Terry Tate: New office enforcer, TV star
By John Tomase
Tampa Bay's defense may have dominated Super Bowl XXXVII, but with all due respect to Warren Sapp and Co., the hardest hits of the night belonged to Terry Tate.
Reebok's office linebacker doled out jackhammer justice to the guy who spent an extra 15 minutes on break, another who made a long distance call on the company phone and another who forgot the cover sheet on his TPS report, to name three.
Terry punctuates most of his tackles with the "Whoo!" captured 150 times a game by NFL Films, and he talks more trash than Gary Payton and Terrell Owens at a landfill. One victim who failed to refill the coffee maker is admonished: "You kill the Joe, you make some mo'!"
In just over 24 hours, the commercial has generated a ton of buzz for Reebok and helped position the shoe company to put itself back on the map after a decade of dormancy.
They owe it all to a 27-year-old USC film school grad named Rawson Thurber and a 6-foot-5, 315-pound former college football player turned actor named Lester Speight, who now goes by the moniker The Mighty Rasta.
"When I look at my eyes in the commercial, I'm like, 'Who the (expletive) is that? That guy is insane," Rasta said from a New York hotel last night. "When you do a character, it's got to be from within. When I'm Terry Tate, it's full throttle."
Terry tackles women. He tackles men. He tackles anyone who breaks an office rule, no matter how benign.
"Despite my best efforts," Thurber said, "(the popularity) has very little to do with football and a lot to do with how much people hate office culture. The stupidity of refilling the coffee pot and communal living drives people nuts."
Terry Tate: Office Linebacker began as a digital short Thurber filmed in 2000, "to make me and 10 buddies laugh, and hopefully score some chicks."
Pirated DVDs instead made it an underground San Francisco sensation. It played at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and strong word of mouth ensued.
"It was sort of like the 'Blair Witch Project' of office linebacker comedies," Thurber said from his California home. "It's a growth market."
Doug Liman, director of hipster movies like Go and Swingers, picked it up for his production company Hypnotic. A partnership with a New York ad agency led to Reebok.
Turning a four-minute short into a 30- or 60-second commercial is not easy, especially when the short is an expletive festival.
"I tried to get away with anything I could," Thurber says. "I was trying to make the 'NYPD Blue' of Super Bowl commercials. I was like, 'What, we can't say mother(expletive)?' That's how dumb I am."
But even with gentler language, Reebok marketing executive Mickey Pant believed he had a pop culture hit. He assembled company executives from the world over at their Canton headquarters just before Thanksgiving for a preview.
Entitled "Vacation," the ad showcased Terry Tate "relaxing" by tackling bellhops, bartenders and pool attendants. The crowd of 500 loved it.
A cell phone call interrupted Pant's post-commercial presentation. He held one finger aloft. He just needed a second.
That was Tate's cue. He roared onstage and clotheslined Pant right over his chair. "It was bad etiquette," Rasta said. "I didn't hold back." A custom taunt followed. And thus a Super Bowl commercial was born.
The commercial features a string of bone-rattling hits. Tate drags one office worker across the top of a file cabinet, along his 11 Employee of the Month awards. Another gets thrown into a cubicle. Another crumples after being checked into a window.
"The skinny black guy, he weighed 120 pounds," Rasta says. "I hit him so hard, he could barely stay in the frame long enough to register on film. It was like a cartoon swipe."
But the hardest hit of all is head-on demolition of a ponytailed woman who makes like Drew Bledsoe to Rasta's Mo Lewis.
The stuntwoman is married to the head stuntman. Rasta couldn't bring himself to drill her on the first take.
"Look, I'm a pro," she said to Thurber. "Hit me."
Thurber turned to Rasta and shrugged. "You heard the lady," he said. "Lay it on her."
Rasta obliged. "If you listen to the dailies," Thurber said, "you can hear the crew saying, 'Oh my god.' I thought she was dead. Her head snapped back. She went flying. I made sure I got the shot, then rushed over. She popped up, so proud. She said it was the hardest hit she'd ever taken in 15 years."
Rasta said the only serious injury was a pair of broken ribs for a bellhop who got tackled through a luggage cart. Considering they shot four episodes and 110 scenes in one week last June, that's a pretty good ratio.
"We're talking 600 or 700 takes and 80 percent of it is me taking people out," Rasta said. "We had to make things work in two or three takes at the most. Any more than that and people start telegraphing. When you've got a guy like me rushing you, you can't sit there and pretend you don't know it's coming."
Thurber, who played football at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and plays a fleeing coworker in the commercial, demanded verisimilitude. That means an office worker gets taken down from behind and stripped of his stolen pens with a right-handed club, a la Lawrence Taylor, whose No. 56 Rasta wears in tribute.
It's easy to make the hits look real when your lead actor recorded almost 200 tackles as a linebacker at Morgan State in Maryland from 1982-1985, then signed with the Baltimore Stars of the USFL in 1986, only to have the league fold before he played a game.
"I was going to play for the Cowboys and buy my mother a house," Rasta said, "but life doesn't always work the way you want."
Radio announcer Lamont Germany, Morgan State's assistant sports information director, remembers Speight well.
"He was always in my face about making sure we gave him credit for every tackle he made," Germany recalls with a chuckle. "He used to listen to the broadcast of the games afterwards and critique us. He was a real aggressive player and extremely boisterous on the field. When he made a tackle, you knew it."
Speight's acting credits include bit parts in "NYPD Blue" and the Al Pacino football film "Any Given Sunday." He became Terry Tate after his agent spotted an ad in the back of a Hollywood trade magazine seeking an actor with football experience.
"If I can play any character in the world, it's this guy here," Rasta said.
Rawson agreed. "This guy is Terry Tate," he remembers thinking. "Let's hope he can act."
That wasn't a problem. The charismatic Rasta plays brute physical comedy in one scene, then gives a co-worker a birthday cake in another. "You can't direct that," Thurber said. "You're born with it. He's got it."
And now the two are riding high. Ben Stiller will produce Thurber's first feature film, a comedy called Underdogs. Rasta has parts in movies with Jet Li and Jamie Kennedy.
"I'm looking at Arnold and Sly and Diesel," Rasta said of Hollywood's action stars. "It's time for them to slide over, because Rasta's coming to play."
Reebok will unveil the remaining three shorts at
http://www.terrytate.reebok.com in the coming months. The more immediate future means more commercials, including a 15-second series of tackles punctuated by Rasta's "Whoo!" as well as office re-enactments of famous NFL hits like Nat Moore's helicopter for the Dolphins.
"If you liked the first one, the best hits have yet to come," Rasta promises. "The Pain Train is coming!"
