HYDE: Beck on a mission to be the best

From Eagle Scout to quarterback: Dolphins second-round draft pick John Beck has been well schooled on and off the field.

Published May 20, 2007

PROVO, Utah -- Under the Wasatch Mountains, along the Provo River, on his last Saturday in Utah, the newest Dolphins quarterback taps the brakes of his Ford truck and points through the mud-speckled windshield to some favorite spots.

"I've caught some nice rainbow trout right there at that bend," John Beck says.

Tap.

"... And some there by the bridge ..."

Tap.

"... Down there, you wade in up to your waist and cast back into the rocks near the shore. Get here early in the morning, 5 or 6. You get some nice 20-, 21-inch trout."

One side of his back seat holds the gear Beck uses for twice-a-day workouts with Brigham Young teammates getting ready for NFL camps: footballs, cleats, gym bag. The other side overflows with fishing gear: rods, reels and a tackle box that carries the hand-tied flies he has used along this river for the past four years.

"You see from that seat how I spend my time," he says.

Meet the quarterback who isn't Brady Quinn. The Dolphins couldn't have found a much larger gap in style. Quinn is Hollywood; Beck is Huck Finn. Quinn drives a Hummer; Beck drives a pickup truck. Quinn proclaimed loudly he should be the draft's first pick; Beck's proclaimed only that teams would get his best.

Quinn was the poster child of ESPN's draft coverage even before he became the unwitting focus of millions of viewers for several, stagnant draft-day hours while being passed over by the likes of the Dolphins.

Beck sat in his condo that day. The only media present was a photographer from Boys' Life magazine.

So no one heard the story line about: an Eagle Scout who doesn't touch alcohol but played his sophomore year at Brigham Young with a separated shoulder that was numbed with Novocaine each Saturday; a Mormon missionary who was the Mountain West Conference's Offensive Player of the Year as a senior while secretly playing on two sprained ankles, his right one so bad it was put in a boot every week; the son of a national pole-vault contender and father of a baby boy named after former NFL quarterback Ty Detmer.

As he drives now, Beck has just returned from an early-morning fishing trip in the mountains. The wading pants are in the bed of the truck. He pulls out his cell phone and clicks through to a picture of one of the trout he caught.

He then clicks to a picture from last fall.

"There's a deer I got," he says.

He finds another picture from January.

"Here's a coyote I got," he says.

Each spring, he took his offensive linemen to his grandparent's ranch a couple hours away. Everyone drove four-wheelers, fished and hunted. That's how Beck brought them together.

But this drive on his last Saturday in Utah isn't to channel Grizzly Adams. It's to walk down aisle 11 at the local store.

"Diapers," he says.
And not just any diapers for young Ty. The new Dolphins quarterback smiles as he says, "Winnie the Pooh diapers."

A gym rat

As Beck returns to his condominium, the baby is asleep, his younger sister, Anna, is studying on the couch and the NFL Network is on the high-definition TV. It carries the NFL Europe game of Rhein vs. Frankfurt. But it could be showing anything. This channel is always on.

"And I mean, always," his wife of three years, Barbara, says, smiling as she rolls her eyes.

"I tell her it's like a business person watching those business channels with the stock ticker runs across the bottom," he says.

Until he needed the memory for draft day, Beck had a taped library of NFL Network profiles of players called In My Words. Steve Young. Dan Marino. Jake Plummer. Troy Aikman. Jerry Rice. He studied them, too. Phil Simms, for instance, tells the story of rocketing balls so hard in his first minicamp until he realized it was more important for receivers to catch them.

"I know the Chad Johnson one from memory, it was on so much," says Anna, a Brigham Young junior.

"Oh, man," Beck interrupts, watching a Rhein interception returned for a touchdown.

This is one of the personality quirks the Dolphins appreciate in Beck. "A gym rat," General Manager Randy Mueller called him on draft day. And while the term applies to the time Beck spends doing the actual work -- practicing, working, watching film -- it also covers his general thirst for football.

Example: Over lunch every day, Beck reads the Dolphins playbook. Example: Curious about legendary coach Paul Brown, Beck ordered and read his autobiography. Example: Watching Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward play, Beck implemented Ward's hand signals for his youth team. (Fifteen years later, ask him the hand signal for a post-corner pattern, he'll waggle it for you).

"In my house growing up, we'd play football Friday night, do chores Saturday morning and then watch college games the rest of the day," he said. "On Sunday, we'd go to church and then watch the NFL games. We had the [NFL Ticket] and three TVs would have different games.

"My dad would be saying, `Did you see what he did there?' or `Understand why that's what happened?' That's just how we watched games every week."

He is such a fan that, even now, he can throw 20-yard spirals left-handed while playing with two young nephews. This is a byproduct of being a San Francisco 49ers and Brigham Young fan.

"I tried to become a lefty as a kid, like Steve Young," he said.

Beck's arm strength was obvious from the time he threw a baby bottle up four rows in church. As a high-school junior growing up in Mesa, Ariz., he led his football team to the state semifinals and could throw a baseball from home plate over the left-field fence 315 feet away.

As a senior, he was Arizona's football Player of the Year and a star pitcher to the point Brigham Young's baseball coach later would lobby Beck to play every season. But his football education was interrupted between high school and Brigham Young for three-year education in Portugal, patience and life beyond sports.

