Hiding In Plain Sight

But, Coach, they'd protest, it's so hard to focus when....

No, he'd insist, pitiless as pavement. Dead surer than any other football coach alive that this was life and death. Go see and support your family members, he'd tell them. Don't hoard your pain, as he had. "Only a few," he'd say, "can handle that pressure." Talk it out with him or someone else you trusted. But you can't think about your sick, dead or troubled loved ones when it's time to focus on books and ball because that's the only way you really can help them: Build a mind and a career and become your family's rock.

How? You will it to happen. That's what he'd learned when he'd hit puberty, when the sheer heft of his life project, the enormity of self-creation it would require, began to reveal itself. God, he'd nearly blown it, gorging himself with pancakes and grits and eggs and macaroni and cheese and wondrous coconut cakes that he painstakingly baked from scratch—anything to fill the hole inside him in that empty house after his two eldest brothers were banished, his sister moved out and his mom was working double shifts to afford the house they'd moved into, having fled the projects in Liberty City just before the riots that engulfed them in the '80s. That's when Randy—40 pounds over the Pop Warner weight limit, growing too large to squeeze through his one escape route—learned that you can't have your dream and eat your coconut cake too. That's when he discovered the muscularity of will.

He had one summer, three months, to lose those 40 pounds. He scissored holes for his head and arms in a black plastic trash bag, pulled it over his sweats and ran for miles each day beneath the merciless Miami sun. He slashed 38 pounds and still found himself, on the eve of games, a pound or two over, starving himself that night and the next day, then sweating in the trash bag in his coach's car with the windows up and the heater blasting to make the pregame weigh-in.

He willed himself to wake up every school morning at six, without an alarm, in that empty house. To wash and fold and iron his clothes on Saturdays, to polish his shoes and clean the house, to impose order on chaos. To study game film while his high school teammates were in study hall, to compile folders of notes on their opponents' tendencies, to offset his deficiencies in speed and size as a linebacker through anticipation, technique and cunning. To become so adept at seeing things before they happened, in order to avert the next calamity—one had to be coming—that he became the smartest player on every field, the one everyone turned to when things were spiraling out of control, the one telling teammates what was coming next and how to counter it, the one always on the headsets with coaches upstairs, the one whom Jimmy Johnson drafted in the 11th round—after Johnson made the jump from the Hurricanes to the Cowboys following Randy's senior season—in order to teach his bigger, faster pro linebackers how to play the position.

He spent his summer after college sleeping in front of a refrigerator. He moved into an apartment with an overweight Miami defensive tackle named Cortez Kennedy, cut off Kennedy's cake and nocturnal raids on the icebox the way he once had his own, drove him through three workouts a day and helped sculpt him into the No. 3 pick in the 1990 draft, the dawn of a dominating NFL career. That's when Randy began to discover that his survival tactics, his will, could be transferred to other boys groping toward manhood.

All those clinics and books that other young coaches scrambled for, Randy had no interest in them when the Cowboys released him a year later and his alma mater hired him as a grad assistant. He trusted only himself, and the radar that had taken him alone, among his mother's five children, through the combat zone.

WHEN THE flashbacks came, he'd start scribbling plays, spring from his seat and go jogging, sweat the damn things out, turn on a ball game or a movie—but, oh, be careful of movies! Out of the blue somebody's loved one could die, set that Adam's apple bobbing like a yo-yo. Anticipate! He'd up-tempo everything when tragedy befell the Hurricanes, change game film faster in defensive meetings, pepper players with questions and jokes so none of them would have lag time to think. He'd focus on the sound of his breath moving through his nostrils in bed at night so his crouched mind would uncoil and grant him five hours' sleep.

Who knew when the next 55-gallon drum might fall from the sky and land on him? At a football game! Just one lapse of his hypervigilant eyes as he walked off the field at West Virginia a decade ago, and a trash can full of bottles heaved by a peeved fan from the second tier smashed into his head, inflicting nerve damage to his neck that still requires an occasional injection of muscle relaxant.

Who knew at what hour, what instant, the compartments might collapse, the cross-contamination might ruin him? Like that evening after practice, a few days before a game in his junior year, when a cop pulled him over for speeding, took his driver's license back to the patrol car for an eternity, then returned and informed him that there was a bench warrant out for his arrest for drug trafficking, breaking and entering, and theft of machinery parts.