The New Mr. Big At Bc

The night before road games, the BC squad watches a movie. Ruth doesn't join his teammates if he suspects the movie might have sex, swearing, nudity or violence. Funny, that's why a lot of the players go to the movies. "Sometimes we'll have a bad practice and I'll use a few choice words," says coach Bicknell. "But then I see Mike standing there looking so disappointed in me I feel like I have to go over and apologize."

Not that following the straight and narrow is always easy for Ruth. "I made a couple of mistakes," Ruth says. He loved a girl, but couldn't make a commitment because of the other one he may have to make someday. Poverty, chastity and obedience. "I should've told her that at the start," he says. "I hurt her and that was stupid."

Now he tries not to lead himself into temptation. "Obviously, I think premarital sex is wrong," he says. "Whether I've committed that sin is my business." Which reminds us that last year's preseason leader for the Outland Trophy, Pitt's Bill Fralic—Virginia Tech's Bruce Smith wound up winning the award—announced that his favorite pastimes were playing golf, fornicating and getting drunk.

"Most guys on the team think this 'Joe Priest' thing is phony," Ruth says. "They think I'm a hypocrite. That's O.K. A few people know me."

One is Father Paul Wierichs, a Passionist priest working in New York City. Ruth learned of Wierichs through a Philadelphia seminary student who arranged a meeting between Mike and the priest. "I'm sitting in my office when suddenly the light is blocked in the doorway," says Wierichs, who, at 41, is handsomely blond and looks more like a guy you might play against in the country club tennis tournament than a priest. "I look up and there's this huuuuuuuuge person. I assumed it was Mike."

Since then, Wierichs has been recruiting Ruth harder than Boston College ever did. "It may take 10 years," he says, "but I can wait. He calls me. We talk. It's a good feeling."

What if Father Paul gets his man? What does a 255-pound priest ripping at the cassock seams tell his congregation? open up to Page 109 in your Prayer Books or I'll rip your spleens out? What will this Sunday's sermon be? The spiritual side of cleaning and jerking an offensive guard? Maybe. Maybe he would tell them all about the lessons of the pit. But mostly—and firstly—he would tell them about his mother, for that's how all this got started.

If anybody's tougher and stronger than Ruth, it's Ruth's mom, Sally. Debilitated by acute rheumatoid arthritis—"a murderous disease," she calls it—she has had 12 operations in 23 years, replacing nearly every major joint in her body and fusing together much of what was left.

Before all that, Killer was born Sarah Dolan ("I thought I was more like a Sally than a Sarah, so I started calling myself Sally," she says), and she loved to dance. Any steps, really, but she could dance the jitterbug like nobody's business. As head cheerleader at St. Patrick's in Norristown, she had to cheer the hardest against archrival St. Matthews. St. Matthews had a handsome pitcher and basketball player. Name of Tom Ruth. Sally knew who he was. She had seen him at the parochial school dances. One night not long after they had graduated he asked her to dance at a soda shop, and they boogied right on through to their wedding day. Who could figure it? The cheerleader from St. Pat's marrying a star athlete from St. Matt's. Can I have this dance for the rest of my life?

They had been married 10 years when Sally started having trouble with arthritis. When Mike was 10, she had four operations in six weeks: one for a new right knee, one for a new left knee, one for a new right hip and one for a new left hip. Last fall, doctors replaced that left hip, which had replaced the original. Some people only get two hips their whole lives. Killer leads the league with five.