Cut Off From The Herd

by S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated
August 25, 1997

[ed.  Interesting read after having the benefit of surveying Randy Moss's career, 14 years down the road.]

Everybody's watching him. Randy Moss can feel the eyes of the lunchtime crowd at the Bob Evans restaurant, the double takes and furtive glances from the men in short sleeves and wide ties. He's got his act down: gray hood over his head, butt slumped in the booth, eyes as lifeless as buttons. Moss is a wide receiver at Marshall University, in Huntington, W.Va., and he figures to be rich before long. He jabs at his toast with a plastic straw.

"If I didn't have this hood on, and they saw us sitting here, people would say an agent picked up Randy Moss and took him to Bob Evans," he says. "That's why I got this hood on. Some people are looking, and some are not. Some know I'm here and you're here, they see a bill and they'll say, 'The agent paid for his food.' Anything can happen."

He shrugs. Moss says he doesn't care about the world's judgments anymore, and it's easy to believe he means it. Certainly no player in college football bears more stains on his name. Two and a half years ago, as a high school senior, Moss stomped a kid in a fight, pleaded guilty to two counts of battery and was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a year's probation. That cost him a scholarship to Notre Dame. He enrolled at Florida State. The following spring he broke probation by smoking marijuana, was kicked out of Florida State and served two more months in prison. Then last fall, as Moss was on his way to shattering various NCAA and Marshall records with 28 touchdowns and 1,709 receiving yards as a freshman, he was charged with domestic battery against the mother of his baby daughter.

Yet Moss is not much interested in image-mending. His first words this morning were that he slept through his communications class. His hair is braided in long rows against his skull, a style he knows will give the wrong impression. "People perceive: Only black thug guys have braids," he says, his voice carrying to a dozen tables. "If I want to grow hair, I'll grow it. If I want to wear lipstick and makeup, I'll do that. God didn't put makeup on this world just for women. They perceive me as a thug? I'm not. I'm a gentleman. I know what I am, my mom knows what I am, most people know what I am. Don't judge me until you know me."

Notre Dame did just that, and Moss will never forgive the school for it. "They didn't take me, because they see me as a thug," he says. "Then Florida State...I don't know. You win some, you lose some. That's a loss." Moss pauses, laughs a humorless laugh. "But in the long run I'm going to have the victory. In the long run...victorious."

Moss is sure of this because he has sports' trump card: talent. Better, Moss has the kind of breathtaking athletic gifts seen once in a generation. At 6'5", with a 39-inch vertical leap and 4.25 speed in the 40, he established himself as West Virginia's greatest high school athlete since Jerry West. Irish coach Lou Holtz declared him one of the best high school football players he'd ever seen. Moss was twice named West Virginia's Player of the Year—in basketball. "He does things you've never seen anyone else do," says Jim Fout, Moss's basketball coach at DuPont High in the town of Belle. Moss also ran track for a while. As a sophomore he was the state champ in the 100 and 200 meters.

Nearly every college wanted him, troubled or not. During Moss's trial for the stomping incident, Kanawha County prosecutor Bill Forbes received a half-dozen calls from football coaches around the country assuring him they could make Moss a better citizen if he was released to their care. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden ultimately got Moss and quickly understood his colleagues' hunger. Early in the fall of 1995, during an impromptu late-night footrace among the Seminoles' fastest players, Moss came in second. When he went through practice the following spring as a redshirt freshman, the defense couldn't stop him from scoring. "He was as good as Deion Sanders," Bowden says. "Deion's my measuring stick for athletic ability, and this kid was just a bigger Deion."

Marshall took Moss in last summer after his chances elsewhere had dwindled to nothing, and he was instantly recognized as the best player on the practice field. He then strolled through Marshall's Southern Conference schedule like a grown man dropped into Pop Warner games. His teammates called him the Freak. In the Division I-AA title game, a 49-29 rout of Montana, Moss caught four touchdown passes to tie the single-season college record of 28 set by Jerry Rice in 1984 as a senior. Then, in February, Moss entered the Southern Conference indoor track championships after only three days of practice and won the 55 meters in 6.32 seconds and the 200 meters in 21.15—just .02 off the conference record.

Before coming to Marshall last year, football coach Bobby Pruett spent two years as defensive coordinator at Florida watching dominant Gators wideouts such as Ike Hilliard and Reidel Anthony, who went seventh and 16th, respectively, in the first round of the 1997 NFL draft. Neither, Pruett says, has Moss's weaponry. "He's the best athlete I've ever been around," Pruett says. Last year against Western Carolina, Marshall running back Llow Turner took a handoff on a sweep with Moss five yards behind him. "Next thing I know," Pruett says, "Randy's five yards in front, and in a matter of 15 yards he threw two blocks and sprung Llow for a touchdown. Llow runs a 4.5, and Randy caught him.

