THE MAN WHO WAITED IN LINE

Reader note: This is a first-person account of my limited friendship with Pat Tillman and records only what I personally remember. It does not speak for Pat, his family, or the Pat Tillman Foundation, and it does not imply their endorsement of Seven Years of Change. The Pat Tillman Foundation is the appropriate public source for its account of Pat’s life and continuing legacy.

A first-person account in the Founder Witness series.

I did not wait in lines.

That is where this account has to begin, because it is the clearest way to describe who I was in 1997 and because nearly everything that followed turns on the difference between people who believed ordinary rules still applied to them and people, including me, who had learned how to move around those rules.

I was in my twenties and living in Arizona. I had served, I had graduated, and I was using my GI Bill to study subjects no degree program had required of me: urban planning, economics, community development, and the mechanics of why cities are built the way they are. I wanted to understand why opportunity accumulates in certain neighborhoods, why money keeps moving in the same direction once the channels have been established, and why institutions that speak constantly about mobility so rarely alter the conditions that make mobility difficult.

At the same time, I was helping run an anti-gang program called Pangaea. I worked with a couple who were half out of their minds in the best sense: imaginative, persistent, and willing to try something before an institution had certified it. We produced videos for high-school students and went into schools to speak honestly about why a young person might want to become successful. That is not the same question as how to become successful. In many cases, it is the harder question, because a person must first believe that another future is real enough to justify the effort required to reach it.

The work produced evidence. I still have surveys and thank-you notes from former gang members and students enrolled in community colleges and universities who had not previously intended to go. The program was not large enough to become an institution, but it was real enough to demonstrate that carefully designed intervention could alter the direction of a young person's life.

Three men helped finance that work. One was a quiet and wealthy African American conservative political operator who believed in my version of self-help economics and never asked me to become more convenient for him. One was a Tuskegee Airman who had built a chain of funeral homes across several states. The third was an immigrant who had come to the United States and built a chain of grocery stores.

A Black pilot, an African American conservative political operator, and an immigrant businessman funded a young biracial Black man's anti-gang program because the results persuaded them that the work was worth supporting. That coalition was improbable, but it existed. I mention it because people occasionally describe Seven Years of Change as grandiose, as though cooperation across political, racial, economic, and cultural lines were a fantasy I recently invented. I have been assembling improbable coalitions for most of my adult life. The problem was never that such cooperation was impossible. The problem was that I did not yet know how to make it durable.

In the evenings, I went out and did not wait in line.

I could enter clubs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Bay Area without standing outside with everyone else. The access was not entirely mine. It came partly through the people around me, including Angelo Wright.

Angelo was an agent and one of the reasons doors opened. He later became my daughter's godfather. He died in 2020, and I loved him.

There was another source of access that is harder to describe because it carried nothing honorable. Members of my extended family had reputations that meant something in certain rooms, and what those names meant was not good. People sometimes recognized who I was connected to, and that recognition changed how they treated me. Even police officers occasionally handled encounters with unusual care after making the connection.

I had not created that reputation, and I was not proud of it, but I accepted its benefits. For years, I allowed a name I had neither built nor wanted to perform work on my behalf. I walked past lines I had no right to walk past and told myself that this was simply how the world operated.

It was how the world operated, but that did not make my participation morally neutral. Access was a thing I used, and using it belongs in any honest accounting of who I was.

The social worlds surrounding professional athletes, entertainment figures, political operatives, and men with reputations for danger were not entirely separate. Each group often wanted proximity to something the other possessed. Famous people sometimes wanted proximity to danger because danger seemed like authenticity in a culture that constantly questioned whether fame and money had softened them. Men whose reputations had been built through violence or fear wanted proximity to famous people because fame appeared to confer legitimacy in a society that had spent years telling them they were disposable.

I could move between those worlds. Part of my value was that each side could use me to approach the other without appearing to ask directly. I understood what was happening, and I permitted it. I was not the only person occupying that role, and those environments have never had difficulty finding replacements.

That period is the source of a considerable amount of shame. I do not intend to polish it into a story about how perceptive I was while everyone around me was compromised. I was not standing outside the room offering moral criticism. I was inside the room, and I liked being inside.

