Hard Charger

Wiley, too, had to work for his success. One day during his senior season at St. Monica's, he noticed an assistant coach wearing Columbia football shorts. When Wiley asked the coach where Columbia was, he replied, "It's a place you never want to go as a football player." But Wiley—who had received mild interest from UCLA and Cal and a scholarship offer from St. Mary's, a Division I-AA school in northern California—was intrigued enough to attend a reception hosted by a Columbia alum in the San Fernando Valley. "The guy had a million-dollar wine cellar and a pool with underwater speakers," Wiley says. "That's when I learned about the Ivy League."

During his recruiting visit to Columbia, Wiley did a double take when coach Ray Tellier, while addressing a group of recruits, referred to the Division I-AA record 44-game losing streak the Lions had suffered from 1983 to '88. "The attitude when I got there was sickening," Wiley says. "Guys would watch Florida State on TV with their mouths open. Players had soft-belly attitudes: Either they saw football as a P.E. class, or their daddy wanted them to play." Jackie Blackett, Columbia's associate athletic director and a Wiley-phile—he calls her his "pseudo mom"—says Wiley "refused to let [the Lions] lose. During games guys would talk about what they were going to do that night, and he'd go nuts."

Eventually, the transformation took, resulting in an 8-2 season—Columbia's best since 1945—in Wiley's senior year. His close friend Rory Wilfork, a linebacker who was a co-captain that season with Wiley, says Wiley often instigated fights in practice with lax underclassmen. "Marcellus was the biggest guy on the team," Wilfork says, "and when he'd grab someone's face mask and say, 'It's not going to be that way,' it had a rather dramatic effect."

There is nothing subtle about Wiley, an aspiring DJ and freestyle rapper who drew 107 noise complaints during his first month in the Columbia dorms. He relished his role as the big mouth on a small campus. At the start of his junior year Wiley, after scouting a freshman orientation meeting for talent, cozied up to an attractive student from New Jersey and asked for her number. They talked on the phone a couple of times about their shared love for hip-hop before she said, "Let's see what kind of flow you've got." So Wiley began freestyle rapping, then sheepishly listened as she put him to shame. You might win some but you just lost one. After all, Lauryn Hill was no ordinary freshman.

Wiley laughs at the memory as he changes Morocca's diaper in his LA. apartment on a recent afternoon. Celebrities throughout the city have converged for the taping of the Soul Train music awards, but Wiley is out of the mix, instead watching a videotape of his heroics as the 12-year-old star of the Inglewood ( Calif.) Chiefs. "I've seen the tape," Northern says, "and he's definitely the best Pop Warner running back ever."

It's true: Wiley looks like a cross between Barry and Deion Sanders. He pauses the tape and sighs; it is not lost on him that after a decade and a half of fighting adversity, he's again on the A-list. "A lot of guys have been the Man since they first grabbed a ball, but I've been on the bottom, too," Wiley says. "Yet one thing I fear tremendously is that, like the OutKast song says, I'll get caught up in all this success without realizing it."

If perspective eludes him, there's always that bench in the middle of Broadway. But Wiley has a more ambitious plan. "You know what I'm going to do when I retire?" he asks. "I'm going to get into a Winnebago, get a leather jacket with sketches of the OutKasts airbrushed onto the back and follow them around the country, just like the Grateful Dead's fans used to. I know what it will look like, too."

Of course he does: the extreme of weird.