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North Carolina

Holley goes from 'Fourth and Long' to Cowboys Stadium

By Sam Rosenthal

Sep 28, 2009

The Carolina Panthers play at the Dallas Cowboys Monday night, and the story of one former North Carolina player should be told. He won’t appear on Cowboys Stadium’s extravagant video board, and he won’t appear on the stat sheet. Still, the mere fact that he’s there at all is like something out of a TV show. Actually, it is.

“Fourth and Long.”

Literally, it means fourth down and many yards to go. Figuratively, it represents a last chance, against swimsuit-model-slim odds. But it is a chance, nonetheless, a shot in the impenetrable dark.

Jesse Holley is Mr. Fourth and Long.

Holley, a former wide receiver for UNC, seemed destined to become one of the thousands of NCAA athletes who “go pro in something other than sports.”

Then “Fourth and Long,” a SPIKE TV reality show, came calling. Think “Survivor” meets “Hard Knocks” (HBO’s behind-the-scenes series about Cincinnati Bengals’ training camp). The grand prize? A spot on the Dallas Cowboys’ 80-man training camp roster. A chance to compete for one of 53 positions on the regular season roster of ‘America’s Team.’ A Hail Mary pass at an NFL dream.

Fourth and Long, Jesse Holley. How did you wind up here?

First Down

Coming out of Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., Holley was a top-20 receiver recruit.

He played in all 12 Tar Heel games in 2003 as a true freshman, albeit in a limited role. As a sophomore, he displayed star potential, finishing as the team’s second-best receiver.

As a junior in 2005, he led Carolina with 47 catches and 670 receiving yards (300 yards more than the next closest receiver). He also walked onto the UNC basketball team that won the NCAA title.

Heading into his senior season, he dropped basketball and looked poised to dominate and compile a season worthy of NFL scouts’ attention.

But Hakeem Nicks and Brooks Foster emerged as pass-catching threats for UNC and Holley’s numbers dipped. He finished third on the team in receptions and receiving yards and only caught two touchdowns.

Holley finished his UNC career with 126 receptions (eighth-best in UNC history), 1,760 receiving yards and seven receiving touchdowns, but no team selected him in the NFL Draft.

Second Down

Holley still made the Cincinnati Bengals’ practice squad as an undrafted free agent in 2007.

“I was there for a good portion of the year, learning a lot from those guys,” Holley said in a telephone interview. “It was definitely an experience. That first year is definitely the hardest year to adjust and understand really what you’re getting yourself into – the mental aspect of it, the physical grind of it.”

The Bengals cut Holley Oct. 4. “Unfortunately, my opportunity was taken away from me,” Holley said, “not due to a lack of talent, but just to a lack of numbers. They needed more linebackers … You take the bad with the good.”

A momentary note, something essential to this story: Jesse Holley loves to talk. When he someday meets his mortal end, his heart will likely stop moving before his mouth does. That mouth has rubbed its fair share of people the wrong way. That mouth has also made its fair share of exaggerations, insults, and arrogant statements. As you will see, it has uttered its fair share of wisdom, kindness, and inspiration. Like the man himself said: You take the bad with the good.

“I’ve always been able to talk – we all know that. I’m always a happy guy … that’s just who I am,” he said. “I love life. I love to laugh, I love to make people laugh, I love to have fun. That’s just who Jesse Holley is.”

At Carolina, Holley’s over-the-top persona hurt his cause at times. He hasn’t mellowed much now, but his braggadocio has at least been partially tempered by hubris’ usual nemesis: failure.

In the spring of 2008, Holley wound up with the B.C. Lions in Vancouver, Canada.
“That was cool, but we began to have some contract issues and there were some things of that nature that led to me being released with them,” Holley said. “Again, not due to talent, but due to powers that were out of my control.”

looked like the end of Holley’s pro football chances.

Third Down

One thing about the game of football: You get multiple chances to succeed. Four downs – if one or any combination of the four is successful, you get another set of downs in a better position. As long as you have downs remaining, you have the chance to continue playing.

And Jesse Holley had downs remaining.

He had not been drafted. He had been released from the Cincinnati Bengals’ practice squad. He had also received a pink slip from the Canadian Football League.
Yet he still held the ball.

After the B.C. Lions released him, Holley returned to North Carolina. He started working for a security-monitoring company and as a sales representative for T-Mobile. He started living “paycheck-to-paycheck.”

He did not, however, stop dreaming. Holley worked out five days a week. He still had an agent and tried to schedule workouts with pro teams. “We kept trying and kept trying,” Holley said. “The NFL is kind of funny like that.”

Fourth and Long

He and his agent sought a tryout with a pro team. What they got was a phone call from Kevin Best.

Best, UNC’s Deputy Director of Athletic Communications, handles a large portion of the Tar Heel football team’s media relations and knew Holley well. Best told Holley that he had been contacted by SPIKE TV about a football reality show where the winner received a chance to play for the Dallas Cowboys. The people at SPIKE asked Kevin if he knew anybody with a charismatic personality who could hold his own on the field and on camera.

Yeah, Best knew a guy who might work.