I knew how to behave there. I understood when to speak, when to remain silent, and when it was time to leave. I could sit in the homes, restaurants, parties, and private gatherings of people who possessed resources, influence, and public credibility. I became skilled at making myself acceptable without making myself inconvenient.

I was good at it, and I do not enjoy admitting that.

The contradiction was that I was often surrounded by people who possessed everything my work seemed to need. Yet, I could not persuade one nationally recognized person to build something durable. I had plans, program structures, school data, surveys, and early evidence. What I could not obtain was the sustained commitment of someone willing to place public credibility behind an enterprise that materially improved other people's lives.

That failure was not always the result of cruelty. Those rooms existed for different reasons. They were arenas for the exchange of status, the negotiation of relationships, the management of reputations, and the mutual affirmation of importance. Few people entered with the intention of doing lasting community work.

I grew up around professional and elite athletes. Harlem Globetrotters were part of my childhood environment. I was thrown around swimming pools by Sunkist All-American wrestlers and competitors from Iowa and Pennsylvania because a friend's father coached them. None of that initially seemed unusual to me. It was simply the water in which I had learned to swim.

I was not immune to its attractions. I did not avoid every lure. I enjoyed the access, and I rarely had to stand outside in the cold waiting to be admitted.

My cousin was with me on many of those nights. We called him BoGator. He was enormous in both spirit and physical presence, but he was also gentle, deeply rooted in the church, and more generous than nearly anyone I have known.

He played drums, and so did I. My parents hired a drum teacher for me who happened to be blind, and I learned from him in ways that extended far beyond music. He used every available sense with a discipline and attentiveness I had never witnessed. That experience was one of the ways I came to understand what money, when used well, could make possible in a person's life. I have always appreciated that power, even if I did not consistently practice gratitude during those years.

BoGator had played high-school football beside men who later reached the NFL, and one of them once described him as the most frightening and talented player he had ever lined up beside.

My cousin never needed to prove anything. His physical presence was obvious, but fear was not the reason nothing happened to me when he was nearby. I was protected because he loved me.

He is gone now. I still speak to him, and I still love him deeply.

Angelo is gone too. Their absence belongs to this account, but first there was a line.

The Line

It was a fall night in Tempe, one of those Arizona evenings that temporarily makes a person forgive the summer. Two young men had recently participated in the kind of football victory around which the city organized its attention. They had done precisely what the surrounding culture rewarded: they had performed publicly, successfully, and under pressure.

They were standing in line.

I saw them from the rooftop portion of the club. I was not in the line, and something in me became still. Either man could have been admitted immediately. Anyone working the door would have recognized them. Had they asked me for help, I could easily have brought them through. Later that evening, I did exactly that for people who had been standing immediately ahead of and behind them.

They did not ask.

They stood with everyone else and waited. Nothing in their posture suggested that waiting diminished them. It did not appear to occur to them that public accomplishment had relieved them of an ordinary obligation.

I was taken with both of them that night. Both have remained with me ever since.

One remains with me through memory. The other is still living, and I occasionally see him in interviews or online commentary. The last time I saw him in person was during the 2005 holiday season, when I was running through Chicago O'Hare International Airport to catch a connecting flight. I passed him, doubled back long enough to give him a quick hug, wished him well, and assumed, as I had so often assumed with people I cared about, that there would be another time.

There has not been.

The Inventory

I want to be careful here because I am about to name a man whom this country has spent more than twenty years converting into arguments, symbols, and competing narratives. I will not inflate what I had with him, but I will not erase what was real to make the account safer for people who were not there.

Pat Tillman was my friend.

We were not close friends. We ran in different circles, and I was not part of his family or his innermost life. I do not claim access to every private belief he held, authority over the meaning of his military service, or a place among the people who carried the deepest consequences of his death.

What we had was nevertheless a friendship.

We crossed paths repeatedly around Arizona State and stopped to speak. We shared lunch more than twice and spent additional time together. Some encounters were brief. Others developed into sustained conversations in which neither of us seemed particularly concerned about leaving. On one occasion, we remained at a table for roughly two hours.

That is the inventory: a real friendship, limited in scope but not imaginary.

