LaDainian’s first season with the Horned Frogs was an unmitigated disaster. As a freshman, he rarely took the field, so he bore none of the blame, but the ten-game losing streak in 1997 was one of the school’s worst records. TCU fired Coach Pat Sullivan and brought in Dennis Franchione, who emphasized weight training, something LaDainian loved. Within a year, LaDainian weighed 210 pounds and could bench-press 450.16
Franchione made LaDainian the starting fullback, but the sophomore really wanted to be a running back. He bitterly remembered how the Waco coach didn’t make him a running back until his senior year, hurting his chances with college teams. He worried Franchione would hurt his chances to go pro, but LaDainian’s coaches expected him to wait until the senior starting running back, Basil Mitchell, graduated.17 Three games into his sophomore year, LaDainian confronted his coaches, and Franchione made LaDainian the backup. Even with less time on the field, LaDainian managed seven hundred yards of rushing that year. The Horned Frogs recorded seven wins and four losses, good enough to make the Sun Bowl in El Paso. They beat the University of Southern California 28–19, the first bowl game victory for TCU in forty-one years.18
His junior year, LaDainian was the starting running back, and TCU won five out of their first nine games before they traveled to the University of Texas at El Paso. In that game, LaDainian rushed for 406 yards—an NCAA record that year—and scored six touchdowns, to lead the team to a 52–24 victory. They ended the season with a 7–4 record, which earned them a trip to face East Carolina in the Mobile Alabama Bowl. Loreane went to the game and listened to East Carolina fans complain that LaDainian was unstoppable, and TCU won 28–14. LaDainian’s end-of-season stats set records, with 1,850 yards in rushing and eighteen touchdowns. LaDainian became a national football star.19
That same year, LaDainian began dating another TCU student, LaTorsha Oakley, a Bill Gates Millennium Scholar from Dallas with a 4.0 grade average. LaDainian hadn’t dated much, so when he took Torsha to Loreane’s house, she knew he was serious about her. Loreane held high expectations for the women in her boys’ lives and was happy to learn LaTorsha was a committed Christian.
Loreane had earned her ordination as a preacher as well as a real estate license. She started selling houses and making decent money, and perhaps for the first time in her life, thanks to Herman, she felt financially secure. LaVar was still in high school, and she spent her Friday nights watching him play for South Garland High, and her Saturdays watching LaDainian.20
Moving to the Dallas suburb of Garland at age thirteen proved tough for LaVar. He went from a town of 150,000 to a metropolis of more than one million, and he went from a high school that was largely black and Hispanic to one that was mostly white. The strict dress code and preppy culture made LaVar feel horribly out of place. Race relations were also a much bigger problem, and he said blacks sought refuge in sports:
Those [white kids] were raised differently than a lot of black kids. Those kids tend to be a little more rough, you know. They might not come with the n word, or the slander, but you know it’s there. They look at you. They look at you in that way. The way they talk to you, there’s no respect in their tone when they speak to you. That’s what is overwhelming, to be able to stand that, to go through it and actually stand there and to be like, “Are you really the way that I’m feeling like you are, because I can be a jerk, too? You know?”
I think it was important to be a bigger person and to go on with my sports, and let them be who they are, because I’m going to be who I am.21
One thing South Garland High was not ready to change was its school mascot, the “Southern Colonel,” or the fight song, “Dixie.” Even though the school had officially dropped it in 1991—the year Martin Luther King, Jr. Day became a state holiday—fans still used the school’s old banner, the Confederate battle flag. The symbols offended LaVar:
When you’re taught about the Confederate flag in fourth-grade social studies, you learn in elementary what the Confederate flag meant. I knew and I think the parents knew; everybody knew. But sports kept me out of trouble.
