For the best high school football players in America, today is a day to dream. But tomorrow, as we know well, can never be foreseen.
Today is national signing day, when young football players can commit officially to the colleges of their choice by signing a letter-of-intent. It's a day of expectation. But it's also a day of foreboding. For every success story yet to be written, far more tales of disappointment inevitably await. Heartbreak has always outraced triumph when it comes to young athletes chasing their dreams.
James Brown had a sensational high school career that did not carry him as far in basketball as he had hoped.
(2003 Photo Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
|
|
On a day like today, when these prospects envision a future of fame and fortune, two former athletes come to mind. They were sensational high school basketball players whose futures took unexpected turns that left them deeply disappointed at the time -- but only for a time.
One is well known: He's the sports commentator James Brown, the former all-American at DeMatha who will be seen on television by millions Sunday during the Fox network's coverage of the Super Bowl.
The other is known mostly to his family, friends and colleagues where he has worked for years, at Reagan National Airport: His name is Danny Heater, and he once scored 135 points in a high school basketball game in West Virginia. In tiny Burnsville, and the hills and hollows nearby, they talked about him as much as they did about Jerry West.
The stories of James Brown and Danny Heater suggest that when a young athlete runs smack into a future he never imagined, there doesn't have to be despair.
Brown experienced that "tremendous lure that sports can hold on you." As a rookie in training camp with the Atlanta Hawks in 1973, he believed he was about to begin a successful career in the NBA, especially when Cotton Fitzsimmons, then the Hawks' coach, called him in. "I thought he was going to congratulate me for making the team," Brown said last week. "Instead, he was cutting me. . . . I cried like a baby. I went home and hid for two weeks. I didn't want to come out of the house. You know, two-time all-American in high school, Washington player of the year, not making it . . . "
Without saying a word, Brown speaks to the importance of the academic side of the college life that today's high school seniors will soon begin. He went to Harvard. But no matter where the new hopefuls enroll, there obviously is much to be learned if they use the opportunity. Still, Brown thought that if things didn't work out as expected for young athletes playing big-time college football or basketball, with all the buildup and adulation involved, it would be much harder for them "than I had it when the athletic rug was pulled out from under me."
The "easy" next step for many can be trouble. For Brown, his "easy" next step coming out of Harvard was a secure job in the corporate world. Instead, he gave that up for something he wanted more deeply. He began broadcasting Washington Bullets games for a modest stipend, and from there built an immensely successful sports-related career. Ironically, that bestowed on him greater fame and fortune than he could have achieved years ago in the NBA.
Heater's story is a more typical cautionary tale, because fame was fleeting. At work, he wears a Delta ID pin above his breast pocket -- he is a customer service coordinator. But who knows him to be the guy who scored 135 points in a game, unless maybe they read a profile of him in The Post's Style section in 1991 or have seen an occasional squib in a newspaper that recounts his feat? It was 45 years ago last Wednesday that Danny Heater pulled off his almost unbelievable performance.
His coach wanted the other players to keep feeding him the ball so he would score a ton, bring attention to little Burnsville and, most of all, get Danny Heater a scholarship to college. He was 6 feet and 150 pounds, and he could shoot.
"My family was so poor I couldn't go to college without a scholarship," he said over coffee at Reagan, near the Delta shuttle gate. "I always wanted to go. . . .
"The first couple of minutes I didn't shoot. You know, that wasn't me. The coach called time out and started screaming at me, 'Shoot.' So I did, and we pressed the whole game, and the other team wasn't very good."
The final score was Burnsville 173, Widen 43. He got 32 rebounds and seven assists, and his line read 53-29-135 -- he made 53 field goals and 29 free throws in just 32 minutes.
But only one big-time college scout ever showed up to see him play and, in that game, Heater was laboring with a sprained ankle. Although he still scored 27, close to his average, the scout decided he was "a little slow." But he got his chance anyway, tuition and housing at Richmond provided by a school benefactor. Heater arrived, via bus, between semesters, January 1961, and joined the freshman team. He played but not long enough to get adjusted.
"I had never been away from home," he said. "I was homesick."
And he thought he should help support his parents; his father had been furloughed from the mines. Within six weeks, Heater went back to Burnsville and got a job.
"The freshman coach told me I was making a mistake," Heater said. "It was in my mind quite a lot, especially the first five years or so. I could have played college ball and could have contributed."
His crewcut now is gray. He weighs 100 pounds more than he did the night he poured in the 135. He is ruddy-cheeked, and he smiles easily: He is happy. He lives in Germantown and has a big family that "is everything to me."
For those whose dreams die, as his did, he was sure there are other avenues if only one can find the way, as difficult as that can surely be. "You've got to find something to fill the void and give it everything you have," he said, "and eventually you'll look back and realize it wasn't the end of the world."
