The Human Grenade

They describe him with words that a young, violent man might secretly appreciate: He's an assassin, a grenade, they say. A reckless kamikaze.

But Jason Short makes his living playing football, a game of plotted precision, where even improvisation is diagrammed. Recklessness may be its ultimate sin.

So with training camp a month away, Browns coaches must decide what to do with the man known as "Full Throttle." In years past, placing him at linebacker was a risky proposition. When your urge to hit people is so strong that you often abandon your post, there's no room for you in a coordinator's scheme, which relies on 11 men who will solemnly swear on their playbooks.

But then there are kickoffs -- those 22 car pile-ups that often decide games. This is where a human mortar round serves a valuable purpose. In fact, they're the only reason Short's in the league.

If all goes as planned, Short will line up this fall in the middle of Browns Stadium, next to the kicker. That's where the wedge-buster goes, the man responsible for detonating the beefy phalanx of soldiers who protect the Dante Halls of the world.

The fans won't notice Short. They'll be summoning the beer man, hustling back from a final smoke break, perhaps picking up the ball as it floats across the burnt-orange horizon. They won't see Short, but he'll be there, tearing down the field with radar-lock on that wedge.

In the stands, his dad and brother and wife will hold their breath. They'll have driven from Lake County, along with a band of friends and coaches from Painesville's Riverside High. The last time they saw Short in Browns Stadium, he was in a Philadelphia Eagles uniform. There was blood all over his face. He was getting booed out of the stadium.

Not this time. This time, it will be Short versus three interlocking minivans in a high-speed game of Red Rover. He'll flatten one, maybe two. The fans will notice that. They'll watch Short's teammates traipse through the hole he's blown up and make the tackle. And they'll turn to the guy next to them and ask, Who the hell is no. 50?

Only the rabid will know about the Painesville boy who was barely recruited to play college, barely scraped his way into the league, and is barely seen on the field. But they'll soon learn that NFL players voted Short among the most feared in the league, simply from his work on plays like this one.

That's the plan, at least. But first, Short must make the team.

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The last time you read about him, it was a sweet story in The Plain Dealer, a tale of two brothers with a heated sibling rivalry. Short was a junior in high school that year, 1995 -- still morphing into the specimen he is today: 6-foot-4, 255 pounds, with pillar legs and a jaw that could bust up a driveway.

"When I first met him, it was like this blond-haired, blue-eyed, Greek god-looking kid," says former Riverside assistant Steve Trivisonno. "It was like, holy cow. He had it all."

Short's older brother, Pat, was a senior, and even bigger. The two fought like brothers do, but their size and strength made for Animal Planet bloodbaths. Pat broke Jason's arm and jaw, which had to be wired shut. Jason knocked Pat out. There was nothing sweet about it. "We were 11 months apart," Jason says. "There was no way he was going to beat me."

Football fueled the brawls. When the Riverside coaches handed out equipment, the Short boys went straight home, strapped on their helmets, and headed to the yard. "They put on a little show for the neighborhood," recalls head coach Don Anderson. The fighting continued on the practice field, where Anderson let the well-padded boys go until they were tired or bored. "When there was an explosion, we just waited," he recalls, "and everything was fine."

The beatings brewed in Jason a hair-trigger temper and thirst for contact that followed him off the field. He once went to Anderson to complain about smoking in the bathroom. "That aggravated me," Short says, still sounding offended a decade later. It aggravated Anderson too, so he gave Short informal monitor duties. "Next thing I know, those guys come flying out of there," Anderson recalls. "He's just throwing them out, physically."

When he was old enough to drive, Short started carrying extra shorts and cleats -- in a variety of sizes -- in the back of his truck. There would be no excuses when Short came knocking on your door to round up players for a tackle pickup game. He continued even after high school, though it got harder to find willing participants.