Rock concerts, fashion shows — and now football — all in Bucs G Ali Marpet’s family
TRIBUNE FILEBy Roy Cummings | Tribune Staff Published: November 25, 2015 at 08:08 PMTAMPA — Nothing about what’s on the table will seem out of the ordinary. When Buccaneers rookie Ali Marpet sits down with his family to dig into Thanksgiving Day dinner, it will be turkey, dressing and all the fixings.It’s what’s around the table that is extraordinary.As diverse as the magazines scattered across a coffee table in a doctor’s waiting room, Marpet’s family is one in which mainstream clearly skipped a generation.At the head of the table is the patriarch, Bill Marpet, whose long gray hair, pulled back into a pony tail, and earrings are your first hint he’s not your run-of-the-mill dad. He’s an Emmy Award-winning director and cinematographer who claims to have “sold out” 20 years ago when he began shooting fashion shows for the likes of Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan.At the other end of the table is Marpet’s mother, Martha Joy Rose, a singer-songwriter you might have heard of if you happen to have a Housewives On Prozac album laying around the house, or attended a Mamapalooza Festival. Rose started the band and still oversees Mamapalooza, which she founded in 2002 in New York City as a promotion and celebration of mom-rockers, poets and writers.Between them are their four children: oldest son Brody, 26, who shares an apartment here in Tampa with Ali, works weekdays for a Tampa chiropractic firm and weekends as a bartender; middle son Blaze, 24, who is working on a PhD in philosophy at Northwestern University; little sister Zena, 21, an Eckerd College senior and nurse practitioner working towards a doctorate, and Ali, 22, whose success in landing a job as the Bucs’ starting right guard has turned the entire family, including the two most deeply rooted in the arts, into raging football fans.“It used to be a bit of a family joke when Ali was playing pee-wee (football), because I was the one who was always telling him, ‘C’mon Honey, time to go to rehearsal, got to put your costume on,’” said Rose, who kept her maiden name as her stage name. “But now, and I really can’t believe I’m saying this, I’ve become a huge football fan. I literally used to take my “Football For Dummies’’ book with me to the games, but now I’m just so it into it.’’Bill’s passion for football came a little more naturally. Growing up not far from New York City, his father, a salesman, was a Giants fan who often took Bill to the games with him. But Bill was always more tuned into baseball and basketball, sports in which he actually coached Ali at the youth level. It wasn’t until Ali went to college that Bill, a workout freak who looks like he stepped off the cover of Men’s Health magazine, began to truly appreciate football.“What I really came to like about it is the team aspect,’’ Bill said. “It wasn’t like basketball can be, where one guy can take over a team. Ali actually taught me that, which is nice. He actually taught me something. And now, well, I’m all about the Bucs.’’Not long after Ali was selected by Tampa Bay in the second round of the NFL draft last May, Bill became the owner of two Bucs season tickets. Now, he seldom misses a game, home or away, though he did miss the season opener against Tennessee.“It was Fashion Week,’’ Bill said. “I just couldn’t get away for that one. But Brody was texting me after every play, literally texting me how Ali did on every play. So, there I was, trying to direct all these cameras during one of the shows and looking down at my phone all day trying to keep track of what Ali was doing.’’Bill and Joy divorced when Ali was in middle school, but they shared custody of their children. And Ali grew up deeply interested in what his parents were doing at work. It wasn’t uncommon for him to attend fashion shows with his father or concerts with his mother.A middle-schooler at the time, Ali can’t remember if he actually met any of the top supermodels while shadowing his dad, though he’s sure he did. What he does remember is being intimidated by the experience.“Here you are, a kid in seventh or eighth grade or whatever it was, and you’re hanging out with all these beautiful women,’’ Ali said. “It was different, but it was a cool experience, too. I think the thing I remember most about it was all the swag that was around. The gifts and things that they gave out at those shows, that was incredible. It really was a cool scene.’’The scene inside the little nightclubs his mom used to work in New York City was a different kind of cool. It wasn’t as glitzy as the runway shows, but, for Ali, watching his mom perform was a rush.