The apartments we stayed in, there were gangs over there. If I didn’t play football or if I wasn’t in sports, then I could have ended up with them. I don’t know where a lot of those guys are today. I heard a few of them went to jail. It could have been me. So, you make a decision, a conscious decision: What’s worse? Listening to a racist fight song or going and sitting in jail for the next fifteen years. I’ll take the racist fight song.22
LaVar made it through his freshman year at South Garland, but he didn’t want to return. He transferred to Lakeview, another Garland school, but one where African-Americans made up the majority. That fall, he played football against the South Garland Colonels and beat them.23
That wasn’t the last move for LaVar, though. His parents moved again to Pleasant Grove, one of the toughest neighborhoods on the southeast side of Dallas, and he enrolled in W. W Samuell, a school known for gangs. LaVar felt whipsawed, but he concentrated on football:
I [had] my friends; they were gang members. But they were my buddies. We ran around together and went to parties together. They had my back; I had theirs. They’d come to my house; I’d go to theirs. My mom loved them; their moms loved me. It was all love, man.
They wanted me to do certain things with them, but at the same time, they knew what I had going and they actually cared enough to try to keep me away from certain stuff. So it truly wasn’t that hard to stay focused.24
Herman and Loreane’s struggle to move from manual labor to professional jobs reflected the experiences of many Texans. Between 1972 and 1987, the number of African-American businesses in the state increased from 15,001 to 35,725. Overall, though, blacks owned only 6 percent of Texas’s businesses. The African-American high school dropout rate also fell from 41 percent in 1988 to 23 percent in 1993.25
In 1995, Dallas became the first major Texas city to elect a black mayor, Ron Kirk. Former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach and real estate developers had backed Kirk’s campaign, and community leaders complained that he spent more time defending white developers’ interests than those of poor African-Americans.26
Barriers, however, did remain. A Dallas Morning News study found that among the thousands of partners in major Texas law firms, only eleven were African-Americans. Only 37 percent of black Texans attended integrated schools, largely due to white flight to suburban districts, and between 1984 and 1990, minorities lodged more civil rights complaints against Texas law-enforcement officers than any other state in the nation. The statewide investigative agency, the Texas Rangers, did not appoint its first African-American until 1988. And only in 1990 did Morris Overstreet become the first African-American elected to statewide office, as a justice on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.27
TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH
Loreane’s life took a turn for the worse when Herman suffered a stroke. She nursed him back to health, but she discovered he had no intention of giving up the cigarettes, liquor, and fried foods that had put him in the hospital, refusing to believe that his health was in jeopardy. Loreane pressed him to change his ways, but he only started drinking more and began screaming at her and calling her names. He complained that she spent too much time at church, and he refused to go anymore. He left the house for days at a time and didn’t tell her where he’d been. During one of their fights, he raised his hand to hit Loreane, and LaVar caught Herman from behind and slammed him into a wall.28
Loreane filed for divorce, but after Herman’s illness, she was nearly broke. Her real estate business had turned sour, and all at once, Loreane again found herself wondering how she was going to buy groceries and pay the bills. Creditors called at all hours of the night, and at one point the city turned off the water until a Christian ministry stepped in and paid the bill. Eventually, Loreane began closing real estate deals again, and she started the slow climb back to financial security.29
LaVar’s football performance as a defensive lineb
acker at Samuell High earned him a scholarship to Sam Houston State University, the small school in Huntsville where R. E. L. Tomlinson had earned his teaching certificate. The school’s football team did not compete in a major league, but suiting up with the Bearkats gave LaVar a chance to prove himself worthy of transferring to a better football program, or at least the opportunity to earn a degree. LaVar’s plans nearly got derailed when a man at a party in Denton hit his girlfriend and LaVar beat the man down. A few days later, police asked LaVar to turn himself in. He hired a lawyer and pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, a second-degree felony. The judge sentenced him to six years’ probation.30
LaVar played well his freshman year and tried to get into the University of Arkansas, but his grades weren’t good enough. Instead, he ended up studying at a community college in Independence, Kansas, trying to improve his academic standing. But the math classes he had taken in the Garland and Dallas schools had not prepared him for college, and LaVar grew tired of coaches comparing him to LaDainian. Football became too much like work. LaVar looks back now and sees a system that fails young African-Americans, particularly boys. He said too many think the only means for success is through sports or entertainment. The school systems also promote the kids based on their athletic ability, not academic standards. LaVar said he felt betrayed:
When we get up to the college level, we’re dumb as rocks and we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to make it through college, and we don’t make it. Our dreams of playing football are dashed because did nobody teach us how to do the math or how to read this four-syllable word or even how to speak. We’ll want to do interviews with gold teeth in our mouth, and dreadlocks in our hair. You know, that’s not smart. That’s not intelligent at all, but we don’t know.