Mission to Portugal

At 19, Mormon men are sent on missions for two years to spread the word. They have no say where they land. Beck's father, for instance, went to Brazil while two uncles landed in Fort Lauderdale. Beck was assigned to Portugal. That destination proved the easy part.

The timing was more difficult. Because he has an autumn birthday, Beck couldn't begin his mission until November of 2000. There went one football season. The next two falls consisted of doing a missionary's work: Waking up early, studying scripture, walking first through Lisbon and, later, the Azores island of Sao Miguel for hours each day; and discussing his religion with strangers using the Portuguese he learned.

"You get doors slammed in your face," he said. "But to have a good mission you put in the time and the work. No one's there to make sure you're out there for the hours. It's up to you. I wanted to have a good mission and so I made sure I did the work."
As his father, Wendell, says, "For learning about life and thinking of others, the mission is great. For football? Not so great."

Beck took a football on his mission but rarely touched it. Finding a worthy receiver was difficult. Finding motivation in a culture where football didn't exist was even more so. On one of the few occasions he did pass, Beck once overthrew his receiver. The football landed in a road, where a passing tractor promptly ran over it. End of game.

He stayed in shape, though. He ran each morning. He cobbled together a primitive weight set for a while. He then worked out with the kind of large rubber band that is popular in gyms. That, too, came to a memorable ending.

One day, as Beck worked out on a series of steps, a drug addict approached and said the steps were where he learned to do cocaine. The man then inexplicably pulled out a knife and slashed the rubber band into pieces. All of which added to the missionary experience but did nothing toward football.

"When I first got back home, I remember watching a Thursday night game on the television and thinking, `That's what I'm going to play?'" Beck says. "It seemed so weird just to see the ball thrown in the air and a receiver going up for it after two years away."

There was one positive to the mission regarding football: His body matured. For all his athletic achievement, Beck was a late bloomer ("He hates me to say it, but he didn't have hair under his armpits as a high school junior," his dad says).

Immediately upon returning from Portugal, Beck weighed himself: 178 pounds. That was only eight more pounds than when he left. But he couldn't eat meat there because of the mad-cow disease and was allergic to some seafood.

So as he began working out and eating, his body filled out. Besides Arizona State and Brigham Young offering scholarships, Beck had received a phone call from the University of Miami. Actually, his father did. Beck was still in Portugal when Miami coaches asked for film and then immediately demanded his answer.

"He was in no position to decide that in Portugal," Wendell Beck said.

He landed at Brigham Young. After not touching a ball for most of three years, injuries made him a freshman starter in the second game. This is the first thing Beck mentions when asked if he'd be content sitting in the NFL as a rookie quarterback.

"There's so much to learn when you go to the next level," he says.

Like that premature start, so much of his college career didn't follow script: three offensive coordinators, leading receivers leaving for missions each season, a head-coaching change that led to rebuilding with underclassmen and a scandal that took 14 players off the football team.

No other Brigham Young player was drafted (LSU's JaMarcus Russell, the draft's top picks, threw to two receivers who were first-round picks). Beck's unheralded coaching kept changing (Quinn was coached the final two years by Charlie Weis, who molded Tom Brady, leaving some NFL types to wonder if Quinn has reached his full potential).

Yet there were sparks of Beck's talent through college. As a sophomore, in their final four games of the season, Beck and Utah senior Alex Smith played three common opponents and then each other's team. The statistics were similar.

Smith: 60 percent completion rate, 909 passing yards, eight touchdowns, three interceptions. Beck: 59 percent, 1,092 yards, 10 touchdowns, two interceptions.

Smith became the No. 1 pick of that 2004 draft. Beck healed his separated shoulder that offseason. If his senior year could have made him a more national name, the ankle sprains didn't help that. He couldn't throw with his full legs.

NFL scouts, unaware of the ankle sprains, began questioning the arm strength of a kid who threw a football 75 yards one week back from his mission. Dolphins General Manager Randy Mueller heard the whispers. He watched Beck play the Las Vegas Bowl against Oregon. That closed the subject.

"He looked like the varsity against the junior varsity," Mueller said.

"What you have to love is he played at such a high level while hurt," Cameron said. "Everyone gets hurt in this game. And he didn't just play great. He didn't tell anyone."

South Florida bound

For some draft-day fun, Beck's family and friends wrote down the team they thought would draft him. That morning, he had told his wife, "Hey, I think we're going to end up in Florida."

But for the draft-party pool, he chose Detroit. They had shown the most interest (as well as asked the strangest question: What is your favorite movie? Answers: Rudy and The Count of Monte Cristo).

But as teams ticked off through the first round, Mueller sent Beck a text message: "Are you OK?" Beck wrote back: "My wife wants a tan, and I'm wearing flip-flops."

When the Dolphins' second-round pick arrived, Beck's phone rang with a 954 area code. The room erupted. After a minute of talking with a team scout, Beck blurted out, "Are you guys going to take me or not?"

Cameron took the phone. "Do you think your wife and Ty are ready to live here?" he asked.

At one point last Saturday, as he looked up at the snow-capped mountains, Beck said, "That's what I'm going to miss about this place. The mountains are picturesque."

He then smiled. "But I've already bought a saltwater fly rod. I can't wait to try that out."

Dave Hyde can be reached at dhyde@sun-sentinel.com.

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