The Can't Miss Kid

Maud Humphries has just served up her special-recipe spicy crab gumbo, and now she is awaiting the reaction. She gets it instantly from her husband, Thornton, at the other end of the table. Thornton wipes his face with a napkin and says, "You eat this stuff and you get tears in your eyes, your lips sting and your nose runs. Isn't it wonderful?" There is great, good laughter—pass the iced tea—all around. Even Stefan, Maud and Thornton's 18-year-old son who's already wrist-deep in gluttony, interrupts his chewing to join in. Outside their Fort Lauderdale home, the soft spring breezes are blowing away the leftover heat of the day and the palms rustle in relief. Inside, lively conversation continues—pass the hush puppies—and everything does seem wonderful.

And well it should. For in this ideal, if somehow unreal, south Florida setting, 6'4", 235-pound Stefan Humphries has become the ideal, if somehow unreal, college football prospect of 1980. He's an extraordinary player with extraordinary brains in an extraordinary family fueled by extraordinary gumbo.

Stefan was named a high school All-America by Scholastic Coach magazine and Player of the Year for his district by the Fort Lauderdale Touchdown Club. He was an all-county and all-state selection and co-winner of the National Football Foundation, Brian Piccolo Chapter, Scholar Athlete Award, beating out 24 other athletes from his area for the honor. Blue Chip magazine picked him as one of the nation's 150 finest college football prospects, and Joe Terranova of National Prep Publications calls him one of the nation's 15 best recruits.

Nearly every college that pumps up a football humped for Hump, as he is called. Recruiters from more than 40 universities trekked to Fort Lauderdale to smile and grovel. Michigan got him and probably will play him this fall at defensive tackle, although most of Stefan's experience has been in the offensive line. Wolverine Coach Bo Schembechler says, "He has the attitude, the athletic ability, the size, the motivation, the scholastic ability, everything."

Schembechler has good reason to be positively giddy. In these days of sleaze in college football—including all manner of fakery when it comes to transcripts, class attendance, recruiting, etc.—Stefan (named by his mother after a doctor on the television soap Young Dr. Malone) is a lighthouse in a stormy night. His high school coach, George Smith, says, "Stefan gives you faith in what you're doing."

Indeed, Hump is proof that the system, whatever that is, can produce an outstanding football player who loves the game but who knows there are many things more important than being able to knock somebody down. Like what? "Like my mind," says Stefan.

Meet Stefan's mind. In the senior class of 260 at Fort Lauderdale's St. Thomas Aquinas High—a school with fine and growing athletic and academic reputations—Humphries ranks first with an average of 99.40 (see box). His lowest marks are 93s in communication arts and typing, but he shoots the lights out in physics, calculus, biology, Latin, American history, chemistry and theology. All of which doesn't much impress Stefan, who is a member of his school's National Honor Society chapter. "Frankly, I'm more interested in learning than I am in grades," he says.

Stefan hasn't come by such high-mindedness accidentally. His father was a high school valedictorian and got a basketball scholarship to Seattle University, where he was a teammate of the legendary Elgin Baylor. "What I learned at Seattle," says Thornton, "is that if you didn't get the ball to Elgin, you found your way to the bench mighty fast." Thornton is principal of Everglades Traditional Middle School, and at 6'7�", 275 pounds he's fully capable of upholding any traditions you care to mention. Maud was valedictorian of her high school class, went to Florida A&M on an academic scholarship and teaches English at Dillard High.

This brings us to the Humphries' firstborn, Thorna, who was valedictorian at St. Thomas in 1973 with an average of 98.4. She is completing her master's (as a scholarship student) in computer science at MIT. The second child, Shawn, was valedictorian at St. Thomas in 1974 with an average of 97.9 and is completing her second year (on scholarship, of course) at Nashville's Meharry Medical College. The third child, Faye, was—oh, horrors!—35th in her 1977 St. Thomas class of 232 with an average of 93.15. "I don't have any complexes," says Faye with a laugh. "I'm not stupid." Her scholarship came in basketball from Tennessee State, where she has completed her junior year. And then, of course, there is Stefan.

"In this house, we set goals, and once they were attained, we set higher goals," says Thornton. "We taught all the children how to study, then required it. Stefan had no choice in the matter. What we do around here is work hard and achieve. I was just the enforcer."