Black people are known for [physical prowess]. We’re known as that warrior race; that’s why we were enslaved, because we had the build. We had the muscle mass. We had the longevity to endure these kind of hardships, the physical beatings. We can endure that. And to this day we’re just in another form of slavery.31
LaDainian, though, never lost his love for and obsession with football. He entered his senior year at TCU in 2000 as the undisputed star of the Horned Frogs football team, and the excitement of his final season swirled around the twenty-year-old. Loreane discovered that her son had a new nickname, “LT.” Fans chanted these initials at football games and bumper stickers proclaimed LT’s greatness. Loreane took a moment to reflect on her son’s years of hard work from Pop Warner to TCU, and she realized that not once had O.T. seen his son play college ball. Loreane invited O.T. to attend a game and offered to let him stay in her guest room. He agreed, and she drove down to the Hill to get him.32 That day, LaDainian looked up into the stands and found his father’s smiling face next to his mother’s:
It’s emotional, because it was his first time seeing me play. I remembered when I seen him. I would always spot my family in the stands before the game. I had to find them to see where they were, because if I scored, I would point to my family, or tap my heart, or whatever.
So I saw my dad and I remember trying so hard to impress him. I tried so hard that I probably didn’t have the best game. I mean, I probably had one of the worst games that I possibly could have because I was trying to impress him.
After the game, he gave me a hug. He said, “Great job. I know you was trying real hard.”
It was a moment that I never wanted to end because it was special. I finally felt like all those years of watching football with my dad had come full circle, where he was now able to watch me in real life. He could finally say, “Son, you did it. You know, you did it.”33
LaDainian gained only seventy-five yards on twenty-one carries that game, and years of disappointment still overshadowed the relationship between the two men. O.T. stayed with Loreane the entire season and attended every home game. Slowly, father and son reconnected, and LaDainian overcame his resentment toward his absentee father. They started to talk again, and for LaDainian, those were the best years he spent with his father. LaDainian finally forgave him.34
O.T. appeared to keep his addiction under control while he stayed with Loreane. LaDainian even started driving to Waco to visit with O.T. and his older stepbrother Ronald. Sitting on Ronald’s porch and talking to his father gave LaDainian a chance to feel more like a Tomlinson. But after Loreane bought O.T. an old truck to commute to and from the Hill, he began spending more and more time down there.35 That allowed O.T. to fall back into his old habits, and while he never missed a TCU home game, Loreane and LaDainian noticed the change. O.T. resented them trying to control his life and tell him how to live it.36
The Horned Frogs and LT, however, had a great season, blowing out the competition in their first seven games. They ended the regular season with a 10–1 record, and LaDainian racked up 2,158 yards in running, 354 yards in receiving, and scored twenty-two touchdowns. TCU lost the Mobile Alabama Bowl to Southern Mississippi, but LaDainian won most valuable player for the game and ended his college career with the sixth-best record in Division I NCAA football history: 5,263 rushing yards. After the Mobile Alabama Bowl game, LaDainian signed with an agent, who pulled him out of school for a special training camp. He was going to the NFL Scouting Combines and needed to get in the best shape of his life.37 His agent also handed him an envelope. La Dainian described it:
I remember going back to the hotel with my mom, and it had to be like $75,000, all in a big envelope.
I remember dumping it all on the bed, like, “Mom, I can’t believe this. I cannot believe this. I’ve made it to the NFL. I’m going to the NFL.”
