I Beat the Odds (17 page)

What is most amazing to me is that Miss Sue did it all for free. Where I came from, there was always a “You gotta get paid” mentality, but Miss Sue wasn’t interested in teaching me—or anyone—for money. I mean, of course she had worked as a teacher professionally and got a paycheck for it, but it was clear to me from the beginning that she was someone who knows the reason God put her on this earth, and it is to teach people who need some extra help. No one would put in that kind of time and effort and work with that much passion if they were only doing it to get something material out of it. The patience she had with me as I worked through problems and assignments, and the excitement she had whenever I got them right, were real and came from a place inside that was concerned first and foremost with my achievement.

I have to admit, though, that it was tough at first for me to accept her help. I mean, I’d been relying on myself for so long that it was kind of scary to say to someone else, “Okay, I need you. I’m going to let you show me how this works.” I’d had people looking out for me before, but never in quite the same way that Miss Sue did. She wasn’t just teaching me skills, she was building my sense of confidence in my own abilities. She wasn’t just helping me get through each day, she was working to help me meet my long-term life goals.

My last semester in high school, I made the honor roll, which remains one of the proudest accomplishments of my life. In order to attain the NCAA’s GPA requirements, though, I needed to do some extra work to make up for my earlier years in high school before I got to Briarcrest and while I was still adjusting to a more rigid academic schedule.

Instead of jumping into summer vacation like so many of my friends, I began work with a series of online courses offered through Brigham Young University that were approved by the NCAA for core course requirements for athletes trying to improve their GPAs. The grades earned there can be used to replace older, failing grades on the transcript, and it was an exciting series of courses for me. Subjects covered a wide range, including foreign languages, math, social studies, business, and English. It was a wonderful program for kids like me to go back and redo some of the courses we didn’t get right the first time.

Now that I was so much more confident in my ability to study, I gobbled up those courses, studying authors and historic figures, writing reports on poems and novels. Each time I finished one and got my grades back, I felt like I was erasing a failure from my past. Just because I didn’t have someone to show me how to learn effectively when I was fifteen didn’t mean I had to lose out on a chance for college now.

I was very fortunate to have such a strong support system of people who were really concerned with helping me catch up. If I had known how much work it was going to take to get my grades up, I would have been in the books more when I was younger. It was my freshman year, when I was still in the public schools and still cutting class a lot to hang out, that caused the problems. I am just grateful that I had the opportunity to make up for some of my earlier mistakes and poor decisions because I know that most kids in my situation don’t get that second chance.

And, of course, Miss Sue was cheering me on the whole way. By the time I had brought my high school GPA up to the standard, I was excited about starting college in a way I never thought I would be. I wasn’t just ready to play football; I was ready to start working on my degree.

Miss Sue, in the meantime, had applied for a tutoring job with the university and was offered the position! That fall, it wasn’t just Collins and I who were moving to Oxford; Miss Sue moved there, too—something she said she’d been wanting to do since she’d graduated and left years before.

Her new job involved working with a number of athletes, including a number of my teammates, and everyone else loved her as much as I did. She really cared about us. We weren’t just a job for her. She was excited for us and cared about how we did in the classroom and on the field, but she also cared about how our lives were going. She knew if someone broke up with his girl-friend or if someone was struggling with a bad family situation.

Miss Sue’s investment in us was one we took seriously. We were all amazed by her patience and we felt her real concern for us. I know that her other student-athletes worked harder for her because they didn’t want to let her down. No one likes to disappoint the people they love, and just the few hours we spent with her each week made it clear that she loved us all. (She loved me best, though!)

 

 

I KNOW THAT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE PEOPLE who think that the extra courses I took to help raise my high school GPA were a lame excuse for making up classes I failed the first time around. There are other people who will always be convinced that I am just a dumb football player who only graduated from Briarcrest because I had a lot of people helping to pull me along because they wanted to get me into college. All I can say in response to that is, look at my academic record while at Ole Miss. I wasn’t just squeaking by with the minimum GPA—twice I made the dean’s list. It’s amazing how a life can turn around with some encouragement, some support, and someone willing to say, “I believe you CAN do what you’ve set your mind on doing.”

Miss Sue is a huge part of my success because she helped me believe that I could do what so many people around me seemed to think I couldn’t. She also goes to show that you don’t have to just put a roof over a kid’s head to make a difference in his life. There are other needs that have to be met, too, and she dedicated her own life to helping kids improve theirs.

W
hen college coaches started showing up to recruit me, I couldn’t believe that it was all starting to happen for me. So many things in my life had been such a disappointment that to suddenly find myself in a loving family that cared about my dreams and were committed to helping me reach them—it was almost too much. But as college began to become a reality for me, I still had to prove that I had the ability to do the schoolwork. I clearly had the drive, will, and discipline—I’d demonstrated that through my long hours of studying, homework, and extra coursework. But I still wanted to prove not only to myself but to everyone who had stepped up to help me that I had what it took to succeed.

One of the big fears coaches seemed to have was that I wouldn’t be able to read and understand the playbook, because I had required so much extra work to help bring up my GPA. That kind of made me laugh because while I might have struggled with school and had to learn how to succeed in the classroom, I knew sports. I may not have spent much time poring over the various plays by name, but I understood strategy. I think that became clear the more the coaches watched me play.

When I finally decided to become an Ole Miss Rebel, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I couldn’t believe that in just a few short years I had gone from being a kid who was struggling to figure out how he would be able to get into a junior college to a kid who had a lot of major schools recruiting him and offering scholarships. And I really, really liked a couple of the schools I visited—I liked their coaches and their teams and how I felt when I was on their campus. It was such a tough decision.

