They will gather tonight in a large, open room to watch football. There will be Louisiana State fans, Texas fans, Arkansas fans. Many of them can't stand Oklahoma, and would, in fact, prefer that the Sooners not be in the Orange Bowl, playing for the national championship against Southern California.
Yet when Sooners freshman Adrian Peterson gets the ball, the calls will echo through the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Tex. "They might not like Oklahoma," Adrian's father, Nelson, said of his fellow inmates. "But almost all of them root for A.D."
Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson's dad will support his son from in front of a television set in a Texas jail.
(Carlos Barria - Reuters)
|
| USC vs. Oklahoma
• Orange Bowl participants USC and Oklahoma are very similar in terms of talent.
• Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson has a cheering section at the Texas prison where his father is locked up.
• Wilbon: The BCS debate has distracted from a bumper crop of talent in college football this year.
• The two Heisman winning quarterbacks will likely decide who wins the national championship.
_____Bowl Schedule, Results_____
• From Boise to Mobile, keep up with all 28 bowl games crammed into three weeks of college football.
| | |
|
A.D., in this case, means "All Day," which, long ago, was what Nelson Peterson dubbed his son, because that's how long he could run. But that was before Nelson Peterson ended up spending his son's legendary high school career locked up, before he was sent away for 10 years for laundering money in relation to the sale of crack cocaine, long before his son was just 21 yards away from setting a Division I-A freshman rushing record.
It was before Nelson Peterson started trying to raise his son over the phone, or through a pane of glass.
"The mistakes that I made, I talk to him all the time about those," Peterson said in a telephone interview last month. "Things can change, just like that, overnight. It's all about choices you make. Look at your father. Your father was 35 years old, and he made the wrong choice. If you make the wrong choice at the wrong time, you could end up here."
"Here" is not exactly Alcatraz. The FCI in Texarkana is a low-security facility adjacent to a minimum-security camp for men, where Peterson spends his days. "If Martha Stewart was a man," Peterson said, "this is where she'd be." There is softball, tennis, free weights, basketball -- and a television. Each Saturday since September, the men have gathered around the TV, where, Peterson said, "sports is the main thing."
"You have people pulling for different teams," Peterson said, "but over the last year, a lot of people have warmed up to me."
They have warmed because of Nelson Peterson's son, the kid who enters tonight's national championship game having become the Heisman Trophy runner-up in his first college season, who will almost certainly surpass the freshman rushing mark set by Wisconsin's Ron Dayne in 1996. Entering the Orange Bowl, Peterson has rushed for 1,843 yards on 314 carries. Should he gain 53 yards tonight -- he has at least 100 in 11 of his 12 career games -- he will surpass the Oklahoma season record, set by Billy Sims in 1978, when Sims won the Heisman.
Thus, Peterson's story would have been one of the most intriguing in college football this season, even without his family situation. But not many college freshmen receive counsel from an incarcerated father. In the interview, Nelson Peterson declined to discuss the specifics of his case, though he said his discussions with Adrian constantly deal with the topic.
"I mainly got hooked up with the wrong people, and made some wrong decisions," Peterson said.
To hear Nelson Peterson tell it, he knows what it's like to have athletic potential and let it slip away. He played two years of college basketball at Idaho State, averaging more than 18 points one season, but then, by his own admission, allowed injuries to derail him -- "messed up my leg, and couldn't continue my career," he said.
These are the things he tells Adrian about sports, about choices, about focus.
"I could've made the choice of going back to college," Nelson Peterson said. "But instead, I took the easy route, and the easy route will most times wind you up in a place you don't want to be, a place like this."
"I started him off playing basketball, had him playing football when he was seven years old. It was hard on him to digest when I got incarcerated. I wasn't there no more. We never had a time when we had any negative feelings about it; we always loved each other. But I was more worried about how he would be able to function and deal with things out there with me not being there. He respected me so much, and he looked up to me so much, and then I went away. He lost a piece of his heart."
