For a Non-Passer, Jason Buck Has Done the Outlandish at BYU

Although Webster’s barely makes a distinction, Jason Buck will tell you that there is a big difference between destiny and fate .

According to Buck’s interpretation, destiny is something you have a say in, something you have a little control over. Fate is more mystical and mythical, another word for dumb luck .

Buck will tell you that he was destined to become a good football player. Luck had nothing to do with it. If it had, he probably never would have gotten where he is. For until recently, Jason Buck’s luck has been mostly bad.

But Buck knew he would one day become the kind of football player everyone would want on their team. And it’s a good thing, too, because there was a time when nobody else knew. There was a time when it appeared to everyone that Jason Buck’s destiny was working 49 hours a week in a seed plant in St. Anthony, Ida., for $3.60 an hour.

But after several detours and a few very painful distractions, Buck arrived at Brigham Young University in 1985 to play football. Now at BYU, the two most important positions on the team are quarterback and back-up quarterback. Provo is the home of the General Motors plant of quarterbacks, and folks in these parts are quite proud of their product. One year, BYU even put out a promotional photo of Coach LaVell Edwards, wearing a hard hat, standing near an assembly line as football players named Young, McMahon, Wilson and Nielsen rolled off. The ol’ quarterback factory theme.

But something strange happened in Provo this season. The Cougars were without a big-name quarterback. Their biggest name was a defensive tackle named Jason Buck. Somewhere along the assembly line, somebody threw in a few spare parts and out came the man who would win the Outland Trophy as the nation’s best interior college lineman. How can this be?

“It’s a lot like our (1984) national championship,” Edwards said. “It almost boggles your mind that it happened.”

But it did. Jason Buck, sack-happy BYU defensive tackle, became only the third Far West player in history to win the Outland award. The other two had been USC’s Ron Yary and Utah State’s Merlin Olsen.

Buck, who will play his last college game for BYU Tuesday in Anaheim Stadium when the Cougars meet UCLA in the Freedom Bowl, was informed that he had won the Outland by Marion Dunn, sports editor of the Provo Daily Herald. There was a certain circularity to that. Some 24 years before, Dunn had covered Olsen’s Utah State teams for the Salt Lake City Tribune.

“I think Jason and Merlin are an awful lot alike,” Dunn said. “They’re both very intelligent. No one could handle Merlin one-on-one, and no one can handle Jason one-on-one, either.

“The funny thing about Merlin was that he really didn’t know how far he could go in football. He hadn’t given much thought to playing football for a living. His plan was to finish up his Army ROTC work, then come back to Logan to open up a sporting goods store.”

Buck was different. He knew .

JASON BUCK AGAINST THE WORLD

Poor upbringing. Family tragedy. Prejudice and rejection from his peers. You name it. Buck went through all of it. It was almost as if the world was trying to run up the score.

The son of a farmer and one of eight children, Buck grew up in poverty. His parents lost their farm when he was an infant and moved the family to Adrian, Ore., a tiny town near the Idaho boarder, to start over. The family settled into modest living quarters. There were two bedrooms. Buck’s parents occupied one, and his five sisters had the other. Buck and his two brothers slept on the floor near the front door.

Buck learned quickly that being Mormon wasn’t going to help him get voted the most popular boy in his class. He was one of only two Mormon boys at his school and came to learn the meaning of religious prejudice. Buck said his family’s farm was vandalized and he heard of people pulling shotguns on Mormon missionaries in Adrian. At school, he was an outcast. He made regular visits to the principal’s office for fighting.

“I was on my own, and I had to defend myself,” he said. “Some of these guys would bring in pornography and hang it on the walls because they knew I didn’t believe in it. I don’t believe in drinking or smoking or partying, so when all the guys would go out, I wouldn’t go because that was all they did. I just never had an opportunity to fit in.”

The closest thing to a friend Buck had was his older brother, Sid. “I can remember nights when Sid would get off work after working 10 hours, drive an hour to get home, then go out and run patterns for me because he knew I wanted to play football,” Buck said. “He’d always tell me, ‘Jason, you’re going to do it someday.’ ”

Sid knew . But when Buck was 15, Sid died.

“We didn’t have a phone on our farm,” Buck said. “I was on the floor asleep when a man came and knocked on our door at about 2 in the morning. My father went to the door, and the man told him that my brother had been killed in a car accident.

“I hero-worshiped my brother. I didn’t have any sports figures or anything as heroes. My big brother and my father were my heroes. I worked with them, I followed them wherever they went. My brother dropped out of high school and got a job when he was 16, and just started giving all his paychecks to my father and the family. He sacrificed everything for our family. When we lost Sid, it was like there was a big void in all of our lives.”

Not long after his brother’s death, Buck convinced his parents that he would have to leave Adrian if he was going to make it in football. His older sister had moved to St. Anthony, a potato-farming town on the eastern edge of Idaho, and Buck persuaded his parents to follow. The high school football would be better there, he told them. “It’s tough to just pick up and move because you have some son who thinks he needs to move to a bigger high school,” he said. “They went totally on my thoughts and what I believed. They trusted me.”

Buck enrolled at South Freemont High School in St. Anthony, where he quickly encountered a different type of prejudice. The new kid in town was not made to feel welcomed after taking the starting quarterback position away from one of the locals. Buck wondered why he had defensive linemen in his face nearly every time he dropped back to pass in a game. He would later find out it was because his offensive linemen wanted to see him get sacked.

“I didn’t know what was going on at the time,” Buck said. “I knew they didn’t want to play for me, but I didn’t know that it was so bad that they were willing to lose the game and let themselves be defeated just in order to spite me. They confessed it to me after the season. It took me until then to work my way into the crowd and get accepted.”

