Men's Journal

The front five of the Super Bowl champ New York Giants exemplify the bond that forms between men who play the O-line. To be effective, they must work selflessly, seamlessly, as one entity. That, and eat a lot of pasta.

by Rick Telander

Four of the five very large men with swollen necks, ham arms, and keg midriffs known as the New York Giants offensive line lounge by the pool on the rooftop of the Standard Hotel in downtown L.A. They are in bathing suits, a sight in itself. Only one member, right tackle Kareem Mc-Kenzie, is not here. “I’m not a big red-carpet guy,” he will explain later. By that he means not an enthusiastic red-carpet guy. For big, he is: 6–6, 327.

The others are big too. Have we mentioned that? Center Shaun O’Hara, 6–3, 306; right guard Chris Snee, 6–3, 317; left guard Rich Seubert, 6–3, 310; left tackle David Diehl, 6–5, 319.

McKenzie’s heart is with his mates, as they kill time before tonight’s ESPY Awards ceremony. Just not his size 4X self. Which is a pity, since the quintet moves afield like a massive 10-legged caterpillar, a sack of boulders. They are, at their best, almost a single entity, working in selfless synchronicity like a cluster of army ants.

The Super Bowl champ Giants have been nominated for the best something-or-other for this made-for-TV quasi-fraudulent event, so the linemen have made the trip. It’s a freebie, and jocks like that. “I hope we win,” says Seubert, who has a dark beard, cheerful eyes, and, like Snee and Diehl, is married, with kids. The other two are single, though O’Hara, also bearded, is engaged, allegedly close to tying the knot. All the guys will be there if it ever happens.

O’Hara pulls out some tanning oil from a small bag. “ESPYs,” he says to himself. “Can’t be pale.”
“A man bag,” says Snee to the others. “What do we think of this?” There is grumbling and casual disgust, sarcasm, resignation. O’Hara continues oiling.

The men ponder the awards ceremony, an event for famous people and self-absorbed blowhards. Not guys like them. They are not salt of the earth; they are the earth itself.

“When we go up, we should all tackle Eli,” O’Hara says.

Eli, of course, is quarterback Eli Manning. The O-line exists to make his life easier, to protect him at all costs. Yes, the line will periodically spring jackrabbit running backs, too, such as former star Tiki Barber. Current tailback Brandon Jacobs, 6–4, 264, is more of a bear, often plowing into the backs of his mates. (“Full head of steam. A wrecking ball,” says O’Hara with concern.) But taking care of the QB is the essence of their duty. And to show their respect for such protection, NFL quarterbacks routinely give their offensive lines gifts at the end of the season. Particularly if their line is the caliber of the Giants’. Particularly if the team’s last stop was the mountain peak. Word is, the Patriots’ multitoothed, sparkling-eyed supreme leader Tom Brady gave his line expensive new cars after last season. “ATVs, I think,” says O’Hara. Actually, it was Audi Q7s in the $40,000–$60,000 range. “But Eli, you know, is smart,” O’Hara continues. “He said, ‘I can’t start at the top. The baseline is important.’ ” So in recent seasons he has given his line nice sunglasses, custom suits, high-def camcorders. “Plus, his rookie year he was on the ground a lot,” says Snee.

The others nod. The sun is extreme, and the group continues to lounge the way sea lions do on spray-flecked basking rocks.

A friend of the group, Noel LaMontagne, arrives. He’s a tall, sinewy sports agent for Eastern Athletic Services. But back in 2000, when he was beefier, he and O’Hara were rookie O-linemen and roommates with the Cleveland Browns. “There are some guys from Under Armour downstairs,” LaMontagne says. “Somebody who looks like a football player needs to go down, talk to security, and let them in.”

Without saying anything, O’Hara quickly puts his right index finger on his nose. Diehl puts his finger on his own nose. Snee soon does the same. Seubert, who is not paying attention, eventually notices the silence, looks around, and mumbles, “Shit.”

No other unit in any sport must function as symbiotically as an offensive line. Baseball infielders work in sync, but only sporadically. Basketball players are all over the place. Soccer players too. Rowers work together, but their mission is too simple to count. Defensive linemen — usually a threesome or a quartet — run coordinated stunts, but basically they’re lone assassins. The offensive line, however, fanning out from the center, who is always drawn on blackboards as a circle with an “x” through it while the others are simply circles, must correctly choose their targets, hold their blocks simultaneously and in cohesion, and remain engaged to the end, or else the dam is breached, the wall torn asunder. And they do it in near obscurity.

