Drawing on the Past to Secure a Future : Incentive: Barry Voorhees’ memory of his late father motivates him to become the first CS Northridge player drafted by the NFL.

Barry Voorhees says that he would like to play professional football.

So who’s going to tell him he can’t?

Voorhees is 6-foot-5, weighs nearly 300 pounds, has bench-pressed almost twice his weight and is routinely timed in the 4.75 range for 40 yards.

Besides, his track record shows he delivers. What Voorhees wants, he usually gets.

For instance, five years ago an attractive brunette dumped him for someone else. Voorhees wanted her back. She became Mrs. Voorhees on Aug. 15, 1987.

And that truck he had to have as soon as he could drive? Voorhees, still a few months shy of his 16th birthday, paid cash for it. Four thousand, eight hundred dollars earned delivering newspapers and mowing lawns.

You say the odds of playing in the National Football League tend to be slim no matter how big you are? No kidding, Voorhees says. Please spread the word among friends, family and anyone else who asks.

They see that physique, chiseled like Greek sculpture. They know of his speed and strength. Therefore, they expect certain things.

“Hey, Barry, when you go pro . . . “

Did someone just say when?

Never mind that Voorhees, 25, currently toils at offensive guard for Cal State Northridge, a Division II school that has managed to play football for 28 years without one of its players getting drafted.

Indeed, Voorhees, a senior, might be the first. He has been told by professional scouts that he might be selected as high as the third round of the April draft.

But he is not sure he believes them. And no, it’s not false modesty. It’s because he is a Voorhees, one who chooses to hold emotion close to the vest. Some might say he’s a tad cynical. He likes to think he’s a realist.

Barry’s mother, Nancy, says those traits come from his father, a man who would speak his mind without pausing to sugarcoat the words. You either liked Vern Voorhees because he was honest, or disliked him for the same reason.

Gabe Marquez, who lived in the same Goleta neighborhood, tagged his best friend’s father with the nickname “Vicious.” Why? “Because he was,” Marquez says.

Heck, the man didn’t even like Christmas. “He thought it was used as an excuse for America to get crazy and spend money,” his son says while resting in the bleachers at North Campus Stadium after a recent practice. “He thought it was blown way out of proportion.”

Thanksgiving, now that was a real holiday. No commercialization. Just a time to reflect on life’s goodness, sit down to a hearty meal with family and watch football on TV.

Vern Voorhees spent Thanksgiving Day, 1988, doing just that. He helped cook dinner, made his first apple pie, then settled in for an evening of conversation.

He died, a victim of heart disease, two days later.

Stubbornness may not be hereditary, but don’t try telling that to the people who best knew Barry and Vern Voorhees.

Barry, it is said, is a size-XL chip off the old block. He says so himself. “We were so much like each other,” Barry says, “we clashed.”

The two couldn’t even agree on football, a passion they shared. Barry was a Dallas Cowboys fan. His father rooted for the Washington Redskins. The intra-division rivals played twice each season, at which time Nancy was forced to send son and husband to neutral viewing sites in order to keep some semblance of peace.

It wasn’t until he suffered his first heart attack, in 1980, that Vern Voorhees started to mellow.

“I feared the man until I was 14,” says Marquez, who lived around the corner. “I’d come over to see if Barry wanted to do something and I’d see his car there and just say, ‘Forget it.’ He had a real tough side to him. But after his heart attack, Vicious was a lot more open with his feelings to Barry and other people. Once you got to really know him, he was an incredible man.”

Unfortunately, it took a heart attack--and a series of other heart ailments that followed--to bring father and son together.

“I hate to say it but (the heart attack) was probably the best thing that could have happened to me and him,” Barry says. “At least we got quite a few close years before he died. Before, he always wanted to uphold that Mr. Tough Dad image. We just didn’t relate.”

Vern had been only 13 when his father died of cancer, leaving him to provide for his mother by shoveling sidewalks and taking other odd jobs. He wanted Barry to learn similar responsibilities and priorities at an early age.

So, soon after reaching double digits in age, Barry was encouraged to work.

“He never really leaned on me to work,” Barry says of his father. “It was my money and I did what I wanted to do with it. But I definitely earned everything I got.”