The Show

SPIKE held open casting calls in Dallas, Orlando and L.A. and took online applicants as well. The interviewees numbered in the thousands. Of that group, the TV network flew the top 20 to L.A. for a combine. There, they narrowed the field to 12 finalists – six defensive backs, and six receivers.

They called it “Fourth and Long,” and that’s what it was – fourth down and a few thousand yards away from a spot on the Dallas Cowboys’ regular-season roster. All Holley had to do was get selected from thousands of applicants for a group of 20, withstand an eight-man cut to appear on the show, and outlast 11 other hell-bent last-chancers during a grueling boot camp competition. From there, all he’d have left would be to survive Cowboys’ training camp, cut after cut after cut like everyone else (except he’d be like nobody else), and eventually become one of 53 men chosen to wear the silver and blue.

From the start, Holley liked his chances.

And from the start, he looked like a strong contender. The first episode included a run-down on all 12 players and their back-stories. All the players’ careers had at some point been derailed, whether by injury, bad luck, irresponsible habits, or some other reason. As they gathered on the field for the first time, former Cowboys star Michael Irvin walked out and explained the situation.

Basically, Irvin, ex-Cowboy Bill Bates and ex-coach Joe Avezzano would lead the players through a pseudo-training camp. Irvin emphasized that it wouldn’t be a “cute” reality show, and he proved that point by running the players so far into the ground they hit bedrock. Guys cramped up, keeled over, wondered when it would stop. One player threw up copiously on the ground, and Irvin came over and berated him to “get the sickness out” so he could continue running.

“The toughest for me was the day we did the five-hour conditioning,” Holley said. “That was, that was just brutal. It really challenged you and beat you up mentally and physically.” But that first day, the cameras never caught a single shot of Holley slackening, complaining or taking a knee – not one.

For about six-and-a-half weeks, Holley and the others lived inside Cowboys Stadium – literally. Their cell phones were confiscated, and they were allowed no contact with the outside world. Holley said he missed family and friends terribly.

“As the weeks went on, it got tougher and tougher. You started to see guys get injured, guys lose their mental toughness. So I just really focused in on staying healthy, treating my body right, being mentally and physically tough,” he said. “Cause I knew as the competition went on, the drills would get harder, the competition would get stronger, and you had to really step up every time you got a chance because it was coming down to cutting time, and you don’t want to be that guy in the War Room, and they send you home.”

"The War Room” – the place where the three coaches called three players in each week to send one home, to tell him, “The Cowboys cannot use you.” Week after week passed, and Holley never entered that room. Eventually, the season finale arrived – Holley and two other competitors remained.

At the end of the episode, Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones came down to join Irvin and the other coaches. With the three players standing together, Irvin looked at Holley: “Jesse Holley, the Cowboys can use you.”

Holley didn’t react immediately. “At first, I had to make sure he said, ‘Can,’ instead of ‘Can’t,’” he explained. “The first thing that went to my mind was, when Michael Irvin said your name first, you knew you were being cut. When he said my name first, I thought I was going to be cut because I didn’t know how they were going to do it. So once I heard him say, ‘Can,’ and I saw everybody smile, I just became speechless. It was definitely a blessing.”

Training Camp

Once the season finale aired, Holley said his phone rang constantly with congratulations. The week before he left for training camp – which started July 28 and ran through August – he said he felt extremely confident. “If it was any other way, I shouldn’t even walk onto training camp grounds … I believe 100,000 percent in my abilities and my work ethic. I don’t waver or doubt it one single bit.”

He attributed much of that to lessons he learned from Irvin and Avezzano during the show. “The most important thing that I took from ‘Fourth and Long’ was knowing that I could push myself farther than I’ve ever pushed myself. We have a level, where we say ‘to the max,’” Holley said. “According to ourselves, that’s as far as we can go. When you have something that you really want and that you really desire, you learn to push yourself past that max and tap into something that you never really knew you had.”

When asked what his pre-training camp fears were, Holley said, “There are no fears. What is there to fear? There’s nothing to fear. It’s just football.”

Holley always had the perfect attitude about his opportunity: Whatever happens, happens. “I’m going to go out, give everything that I have. And, if everything that I have is not what they’re looking for … it’ll be a great experience. I’ll have something to tell my kids one day. I have the DVD to show them, the jersey to show them, the archives to show them. And I’ll move on,” he said. “I don’t plan on chasing the dream forever.

But I feel really, really good about the situation I’m getting myself into now.”

Still, he said, “It would mean a whole lot. That’s my ultimate dream, to play in the NFL … It just would be a tremendous, tremendous achievement. It would probably be the biggest achievement of my life to make the National Football League.”

Once the 6-foot-2, 213-pounder reported to camp, he wanted to prove that he wasn’t some gimmick player who had won a TV show. He also knew that every opportunity mattered greatly for him. “You have to bring it every single day because you’re not a 1st-rounder, you’re not a 2nd-rounder. You don’t get ample opportunities. They’re not going to work around you,” he said. “You don’t have time for injuries. Your room for error is very, very minimal.”

