It’s hard to feel sorry for a guy selected in the first round of the NFL draft, a guy who will make millions of dollars and has the chance to become the new face of a struggling franchise. But of all the handsome, chiseled 22-year-old multimillionaires you know, it’s a safe bet none has had a tougher month than Brady Quinn.
It started April 28, draft day, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell ushered the former Dublin Coffman and Notre Dame star into a private room away from the cameras as teams took turns not picking him.
Then, after the Cleveland Browns selected him with the 22nd pick, former Notre Dame and Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann criticized Brady Quinn for making his long-awaited appearance at the podium with a moppy hairdo, loose tie and wad of chewing gum. Brady Quinn responded to his crotchety old predecessor’s remarks with an utterly unnecessary apology to the Notre Dame community.
If bad things come in threes, Brady may have turned the corner last week. After the draft debacle and the Theismann theatrics, Brady Quinn bashers were on the lookout for the next excuse to flog him silly.
They got it, courtesy of a Columbus wedding photographer’s website.
Joel and Amy Harcar often post photos from clients’ nuptials on their site, and it’s doubtful they’ve ever drawn a glitzier gig than the ceremony and reception for Brady Quinn’s sister, Laura, and her husband, ex-Buckeye A.J. Hawk.
The two were married in Wisconsin last summer, as Hawk prepared for his first season as a Green Bay Packer, but they invited friends and family to celebrate with them in Columbus on March 17—St. Patrick’s Day.
Brady Quinn must be starting to suspect that “Luck O’ the Irish” business is a bunch of bunk.
In a photo from the reception that was quickly lifted from harcarphotography.com by countless bloggers and jock-obsessed e-mail fiends, Brady Quinn poses in a sleeveless T-shirt, an unbuttoned vest, a leather biker cap and a scarf, pointing into the distance with a hand partially obscured by a fingerless leather glove. With the other begloved hand, he appears to be grabbing his crotch.
A quick glance at other pictures from the reception added much-needed context. Brady Quinn and several other members of the wedding party were dressed as the Village People.
According to Ty Quinn, Brady’s father, all the guys in the dance routine were just being good sports. When the DJ asked them to dress up and dance, they obliged. And there’s nothing terribly salacious about the photos. They depict a 22-year-old cutting loose on a festive occasion. But most 22-year-olds aren’t Brady Quinn.
Type “Brady Quinn Village People” into Google and you get 232,000 hits. Among the headlines of the top links: “Brady Quinn wants to be a Macho Man” and “Brady Quinn just has to dance—with leather.”
Not surprisingly, Brady Quinn’s new brother-in-law is none too pleased the pictures got out.
“Yeah, that was just a bad decision on the photographers we chose. It’s been an issue a little bit. We had no idea what happened,” Hawk told a Wisconsin newspaper, The Janesville Gazette. “Some photos got put up without our permission, and I just feel bad for Brady and other people that were at the wedding, because it was just something that the D.J. had set up, I don’t know, some ‘Village People’ thing that they did, and some pictures got out and it’s tough. I guess you’ve got to watch every single thing you do because everything’s public now.”
Brady Quinn’s dad isn’t pleased either, but he says he saw it coming.
“A year ago, I said to the kids, ‘There is no way that there are not going to be things like this ending up on the Internet,’” Ty said. “If it had not gotten out, I would’ve been
surprised.”
Ty said that after four years at Notre Dame, his son has learned to ignore criticism from armchair quarterbacks.
“A lot of people’s lives are miserable,” Ty said of his son’s haters, “and they just want other people to be miserable.”
He figures his son is developing a thick skin that will serve him well in the NFL: “Being in Cleveland , he better get used to it.”
The Harcars, who chose not to comment for this story, have retained a lawyer. Laura Bogrees said she was hired for no other reason than to help protect the Harcars against the theft of images from their website for use by other websites that are “exposing them in a false light.”
She made it clear that she was not hired in anticipation of legal action from anyone at the Hawk wedding. In fact, by Tuesday, the Harcar web page that once displayed the Brady Quinn pictures contained this text inside a solid black square:
By request of the Hawk and Brady Quinn families the images from A.J. and Laura’s wedding have been removed. All of our contracts, including the Hawk contract, reserve the right for Harcar Photography to use images for display, advertising and publication.
Bogrees said there was no attempt by the Harcars to cash in on their celebrity wedding photos.
“When they featured the photographs, they did not exploit them in any way to bring more attention to their website,” she said. “Every month, they have a featured couple listed, and that month happened to be A.J. and Laura.”
Bogrees said Laura Quinn gave the Harcars permission to use the photos in advertising, and even approved the pictures to be used, which is contrary to the statement Hawk made.
Bogrees—who said the Harcars are “deeply concerned” about the fallout from the
pictures—repeatedly stressed that their
primary concern is the use of the pictures on other websites.
“The issue is people on the Internet stealing this information,” she said.
One of the most notable sites to draw attention to Brady Quinn’s photographic flubs is Deadspin.com, which boasts 900,000 visitors a month. Deadspin Editor Will Leitch has written numerous posts on the Brady Quinn pictures, and he doesn’t see the harm in poking a little fun.
“Those pics are funny,” Leitch said. “I don’t think anyone looks at these photos and says, ‘Oh, now I don’t like Brady Quinn
anymore.’”
For any number of reasons, Brady Quinn has become an easy target. Some think he’s an overrated player, others hate anybody from Notre Dame, and still others don’t like him because, well, he’s just so darn pretty.
Let’s face it, some unattractive lout from another team wouldn’t garner nearly as much attention for the photos Brady Quinn’s appeared in. Want proof? Arguably the weirdest Village People photo from the wedding reception is not of Brady Quinn but of groomsman Bobby Carpenter, Hawk’s Buckeye linebacking mate and a current Dallas Cowboy.
Carpenter, resplendent in an American Indian headdress, loin cloth and his own wife-beater undershirt, appears to be performing some sort of war whoop. There’s been nary a peep about him.
Many of the jabs at Brady Quinn, who was accompanied on draft day by his high school sweetheart, have a distinct homophobic bent. On Deadspin, the reader comments included “At least Brady is touching his own crotch in the picture” and “Brady Quinn makes the Village People look straight.”
On another sports site, thebiglead.com, a poster asked, “Does Brady Quinn have a non-embarrassing photo that he’s in?”
“He has certainly posed for his fair share of glamour shots,” Leitch said, citing a photo spread Brady Quinn did for Interview magazine that included shots of Brady Quinn shirtless on a raft and wearing a midriff-exposing half-shirt.
Leitch said the best thing Brady Quinn can do is learn to ignore the barbs of jealous geeks.
“I’m not so sure that anything that a bunch of dorks on the Internet say is really going to damage him,” Leitch said. “If the worst thing that happens to Brady Quinn is people on the Internet saying, ‘Hey, pretty boy!’ then I think he’s gonna be fine.”