On weekends, while friends played touch football in the street, Voorhees was on the job. “We’d go, ‘Come on, let’s play!’ ” Marquez says. “He’d just say, ‘Gotta work.’ And off he’d go.”

Sure enough, the training came in handy.

Vern’s first heart attack put him out of work for more than three months. The family received a disability check during that time, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills.

Barry, without being asked, made up the difference. He never got around to playing football at Dos Pueblos High in Goleta because there simply wasn’t time. There was always a job to be done. As a freshman and sophomore, Voorhees took all of his basic study classes so he could be out of school and to work by noon in his final two years.

Vern Voorhees eventually returned to his job as a route salesman for a food distributor. But a full work day seemed to drain every last ounce of his energy. What few chores Barry wasn’t already doing around the house, he added to his already busy schedule.

“There was no talking about it,” Nancy Voorhees says. “You never had to ask him to do anything. He just did it.”

From junior high through junior college, in no particular order, Voorhees recalls working as paper boy, gardener, plumber’s assistant, landscaper, janitor, ice cream server, pool cleaner, construction laborer and nightclub bouncer.

The job Voorhees remembers best would probably be the one as bouncer at one of Santa Barbara’s trendiest night spots. He quit that one shortly after being greeted at the door by a man toting a sawed-off shotgun.

“Good thing it wasn’t loaded,” Barry says. Of course, he didn’t know that when he charged the man, slapped the gun out of his hands and wrestled him to the ground.

Barry Voorhees tipped the scales at 11 pounds, 5 ounces at his inaugural weigh-in, a fact his mother states with a pained expression.

Nancy Voorhees is pretty sure she decided immediately upon her son’s arrival that he would be an only child, although it might have been a little later, when she noticed his footprints went off the page of his birth record.

A former high school cheerleader, Nancy was the daughter of a football official, the sister of a professional football player and the wife of a 6-2, 240-pound rabid Redskins fan.

This was definitely the right kid.

Barry--did he have a choice?--loved football too. He played in all the local youth leagues. But at the same time, he also learned the value of a dollar.

So in high school, when it came time to choose between work and football, sport took a back seat. There would be time for that later.

If only he had known how much later.

It wasn’t until the fall of 1986 that Voorhees returned to football. It had been seven years since he last played competitively.

When he had graduated from high school in 1982, Voorhees was a lean 6-2, 200 pounds. He had grown substantially since then.

So much, in fact, one might have wondered if there hadn’t been a little artificial stimulation. Quite the contrary, actually. Her name was Tyree (pronounced Tie-ree).

Voorhees met the former Tyree Rickel while visiting a friend near Carson City, Nev. They dated for a while, but then broke up when Tyree found another boyfriend.

As Marquez tells the story, Tyree chided her ex-beau a bit when she broke up with him.

“She said, ‘You need to get that bigger and these bigger and these bigger,’ and she pointed to his chest, arms and legs,” Marquez says. “He came back to town and started lifting weights like a crazed man.

“(Barry) said, ‘You watch, I’m going to get so big, then I’m going to go back to see her and say, ‘OK, you wanted me big and muscular? What do you think now?’ ”

The correct answer to that question was supposed to be something like, “You look great. Let’s go out.” Then, Voorhees told Marquez, “I’m going to say, ‘You can’t have me now!’ ”

After months of training six to eight hours a day, Voorhees did exactly what he told his buddy he would do. With one minor exception.

When Tyree said, “Let’s go out.” Voorhees said, “OK.”

Already bulked up, Voorhees decided he might as well use his new size constructively.

Bob Dinaberg, who had been the football coach at Santa Barbara City College when Voorhees’ uncle, Al Knapp, played there, greeted his new project warmly.

“He was more a big body than anything else,” says Dinaberg, who had become the defensive line coach after stepping down from the head job. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my. There may be a little potential in there.’ I mean, he wasn’t just big, he was also one of the fastest guys on the team.”

Voorhees never developed into a dominant junior college player, Dinaberg says. “But he was a great second-year player. He learned so quick. Of course, having those tools sure didn’t hurt.”

By the time Voorhees completed his second season, he was a major-college prospect. There was only one problem: Because five years had passed since he graduated from high school, he was ineligible under National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Division I rules.

