Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408260019
SECTION: COLLEGE FOOTBALL PAGE: FB3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The autumn of his 22nd year brings the two together, finally and firmly.
Virginia Tech's record-setting quarterback is in control of what could be the best team in school history and, perhaps for the first time, in control of his own life.
He'll lead the Hokies and himself through his senior year with his bright, billboard-wide smile, the calculating mind of a realist, irrepressible energy, sparks of anger, thrilling and graceful athletic skills and eyes focused on a horizon only he can see.
``Yup, I'm running my own life,'' said the Bassett native. ``I came a long way - a long, long way - [so] that I can do what I wanna do. I'm a grown man.''
He overpowered high school academic worries, earned for himself in college the money he never had growing up, kept on after his parents divorced when he was in second grade, lashed out and left home when his single-parent mother pressured him to keep the house and came to love his high school coach and his paternal grandmother like no one else.
Four years after arriving at Virginia Tech as an ebullient teen-ager Hokies fans couldn't wait to see on the field, the gregarious senior will talk to anyone about anything, and his animated conversations are measured not in words but in minutes, hours and entertainment. In uniform, he followed a tumultuous sophomore season with a breathtaking junior year, and this fall he is expected to lead the Hokies to a second consecutive bowl game for the first time.
That bowl would be shortly after he graduates in December with a degree in physical education and before he starts work on a master's degree in counseling.
``When I look back and think about where he came from, and all he been through, my soul cries out, `I'm happy,''' said Pauline Meadows, DeShazo's grandmother.
\ The boy inside the man
DeShazo, though, carries the still-healing heart of his family, including Meadows and DeShazo's father, Wayne, and mother, Cindera (pronounced SIN-dra) Martin.
Martin raised DeShazo until he was a junior in high school, when, Wayne DeShazo and Meadows claim, her social life lured her away from Maurice and his younger sister, Tiwianna. Maurice, they say, more or less was left in charge of his home and his sister.
DeShazo's high school coach, Jerry Cannaday, confirms that scenario and says DeShazo ``bucked'' the responsibility - he wasn't quite ready to be a man - and left home to live with his girlfriend at the time (in separate rooms, DeShazo adds). Meadows, who lives in Stuart, disapproved. ``I went to war ... I got that mess straightened out, and I got both of 'em,'' she said.
Martin, a 42-year-old secretary in the Martinsville Police Department whose flower-pretty face and lineless skin make her look more like Maurice's older sister than his mother, grimaces and uneasily wiggles her crossed ankles when asked about why her son left. She doesn't address the specifics, and any bitterness about her family's troubles never makes it into her nectar-sweet voice.
She wants to focus on tomorrow, she says, not yesterday. They all made it through a rough time, she says, and she believes her son ``is an outstanding outcome of a single parent.''
She hasn't let go of what happened, however.
``I was always there for Maurice,'' she said. ``[But] I have another child. I just couldn't devote everything to Maurice. And then there was me, my time. I can't do it all. But I did the best I could. I'm not saying I crossed every `T' and dotted every `I.' It's been hard.
``I don't expect anyone to say to me, `Job well-done.' [But] when I see Maurice [I think], `There's the outcome of his mom.'''
DeShazo carries that time with him like a note in his wallet. It's always there when he wants to pull it out, which he does during his numerous speaking engagements with schoolchildren of all ages.
He always has enchanted and been enchanted by children, but that's not why he eagerly visits schools.
``I love doing it for kids, 'cause their parents are there, and that's who I really want to talk to,'' DeShazo said. ``'Cause I grew up in a rough life with my parents. I tell 'em how it is, then I'm like, think about this: You tell Johnny not to do nothin', and it's like, `Why, Mom?'`'Cause I said so.' You don't take the time to explain to 'em, which you need to, which I didn't have done with me. Then don't put 'em down when they grow up and do something bad.''
DeShazo didn't do something bad. Meadows calls him a ``jewel.'' Wayne DeShazo simply can't believe how well his son turned out. And Martin can look inside Maurice and see something all her own.
She still hears from him: ``I love you, Momma.''
``If I don't get nothing else, if I got that, and I know I got it, forget everything else,'' Martin said. ``That's one thing [the kids have] always told me, that they've never taken those words from me.''
