Column flashback (from 2004): Pat Tillman touched many lives

This column on Pat Tillman appeared in the Arizona Daily Sun on April 24, 2004.

Tillman touched many

By Ed Odeven

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
-Bob Dylan.

I never met a more responsible individual than Pat Tillman. I developed this opinion of him when we were both students at Arizona State University. Before he ever stepped foot into a classroom at the Tempe campus, he was told that it’d take him four or five years to earn a college degree, probably the latter. He earned his marketing degree in 3 1/2 years. With a 3.8 GPA.

As much as he hit the books with the gusto of a Rhodes Scholar — when he wasn’t studying the finer pointers of, say, advertising campaigns, he was reading lengthy philosophy books, sometimes a few at a time — the…