“Playing O-line you have to take your ego, put it in your back pocket, and zip it up,” says Jim Covert, the former Pro Bowl left tackle for the Chicago Bears during their Walter Payton/Jim McMahon heyday. “When you win, you had nothing to do with it. Lose, it’s all your fault. You play against first- and second-down defensive linemen, third-down rushers, specialists coming in and out — 70 or so plays, and if you’re successful 68 times, with two plays being a sack and a tackle-for-loss, you failed.”

It takes a tight line to be effective. And it’s hard to find a tighter group than these Giants. Seubert has described them as operating like five fingers of the same hand (making sure to point out that O’Hara is the middle finger). They’ve been together for four years, an eternity in pro football. They eat together at team dinners, barbecue together, and last spring they were at Seubert’s Celebrity Trap Shoot charity event together in Wisconsin. Fifteen-hundred-plus pounds of meat and loaded weapons?

Their durability is a big part of their success. Snee has started 48 straight regular-season games. McKenzie and Seubert started every game last year, including the four play-off games. O’Hara missed only the wild-card game at Tampa Bay with a knee injury. Diehl has started every game (86) the Giants have played since he was drafted out of the University of Illinois in 2003. And, of course, they all played like seasoned vets in the Giants’ 17-14 Super Bowl win over the Patriots.

“They’re such a close-knit group of guys in the first place,” Manning says. “Then to have the same five guys for four years? That’s rare.”

They spend so much time with one another that, as O’Hara puts it, “by the end of the season, we’re finishing each other’s sentences.”

“It’s like ESP,” says McKenzie. “It gets to be scary at times.”

Which leads to the most transcendent of athletic quests: performing hard things in cohesion without even speaking, the ephemeral realm where the whole becomes far greater than the sum of its parts. It is an offensive lineman’s vision of perfection. “You’ll be on the road where it’s loud and hostile, and all five guys are on the same page, and you play nonverbally,” says Diehl. “To not even talk? To go off of looks? Unless you’re an offensive lineman, you don’t know.”

At the 24-hour fitness center across the street from the hotel, O’Hara, Snee, and Seubert pump iron. You forget that no matter what else, these guys are ungodly strong. Weightlifting is a way of life for them. The biggest dumbbells in the place weigh 110 pounds. Chicken shit. “We have 150-pounders at the stadium,” says O’Hara. “When we travel, this is all we can expect.”

As they move from station to station, eliciting sideways gawks from the mortals in the gym, the guys urge one another on, spotting the weights, needling the whole while.

“Shaun is known to make noises in games,” says Snee in a conspiratorial aside, as O’Hara grimaces on a bench, spewing grunts. “Little noises — ‘oy, oy, oy’ — as he’s being driven backward.”

“Okay, now we’ve opened a can of worms,” says O’Hara, rising after his set. “It’s stone-quiet before a game, we’re just ready to take the field, and what do we hear? Snee barfing his guts out. Every game.”

Like nervous dry heaves?

“No,” says Snee, sheepishly, his Grim Reaper no mercy tattoo visible on his left biceps. “Wet ones. Whatever I ate. Red beans and rice, pasta…”

This begets a round of smart-ass comments from the other players. On and on it goes. Egos must be subjugated. Humor and sarcasm will bring every member of the O-line back to ground, just as illegal head clubs and piles of falling bodies from the side and behind will. That is what happened to Seubert on October 19, 2003, against the Philadelphia Eagles, when his lower left leg played Twister in a Tiki Barber–induced pile. It took him the rest of that season and all of the next to recover from the triple fracture, which has resulted in an indented, eight-inch scar on his calf and metal tubing inside.

“I tell people it’s a shark bite,” Seubert says. O-linemen are so tough they seldom notice pain. Or rather, they disregard its milder forms and tape up the rest. Former Bears center Jay Hilgenberg once played with a dislocated elbow and a separated shoulder by connecting his arm to his torso with a chain. Normal stuff for O-linemen. But this constant threat of injury is another reason they rely so much on one another. If one of them has his blind side exposed on a block, another must have his back, literally.

