"One throw changed everything. Sort of.

As part of the tight ends group during freshman football tryouts at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, Mass., Matt Hasselbeck was both eager to distinguish himself from the others and to align himself with his father, an NFL player at the position who had retired a short time earlier. When a quarterback missed him on a pass route, he tracked down the loose ball and threw it back.

"The coach came over to me and said, 'Hey, I want you to try out for quarterback,'" Hasselbeck said. "He put me in the quarterback line, and I thought he must have really liked how I threw the ball.

"Then he said something like, 'You're never going to be strong enough to block anybody.' ""