. You hear it through the grapevine that you’re a jerk for saying that.”
Offensive tackle Blake Brockermeyer, McNown’s self-described best friend on the team, wonders aloud about McNown’s future.
“Cade is either going to learn from his mistakes and use it to his advantage,” Brockermeyer said, “or he’s going to let it all get to him and he’s going to be, I don’t know, who’s a bust? Ryan Leaf.”
Brockermeyer says McNown is characteristic of someone who’s 23 in both his independence and stubbornness. “You can try to tell him things and talk to him and he doesn’t want to hear negative feedback,” he says. “He gets real defensive if you try to tell him, `You can’t do this.’
“He always wants to be in the right, but sometimes he’s not right. And he’ll keep denying that. I think once he learns to listen and to learn from some of the mistakes he’s made, then hopefully, he’ll grow up.”
McNown believes he is learning. This summer, he completed 200 hours of community service, which was part of his sentence after pleading no contest last year to misdemeanor charges of illegally obtaining a handicapped parking placard while a student at UCLA three years ago.
McNown fulfilled his community service at a Ronald McDonald House for the families of seriously ill children in Old Town, spending long weekends to finish by the judge’s deadline.
At first, he admits, he resented the sentence. “It’s one thing when you do it because you want to do it,” he explains. “It’s another thing when somebody tells you that you have to do it because it’s not viewed the same way. But I’m actually glad it happened because I turned it into something great.”
The real question now is whether McNown can become not just a successful quarterback but an effective leader.
Fellow quarterback Shane Matthews says he thinks the rest of the team is coming around. “There’s still some guys who may not get along with him,” he says. “I don’t know what reason that may be, it’s just the way he comes across to some people sometimes and he doesn’t do it on purpose. Once you get to know him, he’s a great person and I think people here in Chicago will eventually see that.”
It would be easy to explain McNown’s difficulty in ingratiating himself with the team by writing it off to simple envy. But Brockermeyer begs to differ.
“It’s not jealousy,” says Brockermeyer. “I think the biggest factor is some of the other [quarterbacks] have come in and played well and the team seems to have responded to them. … When Cade’s been in there, he just hasn’t won over the guys with all these plays he was making in college. … That’s the bottom line.”
Winning, he says, would help everything. “Watching [Dan] Marino growing up, he’d yell at his linemen and cuss them out and it was OK because he made plays,” says Brockermeyer.
That suggestion, however, that somehow he can be as obnoxious as he wants if the Bears just win is also offensive to McNown. “People have said that but I don’t want to be obnoxious,” he says. “I don’t want to get away with stuff. I don’t want winning to afford me the opportunity to be a jerk. I want winning to afford me the opportunity to enjoy Chicago and enjoy the people here.
“It’s a lot more fun when you can open up the paper and not be called these names and insulted personally.”
Bears vice president of personnel Mark Hatley sympathizes to an extent.
“He’s made this for himself a little bit and he’s just got to grow up and get himself out of it,” says Hatley. “Wins will help but that won’t solve everything. He’s just got some maturing to do.”
Still, Hatley sees some of McNown’s worst qualities as contributing to someone he thinks will be a great player one day. “I like him as much as any of our players,” Hatley said. “You love him and hate him for the same things. He’s a piece of work.”
What he is, says McNown, is a person who is trying to weather a storm he is confident will blow over.
“You can develop a certain numbness to it, but you don’t want to get to the point where you don’t care about anything because then, why are you living?” he says. “The way I see it right now, the good times will be that much better. I’m going to get through this. None of this stuff is going to kill me. I know I’ve got what it takes and I know eventually it will show. If not this weekend, then next. It will show up because doing something over time is ultimately what matters.”
