There Is No 'I' in Uneasy Truce

A battle loomed.

But something happened in the ensuing months. The Seahawks hired a new president for football operations, Tim Ruskell, and he set out to rebuild the Seahawks quickly. He sat down with Alexander and got the player to agree to a one-year contract with the provision that after this year Alexander would be allowed to leave as a free agent. Alexander said yes, then gave the Seahawks the best year of his career.

He is different now, smiling but saying little. This week he offered benign comments about the Redskins and then turned every question about himself into a statement of gratitude that the team is doing well. He makes the blocks and catches the passes the coaches have wanted him to do. He questions nothing and obeys every command.

When the Seahawks had the ball near the goal line against Indianapolis in the next-to-last game of the season and Alexander was a touchdown from tying the NFL record for touchdowns in a season, Holmgren turned to his coaches. The crowd was shouting for Alexander, but the score meant nothing. There was a chance Alexander could get hurt, and for what? Vanity?

"Should I put him in?" Holmgren said.

"I don't know if I can do it," he then said.

Finally he agreed. Alexander ran. Touchdown. There was a roar at Qwest Field. Alexander held the ball aloft. The coach smiled, the player beamed. The next week he broke the record with his 28th touchdown.

The Seahawks have at most three games left before the obligations are over. After that, Alexander is free to leave, and the old mistrust could come bubbling back to the surface.

Alexander has never been understood in Seattle. He has been something of a mystery, different from the other players. He smiled constantly, laughed even after losses and carried himself with an air that many interpreted as conceited. He talked about how beloved he is at the University of Alabama, about how he needs police escorts when he returns to town, and he said it not in a boastful way but as a statement of fact.

Yet all of it confounded his NFL employers. In a sport where many players pray, Alexander took his Christianity to another level, naming his children Heaven and Trinity. He didn't just have a youth foundation, he had foundations in more states. Everything, it seemed, he did in extremes.

"Here's a guy who is smiling even when the team isn't winning games, and then he enjoys his faith in God, then you know people are saying, 'We've got to put this guy in his place because he's the Super All-Star,' " Durran Alexander said. "It has hurt him in the public's opinion."

Alexander has seemed oblivious to this hidden hostility. It startles him when people say he is arrogant or disingenuous. In the months before the 2004 season, he and his wife, Valerie, took a vacation at an Idaho resort with teammate Heath Evans and Evans's wife, Bethann. One night, the other three confronted Alexander.