THE LEGEND OF Max Duggan, the stubborn overachiever who began the regular season as a backup quarterback and ended it as the Heisman Trophy runner-up leading TCU to a College Football Playoff berth, was born on the Fourth of July back in Iowa.
Jim Duggan, Max’s dad and former high school football coach in Council Bluffs, recalls first seeing his son’s stubborn resistance to losing during an annual family rite of passage, a water fight in which all the Duggans would use whatever means necessary to drench their opponents.
“It’s hoses and it’s water guns and it’s balloons,” Jim said on Thursday morning from Arizona, thinking back to where he first saw his son’s never-say-die attitude take shape. “It’s buckets of ice water. It’s adults climbing up on grandma and grandpa’s roof, hiding and then blasting the kids with a garden hose. It was all well water, and that well water comes out of ground ice cold. It’s a shock to the body. Kids are slipping and falling down in the yard. It was just a good old-fashioned water fight and it lasted for 45 minutes. It was just a tradition at the Duggan Fourth of July parties.”
There was only one rule in determining the winner: You cry, and you’re out.
“He would be 3, 4, 5 years old and would always be one of the last survivors because you could do just about anything to him and he wouldn’t cry, he wouldn’t come out of that water fight for anything,” Jim said. “He always battled. That was kind of the early sign that this kid’s a little bit different.”
In his four years at TCU, Max Duggan has stayed in the fight. He overcame the discovery and subsequent nine-hour surgery to correct a heart condition known as Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, where an extra electrical pathway caused a rapid heartbeat. He overcame a subsequent emergency surgery for a blood clot from the procedure. The TCU coach he bonded with in recruiting, offensive coordinator Sonny Cumbie, left. The coach who signed him, Gary Patterson, parted ways with the school, and the…
