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His first birthday cake came in the shape of a football, setting in motion a series of events that led him here to Memorial Stadium, where he feels the quiet days of the offseason drawing to a close.
UConn, set to play its first season as a full-fledged member of the Big East Conference, begins camp next week, and just weeks remain until the Huskies open their season against Murray State at Rentschler Field, where Orlovsky will be thrust into the spotlight for a senior year fraught with lofty expectations.
One year after throwing for a school-record 3,485 yards and 33 touchdowns to lead the Huskies to a 9-3 record in their first season with a full allotment of Division I-A scholarships, Orlovsky appears on preseason watch lists for every major college football award, including the Heisman Trophy. Most scouting services rank him as a likely early-round selection in the 2005 NFL draft. Barring the unexpected, Orlovsky will turn pro in six months.
Orlovsky cringes when his older sister, Lauren, asks what it feels like to be famous. He still folds his thick, 6-foot-5 frame into the same old ’95 Jetta -- "I’m just Dan," he says.
A couple of weeks ago, Orlovsky was approached by a father and his three young sons at a Stop & Shop supermarket. Was this really Dan Orlovsky, standing in the cereal aisle? He shook their hands and offered some encouragement to a group of boys who aspired to be like him someday.
But minutes later, Orlovsky, who turns 21 later this month, was just Dan again. He and Alfred Fincher, his best friend and UConn teammate, were racing shopping carts through the parking lot. He long ago learned to deflect pressure.
He turned to Lauren before she graduated from UConn this spring, his voice nostalgic. Did she remember when they were growing up in Shelton? Riding Big Wheels together in their long driveway? Pretending to fish in the brook that cut behind their backyard, then catching the leaves that floated on the surface?
Things were never that simple, of course. Perhaps the simple repetition of throwing a football provided a sense of stability when the rest of his life appeared beyond his control. He found refuge on the field. But even here at Memorial Stadium, where he and his teammates pace through summer workouts, Orlovsky hears voices echoing among the metal bleachers.
Above all, he hears the booming voice of his father -- the driving force throughout his life, for better and for worse.
PARACHUTES AND SAND BAGS
Orlovsky, age 13, left St. Lawrence Elementary School one afternoon under overcast skies. When his father, Dan Orlovsky Sr., got home from work, the questions came rapid-fire, as they often did. Had Danny taken his amino acids? Had he worked out? Had he run yet?
Danny shook his head. The vitamins tasted bad, he said. He was tired, he wanted to take a break. His father wondered how pills could taste bad, but he kept his voice even and calm.
"Well," Orlovsky Sr. said, "maybe you shouldn’t work out. But your competition is working out today."
Was his father trying to motivate him, or just tick him off? Either way, Orlovsky headed outside with the running parachute his father had purchased for $100.
As the parachute pulled at his shoulders like a defensive end trying to tackle him from behind, Orlovsky pushed his body through a series of sprints designed to improve his strength, his tenacity, his resolve. Afterward, he unhooked the parachute, then watched as a gust of wind swept it high into a tree next door.
Orlovsky went to the garage, found a bucket of baseballs, aimed and fired -- throw after throw, as hard as he could. He finally hit his target, and the parachute fluttered back tothe ground.
Lauren Orlovsky, 22, sometimes wonders how her brother emerged intact. She and Dan played on the same tee-ball team when they were 5 and 6, and this is when their athletic lives diverged. Dan was good, Lauren was not.
"So my father took the kid with the athletic ability and went to town with him," she said, laughing. "There’s only so much -- not harassment, but pushing you can take from your parent before you’re just like, ‘You know what? You’re going to drive me to hate this game.’ And sometimes I’m surprised Danny didn’t say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’"
He ran through other drills, pulling a truck tire filled with sand bags, rolling out from behind a tree and pegging a garbage can with passes. And as the years passed, Orlovsky needed less and less prodding from his father. The regimen became second nature. He sat at the kitchen table and diagramed plays. He lay in bed at night and watched game film on a 15-inch television/VCR combo.
His father had always been determined to send him to the brink, to poke and push, but Orlovsky never tumbled over the edge. Maybe he loved the game too much to give it up. Maybe he always found himself in charge once he stepped inside the lines. Maybe it was a way to please the man who stuck by him, raised him. Maybe his father knew what he was doing all along.
"I think if I’d played the piano, my dad would have been hard on me," Orlovsky said. "Or if I was a dancer, he would have been hard on me. It’s just that he wanted me to be successful at something."
