Somebody Worth Talking About : Charger Rookie Courtney Hall Is Young and Full of Promise

The Chargers will tell you all sorts of fascinating facts about Courtney Hall, the center they selected in the second round of April’s NFL draft.

They will tell you about how he bench-pressed 225 pounds 36 times in a row at the combine scouting workouts in Indianapolis last winter. Nobody else did more.

They will tell you Hall was identified as “gifted” (135 IQ or higher) by the California state educational system when he was a fifth-grader in Carson.

They will tell you Hall will be the youngest player in the NFL (20) when training camp begins in July. They will tell you he is the center of their future despite the ferocity of the competition Hall is getting from ornery Dennis McKnight and 34-year-old Don Macek, a player who refuses to go away.

There’s lots to tell about Courtney Hall. There’s even more to know.

Many of the facts the Chargers won’t volunteer about Hall are scary, sad, moving, marvelous, interesting, inspiring and intense.

They will tell you Hall’s Banning High School football team won the Los Angeles Class 4-A city championship in 1983. But they won’t tell you about the darkness that invaded Hall’s world that fall. Probably because they don’t know. And even if they do, it’s not the kind of stuff you put in the media guide.

“Courtney never smiled once that whole year,” said Chris Ferragamo, Hall’s high school coach and brother of former Ram quarterback Vince Ferragamo.

And he didn’t tell anybody why. He didn’t want anybody to know his father was dying.

“What good would that have done?” he says.

In September of that year, William Hall had driven himself to the hospital in the family car. He would never leave. He complained initially to doctors about shortness of breath. Tests uncovered a cyst on his neck that eventually caused paralysis from the chest down.

There was a brief period after doctors removed the cyst when they thought William Hall was recovering. But soon he needed a tracheotomy. Then he began hemorrhaging. A week after Banning won the city championship, he died.

“It was very devastating to all of us,” said Doris Hall, Courtney’s mother. So devastated was Doris that she never returned to her job as dean of a local junior high school.

She isn’t sure whether it was her son’s role in Banning’s championship season that kept her husband alive that autumn or just strong family ties. “But there was something,” she said. “There was somebody holding onto somebody. . . . But in the end, he just asked me to let him go.”

Each day after football practice that fall, Hall would visit his father. He begged Ferragamo to let him take game film, which he would show his father in the hospital room. William Hall had no voice, and his son could only understand his father’s words by reading his lips.

“But,” Doris Hall said, “my husband was lucid to the end.”

He was so lucid that it frustrated Courtney. USC and Rice were aggressively recruiting Hall. And when Stanford, Hall’s first choice, lost interest, Hall wanted his father’s guidance.

“Recruiting,” he says now, recalling that period, “is a dirty game.”

But William Hall had raised his son to be independent. The boy, not the father, would make the decision.

“Courtney came home from the hospital one day with tears in his eyes,” Doris Hall remembers. “He was angry. He said: ‘I just asked my father which school I should attend, and he wouldn’t tell me.’ ”

Doris Hall thought about that for a long time after her husband died. The conclusion she finally reached was unmistakeable. “Courtney would have done whatever his father had said. But I feel his father didn’t want to control Courtney’s mind from the grave.”

So Hall chose Rice, a school whose incoming freshmen last year averaged more than 1,300 on their combined SATs. He enrolled as a petroleum engineering major. And he was 16 years old when he became a starting center in the nails-tough Southwest Conference.

Neither his mother nor Ferragamo was surprised. Doris Hall remembers Courtney teaching himself to ride a tricycle less than a month after learning to walk. “If you gave him a task to do,” she says, “he’d do it.” She sent him to kindergarten at age 4.

Ferragamo’s first exposure to Hall was in 1981. Hall was a 5-11, 143-pound 10th-grader Banning used at the end of the season to run scout-team plays. One year later, Hall had gained 40 pounds and made second team all-city at left tackle. By his senior year, he was up to 225. “But it was his get-off that was incredible,” Ferragamo says. “He got off the ball so quickly. He wasn’t fast, but he had this acceleration in his legs. It was like an explosion.”

Courtney Hall, Ferragamo says, threw the best block he ever saw. It was against a big, fast, mean 250-pound kid from Long Beach Poly. Ferragamo still uses film of the block as a training tool. “He just got under this kid, lifted his head, kept his feet driving, raised him clear off the ground and put him flat on his back. Then he hustled downfield and made a shield block that helped the running back get a couple of extra yards.”