Seubert brings up the leg injury again. Not the injury per se, but the surgery that followed. “I wanted to keep the screws, so I asked the doctor for them. Thirteen or 14, hexagonal head, some small, some big. Can’t throw ’em in the mail, so he gave them to me. There was a plate in there, too, very thin. Really thin. It surprised me. Also a rod. I asked the doc about taking that out, the rod — they’d pounded it down from here [He points to a different scar on his knee] — and he said, ‘You don’t want to do that.’ Guess it kind of holds my leg together.”

Just as injuries are a part of the job, so is size. And with that comes the toll on O-linemen’s joints, hearts, vascular systems. “We’re aware of the life-expectancy issue,” says O’Hara, who, if he were to lose, say, 100 pounds, could be a leading man with his blue eyes and (likely) chiseled features. “Every time an offensive lineman passes away, we know about it. Eating 4,000 calories a day, lifting… We’re thinking about the day we can buy jeans in a regular store.”

“You worry about breaking chairs,” Seubert adds. “Those little plastic ones? Those are toast. [Ex-Giants QB] Kerry Collins had a deer stand in his backyard. I’m a bow hunter. I climbed up to get in position and every step bent.”

Sleep apnea is routine for men with necks well more than 20 inches around. “Noel used to say I was inhaling the curtains at night,” says O’Hara.

“You could hear him 12 floors below,” LaMontagne says.

Of course, these wouldn’t be O-linemen if there weren’t a funny story in this. A couple of seasons ago tight end Jeremy Shockey got a concussion in camp, and his grizzled position coach Mike Pope was assigned to check on him through the night to make sure he was okay. Pope went into the wrong dorm room, saw O’Hara in the dark hooked up to his breathing mask, and freaked. “He thinks Shockey’s on, like, a ventilator,” says O’Hara. “He’s leaning over me saying, ‘Jeremy, are you okay!?’ Jesus, that’s not a face you want to wake up to.”

It’s late july, and camp is in full swing. The O-linemen are reunited once again in the dull humdrum of the State University of New York–Albany campus — 3,000 miles and many fake smiles away from Los Angeles.
Eli Manning stands on a podium here in the dorm courtyard at noon, speaking to a horde of reporters and TV folks in harmless clichés. Other stars speak to smaller clots of newspeople. The O-linemen trudge about, nearly anonymous.

Rich Seubert is wearing shorts, sandals, and a Chris Snee Football Camp T-shirt. learn from the best it reads.
Seubert snorts. “It’s not his camp. He just takes the money.” Situation normal.

“We pick up where we left off,” Seubert says. He yawns. “Man, I gotta take a nap.”

Here at camp and throughout the season, the offensive linemen’s practices are similar to the work of stonemasons building a brick walkway that goes on forever. The same thing again and again. “If they didn’t have fun and joke around, they’d go insane,” says Giants O-line coach Pat Flaherty, whom the players call “Flats.”

Flaherty is not immune to their antics. Among other ways they mess with him, they’ll leave autographed photos of other teams’ defensive stars on his desk. But when he had a bout with colon cancer a couple of years back, they were all there for him. What did they do? “I really don’t want to talk about that time anymore,” says Flaherty, who is now cancer-free. “They were just always there.”

He has great respect for what they do on the field as well. “They have to be able to run-block and pass-block.

They have to be able to reach-block, down-block, and they all have to be able to pull and block in space. Then there are combination blocks, where they have to work guard-tackle or center-guard or team with the tight end. They have to communicate constantly and work together. And all it takes is one breakdown.

“The natural position for offensive line play is knees bent, shoulders down, eyes up,” Flaherty continues. “Natural for them, unnatural for most people. But my guys are athletic. They can move their feet. They need athleticism to pass a defensive lineman off to one another, from one to the next, even pass him back. Sometimes three players will block the same guy at different times. And they have to fire out, come off the ball.”

But these O-linemen are bloated toads, not ballerinas, Coach.

“Well, I’ve seen a tape where Chris Snee dunked a basketball.”

Yes, and O’Hara was an all-conference high school basketball player in New Jersey, McKenzie was the captain of his school track team, and Seubert played on a Marshfield, Wisconsin, basketball team that won the state championship twice.