GETTING A GRIP
Dan Orlovsky Sr. was a decent football player when he was young, good enough to play on the defensive line at the University of Bridgeport in the early 1970s, back when football meant something at the school.
"I was always the guy who people thought had a lot of potential," he said. Asked why such promise fell short of being fulfilled, Orlovsky Sr., 52 and a financial planner, sighed and shrugged his broad shoulders. He wishes he had an answer, he said.
His strongest quality was his work ethic. As a teenager, he spent hours training at Harding High in Bridgeport, a few blocks from the three-family home where he was raised. He even had his own squat machine. He had to be self-motivated, he said, because his parents took little interest in sports.
"I never had any guidance as far as athletics went," he said. "I had to do everything on my own. And I always said that if I had a son, at least I would know what he could do or should do."
Orlovsky Sr. and his first wife divorced when Dan, the youngest of their three children, was 1. Orlovsky Sr. was awarded custody of the children, according to court records. Though his mother was given visitation rights, Dan Orlovsky said he has not seen or spoken to her since he was 8.
"My parents got divorced when I was 1, and that’s the relationship I have with my mother," he said. "I mean, is it her fault? His fault? My fault? I don’t know. I don’t know the whole story. Do I want to right now? No. All I know is, they got divorced and whatever went down, whatever shaped up, happened. ... And the weird thing is, my mother lives in Trumbull, which is five minutes from me."
Dan and Lauren are also estranged from their older sister, Christine, 26, who left to live with their mother before she started high school. Orlovsky Sr. refused to discuss the divorce, and his ex-wife, reached by telephone, also declined an interview request. Lauren said that only after Dan rose to prominence at UConn did she and her brother turn to their father to learn some of the details of a sensitive situation.
"Reporters were asking questions, and Danny was like, ‘I don’t know how to answer that,’" she said. "All we knew is that we had a daddy, and we had each other, and it was cool. It’s funny, because I didn’t even search that question until recently -- and I’m 22 years old. You would think that at 18, 19 years old, something like that would pop into your head. But I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you push that stuff so far back that you don’t really think about it.
"Some people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so sad.’ But you know, my brother’s doing fine. We’re well-rounded kids, we’re both educated, and he’s going to make a lot of money someday. Then the family will come out of the woodwork. That’s what I’m waiting for. You know, ‘Oh, this is your Auntie Sue, she’s related to your cousin Jan’s boyfriend.’ Like, ‘Who are you?’ I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet."
Lauren said she felt prepared to discuss bits and pieces and, in effect, take some of the heat off her brother, "because he’s got so many other things on his plate that he has to worry about."
Dan was more reserved.
"I’ve never seen a working, complete family," he said. "So that part is still a blank. I mean, I’ve seen my friends and whatnot. But I’ve seen my dad hold down a job and raise two kids pretty successful."
Orlovsky Sr. has been divorced three times, but the core -- Big Dan, Little Dan and Lauren -- has endured. Since Dan suited up for his first team at age 8, football played a vital role. It bonded father to son.
Shelton coach Joe Benanto remembers a frigid day at practice when Orlovsky Sr., then an assistant coach, ran to a sporting goods store to buy a ball-warmer. Orlovsky Sr. wanted to make sure his son could get a good grip.
"In one respect, he certainly was looking out for his son," Benanto said, "and I could see that. But it also helped us as a team. Towels, for example. There were years when we’d forget the towels. But when he was there, we always had a load of towels."
MAKING DECISIONS
Shelton won 29 of the 32 games Orlovsky started. As a senior, he threw for 2,400 yards and 24 touchdowns as Shelton went 12-0 -- its first undefeated season since 1956 -- and seized the Class LL state title. In 44 years of coaching at the high school and college levels, Benanto said, he never met a harder working player.
Orlovsky had a personal breakthrough his sophomore year in a game against Hamden, a traditional power. The two teams met on a Monday afternoon at Strong Stadium in West Haven, where Hamden survived several late threats to win 29-26. But Orlovsky, a gangly sophomore who completed 13 of 18 passes for 209 yards, left the lasting impression.
Tony Martone, then thecoach at Hamden, remembers Orlovsky taking numbing hits but bouncing back up, slinging 35-yard darts across the field and maintaining his poise. Martone wanted his team to control the clock and demoralize Shelton’s defense. But each time the Gaels got the ball back, Orlovsky chucked a couple of quick throws that put his team back in scoring position.