One of our longer conversations began when I encountered him near the computer science building. We started talking, continued walking, and eventually sat down because the conversation had not reached its natural end. I told him about the students I was working with and about Pangaea. I asked whether he might visit the program, meet the students, or participate in something we were developing.

We never completed that part. The omission belongs at least as much to me as to him. We were young, occupied with our own work, and behaving as though time were an unlimited resource.

What remained were the conversations. We talked about how a person moves from difficult circumstances into a life with genuine choices. We were not discussing poverty as an abstraction or using hardship as an opportunity to display concern. Pat was interested in mechanisms: how someone gets from where they are standing to somewhere safer, more stable, and more useful; what kinds of structures make that movement possible; and what a person with a public platform could do beyond lending a name to a temporary event.

He listened when there was nothing he could gain by listening. I was running a modest program in high schools. I had no contract, publicity, influence, or professional opportunity to offer him. He gave the conversation his attention anyway.

People often reveal themselves most clearly through what they take seriously when there is nothing available to them in return.

The Plan

I later saw Pat at a pre-draft gathering in a pool hall on Mill Avenue. Several athletes were present, including players who would go on to professional careers. Pat and I had enough time to return to the idea we had discussed before. If his career developed as I believed it would, I imagined that we would eventually come together to build something lasting in the community, joining his public standing and character with the structures I was continuing to develop.

I told him he was going to become a star.

That was our last long conversation before the draft. I saw him again after he became an Arizona Cardinal, including one occasion when we crossed paths at the team facility and walked outside together for several minutes.

I did not regard the unfinished conversation as a loss because I believed we had time.

In my mind, the plan extended across ten years; most of my friends lasted three or four years playing in the NFL. He would play professional football, finish his career, and eventually reach the point that confronts many athletes when competition no longer provides the organizing purpose of daily life. He would be older, still young enough to build, and searching for work proportionate to his ability and character.

I intended to be ready.

I coached basketball through Boys and Girls Clubs and the YMCA. I worked at the first Intel Computer Clubhouse in Arizona, hosted at the Boys & Girls Club of the East Valley in Chandler, where I tutored, advised, and helped young people use technology as a vehicle rather than a distraction. I continued developing ideas about employment, ownership, community infrastructure, and the transformation of people whom conventional institutions had already written off.

Some ideas were practical. Others were far ahead of my competence and resources. I attended gyrocopter testing sessions in Salt Lake City and spent time with two brothers who had flown Hueys in Vietnam. I developed a concept for a rooftop air-taxi system in which commercial roof leases would support training and employment for former gang members working as fabricators and construction crews.

Parts of that concept would not have worked. People with greater capital and technical capacity later demonstrated other elements. Frank Robinson built helicopters. Father Greg Boyle built Homeboy Industries from a premise I immediately recognized: create real businesses in the community and entrust the work to people whom the larger economy had treated as permanently disposable.

The most improbable idea has never entirely left me. I imagined properly training people who had survived years of gang involvement and placing them in lawful conservation work protecting rhinoceroses, elephants, and other threatened animals from organized poaching.

The point was not to admire past harm simply because it required courage. Rather, the insight was that courage could be put to better use. Many of these men had demonstrated endurance, nerve, loyalty, and the ability to function under pressure. Much of what they had done with those capacities had injured other people and themselves. The capacities remained real, and the world contained necessary work that required precisely those qualities.

That was the kind of structure I imagined building while Pat played football. I believed I was preparing a landing place for a man who would eventually need work worthy of whatever came after public recognition.

What He Did Instead

I woke one morning to the news that Pat Tillman had left the NFL and enlisted in the United States Army.

I believe my response was, "Yeah. That's Pat."

Then, as I remember it, I went back to sleep.

I do not tell that story to make myself appear detached or unusually perceptive. It is an indictment of how unsurprised I was by another man's willingness to align his conduct with his convictions. His decision was so consistent with the person I had known that I did not initially recognize the magnitude of what he had surrendered.

Pat did not enlist alone. His brother Kevin enlisted with him and served beside him. Kevin was in Afghanistan when Pat died.

I have never met Kevin, and I have no standing to narrate what belongs to him. An honest account must nevertheless acknowledge that two brothers went, one of them returned, and what the surviving brother was required to carry is not mine to interpret.