By that point, I realized that God had blessed me and blessed my life with not just talent but people who were willing to help me develop that talent into something great. When it came down to the final couple of schools, I prayed about my choice a lot because there didn’t seem to be a clear-cut sense of one being a good school and another being a bad school. I felt like wherever I chose to go would be a good decision and would be a place where I could keep growing as a player and as a person.

So when I made up my mind at last, I could finally breathe a little easier—it was like I’d been holding my breath for months. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to enjoy the moment, though, since I still had to worry about my grades for graduation and eligibility. And I didn’t get much of a summer break after graduating high school, either. All my friends from school were taking off on vacation and enjoying their last summer before college, but I was hitting the books for the last of those extra courses to help my GPA. And then almost as soon as that studying was over, it was time to pick up and move to Oxford, Mississippi, for football training.

It was a very busy summer for me, because there was one other pretty major event that happened right after I graduated high school: I became a legal member of the Tuohy family. Leigh Anne and Sean had already assumed responsibility for me as guardians, which allowed them to sign my school permission slips and take me to medical appointments. This last step was the one that would make everything binding.

It kind of felt like a formality, as I’d been a part of the family for more than a year at that point. Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named as my “legal conservators.” They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as “adoptive parents,” but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was called. I was just happy that no one could argue that we weren’t legally what we already knew was real: We were a family.

I wish I could say it was just an uneventful morning with a trip to the courthouse and then a nice brunch to celebrate. Unfortunately, I found my past and my future in conflict yet again.

My mother was going to be at the hearing to agree that she supported the decision to have the Tuohys listed as my next of kin and legal conservators, and we were supposed to pick her up on the way to court. Leigh Anne was driving (Sean was meeting us there), but when we pulled up to my mother’s house in Alabama Plaza, she wasn’t waiting for us. I ran inside to get her so we wouldn’t be late, but a certain person answered her door who I knew was bad news. He was an old boyfriend of hers who she had broken up with before and who I had hoped was out of her life for good. But there he was and just the sight of him sucked all the joy out of what was otherwise a happy, joyful morning for me.

I stormed out to the car, and even though Leigh Anne wanted to know what the matter was (she could tell from the look on my face that I was furious), I didn’t say a word. My mother came running out a minute or two later and we all headed to the courthouse together. But I was haunted by seeing that man because it was just another reminder of the trap of bad decisions that she was stuck in. I had been surrounded by those kinds of bad cycles of behavior my entire childhood and finally felt like I had escaped. And yet on the very morning that I was legally breaking free from the ’hood, there was an in-my-face reminder of the kind of life that might have been mine.

It was very much a but-for-the-grace-of-God moment for me. I knew that I had escaped—but how many other kids were there who were just like me but would never get the chance I did? It was depressing to think about. I figured that I owed it to all those kids to do something great with the opportunities I’d been given.

The court hearing was quick—probably only about fifteen or twenty minutes, beginning to end. My mother was supportive of the whole thing and there wasn’t a whole lot of emotion all around because it was just a matter of formalizing the way we’d all been living for the past year. After court, we all went out to brunch together to celebrate. Then we dropped my mother off and went back to the house—to
our
house.

 

 

I COULD NOT HAVE PICKED a better time to start at Ole Miss, if for no other reason than they had just opened the Indoor Practice Facility next to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. I know that might sound silly, but if you’ve never practiced football in the mugginess of a Mississippi summer, you have no idea what a difference it makes to have a field that is shaded and has some climate control. There was also a brand-new weight room. Basically, it was a long way from the empty lots where we used to play football back in Hurt Village.

There wasn’t any time for me to get used to things, though. I started as a true freshman instead of having a Red Shirt year to learn how it all worked. So all at once, I was doing two-a-day practices, learning a whole new playbook, and getting ready for college classes.

I decided to major in criminal justice. I was interested in a communications degree so that I could go into broadcasting someday, but I was also interested in the law and definitely had grown up around a lot of crime, so criminal justice was a good fit. It was also more practical because the classes worked better with my football schedule. My life suddenly was just a blur of workouts, classes, practices, homework, and then back to the dorm for a few hours of sleep before getting up to do it all again.

Dorm living wasn’t as big an adjustment for me as for some students. I was used to living in a small space with a lot of other people, so that wasn’t a problem for me at all. In fact, I loved it. I enjoyed being a part of a community, surrounded by friends and bonding together as a team. I would end up making some lifelong friends, including football teammates like Jamarca Sanford, who is the most loyal person I have ever met and is still one of my best friends. But the one thing that did take a lot of getting used to was meeting a ton of new teammates, coaching staff, and students around campus. Being a naturally shy person, this was the scariest thing of all.

It made such a difference for me, though, having a great support system around me—not just tutors like Miss Sue but a couple of high school friends and Collins and some of her friends. They made me feel like I belonged.

I also looked around and saw lots of kids who, like me, were the first people in their biological family to ever go to college. So many of them seemed really lost, since they didn’t have anyone back home who understood how overwhelming that first semester can be, or to warn them about all the temptations that college life can bring. Many colleges now have programs in place to help students in that situation, but it’s still tough when you can’t call home and talk to someone who understands. I was lucky that all those hours around the Tuohys’ dining room table after football practice taught me a lot about time management, which is so helpful when you have no parent around telling you to put down the PlayStation and finish your homework!