Relieved but exhausted, Martone turned to his assistant coach, Paul Catino, after the game. "That kid is going to be a big-time player," Martone said.
Everyone saw the magic that day. Orlovsky cannot recall any of it. He suffered a third-quarter concussion when he rolled to his left and jumped to release a short pass. Before his feet returned to the turf, he was flattened by defensive tackle Anttaj Hawthorne, now an All-American at Wisconsin. Orlovsky landed in a crumpled heap. Only laterhe learned that he had lifted himself and continued to play.
"That was just lights out," he said. "All I remember is waking up on the bus, crying."
Shelton assistant coach Mike Dokla still sees Orlovsky plowing through an Amity-Woodbridge safety to score a game-winning two-point conversion, or surprising West Haven with a no-huddle offense and finding the end zone on a meticulous 12-play drive. Once, before a big game against Greenwich, Orlovsky begged the school nurse for an excused pass from class so he could join his coaches in a strategy session.
With recruiters sniffing around throughout his junior season, it came as little surprise when Michigan State, Virginia and Purdue offered scholarships. But Orlovsky probably would have gone to Boston College had the coaching staff expressed an interest. When Orlovsky visited BC for a camp the summer before his senior year, the coaches liked his arm and his instincts. But his time in the 40-yard dash, a pedestrian 5.3 seconds, was a problem.
"We like our quarterbacks to have an arm and legs," one coach said, according to Orlovsky Sr.
Benanto, along for the visit, told his quarterback to pack up. So they left.
Orlovsky cultivated a healthy chip on his shoulder throughout the summer, carrying it with him to another recruiting camp at Virginia, where coach George Welsh kept calling him "Matt," perhaps confusing him with Matt Schaub, an incoming freshman quarterback. Orlovsky did not take kindly to this mistake.
"I was like, ‘Why would I ever come here if you have no clue who I am?’" he said.
His father picked him up at the airport, and somewhere between Windsor Locks and Shelton, Orlovsky revealed that he had pared his list to three schools: Purdue, Michigan State and UConn.
"You know, dad," Orlovsky said. "I think I want to stay closer to home."
"Well," his father said, "I guess that makes your decision pretty easy."
His sarcasm was lost on Danny. Orlovsky Sr. went upstairs when they got home, but soon heard his son talking on the kitchen phone.
Throughout the recruiting process, Orlovsky had been drawn to UConn coach Randy Edsall. He liked that Edsall was direct, that he had never guaranteed a starting position. He also anticipated the challenge of being part of something new, of building a program in his home state.
"Coach Edsall, this is Dan Orlovsky. I’m coming to UConn."
His father barreled down the stairs, waving his arms. "Whoa!" he screamed. "No! No, you’re not!"
It was too late. Danny handed him the phone. Edsall wanted to chat.
"What do you think?" Edsall asked.
"What do I think about what?" Orlovsky Sr. asked.
"What do you think about Dan coming to UConn?" Edsall asked.
"Well," Orlovsky Sr. said, "I would love to see Danny play in a bowl game someday."
Then he hung up. He did not speak to his son for two weeks.
GET THE GHOST
Orlovsky Sr. wanted him to go away to college. Why was that so hard to understand? So many opportunities were being wasted.
Just as he feared, other college coaches who had been interested were laughing at his son -- laughing at both of them. "Does UConn even have a football team?" they asked.
"It’s not your decision," Orlovsky told his father. "You’re not going to spend four or five years there. You’re not putting in the time and effort. So it’s not your decision. I don’t tell you how to do your job, or where to work, or what car to drive. So let me make this decision on my own. Just trust me. And in four years, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll let you say, ‘I told you so.’"
Edsall threw Danny to the wolves, to play him as a freshman and, in the mind of Orlovsky Sr., botch the long-term plan. Danny was a young freshman -- he had always been young for his grade, since he went to preschool with Lauren one day and never left -- and the idea had been to redshirt, to take a year to grow.
But once starting quarterback Ryan Tracey unexpectedly dropped out of school 13 days before the season opener, everything changed. Seven games into the season, Orlovsky, 18, became the starter. UConn endured a 2-9 campaign, including a 56-7 loss to Temple, a perennial Division I-A doormat. Orlovsky and his teammates walked around campus with their baseball caps pulled low.