I also do not claim to know every reason Pat enlisted. Those reasons belong to him, to Kevin, and to the people with whom they chose to share them. I can say only that the decision was consistent with the friend I knew: a person who took responsibility seriously, who listened to discussions about strangers when no advantage could result, and who appeared unwilling to allow comfort to become a complete explanation for inaction.

There was very little visible distance between what Pat believed he should do and what he was prepared to do.

Many of us spend our lives inside that distance.

At the time, I could imagine Pat eventually running for higher office. That statement may sound like grief manufacturing a larger destiny after the fact, but the thought began before his loss. I had watched him stand in a line he could easily have bypassed. I had heard him ask serious questions about people he was unlikely ever to meet. I had seen him give unprofitable attention to work that offered him nothing.

I understood the value of that combination in a country where public leadership often separates humility from power and belief from action.

Even after he enlisted, I kept imagining what might come next. I pictured a former professional athlete returning from military service with direct knowledge of what service could cost, then entering communities with a structure capable of producing food, work, ownership, environmental repair, and a durable route out of crisis. I imagined reviving the conservation idea and placing it before him, or adapting the work to whatever he believed was most necessary after he returned.

I thought I had time to finish something worthy of the conversation.

He did not come home.

The Cost of an Unoffered Future

I lost a friend I did not know long enough.

More than twenty years later, I understand the unusual shape of that grief. I am not grieving a closeness we did not possess. I am grieving a real friendship, the unfinished conversation inside it, and a future I had quietly constructed around the assumption that I would one day be able to place completed work in front of him.

I believed there would be another chapter after football and, later, after the Army. I imagined a man with discipline, public standing, curiosity, and little visible sense of entitlement walking into neighborhoods with a structure that helped people build their own route forward.

I never had the opportunity to offer it.

For years, I carried portions of that plan without anywhere for that particular future to land.

Pat's example was not the only one I carried. When I was a child, my friend Dustin acted immediately when someone used a racial slur against me. He did not wait for an adult, an institution, or a formal process to explain what decency required. BoGator protected me through love rather than display. Angelo opened doors and became family. The men who supported Pangaea acted on evidence before a large institution had certified the work.

They acted while I continued planning.

Pat acted while I continued preparing.

Eventually, the question became unavoidable: how could I not build this?

What exactly was I waiting for? Permission? Funding? The endorsement of an institution? A famous person willing to make the work safe enough for everyone else to approach?

For years, I spoke about rejection as though rejection was the largest sacrifice this work had required of me. It was not. No closed door, unanswered letter, denied proposal, or institutional refusal carried the weight of Pat’s death in a country he had never seen before choosing to serve there. I remained alive, free, and capable of continuing. Whatever disappointment I carried, I still possessed the one thing he had lost: the opportunity to act again.

Seven Years of Change exists because I eventually ran out of acceptable excuses. That is not the only reason I built it, but it is the reason I stopped negotiating with myself.

The Classroom

There was a more literal reason as well.

I nearly died. Surgeons removed roughly three feet of my intestine. Recovery from something like that does not deliver revelation. It delivers arithmetic. You come out of it holding a smaller number than the one you had been spending so freely.

What I decided to do with that number was teach seventh grade.

From 2021 to 2022, I taught seventh-grade social sciences at Bret Harte Middle School in the Almaden Valley of San Jose, in the San Jose Unified School District. It is the school Pat attended. His mother taught special education in that same district and in that same building, and she was still teaching there more than three years after he was killed, while she was fighting the Army for an honest account of how her son died.

I want to be precise about what I am saying. I never met Mrs. Tillman. My hiring had nothing to do with the family; I have no place in their story, and the school was under no obligation to include me in it. I taught twelve-year-olds government and history in a building that has seen generations of students pass through.

But I knew where I was standing.

Teaching seventh grade is not a tribute. It is a Monday, and then another Monday, and a great deal of paperwork. That is exactly why it counted. For twenty years I had been waiting to hand finished work to a man with a platform, and when I finally stopped waiting, what was available to me was a classroom in the valley he came from and a room full of kids who needed somebody to show up.

