Hiding In Plain Sight

The stakes had grown steep, tens of millions of dollars ... and so much that's dearer than money. Everyone needed to solve the problem. But the Hurricanes needed to solve it now.

THEY'D TRIED white coaches blazing fire, ones dripping charisma, ones spewing slogans and even, most recently, the graying, grandfatherly sort. That was Coach Coker, who'd won a national title in his first season, 2001, and been pickpocketed of another by a ref's delayed call in overtime of the championship game against Ohio State the following year, but in the end was perhaps too nice a man to yank enough leash on his players.

The first name on Dee's list, after Coker was fired last November, was Greg Schiano, a former Hurricanes defensive coordinator who had transformed lowly Rutgers into a top 15 team. The sexy name was Steve Spurrier. Neither was interested. Then Dee blinked and saw the man hiding right in front of his eyes.

Randy Shannon had played for the Hurricanes from 1984 to '88, and been one of their assistant coaches for another 13 years, the last six as coordinator of a hornet's-nest defense that was perennially among the country's top 10. He'd strayed but briefly, and barely, to be a defensive assistant for the Miami Dolphins from 1998 to 2000, then returned the next season to win the Frank Broyles Award as the finest assistant in college football, and to contribute to his third of Miami's five national titles. Yet no one knew him. What if he, too, was carrying baggage that would blow up in the school's face?

His secretary would be certain that he was working in his office—why, she'd just seen him in there—but, poof, he'd be gone, having slipped past her like a cat. His players and colleagues noticed how swiftly he would shift the subject if his past or his family came up. His high school coach was sure Randy was an only child and was shocked to find out, not long before Randy turned 41 last February, that he had four siblings. His best friends had never been to his current apartment in the decade he'd lived there. In all those years of staff photos in the Hurricanes' media guide, of head coaches and assistants posed next to their beaming wives and children, there stood Randy, always alone. "A monk," former Miami defensive end Javon Nanton had once called him. "A Hurricane monk."

It maddened many of his defensive players. He knew everything about them, and they nothing of him; such privacy among them was rare. They were a different kind of clan, the Hurricanes, forged by triumph and sorrow more dramatic than their foes', a brotherhood whose graduated warriors returned en masse to train with them and mentor them. Where do you live? Where do you hang out? Who do you date? his players would pester him. It was too much, finally, for defensive backs Antrel Rolle and Marcus Maxey. A few years ago they slipped out of the locker room after practice and into a car, lay in wait for their defensive coordinator and then followed him when he pulled out of the parking lot. Randy spied them at once, toyed with them for a few minutes, then yanked his wheel in a last-second turn and ditched them.

AND YET, over all those years, it wasn't to the charismatic or sloganeering coaches, the gung-ho or the grandfatherly, that Miami's African-American players turned. It was to the office of the sternest coach that they flocked, to the lair of the mystery man. The coach who'd materialize in the lecture hall where they were whispering and giggling in the back, confiscate their cellphones and march them to the front, spreading them a seat or two apart and sitting behind them the rest of the class, watching every move, notifying them afterward they they'd pay a terrible price if they didn't stay in those same seats, with that same focus, the rest of the semester. The coach who'd instruct players on the scout team to punch and late-hit his starters, to prepare them for opponents who might do the same. The coach who wouldn't just threaten to sit a fourth-year all-conference player for a sloppy practice and start the raw sub in his place, like all coaches did. The one who'd do it, with a shrug.

It would take nearly a year for freshmen to overcome their fear of his intimidating silence and angry explosions—his hurling those 15 play cards across a meeting room, busting the blackboard, or chasing and screaming the defensive captain right off the practice field. Nearly a year to get past their confusion at being called chivos, Spanish for "goats," if they made mistakes, or JAGs, for Just A Guy, if they were merely occupying the field, not dominating it. One day the freshmen would chip in a few bucks and join the 35 or 40 other players who'd eat pancakes and eggs and catfish that he'd pick up at 5 a.m. at Jackson Soul Food to fill their bellies before their 6:30 meetings, and they'd begin to see another side of him. Then they'd risk entering Randy's office with an upperclassman and find their teammates, seven or eight at a time—often the players who'd come from the harshest circumstances—lounging about as if it were their rec room. Some rifling through his desk drawers, closet and refrigerator for snack bars, muffins or peanut butter and jelly that they'd pitched in for him to buy. Some dozing in a chair. Some watching TV or game film, or talking life with him.

Somehow he'd sense what was troubling them, sometimes before even they could. They took things to him that they wouldn't drag into white coaches' offices, not in a million years, nor even the offices of those black assistants who'd been raised by schoolteachers and ministers. Because those guys wouldn't get it, man, couldn't possibly know what it was like for Nanton to have grown up with a mother on crack and a dad missing from his life, or for safety Kenny Phillips to have three buddies who were shot and killed in separate incidents, all within a few weeks. They'd tiptoe around the raw stuff, those assistants, trying to say the correct thing, or spoon out something straight from the coaches' can. Not Randy. Players could take the worst to him, and the worst from him. They could talk to him in shorthand. They wanted what they could smell all over him: survival.

He was the one all of them turned to every time another Hurricane died—and, God, they just kept dying. Randy would be the athletic department's liaison with the devastated family, the community and former Hurricanes, the one behind the scenes who gathered and calmed all those who were crazy with grief when Pata was gunned down last fall. When safety Al Blades, one day past his 26th birthday, plunged into a Miami canal in his car in 2003. When linebacker Chris Campbell, just two months before the '02 NFL draft, died in a car crash with a blood-alcohol level exceeding the legal limit. When cancer took Randy's old college roommate, defensive tackle Derwin Jones, in 1999. When linebacker Marlin Barnes was bludgeoned to death in '96 by the jealous ex-boyfriend of a woman he was friends with and guard Robert Woodus went down in a plane crash the same year. When two of Randy's former teammates, Jerome Brown and Shane Curry, died in '92, one in a car accident and the other from gunfire outside a nightclub.