Marie Tillman doesn’t have much time for the strangers who profess to know what her late first husband stood for. She knew Pat Tillman as well as anyone, so she understands that he never considered his legacy, never called himself a patriot, never wanted to become a symbol. “We talked about our future and all the things we wanted to do together,” she says. “Not, like, what happens if somebody dies.”
She chooses her words carefully from a couch on the sixth floor of a nondescript office building in downtown Chicago, home of the Pat Tillman Foundation since 2013.