Work ethic, practicality stayed with Kolb

Fifth in the

season-preview series

GRANBURY, Texas - Kevin Kolb is cheap.

OK, he's frugal.

Or thrifty, yeah, thrifty.

How does "economically conservative" sound?

Nope, Kolb's friends say, "He's cheap."

The Eagles' new starting quarterback doesn't disagree, although he isn't sure if it's his friends who consider him tightest with a buck.

"My wife might," Kolb said.

Earlier this summer, not long after the Eagles rewarded him with a $12.26 million contract extension, Kolb and his wife, Whitney, went clothes shopping in this burgeoning Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, where they live in the off-season.

They walked into a relatively upscale department store, and Kevin, as usual, headed right for the sale rack. Kolb hadn't shopped in some time, so he grabbed an armful of shirts and headed to the register. The items were scanned, and the total was $120.

No, that's too much.

"One of the shirts was $27, and I said, 'Take that shirt out of there. I don't need a shirt for $27,' " Kolb said.

And Whitney?

"She's just dying laughing at the cash register," he said.

Kolb's friends aren't as amused.

"Sometimes I want to slap him," best friend Kendal Briles said. "I mean, not getting potatoes on a burrito, and you're making that kind of money? Are you kidding me? I'll give you the dollar for the potatoes."

It's July and hotter than a half-chewed jalapeno, as Texans like to say. Kolb is to meet a visiting Philadelphia reporter for lunch, and it's requested that Kolb choose a nice restaurant, preferably one that serves some of the state's famous barbecue. He chooses a Chili's on Highway 377 because, he says, it would be easier to find for the traveler.

The reporter arrives 10 minutes early, and Kolb, in a button-down checkered shirt with a pair of sunglasses perched on his head, is already seated at a booth.

"I went ahead and ordered us some nachos," Kolb said.

Eagles training camp, and the unofficial start of Kolb's new career as the team's starting quarterback, is half a world away, and the conversation is about his worst job ever. When he was 12 or 13, Kolb spent part of one summer scraping and repainting his neighbor's fence. It was the only job he has ever quit.

"It was brutal," Kolb said between sips of Dr Pepper and bites of his boneless chicken salad. "Halfway through, I said, 'You don't have to pay me for my work, I'm stopping.' I was getting nowhere, and they wanted it done by a certain time."

Kolb, in his latest occupation, will be given a little more time to finish the job - but not much more. It's been 50 years since the Eagles have won a championship, and an exasperated fan base is probably willing to give the new quarterback a year of grace.

But that's it.

Kolb, and those who know the 26-year-old, say that if he can't complete the task, it won't be for a lack of trying. From his humble beginnings and disciplinarian parents, Kolb learned the value of hard work and responsibility, even if he can sometimes be too hard on himself.

He did allow himself two major purchases after his contract. Parked outside Chili's is one: a brand-new Jeep. The other he bought for someone else.

The Kolbs struggled as much as any family would with a high school coach father and a grade-school-teacher mother. But the purse strings tightened when they moved to Stephenville, Texas, before Kevin's freshman year of high school to better his chances of bagging a college scholarship.

Roy Kolb took a pay cut and a lower-level coaching job at the high school, and Lanell Kolb eventually found a teaching position in the district. The Kolbs' only daughter, Amy, was just starting college at the time, so they rented a "rinky-dink" house, as Kevin called it.

"I wasn't already thinking about going to the NFL. My first thought was to pay for college because I knew my parents needed that and my dad was really counting on that, I guess you could say, because they were helping my sister out," Kolb said. "That was a little bit of added pressure."

Kevin learned the value of a dollar young. When he was in the sixth grade, his mother handed him a checkbook with a pittance added each month. He also had to work to help out - like the $7-an-hour tree nursery job he held - and pay for things he yearned for, like the time he wanted a pair of Doc Martens boots.

"I think [his parents] struggled pretty hard putting him through - getting [health] insurance and everything else," said Mike Christian, a Stephenville resident and friend of Kolb's. "That's just all hearsay, so I don't know. But I'm thinking they sacrificed a lot for him."

The Kolbs were not interviewed for this story at the request of Kevin, who said his parents preferred to stay quiet now that their only son is the Eagles' starting quarterback. They live in Flatonia, Texas, about a three-hour drive south of Stephenville.

After Kevin's sophomore year of high school, Roy retired from coaching and started his own carpet-cleaning business. He earned more money, but the primary purpose was so he could be home more and flexible enough to follow his son's football career.

When Kolb went off to the University of Houston - on a scholarship - the Kolbs bought an RV with their savings. They moved out of the one-floor rancher they had been renting and parked the RV in a lot about 400 yards away from the home.

