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The Quarterback Who Completed A Pass To Lady Gaga At Super Bowl LI

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Lady Gaga needed the right person to help her cap her Super Bowl halftime show. Brian Mann was perfect for the job. (Courtesy Brian Mann)
Lady Gaga needed the right person to help her cap her Super Bowl halftime show. Brian Mann was perfect for the job. (Courtesy Brian Mann)

Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017, started out like any day for Brian Mann.

Brian's an associate athletic director at Rice University in Houston. He does fundraising and alumni relations.

"I was sitting at my desk. I was communicating with some alumni for Rice. It was a beautiful day, but not unlike any other that had come before or after it," Brian says.

"And so when did it start to not become a normal day?" I ask.

"I got a voicemail that didn't really make any sense to me," Brian recalls, chuckling. "And so I sort of let it alone for a while. And a few hours later I got an email from the same person. Basically just said, 'I work for the Super Bowl Committee,' and that they'd like to speak with me, and they'd like to do so quickly."

Brian knew the Super Bowl was coming up in five days at NRG Stadium — about three miles from the Rice campus — but he had no idea why someone from the Super Bowl Committee would want to talk to him.

Brian called back and received a very odd request.

"They said, 'We need you to throw a pass at halftime, but we can't really tell you more than that until you sign a confidentiality agreement. You have to give up your afternoons and evenings every day this week, and we can't tell you exactly what it is you're going to be doing. And we can't pay you,'" Brian recalls. "So I said, 'I'm in.' "

Brian Mann didn't know it at the time, but he'd spent his whole life building the near-perfect resume to help Lady Gaga execute her grand finale.

"It felt good coming off my hand. And she's scrappy and athletic, and she went out and grabbed that thing, and the rest is history." (Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)
"It felt good coming off my hand. And she's scrappy and athletic, and she went out and grabbed that thing, and the rest is history." (Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)

From Dartmouth To Arena Football

About a decade before he started working for the Rice athletic department, Brian Mann had been a quarterback. He starred at Dartmouth in the late '90s and early 2000s. As a senior, he set the school record for passing yards in a season.

Brian wasn't NFL material, but he didn't want to stop playing football after college. So he made the unusual jump from the Ivy League to the Arena League.

In case you're not familiar, the Arena Football League is sort of to the NFL what Las Vegas is to New York City.

It has gimmicky rules designed to increase scoring, and teams have names like the Dragons and Desperados. Jon Bon Jovi and members of the band Kiss have owned franchises. The league is currently run by a former casino executive.

Typically, it does not attract Dartmouth grads.

"You know, I had some nicknames," Brian says. "First I was 'Ivy.' Later I was known as 'On Star.' "

"Wait, why 'On Star?'" I ask.

"You know, because I knew stuff. That's what they said, 'He knows stuff. We'll call him On Star.' "

"They said, 'We need you to throw a pass at halftime, but we can't really tell you more than that until you sign a confidentiality agreement.' ... So I said, 'I'm in.' "

Brian Mann

Anyway, Brian eventually became the starting quarterback for the Los Angeles Avengers. The job didn't come with many perks — and even the "perks" weren't really perks.

"One year we had a new general manager, and I remember he was really excited because he had secured a new corporate sponsor who was going to provide us with two meals a day," Brian says. "So every day for about six months, I ate Denny's."

Brian didn't want to go into details, but he says he no longer eats at Denny's.

Brian and his teammates did not get paid much. So a lot of them tried to make money other ways. Brian learned more about one of his teammate's lines of work when the police showed up at practice to arrest him.

"He was involved in some drug trafficking scheme," Brian says. "I don't know the details. But that was eye-opening for me."

Luckily for Brian, he found a legal side gig, and it was one that would help him prepare for football's biggest stage.

Life In Hollywood

After Brian's second pro season in LA, Paramount Pictures was looking for a stunt double for Adam Sandler in the 2005 movie "The Longest Yard." Brian got the part.

And he did well enough in "The Longest Yard" to earn more stunt jobs in football movies.

By Brian's fourth year in the AFL — around the time he started to realize he was going to lose his starting job with the Avengers — it looked like he was ready for a seamless transition to a Hollywood career.

Next up was a role in "The Game Plan" starring the wrestler turned actor, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

"And I actually had grown, and I was going to play the quarterback opposite The Rock," Brian says. "I was gonna have a couple lines where I talked a little bit of trash to him. It was going to be huge, because if you have a line in a movie, your pay goes way up."

Early in the filming, two of the other stunt doubles were supposed to stage a big tackle.

"And it wasn't working out," Brian says. "And my boss, whom I'd worked for before, came up and said, 'Listen, I need you to do me a favor. Can you take a hit? And, don't worry, I'll make it worth your while.' So I thought I was going to take a hit as I had done dozens of times before, and make a little bit of money.

"And after the first hit my hand felt funny. So we kept doing it. And we got the hit lined up and everything, but I wasn't very valuable as a quarterback with a broken hand. So kind of an unceremonious end to my stunt career, I guess."

