The Back Alley Archives

Two years after he cried with his father, Urban Meyer stood on the field with his second national championship team, the 2008 Gators, singing the fight song. After the last line, he rushed into the tunnel and locked himself in the coaches' locker room. He began calling recruits as his assistants pounded on the door, asking if everything was okay. Back in Gainesville, his chronic chest pain got worse, and he did test after test, treadmills and heart scans, sure he was dying. Doctors found nothing, and the pain became another thing to ignore. "Building takes passion and energy," Meyer says. "Maintenance is awful. It's nothing but fatigue. Once you reach the top, maintaining that beast is awful."

The drive for it changed something inside him. For the first time, Meyer needed an alarm clock. Shelley called his secretary to ask whether he was eating. Unopened boxes of food sat on his desk. He lost even when they won, raging at his coaches and players for mistakes, demanding emergency staff meetings in the middle of the night. He stopped smiling. Days ended later and later. He texted recruits in church. He ignored his children, his fears realized: He'd become That Guy.

Four days before the SEC title game against Alabama, Meyer got an early-morning phone call: Star defensive end Carlos Dunlap had been arrested and charged with drunken driving, threatening the perfection, triggering the rage, which had always been connected for Meyer. He wanted order, and this desire had turned him in a circle, or, more accurately, a spiral: Losing filled him with loathing, for himself and everyone connected to the loss, and over time his personality came to define losing as anything short of perfection. His rage was the exhaust of whatever hidden motor turned inside him. After the campus police officer delivered the news about Dunlap, Meyer went to the office, overcome, driving in the dark. That week, everything came apart.