"Here's a guy who's 6'5". That's hard to find. Can jump out of the gym. Hard to find. Great body control. Hard to find. He's got great hands, and he can run faster than anybody else on the field!" By now Pruett has his hands up around his face, mouth wide open, looking like one of those horror-struck victims in a Dracula flick.

Already, Moss is being touted as a top-five pick in next year's draft, and few believe he won't go pro after this season. "If I have half as good a season as I had last year, then why not leave?" Moss says. "I have nothing else to prove." If he does go pro, says Atlanta Falcons scout Boyd Dowler, "there's no doubt where he'd be placed: very, very high. Joey Galloway, J.J. Stokes, Keyshawn Johnson—I don't recall anybody who's had his combination of exceptional athletic ability in all these areas. Keyshawn is bigger than Randy, but he's not as talented, not as fast and not as quick."

That kind of praise doesn't impress Moss anymore. "The way I look at it," he says, "God's got a magic wand, and he taps just a few on the head." That he can say this, straight-faced, isn't nearly as disconcerting as the fact that he says it here, in a place about as far from the universe of blue-chip cockiness as you can get. Huntington, wedged between Kentucky and Ohio along the Ohio River, has none of the bucolic self-importance of South Bend or Tallahassee; its aging downtown wages a daily battle between development and decay. The Marshall football program had, until recently, a tradition marked mostly by losing, disgrace and catastrophe. In 1970, one year after the school was kicked out of the Mid-American Conference as punishment for more than 100 NCAA violations, a chartered plane carrying 75 players, coaches, fans, university employees and crew crashed, killing all on board. It remains the worst disaster in U.S. sports history.

Much has changed since then. Coming off its second Division I-AA national championship, Marshall will this year complete a remarkable resurrection with a trio of milestones. The Thundering Herd, long overshadowed by upstate rival West Virginia, will enter the Mountaineers' class on Aug. 30 by joining Division I-A, rejoining the MAC and opening the season with its first game against West Virginia since 1923. Yet nothing legitimizes the Marshall program more than Moss, whose outspoken opinions make the Thundering Herd impossible to ignore. "I don't see any way they can win," Moss says of the Mountaineers, whose scholarship offers he twice turned down. "If West Virginia were like Florida State, the type of team that can get to the big game and win it, I would be there. But I don't like losing."

Indeed, everything about Moss—ambition, talent, trouble and talk—leaves the impression that he is bigger than Marshall, that he is the kind of show-time player churned out yearly by Miami or Nebraska, capable of dazzling the nation on Saturday and causing his coach headaches during the week. "Be blunt: I'm the...I don't want to say big star, but let's say main standout." Moss says. He is, in fact, the school's first Heisman Trophy candidate, but he says the award doesn't matter to him.

No, Marshall has never seen anyone like Moss, and the result is an odd lack of connection between player and school. Marshall has long been an insular, homey place, relying on its own people in the worst of times, and the university takes great pride in the fact that so many of its coaches, announcers and administrators are Marshall grads come home. Yet here is the school's greatest player ever colliding with the greatest moment in Marshall sports history, and he feels as if he's besieged. "I don't trust anybody," Moss says. "If I've got a girlfriend, I don't trust her. My mom, my daughter, I trust them, but anybody else? I don't even trust my roommate."

Coaches, teammates and fans approach Moss and tell him to be careful. He doesn't want to hear it. "If I needed someone to give me advice, then I'd have a second brain to tell me what to do," he says. "I already know: You're not going to get past the judicial system, so many strikes and you're out. I wish my first two hadn't occurred. Nobody told me to kick the guy while he was down, or go out and smoke some herb. I did that on my own. If I did that, I can make my own decisions."

So Moss is a star, alone and wrestling with his mistakes, and the shame of it is all in the timing. For although every college football fan will tell you that his school's program is special, that "it's about more than just football here," Marshall may well be the only place where this is true. No program in America has been beaten down so far and risen again, and this season promises to be the cathartic first step into a new era. Moss is 20 and has no idea what kind of horse he's riding.

"The plane crash was before my time," he says. "I don't try to go back in the past and say this football game is for the people in the plane crash. I've seen the burial ground. I went up there and looked at the names. It was a tragedy, but it really wasn't nothing big."

Up on the hill overlooking Huntington, a flame of stone burns in a downpour. The flame does not flicker, it gives no heat. It sits atop the monument with the 75 names like a lightless beacon, sending a beam no one sees. But everyone can feel it—everyone in town of a certain age, everyone connected to the university, and almost everyone who has anything to do with the modern stadium down the hill.

The stadium is empty today, silenced by July's lazy hand, but in one of its rooms a man sits by a window overlooking the football field. He stares out at the rain and sees faces: Frank Loria. Deke Brackett. Ted Shoebridge. Players, coaches. The doctor who introduced him to the woman who would be his wife. "It's every day," Red Dawson says. "Every day something comes up, and you have a flashback."

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