"Matt Cassel is unsatisfied. He gets this from his mother, a well-known set decorator in Hollywood who raised four teenagers mostly by herself.

Cassel is a dreamer, too, which he gets from his father, a screenwriter who never stopped trying until he died two years ago. Cassel is also enormously competitive, which he gets from his two brothers, who both made it into professional baseball.

Cassel is the melding of many, a goofball who sings Backstreet Boys at karaoke, a mischievous kid who sometimes had to sleep in the coach's room on baseball road trips, and a romantic who decided not to transfer out of a tough situation in college in large part because of the woman who is now his wife.

But Kansas City hasn't seen any of that. Not yet. We've seen the Chiefs quarterback play it mostly straight, to the point that fans call in to local sports talk radio shows complaining that he's too dry. Too boring. You might know where that comes from.

"The New England way, I guess," says Matt Fisher, one of Cassel's closest friends from childhood. "He's all business right now. But if he wins, you'll see more. I'm sure."

Even so, pieces of Cassel's personality and past emerge. There are a million moments that should have led him somewhere else, but here he is anyway, set for the biggest day of his professional life a year after his most miserable time.

Today he can be the first Chiefs quarterback to win a playoff game since Joe Montana, and after that he has the opportunity to be Kansas City's biggest sports icon since Derrick Thomas.

No NFL quarterback has ever had this kind of background. He survived a devastating earthquake, got shaped by his parents' divorce and went five years of college and three in the pros without starting even one game."