A tear appears and is erased. Later, she says: ``I have the right to pat myself on the back. I've done a hell of a job. If we all open the closet, we all have skeletons. We've always had that L-O-V-E. If you've got that, you can go through anything.''
Said Maurice: ``Yeah, I love her, because she's my mother. But what she did wasn't right. ...
``But I just keep keepin' on. It'll get better, I hope, before it gets worse.''
DeShazo gives thanks to Meadows, a loving but no-nonsense retired factory worker, and Cannaday, then Bassett High School's coach, for helping steady his careening life.
To this day, DeShazo won't drink a beer in front of his deeply religious grandmother, to whom he gave his Independence Bowl Most Valuable Player trophy. Cannaday, now the athletic director at Shawsville High School, has DeShazo's jersey from that game.
Even today, DeShazo's endless words repeat Meadows' directive to ``keep your head screwed on straight,'' and Cannaday's preaching to take the bad with the good.
\ Playing `ball'
DeShazo was no burden. Meadows' small home is a testament to her first grandchild, from the huge framed family-room picture of DeShazo in a Tech uniform to side-by-side baby pictures of Maurice and his father on Meadows' credenza.
The 1989 Group AA state player of the year might as well be a Cannaday family member. Four-year-old Nick Wingfield, son of DeShazo's high school offensive coordinator, Bobby, recently heard Cannaday family members talking about teaching their newest, 6-month-old member to say ``Mommy'' and ``Daddy.''
``I'm gonna teach her to say, `Reece,''' Nick said, invoking DeShazo's nickname.
After a Tech game in 1993, Cannaday brought his mother-in-law, Ruth Lemon, to meet Meadows for the first time.
Said Meadows: ``I'm Maurice's grandmother.''
``Well, so am I,'' Lemon said.
DeShazo - pronounced de-SHAYZ-oh, not one hapless Tech fan's Shuh-shazio or any other mutation - has an NFL-sized booster club. But he never has overdosed on his pro football potential, even though he left Bassett High School as the ``next Shawn Moore,'' a reference to the Martinsville native and former Virginia quarterback who is searching for an NFL home after being cut by the Denver Broncos.
When he speaks to business groups, he doesn't just rap about football. He knows what work is, having risen from car washer to parts deliveryman to salesman at a Christiansburg car dealership, where he estimated he sold 45 cars and made as much as $9,000 this summer.
Although four summers of class-taking at Tech have him ahead of a five-year graduation plan, he has no romantic view of parchment with fancy calligraphy.
``It's about who you know, not what you know,'' he said. ``I'm not the smartest person in the world. Some people got so much book sense, they don't have common sense. I can always learn book sense. ... You ain't got common sense, you don't have jack. I got common sense. I know what's right and I know what's wrong. I know to respect other people - `Yes, ma'am, no ma'am.'
``When I speak ... where big alumni or big anybody is around, I tell 'em, `Look, I need a job.' What's wrong with that? After my time [playing for Tech] is up, people are not even gonna see me? No, nah, I'm not gonna play that little game.''
Games, however, are DeShazo's thing. His family drops the prefixes and refers to his endeavors simply as ``ball.'' Used to be you'd have to add ``-oon'' as a suffix; because DeShazo's family couldn't afford many toys when he was little, Meadows would string inflated balloons across DeShazo's crib and ``he would bat them balloons till he bat himself to sleep,'' Meadows said.
DeShazo's physical resiliency at Tech mirrors his childhood devotion to sports. As a Hokie, he's missed part of one regular-season game and one spring game despite two knee sprains, an ankle sprain, a viral infection and tendinitis in a knee. A week after he sprained his right knee in September 1993, he threw four touchdown passes against Maryland.
DeShazo, the boy, was obstinate. Martin recalled a trip to the doctor's that resulted in a prescription for flu symptoms and orders to rest.
``[He said], `Momma, Momma, if I go home, take my medicine and lay and rest, I can play,''' Martin said.
As a youngster, DeShazo said, the family couldn't support a basketball goal, so he and his friends made one by cutting the bottom out of a fast-food chicken bucket, nailing it to something and playing hoops with a tennis ball.
If it wasn't that, he and his buddies walked, rode bikes or hitched rides to the nearby Bassett Community Center to find a game.
At Bassett High School, he became the starting quarterback four games into his freshman year and missed only one game thereafter when he hurt his back in an off-the-field accident.