That was one of the most exciting times in my life, knowing that not only did I just do something that nobody else in my family had done. I had just changed my family’s life forever.38
Groups across the country named LaDainian an All-American and Senior Bowl most valuable player. He won the Doak Walker Award as the nation’s best college running back and the Jim Brown Trophy for the NCAA’s top running back. He also earned a nomination for the Heisman Trophy, the award for the best all-around college football player of the year.
In February 2001, LaDainian flew to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combines, an invitation-only opportunity for scouts to evaluate three hundred potential players. I am not alone in drawing the obvious and uncomfortable comparison between the recruiters inspecting players and buyers at a nineteenth-century slave market inspecting a slave’s teeth. The recruits undergo an extraordinarily thorough physical, and every major muscle group is measured and evaluated. Then the scouts put them through a series of workouts, including a forty-yard dash, a bench press, a vertical jump, broad jumps, a slalom run, and a shuttle run. Players undergo interviews and tests to see if they are psychologically prepared, and scouts use these measurements to determine whether to draft them and how much to pay them. LaDainian said the multimillion-dollar job offer makes it worthwhile.
The NFL uses a draft system, where teams each take turns choosing one player at a time from the pool of new recruits. The order is determined by a team’s record the previous year, and coaches often trade their place in line to get a player they really want. The thirty-one teams can choose from 254 players. The NFL held the 2001 draft at Madison Square Garden, in New York.39 LaDainian took his family and LaTorsha with him.
Despite the fact that LaDainian ran quick times at the combine, football pundits argued that he was too small for professional football, even at 221 pounds. But LaDainian was used to being underestimated.
The San Diego Chargers called his name when they made the fifth pick in the first round of the draft.40 San Diego was LaDainian’s first pick, too, since he knew they needed a starting running back. The nine-year-old’s dream of playing professional football had, twelve years later, become a reality. The little boy who had worried about his mother making ends meet in Waco would now earn enough money to make sure she never made another mortgage payment. Loreane saw the reward for all the sacrifices sh
e’d made so that LaDainian could take advantage of every opportunity.
LaDainian’s agent sat down with the Chargers and began hammering out an agreement. As the negotiations dragged on, LaDainian moved to San Diego, and Torsha transferred her credits from TCU to the University of California-San Diego.41 The two sides only reached agreement in time for LaDainian to play in the last preseason game against the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix. The six-year, $38 million contract instantly transformed LaDainian’s life.42 Loreane, LaVar, and Londria watched him play in his first professional game.
Playing against the Washington Redskins, LaDainian proved that he was capable of delivering at the professional level, running for 113 yards, catching one pass, and scoring two touchdowns. The Chargers had ended the previous season 1–15, so LaDainian was already making a difference.43
LaDainian started in all sixteen games, ran for 1,236 yards, and scored ten touchdowns. His performance belied a seriousness not often found in rookies. He never celebrated touchdowns with an end-zone routine; he merely tossed the ball to a referee. Sportswriters started describing him as the quiet rookie, who rarely spoke up, but when he did, his teammates knew to listen because it was something important. The Chargers ended the 2001 season with five wins and eleven losses, but the team had made remarkable progress.
LaDainian hired a financial adviser and told him to prioritize saving money. Running backs are fragile, and small ones like LaDainian could see their careers end in a single tackle if hit the wrong way. In those early years, when the checks came only after he’d played the game, he chose to live frugally until he could build up a nest egg. He married LaTorsha on March 21, 2003.44
During his first three years in the NFL, LaDainian racked up statistics seldom seen before. He became the fifth player in NFL history to run more than two hundred yards in four games in a single season. He became the first to rush one thousand yards and catch one hundred passes in a single season. In 2004, LaDainian negotiated an extension on his contract, agreeing to play for San Diego until 2010 for as much as $60 million, with $24 million guaranteed. Chargers fans felt relieved to see their star player stay in San Diego.
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