JASON WHO?

College football recruiters weren’t exactly flocking to St. Anthony to offer Buck a scholarship. Fact was, they didn’t know he existed. He was mostly a running quarterback at South Freemont. Jason right and Jason left. If he couldn’t outrun defenders, he’d run over them. But at South Freemont, that was easy to do. So easy that nobody noticed.

Buck figured that his next move was to be a walk-on player at Ricks Junior College in Rexburg, Ida., located about 10 miles South of St. Anthony. He would have to earn a scholarship though, because tuition and fees at Ricks just weren’t in the Buck family budget.

Ken Schmidt, the outside linebacker coach at BYU, was head coach at Ricks then. He said he knew nothing of Jason Buck, except that he wanted to play and wasn’t too particular about his position.

Schmidt said one of his assistants informed Buck that he didn’t have a big future as a quarterback, so Buck tried tight end. That lasted one day. He tried linebacker, “but he wasn’t a linebacker, either,” Schmidt said. “Finally, we tried him at defensive line. He played there for about four or five days. But when he realized he wasn’t going to get a scholarship, he came to me and said, ‘Coach, I’m gonna work hard and build myself up, then I’m gonna come back here and play for you.’ I thought to myself, ‘Mmm-hmmm. Sure you are. As a coach, you hear that kind of thing from kids all the time.”

Buck took a job stocking shelves at the local supermarket. Whenever Schmidt came in to pick up some groceries, Buck would approach him to remind him of his plans to return to Ricks. Schmidt had to pretend he recognized him.

“I didn’t even remember his name,” he said. “I just called him ‘Big Fella.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’m working out. I’m gonna get better.’ And I said, ‘Hey, that’s great, Big Fella.’ ”

It was nearly two years before Buck decided to give Ricks another try. He spent some of that time lifting weights to turn his quarterback’s body into one more befitting a defensive lineman. The rest was spent earning money for his family.

Buck labored in a seed plant in St. Anthony, filling sacks of grain and stacking them onto pallets. “We got up to eight pallets an hour, so that meant throwing about 15,000 pounds or more of grain an hour. You’d take a sack, sew it, spin it around and throw it on a pallet while your partner did the same thing. Nine hours a day.”

And for $3.60 an hour. The pay wasn’t much, but there were a few benefits. The work gave him strength and taught him the principles of leverage. And it gave him more incentive.

“It just drove me harder to succeed in football,” he said. “It gave me more hunger and desire. It told me I didn’t want to do things like that the rest of my life. I wanted to work my way up.”

Throwing sacks of grain and pumping pounds of iron enabled Buck to add about 30 pounds to his frame. Two years after leaving Ricks, he decided it was time to try again. This time, coaches there presented him with a scholarship. Things began happening, as Buck knew they would. He set a school record for sacks as a freshman with 17. As a sophomore, he set a national JC record with 25 quarterback sacks. He was a first-team JC All-American.

Suddenly, the quarterback nobody wanted was the defensive lineman college coaches craved. Buck stood 6-feet, 6-inches tall, weighed 270 pounds and had the speed to chase down running backs. ‘Bama was bananas about him. The Longhorns of Texas wanted to hook him. Ohio State, Arizona, Maryland and Georgia Tech all courted him.

And, eventually, so did BYU.

CHECKING IN AT THE ‘Y’

Before the 1986 season, when he was still an Outland Trophy candidate , Buck got a call from the people at Playboy magazine. They wanted him to come down to Miami for a weekend to get in a little deep-sea fishing, go to a big barbecue, and pose for some group pictures as a member of Playboy’s preseason All-American team. “It sounded like a blast,” Buck said. And it wouldn’t have hurt in the campaign for the Outland.

Buck turned them down. He politely told them that having his picture appear in Playboy would conflict with his devout Mormon beliefs.

“When I chose to come to BYU, I chose to represent it,” he said. “I wanted to represent the church well. They were very nice people and they treated me very well over the phone. But I just felt, for years to come, I’d be sort of a sports figure to this area and the church people. I’d be looked up to as an example, especially by children. I just thought it was best in the long run to keep my name out of the magazine and represent something different.”

But despite Buck’s devotion to the Mormon church, BYU almost saw him two-step off to Texas. Buck made no great secret of his desire to attend BYU but felt there were other schools more interested in having him. Texas was one of them. BYU didn’t start recruiting Buck until several months after other schools began their pursuit of him. And the Cougar coaches knew of his religious affiliation, too. “Maybe that’s why,” Buck said. “They just assumed.”

Said Edwards: “We did have a problem convincing him that he was as important to us as he was to the people who had recruited him all along. The only thing that really saved us was that he had always wanted to go to BYU. If it hadn’t been for that, we might not have gotten him.”

In two seasons at BYU, Buck has 24 sacks for losses totaling 104 yards, 40 tackles and 72 assists. He was the Western Athletic Conference’s defensive player of the year last season. He helped the Cougars hold opponents to 88.8 yards rushing per game this season.

After the Freedom Bowl, he and his wife, Roxi, whom he met not long after moving to St. Anthony, we’ll begin the countdown to the National Football League draft. “Roxi already has it marked down on our calendar,” he said.

The Bucks recently had their first child. Brittney Buck is four months old, and Daddy hopes she will one day be able to tell her friends about her father, the pro football star.

“I’m happy with winning the Outland, but I’m not satisfied,” Buck said. “Once I’m satisfied, that means I’ll stop improving, and I don’t ever want to let that happen. I want to be as successful on the pro level as I’ve been on the college level. Hopefully, when draft day comes around, I’ll be one of the first names you here.”

Now, it seems practically all of football has heard of Jason Buck. And to think he was once the only one who knew.