The other day when Bill Marpet saw his son, Ali, he was taken aback when he noticed his boy dressed up in a black Polo shirt with a red emblem on the chest.
This was nicer than Ali usually dressed; for most of his life, he had revelled in the art of the hand-me-down. Once, on a family vacation to Jamaica on New Year’s Eve, Ali donned his version of formal attire: a T-shirt that read AT THE CORNER OF HAPPY AND HEALTHY that he proudly announced was free of armpit stains. That fashion sense that dated back to his toddler years. Once, when Bill was doing the laundry, he asked Ali whether a pair of pajamas he was holding belonged to him.
“Yep, them’s are mine. The ones with the holes in ’em.”
Bill laughs. He’s one of the country’s preeminent fashion videographers. If you’ve seen clips of models tiptoeing down the runway during Fashion Week, there’s a good chance Bill was the one who taped it. There’s a good chance he was the one who suggested to the designers the models should walk to accentuate the wardrobe. Bill looks the part, with long, silver hair and earrings; leather jackets; and shirts unbuttoned in a way that looks effortlessly cool—the kind of thing a lay person could not accomplish without a few hours of time and a T-square. He knows Calvin Klein. And yet, “I still don’t think Ali has a T-shirt that he’s actually bought himself,” Bill says. He was right. When he asked Ali where the new threads had come from, he admitted he’d hocked the Polo shirt from a former teammate, Beau Allen, when Allen had cleaned out his closet.
Ali’s mom, Joy Rose, is a museum director. She’s also a singer, with a hit that made ’s dance chart for a month back in 1988 and a music video that made its way onto MTV. She studies the emerging field of motherhood academically and later formed an avant-garde rock band called Housewives on Prozac.
In that way, it may seem like Ali was the apple that fell far from the tree, a man rebelling from stylish rebelliousness. As he takes the field Sunday against the Chiefs, he does so as the Buccaneers’ most valuable commodity on the offensive line; the latest in a lineage of stout interior offensive linemen that made up the bedrock of so many of Tom Brady’s Super Bowl teams in New England. He is fifth in the NFL in pass block win rate (95%). Pro Football Focus rated Marpet the seventh-best guard in football this year. He has not given up a single sack. But he views his rise from obscurity at Division III Hobart College as a direct product of his parents’ mastery of their own crafts and their individual dedications.
How does a kid who didn’t start playing football until his junior year of high school, who needed to learn how to run the 40-yard dash the weekend before a scout came to work him out in college, who went from eyeing a post-college stint playing American football in Europe somewhere—or finding a way to utilize his economics degree—to becoming a second-round pick and, eventually, one of the highest-paid offensive linemen in the sport?
“I think the absolute and total commitment to a cause that they showed just rubbed off on me,” Ali said last week after practice. “It wasn’t them saying, It was just about them being them. They had a pursuit and a passion and me seeing that was probably the best thing they could have showed me.”
