After Dual Tragedies, Oklahoma Player Turns to His Mother, Not Football, First

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- He couldn't grab her in time. Dominique Franks's mother slipped through his arms and dropped to the floor of their apartment, her sobs and wails filling his ears, and it was right there that he made a decision far more important than any he has ever made on a football field: He would make this up to her somehow.

He recalled lifting her off the floor, hugging her to his chest, trying to smother her anguish as she absorbed the news from the police officers standing in their living room: His stepfather and her beloved husband, Bo, had been killed in a car accident two days before Christmas.

Franks was a freshman in high school then, just 15 and far slighter and less accomplished than he is now as a 6-foot, 189-pound, starting defensive back for the top-ranked Oklahoma Sooners, who Thursday will play the No. 2 Florida Gators in the BCS championship game at Dolphin Stadium.

For more than three years after his stepfather's death, as he set a school record for interceptions and earned various all-state honors, Franks never forgot the promise he had made. And after another unfathomable heartbreak -- his biological father committed suicide hours before one of his games during his senior season, an event that sent Franks and his mother reeling once again -- he knew just what he would do.

"When those tragedies happened, they just brought us closer," Franks, 21, said. "They made me realize I was going to always have her by my side."

And he wanted the world, at least the small part of it in which he roamed, to know exactly where she stood. So as the senior prom at Tulsa's Union High approached and the girls in his class speculated about whom he would bring, Franks told his mother, Thelma Martin, now 37, to buy a dress and get her hair done. She would be his date.

"No woman in the world is greater than my mother," Franks said by phone before traveling to South Florida last Friday. "The prom is one of your greatest nights in high school. Why not top it off with the greatest woman in the world?"

On the night of the dance, he put on a black tux and walked to his own doorstep with a white corsage and friend's car idling behind him. She wore a black dress and black, open-toed heels. When Franks took hold of Martin's hand as she stepped out of his borrowed car, teachers, administrators and students clapped, cheered and, finally, cried. The men cried. The women cried. Everybody did, Franks recalled.

"That was one of the best nights I ever had, just seeing how happy my mother was," Franks said. "I wouldn't change that night for the world."

Martin said she fought to keep her composure because she wanted to make her son proud. Then she danced into the wee hours, honoring requests from all of Franks's friends.

"It was," she said, "like out of a fairy tale."

Only it had taken a long time, and lots of tears, to reach that happy ending, which has stretched out as time has assuaged the mother's and son's pain and brought more reasons for joy. Franks, a redshirt sophomore who has intercepted four passes this season and returned a fumble and an interception for touchdowns, has played a major role in the Sooners' success. Surrounded by reporters in a hotel ballroom Sunday morning, most wanting to know how the Sooners' defense could possibly slow down the most fleet-footed offense in the country, Franks addressed his questioners with "sir," and "ma'am" and looked unfazed.