"We were just embarrassed," Orlovsky said. "We were the worst team on campus. We didn’t want anyone to know we played football. But then we were like, ‘You know what? We’re going to do something about this. We didn’t come here to get killed for four years. We didn’t come here to be terrible.’ "
Orlovsky and Fincher, a linebacker, asked Edsall what they could do to change things. Edsall told them to ignore the class system that typically saturates a college locker room. He told them to act like leaders as freshmen, and if the older guys had a problem with it, forget them.
Around this time, Edsall also fielded a call from Orlovsky Sr., who came right out and said it: He wanted Danny to transfer. A friend with connections had assured him that a handful of Big Ten schools were still interested, he said. Why should his son stick around and lose? Not only lose, but get drubbed by Eastern Washington? By Buffalo? By Middle Tennessee State?
Edsall replied that he had grown to know Dan as a confident young man capable of making his own decisions. Perhaps, Edsall suggested, Dan could speak for himself. And Dan did; he said he wanted to stay.
A few months later, before his sophomore season, Orlovsky met UConn’s new quarterback coach, Rob Ambrose, an old-school type known for expressing approval by saying things like, "That didn’t suck." Ambrose asked Orlovsky if he thought he was a good quarterback. Sure, Orlovsky said. What was his strongest attribute? Orlovsky said that he was a hard worker. Ambrose shook his head. Orlovsky sat there, perplexed. He remembers thinking, who does this guy think he is?
"There’s a ghost who works harder than you," Ambrose said. "There’s always a ghost. When you’re sleeping, he’s working out. When you’re having fun, he’s working out. You need to get that ghost. If you want to be any good, you need to get that ghost."
It was the same sort of message his father had been giving him for years. But now it generated new heat. Maybe he needed to hear it from somebody else.
These days, identical signs hang in Orlovsky’s locker and above his bed: "Get My Ghost."
SEEING IT
It all came together. Bolstered by another year of growth, a fresh attitude, better recruits and an infusion of spirit surrounding the opening of Rentschler Field, UConn capped last season’s stunning run with a 51-17 road win over Wake Forest. But another voice keeps asking Orlovsky whether it was a fluke.
"He’s always wanted to be the best he could be," Edsall said. "And I think he can be."
So he spends his days throwing. He lies on the floor at night and throws toward the ceiling. He throws into targets positioned 30 yards downfield. He even throws blindfolded, an unorthodox drill that forces him to focus on footwork.
Then he runs the steps at Memorial Stadium during late-night workouts with Fincher. Last month, campus police got a call about a disturbance at the stadium after midnight. It was Fincher and Orlovsky, bickering over who could finish the steps faster. The officer told them to carry on -- but please, guys, try to keep it down.
"He has goals," Fincher said. "He’s trying to be the best quarterback in the country."
Orlovsky, a political science major, does not particularly enjoy going to class -- "I hate school, I hate school, I hate school," he says -- and his life tends to revolve around two very different activities: working out and playing video games, either of which can drain as many as eight hours from his day.
"I’m a loser," Orlovsky said. "I don’t do anything else with my life. It’s all football. ... I’m just not good enough not to work hard. I’m not naturally talented enough where I can go out and freestyle and play on talent alone. I have to make up for it somewhere else."
His need for preparation borders on a self-described compulsive disorder. During the season, he invariably finds himself alone on Thursday nights inside one of the double-wide trailers next to Gampel Pavilion that serves as the quarterbacks’ meeting room. Under fluorescent lights, he takes a deep breath, grabs a black marker and -- overcome by a manic burst of energy -- scrawls all the offensive plays the Huskies might run during their upcoming game.
He often catches himself mumbling the blitz formations and secondary coverages he has studied on film. An hour later, every dry-erase board in the room is layered with squiggles and circles -- an unintelligible mess that makes perfect sense to Orlovsky. Then he erases it all.
"You ever see the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ where he just draws?" Orlovsky asked. "It’s weird, but if I’ve already seen everything a defense can throw at me, seeing it again is going to be easy."
He always wanted to run the show. Was it a coincidence that he became a quarterback? The one player who holds the game in his hands? With everything riding on him, the preparation takes away the uncertainty, the doubts, the insecurities that sometimes disturb his personal life.
Asked whether he has trust issues stemming from his mother’s absence, Orlovsky said that he does. "Ask my girlfriend," he said, referring to Heather Kolenda, a UConn classmate he started dating last winter. "I’ve learned to live with it."
His father has a pregame ritual of his own. Home or away, he shows up four hours before kickoff to meet the UConn team bus as it rolls up to the stadium. He needs to lock eyes with his son, always the last player off.