“My brothers hated it,’’ Ali said of the musical blend of rock, disco and blues that his mother made. “I was the only one that could really kind of tolerate it. She’s really creative, but some of the songs she wrote and used to sing were kind of embarrassing.’’Way out on the farthest edge of the alternative-rock genre, the music Rose churned out while Ali was growing up was born largely out of the anxieties associated with raising four kids. Songs with titles such as “Eat Your Damn Spaghetti,’’ “Baby Slave’’ and “Fuzzy Slippers.’’ They were a far cry from the two dance-chart hits she had in the 1980s with “In and Out of Love Affairs’’ and “Sexual Voodoo.’’ But they represented who she was at the time.“I had been a musician my whole life and I found in the mom-rock thing that I was exploring a lot of deeper issues,’’ said Rose, who now moonlights as a professor at Manhattan College, where she teaches a class called Families and Social Change on Tuesday nights.“But everybody was really supportive, you know, putting up with the equipment being set up in the house and going to gigs and all that. When you’re a teenager, you don’t want your parents to embarrass you. But, hey, parents are embarrassing no matter what, so why not just be real?’’The quest to remain real often extended to major holidays. It was customary, for example, for the Marpets to spend Christmas in Jamaica “being Rastafarians,’’ Rose said.“Ali grew up in a house where we lit Shabbat candles on Friday nights, meditated on Saturdays and went to church on Sundays,’’ Rose said. “We really had a very open perspective on religion and spiritual traditions and the pursuit of individuality, or whatever it was that was floating your boat at the time.’’Perhaps because it was usually spent at Rose’s brother’s home in New Hampshire, Thanksgivings were celebrated in a more traditional manner. Right on down to the family football game played in the front yard.“We called it the Rose Bowl and all family members and neighbors were welcome,” Rose said. “And there were no special arrangements for the kids, either. Everyone had to get in the fray and fight for the ball the same way.’’Ali doesn’t recall if his passion for football was sparked by those family pickup games. But at a young age, he developed an affinity for a game that no else in his family, not even his brothers, cared much about.Like cinematography with his father and music with mother, football became Ali’s thing.As late as his senior year in high school, though, there was nothing to suggest it could ever become an occupation. Largely overlooked by college scouts, Ali was recruited by Holy Cross, Fordham and Marist, but for academic reasons he opted to attend Division III Hobart College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York where he graduated on time with a bachelor’s degree in economics.Long before graduation, though, it was obvious Ali might actually have a chance to continue playing football.Having grown to 6-foot-4 and 307 pounds as a senior, he had the physical makeup of an NFL lineman and was sound technically. The only question anyone had was whether he could hold his own against NFL-caliber competition. His first chance to answer that query was at the 2015 Senior Bowl. Bucs general manager Jason Licht will never forget how shocked the NFL scouting community was when Ali gave them their answer.“Coming from Hobart, there were a lot of people who expected him to be swimming mentally and flopping around out there,’’ Licht said. “But he wasn’t. He looked like he belonged. He looked like a top-tier guard prospect.’’He was treated as much on draft day, the Bucs selected him with the 61st overall pick, making him the highest-drafted player from a Division III school. As such, Licht thought initially it might take Ali a few weeks to be ready to play regularly in the NFL. Ali quickly proved again, though, that he didn’t’ need any seasoning.“We hit the jackpot there,’’ Bucs offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter said of Marpet, who started the first eight games of the season, but missed the past two because of an ankle injury.“Yeah, it’s gone pretty good so far,’’ Marpet said of his transition to the NFL. “Like everybody here, I’m just trying to get better every day. That’s my goal. But I have a good support system. The whole family’s on board and that’s great. But that’s kind of how we’ve always been.“Everybody in the family, but especially our parents, they’ve always supported us no matter what it was we chose to do. I get the feeling that if I had decided to be a ballerina they still would have supported me. That’s just who they are.’’[email protected]Twitter: @RCummingsTBO
