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ArticlesFormer NFL star aims to be next GrishamNavigator, November/December 2000 By Joe DeChick 
This year's National Football League season gives players a chance to rebound from a 1999 when rap sheets overshadowed stats sheets.
If that image rehabilitation campaign fails, the NFL can always turn to Tim Green. The retired Atlanta Falcons defensive end makes it safe to use the words "role model" and "NFL player" in the same sentence. Better yet, Green writes sentences as a TV and National Public Radio commentator, and as a best-selling author and USA Today columnist. And his trouble isn't with the law; as an attorney, he practices law. Rather, it is deciding whether to aspire to be the next John Madden or the next John Grisham. Or both. The 36-year-old Green—in his seventh year as a color commentator for Fox—is not ready to supplant the inimitable Madden as the network's top gridiron analyst. But with his sixth novel, The Letter of the Law, out in September, the former first-round NFL draft pick might have the right stuff to tackle Grisham (another novelist with a law degree) in publishing's ultra-competitive legal-thriller arena. Warner Books has unleashed a nationwide promotional and advertising blitz to support the tale of a hotshot attorney representing her former criminal law professor on trial for murdering a student. The promotional push includes an intentional shoving aside of Green's football ties; his broadcasting and eight years in the NFL are barely mentioned. "It's the reinvention of me as an author," Green says from his modest Syracuse, N.Y., law office appointed with law tomes and his novels, and pictures of wife Illyssa and their four children. "Even my bio was rewritten. But it's an accurate depiction of who I am now. Other than broadcasting football, I spend most of my time as a lawyer and a writer." A writer whose five previous thrillers—Ruffians, Titans, Outlaws, The Red Zone and Double Reverse—were stories with football themes. But Law, Green says, doesn't even allude "to anyone who's ever been involved in any way with any sport." The NFL shouldn't take this personally; it's purely a commercial move. "Most book buyers are women," Illyssa Green says, "and women don't want to buy football books." Green garnered some women readers with his 1997 memoir A Man and His Mother: An Adopted Son's Search. Yet, despite a huge and perfectly executed marketing campaign by ReganBooks/HarperCollins, the book's success was sabotaged by its failure to hit store shelves for up to two to three weeks after Green's promotional appearances. It still visibly pains Green to discuss the blunder. "It was criminal what happened," he says. "But it was a great lesson for me in the importance of the publishing process." Green confidantes say that while his first non-fiction work, The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL (1996), was a New York Times bestseller that landed him on 60 Minutes, An Adopted Son's Search is more important for its peek inside Green's psyche. Researching and writing it helped him to trace lifelong compulsive drives to please and to succeed to their root cause: the sense of being abandoned by his biological mother. From a young age, the son of a suburban Syracuse teacher and engineer drove himself to try to achieve twin goals as an NFL player and published writer. He was an All-American at Syracuse University and co-valedictorian in 1986 with a degree in English. Though he admits he was small for the NFL at 6-foot-2, 250 pounds, Green was a starter for the Falcons. During each season, he helped raise a family with Illyssa, who he met at Syracuse during the spring of his senior year. He also wrote the USA Today column. And while he was supposed to be watching game films, he sat in the back of dark rooms and began scratching out novels with a pen, paper and jerry-built penlight. Not content to be just another ex-jock with a B.A., Green studied law at Syracuse during off-seasons and graduated with honors. All along, he searched for his birth mother. Green doesn't regret writing An Adopted Son's Search, but admits it strained relations with his adoptive parents. Today, he enjoys relationships with his adoptive and birth parents. And he's received hundreds of letters from adoptees sharing similar stories. "Writing it was therapeutic—he needed to," Illyssa says. "It brought closure." But it hasn't dampened Green's volcanic fire to please and succeed. "I want to be a franchise novelist and the No. 1 NFL broadcaster," he says. "People say, 'You're a glutton for success.' But often your best successes come from failing to achieve a loftier goal." Green refuses, however, to put career goals above his roles as husband and father. He has turned down TV jobs on both coasts to raise his family in his [his hometown], 20 miles from Syracuse. And whenever possible, he builds his schedule around his family. "He does whatever needs to be done: coach T-ball, change diapers," Illyssa says. "He'll go into the law firm two or three days a week, then is home the rest of the week. He will write at night when everyone's in bed. "What most people would ponder, wonder, fret about—he just does." There's not much Green doesn't do, whether for charity (hosting a celebrity golf tournament to benefit Make-A-Wish Foundation), for fun (baking a crab dip and cracking wise about cheesy films on a local monster-movie TV show) or for career synergy (analyzing the murder trial of NFL star linebacker Ray Lewis for Court TV). "I'm lucky, and I realize it," Green says, "because I love all the things that I do." Especially the writing. "Writing a well-constructed and compelling suspense novel is a mental challenge, a mental exercise, that I really take a lot of pleasure in," he says. Fine. But can Green sack Grisham at his own game? "I'll put my books against all the other competition," Green says.  |
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