Killer Instinct

It wasn’t a good day for the Cal football team.

In front of a raucous crowd of 106,009 orange-clad Tennessee fans, Volunteers quarterback Erik Ainge hit wide receiver Jayson Swain with a 50-yard touchdown pass, Ainge’s fourth of the day. As Swain waltzed into the end zone to put his team up 28-0, Ainge threw his hands up in front of the cameras, as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got?”

Bears linebacker Zack Follett saw it, and he didn’t like what he saw. Ainge couldn’t have predicted that one year later, Follett would make him pay.

Anybody who knows Follett though could have told him that.

“He’s a freak,” says linebacker Worrell Williams, shaking his head. “There are players that are OK, there are players that are good, and then there are special players. He’s definitely a special player. You see him line up like he’s getting ready to come for a blitz, that offensive tackle knows he’s blocking someone who’s coming a hundred miles an hour.”

But Follett doesn’t try to hide his animalistic instincts—all you have to do is look at his hair.

Last summer, Follett watched the movie “Batman Begins,” and like many boys was inspired by the bat symbol that Batman uses to strike fear into the heart of his enemies. But Follett took the idea one step further.

“There’s a line in there where (Batman) talks about how he wants to become something epic. As a human he could be destroyed but as a symbol he’s indestructible,” says Follett. “I was joking around, (saying) I needed to come out with a haircut or a hair design, some symbol so I can’t be defeated.”

And as much as the haircut may have been for fun and games, the symbol he chose was perfectly fitted to the player he has become.

The once-long-haired linebacker cut and dyed his hair to resemble the stripes of a tiger. And if you hear fans hollering “Ziger” at No. 56 after a big hit, you’ll understand why.

“Yeah—because of Zack. Tiger. Ziger,” says Follett with a grin. “Because of the hair and the way I play, that attack mode.”

That same attack mode has led him to record 33 tackles and tie defensive end Tyson Alualu for a team-high 2.5 sacks so far this season, despite missing substantial playing time due to a neck stinger—one that he sustained at Colorado State by trying to hit a Rams player too hard.

But that’s the way he’s always played. It’s the reason he plays.

“Football is the only sport you can play where you can hit someone as hard as you can without getting in trouble,” says Follett. “I think that’s why I’m having neck problems, because my whole life I just knew how to go. I’m trying to change the style a little bit but I don’t think I can.”

Barring the chance of another injury, the Bears probably don’t want him to change anything about the way he plays. Hard-hitting, fast off the edge and a premier playmaker for the Cal defense, Follett was the only reserve to earn All-Pac-10 honors last year.

In the Bears’ rematch against Tennessee on Sept. 1, Ainge found out about Follett’s prowess the hard way.

Follett hadn’t forgotten Ainge’s theatrics—anything but. The 6-foot-2, 232-pound outside linebacker had put a picture of the Vols quarterback on his MySpace page and looked at it every chance he got for motivation.

“It was because of the way (Ainge) carried himself during that victory (in 2006)—he would throw a touchdown pass and then kind of look into the camera like it was too easy,” says Follett. “It was a little disrespectful in my eyes, so I wanted to make him pay.”

Taking into account that the hard-hitting linebacker has been making kids pay since his Pop Warner days, it’s no surprise to his mom, Naomi Follett, that her son has so much success hurting people on the field.

“His aggressive, physical side was always there,” says Naomi. “He played every game like a football player growing up—he played basketball like a football player, he played baseball like one—he would take out whoever was in his way. That was just his makeup.”

Naomi Follett, however, is also acquainted with a side of her son that few are aware of, the side that Williams refers to as “a cupcake” who receives homemade cakes weekly from his mom.

Someone like Ainge would be hard-pressed to believe that Follett is a self-declared mama’s boy who plants bonsai trees and imitates accents for fun.

That is not to say his aggressive nature never comes out once he is off the field.

But he says it was his mother who helped harness this aggression into the passionate, determined man that he is.

“I definitely could’ve gone down some bad roads as far as my personality and she kind of made me the man I am,” says Zack. “Whenever I’m showing bad traits in my character—I definitely have that side of the football field come out sometimes—she is there to put me in line.”

On the gridiron, however, nothing is there to hold Follett back—and on Sept. 1, 2007, that’s the lesson Ainge learned.

On the sixth play of the game, with the Vols on Cal’s 48-yard line, the Bears sent Follett on a long-awaited blind-side blitz.

An unsuspecting Ainge dropped back to pass, pump-faked, and held the ball for a moment too long. Follett delivered a rib-jarring hit to Ainge’s backside, forcing a fumble that Williams scooped up and returned for a score.

“I knew the hit was coming because the way their formation was set up, the back was offset and I knew no one was going to pick me up, so I was basically running as fast as I could to make sure I could get a clean hit on him,” says Follett. “I got up after I hit him, looked at him and looked up and saw Worrell running down the field. It felt good.”

After a hit like that, Follett could have thrown his hands up and smiled into the camera, and no one would have blamed him. Ainge, for one, couldn’t.

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