Hiding In Plain Sight

What? "I didn't do it!" Randy protested. "You've got to let me go. You don't know Coach Johnson. If I miss practice tomorrow, I'll get kicked off the team!"

A second police car arrived, the officer inside recognizing Randy as a Hurricane and permitting him to go if he promised to report to Miami Dade police to get to the bottom of this. Pee Wee! His other brother—his only surviving sibling, Clifford, four years older than Randy—he and his drug addiction were at the bottom of this.

Another nightmare had begun. The arrest charges and the trips to court kept coming. Look, Randy pleaded to the district attorney, it's my brother—he's stolen my identity. Couldn't they see the difference in their pictures? Randy was the one with the scar, the dent Pee Wee had put in his head swinging a curtain rod when they were kids. At last Randy received a blue document with all 10 of his fingerprints to verify his identity, one he must carry everywhere to this day and have renewed every three years ... and still the charges poured in. Seventeen in one bench warrant that arrived in the mail just as he was about to leave for his second and final training camp with the Cowboys, forcing him to arrive late, infuriating Johnson. And still, whenever Pee Wee got out of jail, Randy would take him shopping, deck him out in new clothes and shoes for a fresh start ... then retreat behind the firewall that had saved him, the one he'd teach his players to erect.

"I've got two choices," he says. "I can sit back and say everything's against me, I'm going in the tank. Or I can accept the hand that's been dealt me and move forward. I never think about why? or why me? I never second-guess it. I forget about what happened three seconds ago. People ask me what I did last night. I can't remember. They think I'm joking. Every second you think about the past is a second when you can't think about the future, about controlling what you can control. That gives other people an opportunity to control your life. You control your life. You have to control the world. You can never let it control you.

"Nobody ever knew about my life. I just didn't tell them. The less they know, the better off you are. I'm a loner, and I've been successful being a loner. People will interfere in your life if you let them. I confuse people. It's an advantage when people can't figure you out. A lot of people think I'm cold. I care. I just don't show it. I knew that if I got too involved with my siblings' problems, I could fall apart too. People have to live with the decisions they made. Sports saved my life. It was the only light.

"I don't get mad at myself. I don't beat myself up. I don't feel remorse or regret. Death is death. It's normal where I come from. Nothing fazes me anymore. I saw it all as a kid. But I don't use the past to motivate me. I just move on. I just think of something I've got to do. I just want to sleep good at night. I tell players, 'Don't tell me, I can't. I hate that. Don't tell me, I'm tired. Everyone's tired. Everything has to be done right. There are no little things. Little things add up to one big pile of crap. Do what you got to do to sleep right.'"

His message simplified a world that bewildered many of his players. His words were authentic, and players such as Clint Hurtt—who heard them as a Hurricanes defensive lineman and now as an assistant coach—sensed it. "It's just a different deal, growing up as an African-American male," Hurtt says. "The only one who can really teach you what you need to know is an African-American male, but you don't get a chance to hear life experiences from older black men. They get closed off and don't communicate. Randy doesn't go into many details about himself with his players, but he doesn't have to. He gets it across. The relationship is deeper, and the passion's different, playing for someone who's been through the same fire that we have."

PAUL DEE watched Randy depart from the interview. Never had he heard the tunnel from boyhood to manhood charted so narrowly or efficiently. Rarely had he seen a candidate so well prepared. But, damn, could he fill a position of such prominence with a man from that past? A player might arise from such turmoil—he could bottle it and use it as fuel to explode on a field. But a big-time head coach, who had to be a corporate executive officer, a tactician and a recruiter, an alumni-massager, a marketer and media manipulator? Could Dee give the job to an assistant of the head coach he'd just axed, when such chaff usually got flung to the wind with the wheat and when some might ask, Where was Randy Shannon last season when those 13 Miami players—six of them defensive players—were swinging helmets and fists and kicking during the melee with Florida International?

Well, he was 100 feet above ground zero, in the defensive coaches' booth, and wasn't allowed to partake in the disciplinary decisions that ended up on the desk of university president Donna Shalala and resulted—to howls from all across the culture—in only one-game suspensions for virtually all the Hurricanes involved. "I wanted to come downstairs from the booth and start telling the guys involved, 'You're done, you're done, you're gone,'" Randy says. "But I couldn't."

Jimmy Johnson began pounding the drum behind the scenes, insisting that no coach in the country, not Schiano or Spurrier, was better suited to Miami than Shannon. Shalala, an underdog's best friend, and Dee agreed. But the trustees—the bankers and land developers and big donors for whom campus buildings were named—would they go for this?