The beauty of the Giants’ postseason success last year — four wins in four road games — was that they beat three teams they had lost to earlier in the season: the Cowboys, the Packers, and the Patriots. Why? In part because the offensive line learned from those losses.

“The mistakes they made the first time, they corrected,” says Flaherty. “I don’t know anything about academics, but they’re smart.”

Indeed, Snee and Seubert were high school National Honor Society members (Snee was even a French National Honor Society member), O’Hara made the dean’s list at Rutgers, and Diehl graduated early at the University of Illinois and began doing graduate work in human resource education.

“I like to know what everybody is doing, each guy on the line,” says Snee. The others nod. An axiom. And so what happens is that after Manning makes his call in the huddle, and the O-linemen break and re-form around O’Hara on the line of scrimmage, they begin to talk in their own code of words, grunts, and gestures.

They’ll point and whisper and call out things like “Smack! Smack!” and “Blood! Blood!” These are coded adjustments to defenders lined up in gaps or stacked, to perceived stunts and blitzes, and even just educated guesses about what the primal, slobbering beasts known as D-linemen are going to do.

Sometimes the Giants will make dummy calls to confuse the defense, and even dummy checkoffs of dummy calls. One time their complexities of fake calls even fooled Manning, and he audibled out of a blocking scheme that didn’t exist. “The play didn’t work so well,” recalls Diehl. “The runner nosedived.”

When asked why any boy becomes an offensive lineman, thereby condemning himself to a life of never touching the ball (except for the center, of course, who gets rid of it immediately), never running with it, never catching it, never even tackling someone who has it, McKenzie has a quick answer: “Either you were a fat kid too slow to play defense or too smart to play defense.”

“We study so much film of the defenses, and I’ll tell you, there’s nothing better than figuring out what they’re going to do beforehand,” says Snee. “There are even times when you hear them talking about what they’re going to do, saying, like, which guy is going first on a blitz. That is amazing.”

In the NFC championship game in Green Bay last January, the windchill dipped to 23 below, the coldest game in Giants history. And yet the road underdogs controlled the ball for nearly 17 more minutes than the Packers. The O-line, bare-armed and snot-covered, nearly crusted over in the process. “My hands were frozen,” recalls McKenzie. “Our bodies were so rigid, we weren’t even thinking about proper form. We were just pushing guys.”

Yet that upset of Brett Favre & Co. propelled the Giants into the Super Bowl two weeks later, where they outplayed mad genius Bill Belichick and his heavy favorite, the 18–0 Patriots. One of the main reasons they did was because of the offensive line. In that game the Giants outgained the Pats’ high-octane offense both on the ground and in the air. Perhaps most important, Manning was sacked only three times for eight yards of losses, while Brady was sacked five times for 37 yards.

“It went by so fast,” says Snee of the game. “I’m still trying to figure out what I did.”

“I just remember grabbing my head as the confetti came down,” says Diehl.

You can ask these guys about specific plays, even an entire series, and they can almost never describe what happened. There is chaos all around them as the game is moving forward. All they know is that they worked together and did their jobs. They are like hook-and-ladder guys at an industrial fire. And it’s in those moments that all the clowning, all the familiarity with one another’s personalities and habits and flaws, pays off.

“You know, this off-field stuff is so important,” says Diehl. “We’re all from different places, we’re all different guys, but — this may sound corny — we’ve all come together for a common goal. It’s awesome. I mean, we never talk about ourselves as individuals. We’re in the trenches, and we’re fine with that. We don’t get the recognition. We’re the team of ourselves.”

There is that lasting image of the Giants’ final offensive play (other than a kneel-down as time expired) in Super Bowl XLII. Down 14–10, at the Patriots’ 13-yard line, with 39 seconds left, needing a touchdown, Eli Manning dropped back and watched his three wide receivers head upfield. The Patriots, with stars such as Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Tedy Bruschi, and Junior Seau on defense, were coming in an all-or-nothing sellout blitz. It was the essence of football. No subtlety. Man coverage. Who are we? Who are you?

Shaun O’Hara, Chris Snee, David Diehl, Kareem McKenzie, and Rich Seubert latched onto men in the jailhouse-break charge, clung to them like jellyfish, in unison, just long enough, and Manning, untouched, arced a pass to wideout Plaxico Burress in the left end zone. Touchdown. Champions.

“We have a bond,” Diehl says.

The rarest.

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.