The Back Is Back

IT IS LATE APRIL 2008, AND TORRENTIAL rains have kept the Wisconsin Badgers inside their domed practice facility for their final spring practice, but the diminutive running back with the eye-popping thighs and the glimmering smile is undeterred. P.J. Hill is stretching each noncontact practice play to the limit. When he knocks off a 10-yard gain, the 5' 11" Hill doesn't stop chugging until he's traveled the entire field. Another five-yard rip, and there he goes sprinting the remainder of the open turf. He loops back to the huddle, then unreels a proper 78-yard sweep, untouched to the far end zone.

With all that youthful energy, it almost seems as if Hill has never been here before—which, in fact, he hasn't. For two springs in a row he has been shelved with injuries. Now that he's finally healthy in April, he's not about to waste a precious moment resting. And to think, Hill probably wouldn't be here at all if not for Dolphins running back Ricky Williams. But that part comes later in the story.

IF APRIL '08 WAS A HIGH POINT FOR P.J. HILL, then the spring of '02 was his alltime low. Hill doesn't remember the date, but he remembers the alarm clock shattering the silence of his bedroom in the East Elmhurst, Queens, neighborhood of New York City at 5 a.m. He was a 15-year-old freshman, and he'd been up past 3 a.m. doing homework, so a second alarm was necessary. Pamela Moss, Hill's stepmother, was threatening to use a bucket of water when Hill finally shook off the z's and made his way to the computer printer to retrieve the fruits of a night's labor: the fourth and final draft of a 10-page history paper.

P.J. knew the stakes. If his teacher didn't sign off on this draft, he would have to go to summer school. And if faced with summer school, he would quit Poly Prep, the private Brooklyn school he spent up to five hours commuting to and from every day. And if he quit Poly Prep, it would be back to public school, probably at August Martin High with its 43.9% graduation rate and the gangs that his family had tried so hard to keep him away from. And then college ball would be in jeopardy. As Hill emerged from a dreary seven-floor brick apartment building overlooking the Van Wyck Expressway and under the booming air traffic of LaGuardia Airport, Poly Prep seemed very far away.

From the age of four, when P.J.'s parental custody was determined in a New York courtroom, he was raised in the gritty East Elmhurst and Corona neighborhoods of Queens by his father, Parrish Sr. For the most part, Parrish made do by working two low-income jobs, counseling at a group home for adolescents and delivering parts for a junkyard. He had to be creative when it came to babysitters, which is how seven-year-old P.J. found himself a linesman for an amateur football team called Never Fear Competition. Parrish had friends on NFC, and he trusted they could keep an eye on P.J. if the kid was holding a big orange yard marker. That worked fine until Steve Holloway, NFC's organizer, looked over one day and realized that P.J. was gone. "This big running back, we called him Boogaloo, had just tore off a long run, just bulling people over," Holloway recalls. "And there was P.J. running with Boogaloo all the way down the sideline." When P.J. finally calmed down, he told everybody, "I want to be just like Boogaloo."

From then on Parrish devoted his free time to P.J.'s football instruction. Anything, he figured, to keep his son from the drugs and violence of Northern Boulevard. Afternoons, he would pop an adult helmet onto P.J.'s dome and walk the kid to Flushing Meadows Park, across from Shea Stadium, where he would do his best to mold his son after the greats: Earl Campbell, Barry Sanders...Boogaloo.

BY THE TIME P.J. hit eighth grade, he had made a name for himself on the Pop Warner fields, and Dino Mangiero, the varsity football coach at Poly Prep, offered to watch the boy play. Observing from the sideline that day, Parrish knew Mangiero held the keys to P.J.'s future. A Poly Prep brochure was like a glimpse of heaven: The clock tower, the white pillars, the ponds.... Poly Prep had a nationally ranked football team, top-notch coaches (Mangiero would go on to Indiana) and a history of academic excellence. So, when his son didn't play along, Parrish was livid.

Late in that game P.J. burst into the open field, only a teeny cornerback standing between him and the end zone—between P.J. Hill and Poly Prep. But instead of juking him, P.J. went in for the kill, just as Boogaloo would have. The defender hit the ground, reached out a pipe cleaner arm in desperation and P.J. came tumbling down. Had Mangiero stuck around, he would have seen Parrish run onto the field, grab the kid's face mask and dress him down. But he was already gone. "I only watched him play about 15 minutes," Mangiero remembers. "It was obvious, he was a man among boys." Hill had learned his lesson, and he was still going to Poly Prep.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHERE P.J. FOUND himself heading on that early morning in the spring of '02. Freshman year hadn't gone according to plan, and he would have almost two hours of commuting to take it all in. On a 15-minute walk to the number 7 train he could reflect on a season spent toiling on the jayvee because Mangiero didn't play freshmen. If he missed the express, he had an hour on the local to think about the coming season. Paul Anderson, whose parents drove him 15 minutes to Poly Prep, would be starting ahead of him. From Times Square, P.J. would have 40 minutes on the Q and R trains to think about the buddies he left in Queens every day, the same ones who ragged on his khaki pants and blazer. And when he hit the last stop on the R, at 95th Street, he would have another 15-minute walk to decide how he was going to break the news to his coach and then to his dad. "I was young, and I was stressed," Hill says now. "I eventually passed that [history] paper, but that experience drove me to the edge." In his head, P.J. Hill was done with Poly Prep.

Hill was not ready to be done with football, however, and in June he attended a camp in upstate New York run by then Miami Dolphins quarterback Jay Fiedler. Among the instructors was Fiedler's teammate Ricky Williams, as well as Poly Prep's Craig Jacoby, who had just been named Mangiero's successor. Hill had already delivered the news to Jacoby at this point, but the coach was relentless. He pulled Williams aside and explained that the boy was thinking about quitting private school. He pointed to Hill and implored, "Just talk to the kid."