The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (58 page)

By now five trainers and three teammates had surrounded Lattimore on the field. It was clear the knee was at the very least dislocated. Behind a human curtain, the trainers told him to stay calm. The knee was popped back in place, Lattimore experiencing a feral, almost apocalyptic kind of pain. About five minutes passed. With a towel on his head and tears streaming down his face, Lattimore was ever so carefully helped to his feet and onto the cart. The entire stadium stood and applauded. Both South Carolina and Tennessee cleared their sidelines as players from both sides gathered around Lattimore. The ultimate show of respect.

Right before the cart eased off the field, South Carolina tight end Rory Anderson hugged his teammate and kissed the white Gatorade towel over Lattimore’s head. The home crowd gave Lattimore one last roar as he exited a college football field for the final time.

Towel on his head, faced buried in his hands, Lattimore cried his way into the tunnel, where his mother, Yolanda Smith, was waiting. They cried together as Marcus’s father looked on.

“It’s over,” said Marcus. His NFL dream, it seemed, had died.

In his postgame press conference following South Carolina’s 38–35 win, Steve Spurrier chose his words carefully. There was no need to belabor the horror of what had occurred. He lauded Lattimore as the most popular player in team history. He called the injury “severe.”

The subsequent medical exam confirmed everyone’s fears: Lattimore
had torn the right ACL, detached both the MCL and the PCL and dislocated his knee.

The outpouring of support for Lattimore was immediate and overwhelming. Lattimore received letters from as far away as California and Hawaii. Two days after the game Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a fierce Clemson fan, declared Lattimore’s twenty-first birthday, October 29, 2012, to be Marcus Lattimore Day. “[My husband] and I ask every South Carolinian to join our family as we lift up in prayer Marcus Lattimore and his mother Yolanda Smith during this challenging time,” the Republican governor said. “He has been more than just a Carolina football player—he is a great role model for our state.”

As soon as he saw the hit on Lattimore, Dr. James Andrews figured the injury would be significant. The go-to surgeon for knee, arm and shoulder injuries, Andrews knew Lattimore’s ligaments had almost certainly been torn and the knee dislocated. On November 2, 2012, Andrews, a South Carolina team consultant, operated on Lattimore. He was joined by the esteemed physicians Jeffrey Guy and Lyle Cain. In the operating room the doctors found—just as Andrews suspected—that Lattimore’s ligaments were torn. The good news was there was no nerve damage. After reattaching the MCL and the PCL, the group repaired Lattimore’s ACL with a patella tendon. Given the explosive damage, the surgery went better than expected.

Meanwhile, Lattimore had been thinking. Hard. After he had suffered the torn ACL in his left knee in an October 2011 game against Mississippi State, Lattimore and his family had taken out a $1.7 million insurance policy, the number based on what round in the NFL draft Lattimore figured to be selected. The policy cost the family between $5,000 and $15,000. They could claim the $1.7 million if Marcus could not play football again. Following the horrific scene against Tennessee, cashing in on the insurance policy had become a real possibility. Doctors put Lattimore’s initial timetable for recovery between twelve and fifteen months, meaning there was a good chance he would not play a single down in 2013.

With his future in doubt, Lattimore knew one thing for sure: his dream could not wait. On December 12, 2012, a little more than a month after the surgery, he declared for the NFL draft.

“The main thing I was thinking about was, what if it happened again and I came back to college?” he said. “I was thinking that I’d rather not get hurt at all, but if it was to happen again or anything was to happen again, I’d rather it happen at the next level.”

Even when a running back has two good knees coming out of college, predicting his long-term health is risky business; it’s far and away the most disposable position in sports, with an average NFL life span of about two and a half years. In parts of three seasons at South Carolina the junior running back had already racked up 629 plays from scrimmage (accounting for 3,444 yards) and two torn ACLs. His body had been battered. His NFL future appeared anything but bright.

If Lattimore was looking for hope—and he most certainly was—he found it in the story of former University of Miami running back Willis McGahee. On January 3, 2003, McGahee took a screen pass in the fourth quarter of the BCS National Championship game when Ohio State safety Will Allen leaned his shoulder into McGahee’s left knee. Right before that hit, like Lattimore, McGahee was considered the top running back on NFL draft boards. After the hit he was staring at a torn ACL, PCL and MCL. Faced with a similar decision on insurance, McGahee decided not to cash in the $2.5 million insurance policy. Instead, he declared for the NFL draft and, against all odds, worked his way back into the first round despite missing the entire 2003 season. Nine NFL seasons later, McGahee had more than eight thousand yards rushing and sixty-eight total touchdowns.

In his darkest hours Lattimore reached out to McGahee.

“He mainly told me to just keep family close right now,” said Lattimore. “That was the main thing he drilled in my head, because there’s going to be times that you’re going to be real down and you’ll need somebody there. He just said, ‘Keep that same focus that you’ve had before this happened, because this happened for a reason, and this situation will set you up for success in the future.’ That has stuck with me, and it’s going to stick with me. He believed it, and look what happened to him.”

Two days after declaring for the NFL draft, Lattimore moved to Pensacola, Florida, to start an intensive rehab program with Dr. Andrews’s staff at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. During the course of the rehab, Lattimore worked with Stephen LaPlante, who specializes in rehabilitation of cartilage injuries, ACL rehabilitation and return-to-field drills following knee injury. LaPlante also developed the protocol for the institute’s Athletic Performance Division’s Bridge Program to ensure the correct rehabilitation techniques following ACL surgery.

