The Real Super Bowl Winner

THE SUPER BOWL hero walked down the tunnel with no trophy in his arms or minicams in his face. In fact, all the Super Bowl hero had done was throw four interceptions, a dozen or so wounded quail, and one touchdown pass—to the other team.

Yet can you name anybody in Tampa who stood taller than New York Giants quarterback Kerry Collins, who spent his Super Bowl week gluing his family back together? All week, while Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis ducked and covered, Collins split open his soul and laid it on a butcher block for everybody to see. He stared straight into the jaw of his mistakes and dealt with them all. Ol' Vodka Collins. The DUI. The quitter. The racist.

He told of how his dad, Pat, split him at 14 from his mother, Roseanne, and older brother, Patrick, and moved him 30 miles from their Lebanon, Pa., home, just to enroll him in a high school with a powerhouse football program. How his parents divorced two years later. How he mixed up winning with love, and football with self. How the pressure to win started the drinking, and the drinking led to hating himself, and the hating himself led to hurting himself. How the booze sent his career "to rock bottom," to the place where nobody wants you, except the NFL, which wants you to enter rehab.

He walked into that rehab as a psychological yard sale, bitter toward his father, estranged from his mother, an enemy inside his own skin. Luckily, he found a dozen others just like him. "There was the coolest guy in there," Collins remembered. "A Hollywood agent. We got close. We talked every day."

They both checked out. Within a year the agent had blown his brains out. Within a year Collins's mind was as straight and true as his spirals. "I found out," he said, "winning doesn't make you a good person and losing doesn't make you a bad person."

Within two years he was leading the Giants to the Super Bowl, and his father, mother and brother to a reunion for the first time in 10 years, courtesy of his Visa card. "It was kind of amazing to see us all in the same room again," said Patrick, 29, who lives in San Francisco, "but we were all so happy to see Kerry so happy."

Said Kerry, 28 and single, "Hey, we're not the Brady Bunch, but we're doing O.K. I'm back to being a son to my mom again, and that means a lot to me."

For Roseanne, not only was it the first time she was going to be at one of Kerry's NFL games, but it was also one of the best weeks of her life. "I sat him next to me and said, 'Don't go anywhere. Let me just stare at you,' " she said. "I never stopped being his mom. He just got away from it for a while." Nobody held any grudges against Kerry's dad either. "He didn't mean any harm," Kerry decided. "He saw a big kid with a big arm and didn't want to see that talent wasted."

So Kerry Collins, number 5, went into the biggest Sunday of his life happy with Kerry Collins, happy with number 5 and happy, finally, to know the difference. Naturally, he played like a tranquilized beaver. He missed wide-open receivers. The only people he hit between the numbers were Ravens—four of them. He threw 39 times, missing 24 times, for 112 sickly yards. Yeah, Lewis was the game's MVP, but Baltimore couldn't have done it without Collins.

Yet in the interview room afterward, there he was again, staring into the cameras, accepting his starring role as goat. "I sucked today," he said. "I was prepared. I was ready. I just played terrible."