Matt Tuthill

Published in the Bennington Banner on August 18, 2007, part of Matt Tuthill’s first-person football series, “I, of the Storm”

A PROFESSIONAL IN OUR MIDST

By the time coach Laumann picks this up, it’s going to be too late. He’s going to see the picture of Dennis Mailhot taking a pull on a cigarette and he’s going to flip.

Can you blame him?

The picture was taken just minutes prior to our last game and Mailhot is in his uniform.

“How can we expect to win if guys are smoking before a game?” Laumann will wonder.

Maybe coach will think he should make an example of Mailhot. Maybe he’ll sit him for a quarter this week. Maybe he’ll really lose it and bench him for a half. Maybe Laumann will come after me, too, for highlighting bad behavior.

Hey, Laumann can get along fine if he benches me, but if he thinks for a minute about the ramifications of sitting Mailhot, he’ll make a concession. He’ll take him aside and talk to him and that will be the end of it.

I know what it sounds like, but you’re wrong. It’s not a double standard. It’s a matter of Mailhot being able to perform regardless of what he puts in his body. If that were a picture of me or anyone else on the team with a cigarette, then it would be time for the coaching staff to break out the brass knuckles.

Mailhot, however, is different. He always has been.

It was the fall of 1990. Mailhot was attending East Straudsburg University in Pennsylvania and starting at wide receiver on the football team. The only thing he loved as much as tearing up the opposing secondary was getting totally lit on the night before the game. They take football seriously in any college, never mind a Division II program regularly visited by professional scouts. So when Mailhot’s coach saw his wideout stumbling home drunk at 3 a.m. with a game looming less than 12 hours away, he decided to forego punishment. Threats worked much better.

When Mailhot came into the pregame meeting, his coach took a moment to tell the team exactly what he saw the previous night – a player whose behavior showed a lack of respect for the efforts of everyone else.

“If I were Dennis Mailhot’s teammate, I’d break his nose,” Mailhot remembered his coach saying. Several linemen turned their heads toward him and motioned as if they’d do just that. They were ready to carry out the coach’s order if he didn’t get the job done.

Mailhot had nothing to worry about.

“I had three touchdowns that day,” he said with a laugh.

Part of the thrill for Mailhot was seeing just how much he could get away with. More than once, he joined in for a couple of beers during a pre-game tailgate. It didn’t effect anything.

“I showed off,” he said. “It’s always been a game to me. I’ve said the Storm is backyard football, but so was that.”

His attitude – and his long brown ponytail – is more akin to southern California than it is to southern Vermont. And though he never gave serious thought to how he was performing on the field, scouts did. After encountering knee trouble, his senior year in 1990 paled in comparison to 1989, when he led all Division II schools in the nation in both kick return and punt return yardage. His resume, however, was still strong enough to earn him an invite to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ mini camp.

“I knew my tryout was over before it started,” he said. “I had been drinking. I was out of shape. I needed to run a 4.4″

A year earlier, Mailhot would have been perfectly capable of posting such a 40-yard dash time. But caught unawares by Steelers camp, he had no time to prepare and erase countless nights on the town. After posting a 4.7, he wasn’t asked to return, but the Giants wanted to be sure that Pittsburgh hadn’t missed something. A few weeks later he found himself in East Rutherford, N.J., trying out for Bill Parcells’ team, but his lack of preparation yielded the same result.

“I guess I just didn’t take it that seriously,” Mailhot said. “I wasn’t heartbroken. I never dreamed of playing pro football when I was a kid. It never entered my mind.”

The Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League offered Mailhot one last chance to try out. This time he trained seriously, his brother Chris serving as his trainer. They were both determined to prove that the 4.7 in Pittsburgh was an aberration.

After Mailhot posted a 4.47 and 4.45, the Argonauts showed serious interest in signing him. From an original pool of 79 wide receivers, Mailhot made it down to the final three. The coaching staff brought the three men together and said they’d be in touch. Mailhot never got a call, but after seeing on the news that Raghib “The Rocket” Ismael had signed with the Argonauts for over $26 million, he got the hint.