"I don’t know why I do it, and we’ve never talked about it," Orlovsky Sr. said. "It just happens."
ONE AMONG MANY
Orlovsky seldom visits Shelton these days. He prefers to stay in Storrs, training and preparing for his final college season. His father, meantime, struggles with empty-nest syndrome.
"It’ll be a Friday night, and my dad will call and say, ‘Come home,’" Orlovsky said. "To do what? Sit there? You know what I’m saying? Like, I’d rather just sit in my apartment and play PlayStation with my friends. But he’s getting better with that. I think it’s an adjustment that every parent has trouble with."
Orlovsky Sr. recently had knee surgery and misses his daily jogs.
"I’ve been riding a stationary bike," he said, "but you know what? That just doesn’t do it for me."
So he watches the NFL Network and talks to his son on the phone. If he has trouble reaching Danny, he calls Lauren, who took a job in the UConn admissions department this summer so she could stay close to her brother.
"He’ll call me and say, ‘What’s wrong with Dan?’ Because Danny just does his own thing," Lauren Orlovsky said. "To this day, my father’s like, ‘Danny, you’ve got to get your weight up. I’ve got to get you some vitamins. What are you benching?’ They still sometimes go back and forth about things. And Danny will be like, ‘dad, shut up. Leave me alone. What will be will be.’ "
And if Orlovsky Sr. were interested in sharing his opinions with the UConn coaching staff, he might be out of luck. Edsall stopped taking his calls.
"It’s very hard for me -- and we talked about this -- it’s hard for me to realize he’s gone," Orlovsky Sr. said, referring to his son. "And he is. But my kids have been so much a part of my life -- they have been my life. So it’s hard, because it’s like all of a sudden -- boom! -- you turn around one day, and they’re all gone. And it bothers me, because I feel like there are times when I talk to him that he couldn’t care less whether I’m talking to him or not.
"I even said to him not too long ago, ‘I miss you. Why can’t we have dinner once a month? You don’t have an hour to spend with me?’ And it’s not like I’m trying to lay a guilt trip, but I said to him, ‘I just had my best friend die a few weeks ago, and you don’t understand -- you just never know. Jesus, you don’t have an hour a month? Or two hours a month? I’ll drive up there!’ You know? And he says, ‘You don’t understand.’ "
Orlovsky Sr. worries that other people, outsiders, are influencing his son, affecting the way he thinks. Maybe it was inevitable, the dynamics of the father-son relationship changing under the glare of the spotlight. Orlovsky Sr. suggested that this was apparent during a recent conversation that devolved into an argument.
"I know him well enough to know when some thoughts are his and some thoughts aren’t necessarily his," he said. "But I made a comment -- ‘Everything I’ve done for you’ -- and he said, ‘You made the decision to have kids, you made the decision to keep the kids.’ And I’m like, ‘Where the hell did that come from? That’s not my son.’ And that was hurtful."
Orlovsky said that if he were an offensive lineman, his father would not be so visible in the media. But the nature of his position, quarterback at a rising program, has made his father’s opinions newsworthy. (He reportedly said last month that he and Edsall are "not on each other’s Christmas card list, that’s for sure.")
"We basically have a normal relationship," Orlovsky said. "It just gets blown out of proportion because he doesn’t know when to hold his tongue at certain times."
A source with NFL connections, who asked not to be identified, said that scouts will be watching Orlovsky closely this season to see how he handles pressure -- pressure from all directions, including his family.
"Whenever Dan needs to bounce something off someone, he picks up the phone and calls," Orlovsky Sr. said. "I’d like to think that he’ll always do that. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. I don’t know. But I keep telling him, the only thing I’ve ever asked for is a house on a golf course down south. That’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for. That’d be great."
Orlovsky says he feels fortunate to have a father who pushed him, who drove him to excel. Had his father not been so involved, he said, "I wouldn’t be here today."
Back when the Huskies played their games before small crowds at Memorial Stadium, Orlovsky Sr. sat a few rows up and shouted toward his son. His voice cut across the field.
UConn now plays before crowds roughly four times as large, close to 40,000 strong at Rentschler Field, where fans create a collective roar and Orlovsky Sr.’s voice is just one among many, lost amid the ruckus.
"But Danny can still probably hear him," Lauren Orlovsky said.
Scott Cacciola can be reached at scacciola@nhregister.com.