He thought about trying to catch on with a professional team as a free agent, but decided against it. He did, however, take time out to observe the Cowboys’ training camp in Thousand Oaks, along with Dinaberg.

“We watched the Cowboys scrimmage against the Chargers,” Dinaberg says. “There was a line of kids who came up and asked Barry for his autograph. I think he looked more like a professional than the professionals did.”

It is a rather ordinary-looking trophy that rests on a table next to a recliner in the living room of Nancy Voorhees’ modest three-bedroom home. It was awarded to Santa Barbara City’s best defensive lineman of 1987.

It was earned by Barry, owned by Vern.

Barry wanted it buried with his father, but Nancy decided the trophy should stay put, right next to Vern’s favorite seat in the house.

The last years of Vern Voorhees’ life centered on watching his son playing football.

In May of last year, he and Nancy took what they referred to as a vacation. Their destination? A whirlwind tour of the stadiums where Northridge would play away games during the upcoming season.

Vern’s bodily functions, weakened by the heart attacks and then major heart surgery in March of 1986, were operating at a fraction of normal capacity. Travel was an ordeal. There were motels to scout, parking availability to check and seating arrangements to be made.

Northridge’s game against Idaho State in Pocatello, Ida., was the only game they missed, and even then Barry had to promise he would call with the result as soon as he left the field.

After CSUN’s 34-23 upset victory, he happily obliged. He just couldn’t believe what he was hearing on the other end of the phone.

“I could hear him crying,” Barry says. “He was so happy for us. . . . See, I’d never, ever seen my dad cry. My mom said she hadn’t, either. But toward the end . . . He’d be out there screaming and yelling. After a game, he’d have tears in his eyes . . . I think maybe he realized he was close to death.”

What Barry saw in his father’s tears were the words he never actually heard. They said he was proud. They said he approved.

Unfortunately, Vern never saw Barry play his new position the way he was capable. Switching from defensive tackle to offense only weeks before CSUN’s first game last season, Voorhees struggled to learn techniques that were needed to supplement his raw physical power.

If he could only see him now. The work ethic Barry showed off the field has helped him on it, as well. With a year to learn--and yes, work at--his new position, he has become a driving force for the Northridge offense.

Barry believes that his father knew he was slipping fast on Thanksgiving night. Vern said he wasn’t feeling well, but he still stayed up talking to Barry until the early hours of Friday morning.

Among the topics of conversation, Barry recalls, were pro football, taking care of the family and handling additional responsibility.

“We talked about everything,” Voorhees says. “I look back on it now and wish I would have known, because I think he was trying to say goodby. I remember thinking, ‘That was real nice.’ We were in the kitchen for probably close to four hours. I never really got to talk to him after that.”

Within hours of going to bed that early Friday morning, Vern got up and told Nancy that his pacemaker was acting up, which happened occasionally.

The family doctor was called, and Vern was taken to the hospital.

Saturday, at approximately 3 a.m., he died.

On the nightstand next to the place Barry Voorhees sleeps are three framed photographs:

His father relaxing in the recliner. Barry and his father embracing after a game. Barry, his father and Tyree posing together on the field last year at Southern Utah State, two weeks before Thanksgiving.

“If I made pro football, it would be the icing on the cake for him,” Barry says. “I’m doing it for me, but there’s a big part of me that’s doing it for him, too.”

Chances are, Voorhees will at least get an opportunity. Even if it’s as a free agent.

“If you’re a professional scout, I don’t see how you can let a prospect like that get by,” Dinaberg says. “You have to at least take a look. He has tools that are as good as anybody in the National Football League.”

Voorhees has been nominated to play in the East-West Shrine Game at Stanford in January. He also has been told to expect an invitation to the NFL scouting combine next spring in Indianapolis, where the nation’s best prospects are timed, tested and physically examined.

But his attitude is such that he will wait and see.

“There are a lot of real good football players who never play pro ball for one reason or the other,” Voorhees says. “A lot of it is politics, and I understand that. I’m coming from a small school, so that’s one strike against me right there. But I know I can play.

No matter what happens with football, Voorhees is confident that he’ll succeed. He always has.

“It’s not the dollars and cents. Maybe it’s the prestige,” he says. “I’d be doing it for nothing, maybe just to say I can play pro football.

It’s about pride . . . and maybe ego. It’s in my heart.”