Media guide stuff.

The Chargers will readily tell you about Hall’s strength and how he has bulked up to almost 280 pounds. But they won’t tell you about the two shoulder operations Hall underwent after his junior season at Rice.

“You might not get your position back,” Hall’s mother told him at the time.

She was wrong.

But she wasn’t wrong in the way she kept her two sons away from the gangs and drugs that were almost as prevalent and accessible in Carson as they were in the higher-crime downtown LA areas. Courtney Hall and his older brother Rod were taking piano and guitar lessons when Courtney was 4. Either Doris or William would drive the two boys to and from school and to and from their lessons. Later, there were family trips to Europe.

Eventually, the Halls allowed their sons to ride bikes. “But we didn’t allow them to hang out under the trees at night,” Doris Hall says.

This was wise. Courtney Hall says he could have joined a gang as early as the fifth grade if he had wanted to do so. The younger kids, he says, would audition for gangs by spray-painting on the walls and hanging out at night in Del Amo Park “drinking, smoking, getting high and harassing people.”

A lot of these people are still Hall’s friends (another fact you won’t find in the Charger press guide). But, Hall admits, “you probably wouldn’t want me to introduce them to your daughter.”

Parenthetically, Ferragamo says Hall is just “the kind of kid you want your daughter to go out and marry.”

As the gang kids got older, their activities evolved, in Hall’s words, into “drug-dealing, armed robbery, drive-by shootings and all that.”

“Kids could go out and get a job that would pay them $5 an hour,” Hall says. “Or they could deal drugs and make five grand a week.”

The latter, Hall says, drove Porsches, Mercedes and Rolls Royces. They sometimes ended up being chauffeured. In a hearse.

One of Hall’s earliest childhood friends, also identified by the school system as “gifted,” went “down the wrong path,” Hall says. “He got shot in the head three times and killed in LA.”

The Chargers would rather tell you about how Tampa Bay called moments after they selected Hall and offered a 1989 first-round pick in trade. But they won’t tell you about the scouts who looked at Hall’s 6-1 1/2 body and decided his arms were too short to extend far enough into the frames of opposing defensive linemen.

“I’ve always thought I had long arms,” Hall said recently. “But it would be nice to be 6-4.”

Yet Hall says his arms were measured two inches longer than those of Ohio State’s 6-3 Jeff Uhlenake, a fifth-round pick of the Dolphins. Hall and Uhlenake were the second and third centers selected. Minnesota’s Brian Williams (Giants), who played center in the postseason all-star games, was the 18th player taken overall. Williams is 6-5 but will probably play guard for the Giants next year.

Colt General Manager Jimmy Irsay recently told a reporter for Long Island’s Newsday that the Colts would have selected Hall with the 22nd pick of the first round if Michigan State wide receiver Andre Rison had not been available. Marvin Demoff, Hall’s Los Angeles-based agent, will be happy to read that.

When Hall eventually signs, he says will buy himself a Blazer or a small truck. The Mercedes or Rolls Royce will have to wait until Hall realizes his post-football goal of becoming a “CEO of a major corporation.”

In the meantime, he will continue to study. Right now he is majoring in Dwight Stephenson. Miami’s Stephenson is fighting back from a serious knee injury. But he is generally conceded to be the NFL’s best center of the ‘80s and perhaps the most technically advanced at his position ever to play the game.

Hall says Stephenson gets his left hand up so quickly after he snaps the ball that defensive linemen are “stunned before they can even start the pass rush move. Also on run-blocking, he’s so quick, he can get position on his men and cut them off before they even know where the ball’s going. And he has such great leverage that you rarely ever see him getting run over.”

Doris Hall remembers the summer before Courtney’s sophomore year at Banning. Practice had just begun, and it was his first exposure to tackle football. “Courtney would come home just sagging,” she says. “It looked like his be hind was hurting. He would do those drills till there were tears in his eyes. But he would do them.”

Maybe that’s the most interesting fact about Courtney Hall. You can get him down. But it will be harder to run over him the next time. And harder yet the third.

“The Chargers got a jewel,” Ferragamo says.

Save that quote for the media guide.