A Man With Deep Roots And Deep Routes

The cotton is ripe in the wide fields along Louisiana Highway 1, resembling heavy, wet snow. It's October, and it's raining hard. Lawns are flooded. The runoff ditches are full. Scattered along the two-lane road are reminders of summer and its tourists, boarded-up wooden shacks with signs reading BAIT, FIREWORKS and SHELLED PECANS. On a crackly radio broadcast of the Saints-Rams game on this Sunday come reports from Miami: Dolphins and Oilers, still no score. No TDs for Duper. At least not yet.

This is a road Mark Duper has traveled often. He drove it long before he ever touched a football and started lighting up the NFL. Highway 1 runs up through Louisiana like a scratch across a boot, from toe to ankle to calf, and for the first 23 years of his life, Duper lived or went to school within a mile of it. Talk about roots.

On this wet afternoon, just a few hundred yards off the same road, in the central Louisiana town of Mansura, Mark's parents, Doris and Walter, are inside the new five-bedroom brick house, complete with pool, that their youngest son has given them. Doris is getting misty-eyed talking about it. "I love this house so much," she says. "I still can't believe it. I don't go anywhere. I just spend all my time in here, going from room to room. Markie, he's so good to me. Sometimes I go out on the porch and look around, and I just start to cry."

The TV in the living room is tuned to Miami-Houston. "Twenty yards a catch," says Walter. "That's his average." Walter is a retired plumber, disabled by chronic bronchitis. He never followed sports much, but he knows Mark's stats—51 receptions last year, 10 touchdowns, a Dolphin-record 1,003 yards. And another bushel of numbers this year—53 catches, 1,022 yards and seven TDs through the undefeated Dolphins' 24-23 win over the Eagles on Sunday. The TV announcers are using Mark's nickname. "They call him Super," says Walter, smiling. "Super Duper. I like that." He chuckles.

Doris is afraid to watch her 5'9", 187-pound son getting hit by 230-pound linebackers. She suggests a tour of the house. "Markie chose all this furniture," she says. "Wouldn't let me in the house until everything was perfect. I was working at the old-folks' home then, cleaning, and he didn't like that. I was having trouble with pinched nerves in my hands. When we first moved in he'd carry me to bed like a baby. He'd say, 'You took care of me, now I'm going to take care of you.' He even wanted to have someone in every week to take care of this place. I told him, 'I at least can keep my own house clean.' "

She goes into a den, the trophy room. "These are for track," she says, pointing to a row of plaques Mark earned for winning state Class B high school titles in the triple jump, long jump and 100- and 220-yard dashes in 1976 and '77. Here is a color photo of Mark, one finger raised, crossing the line as the winning anchor for Northwestern (La.) State University in the finals of the 400-meter relay at the 1981 NCAA track and field championships. Here is a competitor's pass from the 1980 Olympic trials, at which Mark finished seventh in the 200-meter dash and reached the semifinals of the 100. Here are high school basketball trophies, a 1970 woodworking ribbon from the 4-H and certificates from a grade school piano recital and a "Junior Deputy Sheriff" course given by the Avoyelles Parish sheriff's office. Oddly, half the awards in the room are inscribed "Mark Dupas" instead of " Mark Duper." Oddly, too, there is very little to suggest that Mark Duper ever played football.

Finally, the inevitable comes: There's a whoop from the living room; it's Marino to Duper, in the end zone. The Dolphins are on their way to a 28-10 victory. "Sometimes," says Doris Duper, shaking her head, "this all just doesn't seem possible."

There he went, scorching a takeoff route down the left sideline of the Pontiac Silverdome. But the ball was underthrown. Mark Duper looked up straight over his head, sank to his knees and caught the pass on his fingertips. "That one catch sold me," says Dolphin coach Don Shula.

The BLESTO scouting camp in the spring of 1982 in Pontiac brought Duper to the fore. "I knew I wasn't thought much of by the scouts, so I had to show them something," he says. To most of the judges gathered in the Silverdome that day, Duper was just another track man, albeit a gifted one, with 10.21 speed for the 100 meters, 20.77 for the 200. He had never played a down of organized football until walking on at Northwestern (La.) State in the fall of his junior year, 1980, and he'd pretty much wasted that season as a backup tailback. Only after switching to wide receiver as a senior and hauling in 24 passes for an average of 24.7 yards per catch had he drawn any attention.

But speed was Duper's selling point. A few days before the tryout camp, several pro scouts and his coach at Northwestern State, A.L. Williams, had timed Duper in the 40 along with teammate Victor Oatis, later a wide receiver with the Colts. "We got 4.29 for Oatis and 4.28 for Duper," says Williams. "We all thought our watches were fouled up. But the watches all read the same." The only NFL player ever to record a faster time is world-record high hurdler Renaldo Nehemiah of the 49ers, who clocked a 4.18. "I think he could have been one of the world's greatest 200-meter runners," says Duper's college track coach, Jerry Dyes.