“I said, ‘That’s it for football.’”

A few weeks ago, I passed around player questionnaires for the upcoming Storm yearbook. One of the questions asked for players to name the team’s best athlete. Mailhot, at the age of 38, won the voting in a landslide.

Laumann, a former Vermont State Trooper who became friends with Dennis’ father, Tom, said the vote was a no-brainer.

“He comes from good genetics,” Laumann said. “His father was a great athlete and his brothers are great athletes. … The last two teams that we played, both coaches came up and said to me, ‘No. 25 is a great football player.’”

As much as everyone around Mailhot loves to talk about his experiences in pro camps, Mailhot never brags. Not about his behavior or his near-misses at the professional level. Stories like that are coaxed out of him only after a long fight. Even then, the details of his past seem to escape him; they’re only later recovered after much difficulty.

During our interview, he trains his eyes on different objects in the room as if they held the answer as he attempts to clear the cobwebs from his brain. The aforementioned anecdotes, recalled with such unbridled enthusiasm by those who know him, are only sparsely detailed when he finally opens up. The pro camps, the athletic career that seemed destined for a grand stage, it’s all just a footnote now and he’s fine with that. He doesn’t put much stock in the past. All that matters now is the present, and for the first time in a long time, he’s paying close attention to the future, thanks to a loving relationship with his girlfriend, Jina.

He sits in my office, his work pants and shirt covered in paint at the end of another long day, and takes a swig from a half-empty two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi and a smile takes over his face. He laughs, as a fledgling smoker’s cough makes its presence known, and he recalls the memories that truly mean something to him.

“All those guys I grew up with and got to play with, they meant a lot more to me than those camps,” he said.

Getting to know those childhood friends as adults was never part of Mailhot’s plan. After college, he pursued a career in sales, mostly talking to groups about time shares, traveling the country and making excellent money. But when his father died of heart disease in 2004, Mailhot came home for the funeral, and wound up staying for good.

“I never realized I had so many friends here,” he said, explaining that old acquaintances set him up with various jobs, including bartending and mason work. Mailhot is painting now, and for considerably less money than he made in sales. But his attitude toward life since abandoning alcohol 10 years ago and re-establishing his connection with his faith, has made him far happier than money ever could.

“You don’t mature emotionally when you’re using any vice like that,” he said. “You change a lot when you’re done with it. There’s clarity. … Before I had things. I don’t need things.”

Hours after our meeting, my deadlines don’t seem so important anymore. I’m still unable to get over how damn perfect the weather was that day and how much more majestic the sunset is in the waning summer months than it is in June.

Another day in practice passes, and the stories of Mailhot in pro camp are circulated yet again. This time, Otero’s doing the honors, and some of my teammates look positively dumbfounded. Their eyes wander to Mailhot, who is once again hauling in long passes and making it look easy. Otero’s story continues.

I think I can read their expressions. They’re thinking what I was thinking when I first heard the stories. They’re thinking that if they had that kind of ability, that kind of opportunity, they would have stopped at nothing to make it to the big-time, to see their names in lights, to get that signing bonus.

Their looks turn incredulous at the mention of Parcells. Like the barflies in Piano Man, their mouths hang agape, as if they’re about to ask, “Man what are you doing here?”

But if you know Dennis Mailhot, you already know the answer. You would know what he believes: Fame is fleeting; money can’t buy happiness; and football, without friends to enjoy it with, is nothing more than a game. With a thinner wallet in his pants these days, he now describes himself as poor. But his enthusiasm for life and the game of football makes him something else entirely.

“He brings the kind of excitement we thought some of the young guys would have,” Laumann said. “They feed off it.”

I never heard of a poor man feeding anyone. So here’s to the richest guy on the team.

“I, of the Storm” from the Bennington Banner, Saturday, August 18, 2007

Note: Assistant Sports Editor Matt Tuthill has been playing with the Southern Vermont Storm of the New England Football League since April. After two games, the team is 0-2, with little good news to report. One of the few bright spots, however, has been the steady performance of Dennis Mailhot.