The beginning portion of training camp passed, and Holley stayed on the team for the preseason games. During training camp, Holley posted a blog through the Cowboys’ web site entitled “Tales from Holley-Wood.” It details some of his experiences from camp, including his emotions during the games. If you have the time to read them, his entries offer some valuable insight into the NFL’s hidden intricacies.

After Holley’s first preseason game, he wrote about his emotions. “We come back in to get dressed, and the whole time I'm like really giddy and really excited on the inside, because this is the first time I'm really back playing professional football in a long time. The feeling is just great,” he wrote. “I caught myself just staring at my jersey for a long time, just looking at it and seeing my name on the back of a Dallas Cowboy jersey. It was just one of those feelings where if you could just capture the whole moment and just freeze it, you would like to just sit in that moment for a little while.”

One of the most poignant entries involves Holley’s account of his encounter with a young girl named Caitlin with Down Syndrome. “They came and got me and said, 'This girl over there, she wants to meet you. She's a huge fan, and she's getting ready to go into surgery, and she was brought down because she kept asking to meet Jesse Holley,'” he wrote.

For Holley, that was a huge moment – he dedicated over 500 words to its description. He gave her the “Holleywood” bracelet he had worn to that point and brought Caitlin’s mom to the verge of crying. “For whatever reason, her meeting me may have done something for her, for her morale, for her spirit, for whatever. It definitely did something for me,” he wrote. “It really showed me that life is bigger than just you. Life is bigger than the game of football. Anytime you get a chance to touch someone in that type of manner, I think it's really a great thing.”

Holley saw limited action in the first two preseason games. He ran a couple offensive series – missed a touchdown catch at one point – and played on special teams.

But in the final preseason game against Minnesota – the players’ last chance to impress the coaching staff before they cut down to the 53-man, regular-season roster – Holley made his closing statement. On special teams, he snatched a live punt and took off running. He said he only hoped to gain 10 yards to put the team in good field position, but he broke a tackle and saw “all that green grass in front of me.” Holley ran as if Death himself was at his heels – once he hit the open field, his determination trumped everyone else’s athleticism.

Holley ran 82 yards for the touchdown, which put the Cowboys ahead, 35-31, late in the fourth quarter. It proved to be the game-winning score. “That was just ‘make a play’ time,” he said.

Moving the Chains

When the Cowboys chose their 53-man roster for the regular season, Holley was not on it. It seemed, for a moment, that his Fourth and Long attempt had come up inches short.

But sometimes in football, something unexpected happens to keep a drive going, and that was the case for Holley. Although he failed to make the 53-man roster, he did make the eight-man practice squad, where he remains. He makes a comfortable salary and gets to be as close to an NFL player as one can get without actually being one.

“I do everything that everybody else does,” Holley said. He goes to all the team meetings and runs the scout team offense. “I’m going against first team guys – Terence Newman, Gerald Sensabaugh, all our starting secondary.”

He added: “I am in every sense of the word a part of this football team … I just don’t dress on Sundays. That’s the only thing different.”

Being on the practice squad means Holley’s an injury away from being activated. Also, any team can try to sign him while he’s on the practice squad, and he’s free to go. But he said during a postgame TV interview that he doesn’t necessarily want that to happen. “Of course I would love to be on someone’s 53-man roster, and be active, but I really, really like being here,” he said. “I really love being a Cowboy.”

For Holley, this is a dream come almost-true. “My brother told me the other day that I was inspiration for people, for where I’ve come from, the hard work that I’ve been through to get where I’m at,” he said in that TV interview. “And that I should be happy – not satisfied – but happy with where I am right now, and that this is just the beginning. We have some more work to do.”

One of the thoughts Holley revisits a number of times in different interviews and his blog entries is the idea of where he was ‘then’ and where he is ‘now.’ "I blogged the other day on my Twitter page (Mr4thAndLong),” he wrote, “I just thought to myself, 'Wow, what a great opportunity this is. Last time this year, I was working at a dead-end security monitoring job from 11-7 and a part-time job from 10-3. Nobody wanted an autograph, nobody knew my name. None of that.

“You fast forward to a year later, to this opportunity I have, which is an extreme, extreme, extreme blessing. Now I have people screaming my name, wanting my name on a T-shirt, a ball, a poster, a flag, a cell phone. Somebody asked me to sign their arm. I even text Michael Irvin and I told him, 'Who knew 43 years ago, 25 years ago that our paths would cross.' It's been written already, but nobody knew at that point in time that our paths would cross, that he would come up with an idea for a show, that I would be the one picked for the show, and to now, being exactly where I'm at.”

One year ago, this story wouldn’t have been worth writing. Who knew where Jesse Holley’s path would take him – where it will take him still.

“It's a bit unorthodox,” he wrote. “To be honest, it's the first of its kind. Nobody has ever come into the NFL the way I have. It's a bit of a privilege.”

It’s more than a privilege – it’s a made-from-TV success story, an inspirational tale about the crazy places life can take you. Mr. Fourth and Long: the man who knows that as long as he has the ball – no matter how many yards to go – he gets to keep playing.