He attended football camps during the summer, including the Gus Purcell quarterbacks camp at Wingate (N.C.) College before his junior year at Bassett, where recruiters such as Gary Tranquill (then at Virginia, now DeShazo's offensive coordinator at Virginia Tech) told him he had great throwing mechanics and a wonderful future.
The same summer, he was named most valuable player at the University of North Carolina's camp, which also featured eventual Tar Heel Chuckie Burnette and current Georgia Tech starting quarterback Donnie Davis.
Remembering that summons DeShazo's huge smile.
``We were just killing 'em,'' DeShazo said of he and his camp teammates. ``Oh, my, we had a great time, we really did. I was like, `I can't believe this, you know, MVP.' [They said], `Most valuable player of the camp is ... ' and they said my name, and they called me `Hollywood' down there - [I was] shaking and baking, oh, my.''
\ Making the grade
But DeShazo almost was cooked in the classroom. College programs as mighty as Nebraska were after him; Tom Osborne, the Cornhuskers' coach, once told Cannaday the Nebraska staff had looked at films of 10 quarterbacks and DeShazo was the best they had seen.
Cannaday knew DeShazo had to maintain a 2.0 grade-point average to keep his college future alive. DeShazo was above a 2.0, but too close for Cannaday, who took a recruiter's suggestion and had DeShazo re-take a math course as a senior that he had barely passed as a sophomore.
DeShazo performed, raising his GPA nearly to a 2.5. It helped that during finals week, Cannaday stashed DeShazo in his house, prohibited phone calls - even from the leading suitor, Virginia Tech - so DeShazo could study uninterrupted.
DeShazo likens that bit of growing up to the year after his unsteady sophomore season at Tech, after which he realized there was more to being a starting college quarterback than he thought.
When he improved his off-the-field preparation, he went from the Big East's lowest-rated passer to No.5 in the nation, and he helped Tech go from 2-8-1 to 9-3.
``I learned what the word `responsibility' meant,'' he said.
And, added Cannaday, ``Since he's been at Tech, he's become a student. He's certainly done a whole lot better in college than he did in high school.''
Maybe not between the lines. As good as DeShazo was for Tech last year, setting five school records that included single-game (four) and season (22) touchdown passes, his high school library is equally impressive.
Among the best times in his life, he said, were playing football on Friday night and reading about it in the paper the next day. He spawned plenty of newsprint, including some ravings about a particular game against Martinsville.
Bassett won 39-22 - beating Martinsville for the first time in 23 years - and DeShazo threw for three touchdowns and ran for one. Typically for the improvisational, unpredictable DeShazo, the how was as enthralling as the what. The 57-yard touchdown run was to be an option play, but DeShazo saw the inside linebackers edge outside and the safety vacate the deep middle.
``He took one step, the thing opened up, and he ran it straight for a touchdown,'' Cannaday said.
When he crossed the line of scrimmage, DeShazo remembers gleefully, he raised one finger skyward. The film got around.
``Danny Ford [then coach at Clemson] called and said, `Who called that quarterback sneak?''' Cannaday said. ``He was laughing when he called. We were back in our own territory.''
DeShazo's option ability led to questions about his arm and, in college, led national observers to list him as an ``all-purpose'' quarterback. DeShazo hated that, taking it to mean he couldn't throw.
Despite his strong arm and sound mechanics, DeShazo completed only 46.7 percent of his passes in high school and 47 percent in his first year as a starter at Tech, when his decision-making also was questioned. He knew two things: What people were saying about him, and what he could do about it.
``I read those [preseason] magazines,'' he said during an interview before his junior season. ``They get me mad. I don't like reading magazines that pump me up. I like magazines that criticize me, because it gives me the drive to say, `Look, here's what the critic says is DeShazo's strong point and weak point.' Strong point, I read it; the weak point, I definitely read that. Then I say, `This is what you need to do.' That's exactly what I'll go do.''
DeShazo must be frothing this preseason, because he's caught in a cloudburst of kind words from national publications. One, The Sporting News, rated him the No.7 quarterback - period. He was not mentioned in a separate ranking of ``all-purpose'' quarterbacks.
It's an easy call to say he'll put up fine numbers as a Tech senior. It's harder to say how the NFL sees him. To his grandmother he talks mostly of his master's degree and the Canadian Football League - and although he's rarely been far from a ball in his life, he doesn't seem obsessed with football after college.
