VivaX

By Gary Myers

Derek Carr invited his family to his house in Danville, about twenty-five miles outside Oakland, two days before Christmas in 2016 to celebrate the holiday.

The Raiders were having a magical season, and Carr was an MVP candidate in just his third season. He had a game the next afternoon on Christmas Eve at home against the Indianapolis Colts and would be required to report to the team hotel the night before the game, making that Friday afternoon the best time for Carr and his wife, Heather, and their two young sons, his parents, and his brothers, nieces, and nephews to get together for an early dinner and to open presents.

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The Carrs are a religious, tight-knit family. David, the oldest, was the first overall pick in the 2002 draft by the expansion Houston Texans. Darren, the middle of the three sons, was a defensive lineman at the University of Houston. Football fans got their first glimpse of Derek on David’s draft weekend in New York when he attended many of the NFL’s events and was by David’s side when he walked onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York after Commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced the Texans’ pick. Derek had just turned eleven years old.

On the day before Christmas 2016, Derek rented a suite for his parents, his brothers, and all the kids to see him play against the Indianapolis Colts at home at the Oakland Coliseum. It was David’s first time to see his brother play in person in the NFL. David had retired following the 2012 season. “It was packed full of family,” Rodger Carr, the patriarch, said. “That was one of the presents from Derek. We were all up there.”

Carr, drafted near the top of the second round by the Raiders in 2014, had guided Oakland to an 11-3 record. They were in control of the AFC West and still had a chance to upend the Patriots and earn the top play-off seed in the AFC. That would be a considerable accomplishment. The Raiders had not been in the playoffs, or even finished over .500, since they were in the Super Bowl in 2002. In fact, they were an abysmal 63-145 from 2003 to 2015. But general manager Reggie McKenzie had drafted well and built the team around Carr and linebacker Khalil Mack, who was a pass-rushing force, and the eeriness of playing in the Black Hole gave this talented Raiders team a decided home field advantage.

Then came agony and shattered Super Bowl dreams.

There was 11:07 remaining in the fourth quarter against the Colts. The Raiders held a comfortable 33–14 lead. Run the ball, try to pick up some clock-killing first downs, don’t get anybody hurt, and get the heck out of there. That should have been Oakland’s approach. Carr instead dropped back to pass and wound up in the hospital. He was moving around in the pocket when he was brought down by Trent Cole. His right leg got twisted. Carr knew right away it was bad. He grabbed his right leg and yelled, “It’s broke, it’s broke,” again and again.

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He’s no doctor, but he knows his body. His right fibula was indeed broken. A few days later, he had season-ending surgery. The despair of the Carr family filled the suite. One minute they were enjoying the food and drink and what seemed to be a lopsided victory, and the next moment Derek Carr’s season was over just as he neared the finish line.

“I read his lips, ‘It’s broke, it’s broke, it’s broke,’ ” Rodger Carr said. “All of us started crying. You know the work he put in to get to that point. We were in shock; Heather and my wife were crying. All the girls were so upset.”

The Raiders held on to beat the Colts 33–25.

Officials from the Raiders took Heather to the locker-room area to see Derek.

“Rodger, I’ve never seen anything like that,” she told Derek’s father. “Big, grown men coming in and crying and hugging Derek and telling him they love him.”

“They are just a good group of men,” Rodger said.

The prognosis for Derek after surgery was excellent. But instead of being able to move on, every time Rodger Carr turned on the television in the days and weeks after his son was injured, it seemed the play of Derek being injured was being shown on the screen.

“I can’t watch it,” he said. “It’s hard to watch.”

* * *

Derek Carr receives a text message from his father before every game.

“Hey,” he says. “I love you. Have fun.”

He and his wife are at every one of Derek’s home games. They live in Bakersfield, a four-hour drive from Oakland, so they load up the car and hit the highway.

Rodger Carr was an excellent basketball player. “Amazing player,” Derek said. “He averaged over 30 points a game in high school. He was one of the best players in the state of California. He had a full ride to USC but his mom, for some reason, said, ‘I can’t let you go.’ So he went to Cal State–Bakersfield and that’s where he met my mom. Thank the Lord that happened.”

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Rodger Carr is six foot five and played at 230 pounds. Back in the ’70s, that was a big shooting guard. He had a forty- inch-plus vertical jump. Derek has a picture of himself sitting on a friend’s head and dunking a basketball looking down at his father. “I was playing back in the day when we wore short shorts,” Rodger said.

After suffering a back injury when he was nineteen, doctors wanted to do surgery. Rodger refused and his career was over. “His coaches were begging him not to stop playing,” Derek said. “He would have easily went on to the NBA and played. He’s an all-around athlete. He ran in the Junior Olympics.”

When Rodger turned fifty, he took his three sons to the park. “He just wanted to play basketball,” Derek said. “He said, ‘I want to be able to dunk at fifty.’ He went up and slammed it.”

Fourteen years later, after playing basketball, Derek couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “You put a basketball in his hands, he looks like he’s twenty- four,” he said. “Man, that is unreal.”

Derek always wanted to play basketball. He goes into the gym and starts drilling threes from NBA range like Steph Curry. “When I retire from the NFL, I’m going to try out for the Warriors,” Derek said.

“Dude, you’re going to be a little old. You’re six-three. Just think of the point guards you are going to have to cover,” Rodger said.

Once he injured his back, Rodger Carr knew basketball wasn’t in his future and he needed to think about what he was going to do with his life. He went to work for Roger Penske’s auto dealership in Bakersfield after college. He got married and started to raise a family. He would work long hours, but he always found the time to throw around the football, first with David, then Darren, then Derek. Even these days, with one son an NFL quarterback and another a former NFL quarter- back and Darren the head coach at Bakersfield Christian High School, they’ll be sitting around watching television, somebody will pick up a football, and then they’re all in the backyard throwing it around.

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Rodger was working hard to support his family at the dealership. He started out in sales and was promoted to finance manager; then, after Penske sold the dealership, he became sales manager and then general sales manager. He would often leave for work early in the morning, and by the time he finished his paperwork it would be ten or eleven before he got home at night. On the days he would get home at nine, the boys were already showered and in their pajamas when he would summon them outside to throw the ball around.

Mom would object because her sons were already cleaned up, but Rodger had a rule: If he was home in time, he wanted to work one hour a day with them. “Come on outside,” he’d say.

So they would.

“My mom always said she raised four boys and my dad was one of them,” Derek said.

He would attend football practice, and most of the time he was the only parent watching. But he would stay off to the side and never get in the way of the coaches. If the coaches felt the need to yell at one of his kids, he didn’t want them holding back just because he was around. Once they got home from a game, Rodger always had just the right thing to say.

“He knew us so well, knew our mood,” Derek said. “If we messed up, he knew we would be down. He picked out the one thing that we did right and was just encouraging us and lifting us. It was the same thing if I went 4-for-4 in a baseball game or if I scored 16 points and hit five threes in a basketball game or if I threw six touchdowns, if I was feeling kind of good, he would say, ‘Hey, man, I’m so proud of you. That was so fun to watch.’ He would always blow it up way out of proportion like you threw twelve touchdowns or scored 40 points. He would remember the one ground ball that you kind of bobbled and told you to keep your head down on it. He would always keep it in perspective for us, but at the same time, he would blow it up like we were the best thing ever if we did something good.”

Excerpted from My First Coach: Inspiring Stories of NFL Quarterbacks and Their Dads. Copyright © 2017 by Gary Myers. Used by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

(Top photo: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

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