During the broadcast of Super Bowl LIV in 2020 a three-minute commercial featured a boy with a football dashing past several current and former National Football League stars who encouragingly yell, “Take it to the house, kid!” amid cheerful music. In the middle of the ad the boy pauses, as does the music, and he gazes up at the statue of Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman outside State Farm Stadium in Glendale. After the ad aired, a familiar debate bubbled up in the press and on social media. Was the NFL honoring or exploiting the memory of a generation’s most famous fallen soldier?
After Tillman walked away from football to join the Army in 2002, he refused to speak publicly about it, believing his enlistment spoke for itself. But circumstances took his life, and therefore his legacy, in directions he couldn’t have foreseen, from the invasion of Iraq to his preventable death in Afghanistan in 2004. The events surrounding his final moments were initially obscured behind a smoke screen of medals, political praise and redacted documents before the truth came out he’d been killed by members of his own platoon. Even today, after a slew of investigations and a congressional hearing, his story evokes bitter disagreement about who was to blame and what his service meant.
In an interview given five years after Pat’s death his mother, Mary “Dannie” Tillman, bemoaned her son’s iconic status. “He was a human being, and by putting this kind of heroic, saintly quality to him, you’re taking away the struggle of being a human being,” she said. “He had to make choices, just like we all do.” Why had Tillman chosen the Army over the NFL? What had he sought