In Florida, Lattimore found himself living a life far removed from college. He was for all intents and purposes a pro now. Up by 8:00, at rehab by 10:00, working with LaPlante from 10:00 to 11:45. After a break, he would return at 2:00 p.m. and continue the rehab protocol—heavy on single-leg workouts—until late afternoon. In January, he started jogging in the pool
to help build up strength in the right ACL. Soon, Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, recovering from ACL and LCL damage, joined Lattimore in the pool, cheering on the running back during daily sessions. Lattimore said that the single-leg squats he was doing less than ten weeks after surgery stunned his therapist and his agent, Pat Dye Jr.

“If anyone saw that injury, and I saw it, I happened to be watching the game live, it’s amazing he is where he is,” said Dye.

Physical recovery was one thing, climbing the emotional mountains something else entirely. By the end of March 2013 the South Carolina star had yet to talk with Gordon.

“In about five years, I’ll reach out to him,” Lattimore said.

“There have been bad days,” he added. “On those bad days, the one thing I think about and the one thing my girlfriend always tells me is, ‘Somebody has it worse than you do. Somewhere in the world, someone has it worse. Someone doesn’t even have legs right now. Somebody can’t even walk right now.’

“That puts it all into perspective. I’m down here by myself, down here living on my own. It’s rough. But with my faith in God and knowing everything is going to be okay in trusting his plans and not my plan, I know these dark days will pass.”

In the weeks leading up to the draft, it became clear NFL teams had high interest in Lattimore. Before the draft Dye said he would have been shocked if the running back wasn’t picked somewhere in the middle rounds. There was hope Lattimore could get on the field in 2013.

“It’s going to take a special effort,” Dr. Andrews told NFL.com. “Mother Nature’s got to help us. The good Lord’s got to help us. This kid’s future is good regardless of what happens, because of his character.”

The San Francisco 49ers selected Lattimore in the fourth round with the 131st pick. As a Niner, he would join former University of Miami star Frank Gore, who overcame two serious knee injuries to excel in the NFL. On the surface, the faith and will of an extraordinary athlete had been rewarded with a perfect place to continue his comeback.

I
n what would turn out to be the final day of his son’s high school football career, Chester Jones stood at the end of his driveway with a stack of recruiting letters in his hand.

It was an early November Friday in 2012 in Sealy, Texas, a working-class, countrified city of six thousand about fifty miles west of Houston. Sealy High’s annual backyard brawl with its archrival Bellville Brahmas was just three hours away, and Jones, a tall, outgoing bull of a man, was feeling a bit anxious, particularly about the bum right ankle that had kept his son pretty much sidelined the last few weeks.

Back in the mid-1970s, Chester Jones was an all-state center in basketball who earned a football scholarship to Prairie View A&M before a torn hamstring cut his college career at tight end short. After graduating, he took to the roads, making a living hauling manhole covers for sixteen years. Now he worked with a friend in the insulation and air-conditioning business, which kept him closer to home.

In his hand now was the daily dose of sugar: fourteen sweet-talking letters in all, eleven from Texas A&M alone, and from the look of things the comely coeds up in College Station had cornered the market on lipstick-colored love letters. The other three letters were postmarked Baton Rouge, home of LSU. The mailings were but the latest entries in the Ricky Seals-Jones sweepstakes, the all-out battle to sign arguably the most talented high school athlete in the country.

By any measure, Seals-Jones would be some kind of catch. At seventeen he stood six feet five, weighed 225 pounds and carried the lean, strong look of a budding all-pro. His hands were huge, the size of a catcher’s mitt. And he ran with a long, gifted grace. He played all over the field—quarterback, wide receiver, safety. He led the state in scoring in basketball as a junior, averaging thirty-two points per game. For added measure he had a nice little nasty streak.

Every major recruiting site in the nation was salivating over his size, speed and pure athleticism. ESPN.com had him ranked as the No. 1 wide receiver and “athlete” in the country; Rivals.com listed him as the No. 2 athlete in talent-rich Texas. He was the personification of
student-athlete:
an honor roll student blessed with the kind of humble “yes, sir, no, sir” attitude and game-breaking talent that can cause coaches in the winning business—and with access to discretionary funds—to do whatever it takes to sign him.

The Joneses’ rambling redbrick home is set on four family acres about a mile down an aging asphalt road. Chester liked conducting tours of the living room and of the Life of Little Ricky, pointing with pride at pictures of his son in oversized peewee football gear looking like a “peanut head” and in Little League taking a major-league-worthy home-run trot (“See, no smile on his face”).

Chester said he noticed that seriousness and promise early and nurtured it. His older sons were good athletes: one, Chester junior, from a first marriage, played quarterback at nearby Blinn College, while the other, Jamal, was a walk-on wide receiver at the University of Houston. But Ricky was different. Chester could see it in the look on his boy’s face before summer baseball games and in the way he quarterbacked his undefeated Pop Warner team to a championship down the road in Katy, where some serious ball was played. Father and son worked out as one, Ricky tagging along as his dad ran that old asphalt road and that hill out back. And when age took its toll and Dad slowed down, Ricky kept going. Kept working. By the time Ricky arrived at Sealy High, Coach Jimmie Mitchell knew he would never see a second on the freshmen or JV team. He started him at safety in ninth grade.