They traveled to Kolb's home and road games and, for the next year and a half, kept Stephenville as their base. When Kevin came home, he slept on the small pullout couch.

"I could hardly stand it," Kolb said. "But my parents are simple people. They don't need a whole lot."

Despite his family's hardships, Kolb never let that dissuade him from his goals, friends say.

"You could always kind of tell Kevin kind of held himself a little bit - not higher or thought about himself as better - but he always knew he was going to be successful," Briles said.

The best friends first met in Stephenville. Briles was the hotshot junior quarterback when Kolb transferred in, but he departed a year later and Kolb was left to follow the two-time state champion.

"He probably disliked me because I was the quarterback that won the state championships," Briles said. "And I probably disliked him because he was the next quarterback at Stephenville."

But years later, they hooked up at Houston, where Briles' father, Art, was the head coach. Kendal Briles had switched to wide receiver by then and wound up catching passes from Kolb. It didn't take long for the two sons of coaches to figure out they had more in common than just football.

The "separated brothers" bought a 19-foot boat the next summer, and "we're running trout lines together about two days later," Briles said.

They hunt, too. Tales of the bowie-knife-wielding, wild-boar-slaying, rattlesnake-killing Kolb have become the stuff of lore since the Eagles drafted him. But for Briles, his friend is more good ol' boy than animal killer.

"He likes going to the coast, going to a ranch down in south Texas . . . fishing and hunting and hanging out with his friends," Briles said. "When he's cutting loose and he has 'my time,' he's not thinking a whole lot about football."

But when it's back to football, Kolb is all business. Sometimes, he said, he is intense, a charge seldom leveled at his predecessor, Donovan McNabb.

"People have ridiculed him for this sometimes, but he knew how to have a good time," Kolb said of McNabb. "He kept everybody smiling. He kept everybody having fun. And, for me, sometimes I'm too hard on myself, and I do need to relax."

Art Briles, now the coach at Baylor, doesn't see Kolb's intensity as a negative.

"Yeah, he's pretty tough on himself," Briles said. "I'm not saying too hard, but he's critical in his decision-making sometimes, which I think all successful people are."

Kolb's wife has been there for almost all of his successes - and failures. They met when he was a freshman and she - then known as Whitney Huddleston - was a junior at Stephenville and started dating a year later.

Asked how a sophomore had the confidence to ask out a senior, Kendal Briles explained it this way: "He was the quarterback at Stephenville, that's why."

They continued to date when Whitney, a basketball player and golfer, left for college. Greg Bruner, owner of a car dealership in Stephenville that Kolb does promotional work for, recalled when he and his wife spotted the couple eating out when Whitney was home from school.

"I remember thinking in my head, 'What's she see in this kid?' " Bruner said. "She's a sophomore in college and just as cute as a button. And here's just this goofy high school kid. What is the deal?"

When Kolb left for Houston, they took a 21/2-year break. But when the football star and tall blonde reconnected, Kolb said, he knew he was done seeing other women. They were married in February 2007.

"To this day, when I meet people, I go, 'There's no doubt, she's the best that could ever come into my door,' " Kolb said. "It was a no-brainer for me."

The Kolbs have two daughters, 20-month-old Kamryn and 5-month-old Atley. Whitney and the girls relocated from Granbury to South Jersey in late July and visited Lehigh several times for Kolb's first training camp as the starter.

While Kolb goes largely unnoticed in Cowboys country Granbury, the trips to Lehigh were probably Whitney's first glimpses of the kind of attention her husband will draw as the Eagles' starting quarterback. Rugged and handsome, Kolb has always had attractive women asking for autographs and pictures. But this will be different.

"He'll laugh it off," Briles said. "He'll take a picture with them and do whatever they want. He's got a little bit of flirt in him, but he won't do anything. . . . And Whitney, she'll laugh and go, 'Oh, Kevin,' because she's used to it."

Whitney may be used to Kolb's budget-conscious ways. But when he went to her with the idea for one more significant expense after the new contract, Whitney signed on.

Roy Kolb had been saving for years to buy a boat. Because his son has contacts in the boating world, Roy recently called Kevin and asked him to find a nice used boat for $15,000. Kevin said he found one, sent him some pictures, and told his dad to come to Granbury to pick it up.

When they arrived at the dealership, Kevin told his father that the boat was in the back getting cleaned and that they should walk outside to look at it. He took him through the showroom, where a new $35,000 boat was sitting.

"And as we're walking by, he's running his hand down the new one, and he's kind of eyeballing it," Kolb said. "And I said to [the dealer], 'Where did you say that boat was?' And he goes, 'The one your dad wanted? It's right there.' "

Dad: "You've got to be kidding me."

Son: "I just bought it this morning. It's all yours."