Brian was out of stunt work. And he knew where things were headed with the Avengers.

"For fun, I formally submitted my retirement paperwork, so that I could see my name on the ESPN Arena Football League ticker line as having retired at the age of 26 years old," Brian says.

"Did you know at that moment that your biggest pass was still ahead of you?" I ask.

"No, I had no idea," Brian says laughing.

For the next few years, Brian worked for a health care consulting company. He tried to stay away from football.

"There were some people that asked me if it was like a death. Was it that big of a deal?" Brian says. "And I actually liken it more to a divorce. Because when there's a death, that's finite. It's over. But football didn't want me anymore. They wanted somebody younger and sexier. And I could go see football anytime I wanted. Football just didn't want to see me anymore."

The Mann For The Job

But then, on Jan. 31, 2017, Brian learned that football wanted to take him back for one more night.

It had been more than a decade since he'd retired from the AFL. He'd been working desk jobs in the Rice athletic department since 2014. But who else in the Houston area had more experience in both showbiz and as a quarterback?

Brian Mann was the perfect guy for the job, and on the night of Jan. 31, he reported to Lady Gaga.

Gaga and her crew were headquartered at an arena north of Houston. Brian signed that confidentiality agreement and was given the full debrief: At the very end of her performance, Lady Gaga planned to jump off an elevated platform, and she wanted to catch a football as she was falling into an off-camera foam pit.

It would be Brian's job to throw her the ball.

Brian was told that in earlier rehearsals, Gaga’s crew members had played the role of QB. The completion percentage was not 100 percent.

There were some obstacles. The first was the ball itself: It had been bedazzled.

"I mean they put crystals in every corner of the thing, including on the laces. It was as slippery as you can imagine," Brian says. "It weighed four times more than a normal football with all that stuff on it."

Then there was the angle of the throw. The TV cameras needed to be directly in front of Lady Gaga, so the toss would have to come from the side.

That meant the pop star was going to have to jump toward the cameras, while looking to her right to catch the ball. There was work to do.

Thankfully, Brian made a quick connection with his new receiver.

"She sort of instantly disarmed me. She knew my name. She knew a little bit about who I was," Brian says. "So there was, sort of, that instant calm. She could have just done her thing and treated me like I wasn't really there, but she didn't."

"I mean they put crystals in every corner of the thing, including on the laces. It was as slippery as you can imagine."

Brian Mann on the football he threw to Lady Gaga

But over the coming days and nights of rehearsals, Brian had a lot of time to think about his return to the football field. He started to worry.

"This was the end of the Super Bowl halftime show. This was going to be the lasting image," Brian says. "And if she didn't catch that football, whether I threw a great pass or not, everybody was going to know my name. And it was not going to be for a good reason."

Practice Made Perfect

Finally, it was Feb. 5. Game time — or, rather, halftime.

As Lady Gaga sang and danced, Brian stood in his spot below the platform. And he waited.

"I couldn't appreciate the 115 million people on television that were watching. I couldn't feel that," Brian says. "But at one point they asked everyone in the stadium to turn on the flashlights on their phones to sort of light up the arena a little bit. And when that happened, I looked around, and I decided not to look up again."

Brian hadn't had a chance to take any practice throws all day. So while he waited, he tried to flip the ball to himself a couple times. And then ...

"She's walking up on the stage, and at this point, there's no more practicing. I just got to try to time it correctly," Brian recalls. "It felt good coming off my hand. And she's scrappy and athletic, and she went out and grabbed that thing, and the rest is history."

After completing the most-watched pass of his life, Brian had to rush off the field so the crew could prepare for the second half.

But back in the concourse under the stands, he had a chance to celebrate with Lady Gaga.

Brian says they hugged and took a picture.

"So I don't know if you have like a girlfriend or anything, but did you think about maybe asking her for a date or something?" I ask.

"You know what was funny was, she was incredibly kind and sent me a thank you with a small bouquet of flowers. And a really nice note on it," Brian says. "And my sister and a girl I'd been dating both came over at the same time, and essentially had the same reaction. They started, sort of, laughing a little bit. And I'm, like, 'What? She sent me flowers. This is amazing.' And they're, like, 'Dude, they're yellow.' "

In case you're not up on flower etiquette, red flowers are for lovers. Yellow means ...

"You're squarely in the friend zone," Brian says, laughing.

These days, Brian's back to focusing on his desk job with the Rice athletic department. He’ll be watching the Super Bowl this weekend, but just as a fan this time.

"You know, what nobody can take away from me is I have completed a pass at the Super Bowl now," Brian says. "Details aside. Let's not worry about the details. But I threw a pass that was caught on the field at the Super Bowl."

Read more about Brian's story.

This segment aired on February 3, 2018.

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Martin Kessler Producer, Only A Game
Martin Kessler is a producer at Only A Game.

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