Nobody needed to admit me to that line. I could just stand in it.

What I Actually Want

Because I am asking people to examine and perhaps trust this work, I should be candid about what I want personally.

I want to work with elderly people in peace and quiet, somewhere small. That is the end of my private ambition. I do not want a movement organized around my personality. I do not want a platform that depends permanently on my presence. I built 7YOC for you, those you love, and my friends and family.

I want the work to become useful enough so that communities can govern it, improve it, and continue it without me. Build beautiful things in your community and your neighborhood. You have a blueprint.

Before that can happen, something must be built. No one built it in the form I believed was necessary. I knew enough to begin, and I had known enough for years. What changed was that I finally became unable to justify further delay.

BoGator is gone. Angelo is gone. Pat is gone. Dustin is gone. The Tuskegee Airman is gone. Most of the people who supported my first serious effort are gone.

I remain.

I do not know why, and I have stopped expecting the answer to arrive before the work begins.

The Line, Again

I keep returning to the same image.

A man who had recently done the kind of thing that entitles a person, in American culture, to bypass nearly every line stood in the line.

A man who had accomplished nothing comparable, but who had learned how to remain quiet in the correct rooms, went around it.

I have spent more than twenty years trying to become less like the second man and more like the first.

That effort is part of Seven Years of Change. It is a structure intended for people who were never admitted, built in part by someone who was sometimes admitted for the wrong reasons and eventually understood that access without useful action is another form of waste.

Pat Tillman did not authorize Seven Years of Change. His family did not authorize it. The Pat Tillman Foundation did not authorize it. I do not place his name above work he never had the opportunity to examine, and I do not claim his legacy as institutional property.

His example nevertheless became part of my moral accounting. Knowing him helped remove one of my final excuses for leaving the work unbuilt.

No reader is required to like me or accept my account without examination. Check the plans. Check the sources. Check the ledger. Distinguish what is operating from what remains proposed. Measure whether the work feeds anyone, employs anyone, reduces environmental harm, creates community ownership, or leaves people with more authority than they possessed before.

Hold me to the same standard I apply to institutions.

But do not tell me that attempting to feed people, protect children and elders, create useful work, repair environmental damage, and give communities productive assets is grandiose merely because the work is difficult.

Pat left professional football and entered military service. Whatever one believes about the war, that decision required the surrender of income, comfort, safety, and control over what would happen next.

I built a blueprint for a community-led system designed to create local ownership, useful work, affordable essentials, and environmental repair in American communities, and called it Seven Years of Change.

I do not believe he would have considered that small.

For more than twenty years, the question I have imagined him asking has remained direct:

When do we start?

Knowing Pat became part of my own moral accounting. My memories of him helped me confront the distance between what I believed and what I was willing to begin.

That influence is mine to describe. It is not Pat’s endorsement of Seven Years of Change, and I cannot say what position he would have taken on this work today.

Seven Years of Change stands or falls on its own conduct, its evidence, its accountability, and the measurable good it produces.

A Standing Word to the People Connected to This Account

Pat Tillman was my friend. We were not close friends, and I do not claim to speak for Pat, Kevin Tillman, the Tillman family, the Pat Tillman Foundation, or anyone who knew him more intimately than I did.

Neither Pat's family nor the Pat Tillman Foundation authorized, reviewed, endorsed, funded, or participated in this account. Seven Years of Change is not affiliated with either.

This essay records my memories, my conduct, and the meaning I drew from knowing Pat. It does not attempt to narrate his family's experience or claim authority over his legacy. My employment in the San Jose Unified School District was my own, and no member of the Tillman family had any part in it.

No family member or representative of Angelo Wright, BoGator (my cousin), Dustin, or any other person named in this account authorized or reviewed it.

Anyone directly connected to a person named here may request a factual correction, clarification, or removal by writing to connect@sevenyearsofchange.org. I will respond. That commitment does not expire.

Geoff Barrett

Related Founder Witness

For the essay on why people return to a promise they know is failing them, read The Lady in White.

For the public request shaped by the examples of Dustin, Pat Tillman, and John F. Kennedy Jr., read A Request to White America.

For People and Planet. Until Green Is How We Live.