Hiding In Plain Sight

He hung around for a half-dozen years more, haunting the project his family lived in. Bed covers would mysteriously be turned back, a book would topple off a shelf or the kitchen would suddenly reek of A.J.'s eau de cologne. "Your daddy's just been here," Randy's mother, Dorleatha, would tell her youngest son.

Randy began backpedaling from death, depersonalizing it. The first one, he'd wanted to take in all of it, pestering his mom to let him see if Daddy had his shoes on, to let him see all of him, not just the upper part exposed by the half-opened coffin. At the next funeral, his sister's, he sat in the front of the church beside his mother—his Adam's apple bobbing like crazy, his eyes never turning toward the pink casket—then stayed in his car at the cemetery, sobbing and waving away relatives who tried to console him and escort him to the burial site. That was it for him. Tears? How could a man cry at funerals when his mother didn't? Coffins? He wouldn't go near them. At his brothers' funerals, then at his players', he became the ghost, wafting in and out of the back of the church, some mourners claiming to have seen him, others insisting they hadn't.

Nobody needed to see his face when the cameras swiveled to show the world the brains behind that howling Hurricanes defense. He secreted himself in the far corner of his press-box booth, stationing an assistant coach beside him to block the lens's view. He telephoned his 24-year-old daughter, Tyquitah, before her recent wedding and begged out of the spotlight moment when the father dances with the bride. He bought and studied hundreds of war movies—it was always the guy with the swollen head or loose lips, he realized, who brought destruction upon himself or the whole platoon. He stashed his three national championship rings in an old briefcase. He removed the Frank Broyles Award plaque from his office wall the day after his secretary, Aileen Lopez, hung it up. He sent a defensive assistant to the White House in his place when the 'Canes won it all in 2001. He deflected most reporters' questions to the head coach.

So what did the athletic director need to know about his past? That all four of his siblings were drug addicts? No. That he'd failed to heed his mother's warning about sex, the plea of a woman who would work four years in an AIDS ward as a nurse's aide and watch the disease take three of her children? No. Did the AD need to know the particulars of the four children he'd had by three women, the first one at age 17 and the second at 20? To hear Randy try to explain the unexplainable, that the same dizzying instant that could bring death was the only one that made a man forget death? To hear about his brief marriage in college and his current one, also to a woman he didn't live with, a marriage that many friends and colleagues didn't know existed? No.

What about all the charges filed against him over the past 20 years, for trespassing, burglary, driving with a suspended license, loitering, petty larceny, grand theft, drug possession and assaulting a police officer? Yeah. Maybe he'd better tell the AD about those.

HE'D PUT sugar in the salt shaker of his high school and college teammates, hot sauce in their fruit juice, baby powder in their helmets. But no, he wouldn't go this far, would he? He wouldn't, for the sake of a guffaw and his renown as a prankster, invent a criminal past. His freshman teammates at Miami had learned not to fall asleep in team meetings. He'd shave their heads. How delicious, for a change, to be the ambusher instead of the ambushed.

Funny, you could never get him back. You'd wait for him in the showers with a bucket of cold water, but he'd anticipate the plot, peer around the corner and duck away. "Like an arsonist," recalls Miami Norland High teammate John Eaford. "Mr. Elusive. He'd be there, but he wouldn't be there. He'd come to my house, but I never went in his. He'd tell me to honk the horn and he'd come outside."

See, that would be the only way to reach air so thin from asphalt so cracked. Compartmentalize. Segregate past from present, like colors from whites in the laundry, just in case they bled. Divvy the personal and professional into separate boxes, lock 'em up, gulp the key. You don't live with loved ones. They're sorrow waiting to happen. You drop by to see your children and their mothers, watch some TV together, play some hoops, cards or Scrabble, take them out to eat. You call them from the office at the crack of dawn, before any of the coaches or secretaries arrive. You visit your diabetic mother on Saturdays, make sure she's taking her meds, pay some of her bills, after your team's on-field business is done.

You forbid your eldest son, Xavier, to play at Miami. That's blurring lines. You tell your guys to hit him in the mouth when you play against his team, Florida International, so they don't blur them either.

You teach your players the compartment trick. "You don't tell anyone what we do here," you order them. "Not your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers, your girlfriends." Nor drag their addictions, their pregnancies, their unemployment, diseases or despair to the practice field or study hall.