Code Of Honor

What would become of a quiet, intense boy governed by a personal code of honor, a machismo that he defined and no one else, a Hemingway character out of the 1920s in Spain transplanted seven decades later to California soil that produced surfers and cyber-boomers and seekers of the next trend?

The 17-year-old who showed up at Arizona State on a recruiting visit in 1994 wore dirty blond hair that fell to his shoulders, flip-flops, a T-shirt and a private grin. He called every male he met "dude," cursed like a sailor, looked and sounded like a classic California slacker. But look and listen closer. When the ASU coach at the time, Bruce Snyder, asked Pat what he thought of the recruiting process—because of his size, only three colleges had pursued the 5'11", 195-pounder—he didn't get a slacker's reply. "It stinks," said Pat. "Nobody tells the truth." When the coach raised the possibility of a redshirt year that would give him extra time to grow and learn the Sun Devils' system, Pat said, "I've got things to do with my life. You can do whatever you want with me, but in four years I'm gone."

Three and a half was all it took for him to nail down his marketing degree, to graduate summa cum laude with a 3.84 GPA. He'd lie on the campus grass in the sun and read books about anything and everything that fascinated him. He'd befriend a student with Down syndrome named Duff, whom he met, according to The Arizona Republic, while taking an elective course entitled Orientation to the Exceptional Child. He'd show up early for off-season conditioning drills and run sprints on bare feet. "Touchdown, this play!" he'd chirp to coaches when they removed him from a game. He couldn't resist a philosophical debate, nor the 200-foot light tower at Sun Devil Stadium, which he'd climb at night to meditate and gaze across the desert and buttes and twinkling airport lights. "The planes flew so close to him that he could damn near reach out and touch them," defensive coordinator Phil Snow told the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer in 2002. "He's just fearless."

No one on campus knew that two weeks before his first college practice, he had walked out of a juvenile detention center after serving 30 days for going to the aid of a friend in a fight outside a pizza parlor and beating up a man so badly that he'd been charged with felony assault. But he so abhorred deception, the slick game of image control, that when a reporter asked if he'd ever been arrested, out tumbled the truth.

He was the last man offered a football scholarship at ASU in '94. Four seasons later, as an undersized linebacker, he was the Pac-10 defensive player of the year and had the second-most tackles and the most interceptions, pass deflections and fumble recoveries on a team that went to the Rose Bowl and was 19 seconds away from an undefeated season and a probable national title. Long hair flying from beneath his helmet, he hurled himself at receivers and running backs, striking them like lightning. In games. In practices. Damn the fist-fights he caused. Every moment of life was live. "Braveheart," he was called by Kevin White, the ASU athletic director at the time, and others in his department. The big shots and the backslappers and the media might catch Pat in the locker room after a big loss, taking ownership of it. But not after the big wins, when he'd slip out before they arrived. Their hosannas might undermine the purity of his mission, might make him wonder about his motives, might undo him. "Dude, I'm proud of the things I've done, my schoolwork—because I'm not smart, I just worked hard—and this award," he told SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's Tim Layden after he'd received the defensive player of the year honor. "But it doesn't do me any good to be proud. It's better to just force myself to be naive about things, because otherwise I'll start being happy with myself, and then I'll stand still, and then I'm old news."

During a predraft workout, the Cardinals wanted a 15-minute look at him performing drills. He made the coaches and scouts stay for 45 minutes, until he got every drill perfect. Arizona took him as a safety in the seventh round—the 226th of 241 players selected—and he arrived at training camp on a bike, sneakers dangling from his handlebars, pedaling in behind his teammates' Mercedes and BMWs.

He had one thing that no one else there had—bottomless desire. He lacked one thing that everyone there had—a cell-phone. He despised the conveniences and designer doodads craved by all those around him. "Life's too f——-' easy," he muttered to a friend at ASU. He ran a marathon before training camp in 2000. He set a franchise record that year with 224 tackles. He competed in a 70.2-mile triathlon before camp in 2001. The Cardinals kept losing; his teammates kept anguishing. "Don't tell me about the pain, show me the baby," he'd say. "We're not showing the baby right now, we're just bitching about the pain."

After the 2000 season his agent, Frank Bauer, told him that the St. Louis Rams, one year removed from a Super Bowl championship, would pay him $9 million for five years to leave the last-place Cardinals. Pat declined to sign the offer sheet and remained with Arizona for $512,000.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Bauer asked.

"It wouldn't be fair to them to leave," said Pat.