'Invincible' is dream for ex-athlete Papale

NEW YORK — Vince Papale once lived a dream. Now he's living a second dream by revisiting the first.

A substitute teacher and bartender who never played college football, he tried out for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1976 and made the team at age 30. That unlikely tale has inspired "Invincible," starring Mark Wahlberg as Papale and Greg Kinnear as Eagles head coach Dick Vermeil.

"It is a second dream," Papale, now a youthful 60, says of the movie. "I've been reinvented. For me, it's a resurrection of sorts. ... What's great about it is I'm now talkin' to another generation."

Papale was down on his luck in the '70s, when big Northeast cities like Philadelphia were suffering tough economic times. The movie opens with a montage that hints at blue-collar despondency, angst, even anger, which serves as a backdrop for the rest of the movie.

He got laid off from his teaching job, and he was scrounging for more hours behind a bar named Max's. His wife moved out, leaving a note saying he'd never amount to anything and never make any money.

Papale says he ran up some debt because he was making a decent buck in the World Football League, which quickly folded. "You do some stupid things because the first time in your life you have some money," he says in an interview. "Then all of a sudden there you are: You don't have those bucks that are coming in all the time."

With the dissolution of the marriage and dim job prospects, Papale says: "I was feeling rejected. I wasn't feeling real good about myself."

For sports fans, Papale's phoenixlike ascendancy was amazing because, aside from his brief stint in the short-lived WFL, he played just one year of high school football. He went to St. Joseph's University on a track scholarship.

He was 5-foot-7, 160 pounds when he was 18. No college was going to beat down his door to offer a football scholarship. But by college graduation, he was 6-foot-2, 185 pounds.

Mostly he played rough-touch football with his friends. His favorite scene in "Invincible" shows them playing in the mud: "It just showed the pure innocence and joy of playing. And to me, it was a bunch of guys who are over the hill but they became kids again, and it just transcended time."

He also enjoys that his children have little cameos: His 12-year-old daughter throwing a football in a city street, and his 9-year-old son running in front of a car to retrieve the ball — with Papale's No. 83 taped on his T-shirt.