``I would sell cars for a living if I had to,'' he said.
Will he? Who knows?
``You've got to be able to throw the ball in the NFL - be smart and throw the ball. I think I can do that,'' said DeShazo, who thinks stereotypes will sack him. ``[But] my skin color, and when they hear the word `option' ... ''
So what, says Tech offensive coordinator Tranquill, who spent the past three seasons as quarterbacks coach of the Cleveland Browns. NFL people, he says, want to see accomplished drop-back passers.
``I don't think skin color has anything to do with it, or whether you run the option has anything to do with it,'' Tranquill said. ``Maurice has adequate tools. It's still [about] performance. It's still going to boil down to what he can do on Saturdays.''
\ Mixed emotions
Some of DeShazo's game-day doings, no pro scout will see. DeShazo once went into a high school opponent's locker room - before the game, fully dressed - to encourage an eighth-grade quarterback who admired him.
And he can pluck the emotions of his dad, a lineman-sized guy who never played sports in high school.
``You know, I'm just tenderhearted,'' said Wayne DeShazo, who sometimes would leave games if his son got sacked or hurt. ``In high school years, I would cry. You know, when Maurice throw the ball, he'd throw it so far and the man catch it, and I'd just be so happy I would cry.''
Gene check: Maurice has been known to cry, although mostly after losing games. He's also known to have sinful fun playing the game, or he can overheat if things aren't going right.
In '92, he publicly ripped Tech's coaching staff for not using him properly, then threw for 853 yards in the season's last four games.
DeShazo knows when he's being trampled on, and doesn't take it. If somebody stares at he and his girlfriend, who is white, DeShazo said, ``I look at 'em and say, `Excuse me, sir, did you lose something over here?'''
A guy pushed him during an argument at a Blacksburg bar just before the Independence Bowl last year; DeShazo found out where the guy worked, walked up behind him and threatened him. (Nothing transpired).
The 1992 West Virginia game, during which he was booed and after which someone let the air out of his car's tires, shaped his militancy. ``I'm not violent, but I'm feisty,'' he said, and added: ``What goes on the field stays on the field. You pay your money, you got a right to do what you wanna do. Outside of that, you put your hands on me, I'm gonna put my hands back on you.
``Coaches say walk away. You walk away, you might not ever see this life again. ... Don't mess with nothing that you don't pay for.''
\ The final chapter
DeShazo's track record recommends heeding his words. He told interviewers in high school that he would qualify for Tech; he did. When he was 6 and his mother worried through his first day of school, he said he could take care of himself; with a little help, he has. He told interviewers during his college career there would be good times and bad, but he'd succeed at Tech; he was right.
Now he stands ready to finish a memorable college football career, earn a degree, get a job and, as Meadows says with a snicker, ``keep hisself up so he won't be gettin' money from me.''
Meadows, Wayne DeShazo, Martin and Cannaday all say they don't care if Maurice plays a down of football after college. Living on his own terms, they say, is what is important.
``He has been pushed to do things that maybe he wasn't comfortable doing,'' Meadows said.
Wayne DeShazo simply marvels at his son, calling Maurice's life a ``blessing'' and saying he has his fingers crossed.
Martin, who always stressed Maurice's academics, would rather see him pitch football for fear he'll get hurt.
``He's maturing, and he's getting to know Maurice,'' she said. ``He wants to be the guy, and it's time. And hats off to him.''
Cannaday, one of DeShazo's role models and toughest critics - he picked apart a tape of DeShazo's MVP bowl performance with DeShazo the night Tech flew back into Roanoke from Shreveport, La. - can see his friend ready to cut loose.
``I told him, `This is how you wanted to be. You're in control, so just let her roll,''' Cannaday said. ``Have a good time, and see what happens.''
Thousands of eyes will be watching, none more important than those of Meadows. DeShazo still will get some mothering.
``So many of 'em get where he is, they mess up,'' Meadows said. ``Head overloads the hind part. I mean, I'm serious.''
So is DeShazo, so much for the better. He chides Wayne - ``Dad, do you think I'm dumb?'' - if he starts getting a drug-abuse lecture. He constantly promises Meadows he won't screw up. His head is clear enough, and bright enough, and wise enough that he doesn't grope to answer when asked what's best in his life right now.
``Being me,'' he said, with the ever-present smile. ``Football season. It's great. I love it.''
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB