You will notice that this trick is very similar to the trick that is printed on your new S.A.M. membership card (if you have received it already). I began working with S.A.M. President Vinny Grosso on the membership card effect at the end of last year. When Louie sent me this trick in April of this year I was really surprised to see how similar it was to what Vinny and I were working on. I really liked Louie’s presentation and the use of Facebook though, so I decided to use it here, the month after the new membership cards came out. It’s a good lesson on how two people on opposite sides of the world can come up with basically the same idea with a different presentation. Thanks for con-tributing this Louie, and thanks for your understanding of why I had to hold it a few months.
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JON DORENBOS
must be one of the luckiest guys in the world. He’s the long snapper for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles.He’s a magician who performs at some of the best A-list charity functions. He is a motivational speaker who presents programs for varied groups from Fortune 500 companies to high schools all over the country. He is a television personality, often hosting feature segments on a number of different shows. He’s a partner in a successful framing business. He has a lovely and talented wife. He’s got it all…but it wasn’t always like this. Jon has a unique story to tell about his life and how he got to this point.
He was born in Humble, Texas, in 1980. His family moved around a lot when he was a kid, finally ending up in Wood-inville, Washington, just outside of Seattle, when Jon was six years old. His dad worked for Microsoft, but he later moved over to a new startup company called Oracle. His family was like the Brady Bunch. His mom was a housewife who did volunteer work and ran the book club at Cottage Lake Elementary. Jon has a sister who is three years older than him and a brother who is six years older. Everyone in the neighborhood knew and liked the Dorenbos family. Jon was really into sports, and as a kid he played baseball, basketball, soccer, and football.
On August 2, 1992, at the age of twelve, he was playing
football across the street from his house. The dinner bell rang and he went home. His dad told him that his mom went for a walk with a friend. They ate dinner, hung out, and played chess for a while. The next morning, when Jon went to baseball camp, his dad told him that his mom had gone to the sports club to swim. That afternoon, friends of the family arrived at the baseball camp and told Jon that there had been an accident and he needed to go with them to the police station. He arrived at the police station, but they wouldn’t tell him what happened.
An officer who knew him through the DARE program at his school asked them to let him be the one who broke the news.
When he arrived, he told Jon that his mom and dad had had an argument, he pushed her down the stairs, and she died. His dad was being held in jail for questioning. His father pleaded temporary insanity and eventually was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison.
After his father’s trial, Jon and his sister moved in with Kathy and Don Robson, who became their temporary foster parents. His brother was eighteen and chose not to go with them.
Jon and his sister were sent to therapy. The therapist decided to use experiential therapy and confront the entire situation head
on. As a part of the process, their therapist thought it would be beneficial for them to view their mother’s autopsy photos. He went as far as getting a court order allowing the private viewing of the photos. Jon and his sister drove into Seattle with their therapist and were faced with the decision of whether or not to view the photos. The therapist told them they didn’t have to, but if they did, they would know the truth about what their father had done. During the trial it was revealed that his mother hadn’t been pushed down stairs; she was beaten to death by their father. Knowing this, Jon and his sister opened the folder that contained the pictures. Afterwards, the therapist drove them out to Puget Sound and Jon stood on the edge of a cliff and screamed for forty-five minutes. Jon was actually asked to testify against his father in court. He remembers telling the District Attorney that if it would help end the trial he would.
Their mother’s sister, Susan, fought for custody of Jon and his sister and they eventually moved in with her in Southern Cal-ifornia a year later. Jon had made the little league all-star team before he moved to Southern California, so he quickly returned to Woodinville to play baseball. He stayed with the coach’s family and it was there that he saw magic for the first time.
One of their neighbors was sixteen-year-old magician Michael Groves. He did a show for Jon and performed coins across, a matrix routine, Roth’s Portable Hole, and a sponge ball routine.
Jon was blown away and thought it was the coolest thing he had ever experienced. Michael saw how happy the tricks made him and taught Jon a sponge ball routine. Impressed with how quickly he learned the routine, and seeing Jon’s excitement, he took him to a local magic shop in Seattle and bought him a copy of Modern Coin Magic by J.B. Bobo. Jon studied every word, and the more he studied, the more he fell in love with magic.
Jon’s aunt also saw how Jon loved magic and introduced him to the ex-boyfriend of one of her friends, a magician named Ken Sands. Jon and Ken bonded quickly, developing a relationship that went beyond mentoring: almost a father-son relationship.
Ken would show Jon magic, but not explain the methods until
Jon had a chance to work them out. He made Jon work for the secrets. More important, Jon picked up on Ken’s style of per-formance and learned at a very early age that magic was just a vehicle for communicating with people. This is the hallmark of Jon’s performing style to this day. That’s not to say he didn’t have other influences. Like many other budding magicians, he would videotape magicians on TV and try to emulate them. He was uncomfortable speaking on stage, so he worked to music.
When he was thirteen, he performed Kevin James’s Floating Rose in a school show. He was initially perplexed when there was no reaction at the end of the routine. He didn’t realize the audience was just stunned by what they had seen. A few seconds later they burst into thunderous applause. That encouraged him to work on another routine for the next year. He virtually copied Lance Burton’s Candle routine. He got a great reaction, but Ken told him that he couldn’t keep doing other people’s material or he wouldn’t grow as a performer. He had to come up with his own routines.
Jon got the message and began creating talking routines for stand-up performances. At the same time, he started doing strolling magic for an agency that Ken referred him to.
Although he was only fifteen, he was a big kid and could easily pass for eighteen or nineteen. He did magic for corporate clients as well as private parties. One of the things that helped him get referrals was that he might be hired for one hour, but he’d stay for three hours. All of this performing brought him to the real-ization that you can never mess up. The audience doesn’t know what ultimately is supposed to happen. It’s all about having fun with your magic and making people love it. As his mentor told him, “Don’t become what you do; be who you are.” Ken Sands owns a magic shop in Orange County and has continued to be Jon’s biggest influence in magic and one of the biggest influ-ences in his life.
While living in Seattle, and during all of this involvement with magic, Jon was even more involved with sports, playing soccer, basketball, and baseball. He particularly excelled in
Performing the Floating Rose Dorenbos snapping a football
baseball. He was also a big Seattle Mariners fan. When he went to the games, he would hang out by the player’s entrance before and after the game. He was not an autograph seeker, but just liked watching the players drive in and out. One day, Mariner right fielder Jay Buhner came up to talk to him. That gave him a thrill he would never forget.
When he moved to Southern California he continued to play basketball and baseball. Once he hit high school, he played varsity baseball and football as a freshman. This was due not only to his athletic abilities, but also his size. He was one of the biggest kids at his school, but at age sixteen he stopped growing, and all-of-sudden, he wasn’t the biggest kid anymore.
In his senior year he still played both sports, but thought he might become a professional baseball player.
Upon graduation from high school, he entered Golden West Junior College in Huntington Beach, California. He chose G.W.
after talking with his high school coach, Bill Simpson, about pursuing football at the collegiate level. Simpson said, “Never stop playing; go where you can play, and someone will spot you.” Since Golden West had a 0-and-30 record, he knew he’d play right away there. Due to the low number of players on the team, he played multiple positions: quick side defensive end, outside linebacker and fullback. He decided to transfer out after his freshman year.
A friend at the University of Texas at El Paso told him they were looking for a long snapper. Being that Jon wasn’t a long snapper, he had to get creative with the film that he sent UTEP.
Jon had good speed; his buddy Nick Heinle was known for his hard hits, and Tim Thurman was the team’s six-foot-six tight end and long snapper. Jon combined the highlights of him and Nick, added Tim’s long-snapping highlights, and made the ultimate highlight tape. He sent that tape to the University of Texas El Paso claiming it was all him; after watching it, they offered him a full scholarship to be their long snapper. Though he wasn’t a long snapper and only six feet tall, he quickly learned the position and found he had a real knack for it. When people ask Jon what his favorite magic trick is, he replies, “Getting into UTEP.”
He played for UTEP for three years but was under the radar for most of those years. No one had really heard of him until right before the NFL draft. A friend who was already playing in the NFL recommended him to his agent. The agent took a look at Jon and liked what he saw. He had to participate in Pro Day: the day the team scouts go to all the schools to look
over potential draft picks. Jon had a slight problem. He had had surgery when he was a kid, and scar tissue continued to form in his groin area. He started feeling pain. He actually had a double hernia, but due to the scar tissue, it was misdiagnosed. On Pro Day, he could barely move. He had been injecting the tendons in his groin with cortisone, but it wasn’t healing the injury. He got two more cortisone injections before his school’s Pro Day.
Although he was unable to even jog, Jon passed the lifting test with ease, bench-pressing 225 pounds twenty times. But it was the forty-yard dash that he was dreading. As Jon lined up to run, the head scout yelled out, “Jon, you are not fast, nor will you make it in this league because of your speed. All the scouts want is to see you snap.” By some miracle he didn’t have to run for the scouts. The Buffalo Bills signed Jon as a free agent in 2003. When asked what his second favorite magic trick is, Jon replies, “Making it all the way to the NFL and never being timed in the forty-yard dash, the signature test of all players.”
He reported to Buffalo on the assigned day and checked into the hotel room they had reserved for him. Within a few minutes, he got a phone call from Jim Kelly, the former Bills’
quarterback, now a Hall of Famer. Kelly introduced himself and told Jon that he had heard of his reputation as a magician. He explained that he was hosting a charity event the next day and asked if Jon would come out and do some strolling magic. Jon nearly jumped out of his skin at the opportunity. The next day he was picked up at his hotel by a limousine. Kelly got out and told him “how stoked” he was to meet him. When he got in, he saw that the other occupants were Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Drew Bledsoe, Bruce Smith, and Thurman Thomas. One of them said, “The Magic Man is here. The party starts now!” Jon thought he had died and gone to heaven. He was a hit; since that function, he has been on the A-list of requested guests at many other such functions.
During the draft, Sports Illustrated asked St. Louis Rams coach Bobby April for his opinion of Jon. April said he reminded him of their own snapper and made some sugges-tions of things Jon should work on. Coach April later joined the Buffalo Bills and coached Jon his second season in the NFL. He really learned the position as he went along. Even so, Jon feels he struggled for two years at Buffalo, partly because he never felt so cold in his life. During this time, he did get to hang out with several prominent local magicians like Vic Trabucco, Dan Block, Mike Gallo, and Paul Richards. He also met a man who would change the rest of his life, a motivational speaker named
With Rascal Flatts on their tour bus Performing Card to Mouth for the Cowboys
TE Jason Witten at Pro Bowl in Miami
Kevin Elko.
Elko heard about Jon and his way with people. He ap-proached him in the Bills weight room and offered him $500 to talk for ten minutes at an engagement for a group of bankers that was happening at the facility forty-five minutes later. He asked him to tell his story and do one trick. When he finished he got a tremendous hand. Elko told him that he was in the wrong business and offered to groom him to become a speaker.
When Jon received nearly a hundred letters from those bankers thanking him for telling them his story, he realized that Elko might be right. The trick he did that day was Timothy Wenk’s Misled, the pencil through bill effect that he saw David Cop-perfield perform on TV when he was a kid. Since then, he has performed that piece in every talk he has given. Elko groomed him to become an accomplished speaker and continues to work with him.
Jon was released by Buffalo after two years. He considered leaving football, and went back to California. He talked with some friends, who convinced him that he should go into the film industry with them. He was about to do that when he got a call from his agent; the Tennessee Titans’ long snapper was injured. At this time, Jon had missed half of the 2005 season.
Could he get on a plane and be ready to play on Sunday? He caught a jet late that night. The first he saw of his teammates was in the locker room that Sunday. He also met Jeff Fisher, the head coach, whom he immediately took a liking to. He loved playing for Fisher. He also loved the ambiance of the town.
Music stars Rascal Flatts and Dierks Bentley became friends, and he became more involved with Garth Brooks’s Teammates for Kids Foundation. Garth said Jon is one of, if not the best, card magician he’s ever seen. Anytime Jon meets up with Rascal Flatts the first thing they want is a trick.
The Titans released Jon after the ‘05 season. He didn’t get picked up by another team, so Jon spent more time speaking to companies and performing at charity events. Eight weeks into the 2006 season he got another call from the Titans. The same snapper got injured again. He flew in and played with the team for two weeks, but was released when the snapper returned.
He then got a call from the Philadelphia Eagles. Their snapper, Mike Bartram, broke his neck. One of Jon’s old coaches had given Eagles head coach Andy Reid a big break early in his career. When he heard about Bartram, he called Reid and told him Jon Dorenbos was his man. Jon had to compete against two other players for the position, but his old coach’s
recommenda-tion gave Jon the edge. He got the job and has been playing in Philly since 2006. He made the Pro Bowl in 2010 and the Eagles hired Bobby April before the 2011 season, reuniting the two once again.
It wasn’t long after Jon’s arrival in Philly that he met S.A.M. PNP Mike Miller (who has a passing interest in sports) at a sports show. They really hit it off and have become great friends. Through Mike, Jon has gotten together with a number of other local magicians and occasionally attends local conven-tions and events as his schedule allows. He has also spent time with another Philly sports figure, Pat Croce, former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers. Pat is a major magic enthusiast, Houdini collector, entrepreneur, and motivational speaker. One of Jon’s favorite memories is sitting in Houdini’s desk chair, reading Houdini’s personal scrapbook at Pat’s house.
In all of his time in the NFL, Jon constantly did magic in the locker rooms and hotel lobbies wherever he went. He became known as The Magic Man of the NFL. His magical exploits have been featured on a number of sports related TV shows,
In all of his time in the NFL, Jon constantly did magic in the locker rooms and hotel lobbies wherever he went. He became known as The Magic Man of the NFL. His magical exploits have been featured on a number of sports related TV shows,