For Lewis, Everything Runs Fine

AAAAAAA-men .

Darren Lewis bellows it like a Baptist preacher, parading up and down the Texas A&M; team bus. The third-leading rusher in the nation is giving a mock sermon, cutting up. In his encore, he takes verbal jabs at his teammates.

“If there’s a pimple on your nose, he’ll talk about it,” teammate Kevin Smith said, describing the scene. “As far as in public, he’s pretty low-profile. As far as behind doors, he’s a character.”

You only see the preacher if you’re in the locker room or on the bus.

If you’re not, you see him the way he was at a press conference three days before the Holiday Bowl. He said all the right things but was sedate, even a little bored.

Lewis and his Texas A&M; teammates will play BYU Saturday in the Holiday Bowl. At this press conference, everybody was given a chance to pepper Lewis with questions. How about the ninth-place finish in the Heisman balloting? The disappointing showing last season? The ejection from the LSU game?

Then someone asked him if he liked being quizzed about all this stuff. He smiled.

“When you’re a football player,” Lewis said, “I guess one of the things that goes along with it is you have to have these pregame (interviews). You know, you’ve got to go with everything. It’s part of it. When you’re doing good things, you receive a lot of exposure.”

The good things have come in bunches. He rushed for 232 yards against Texas Tech, 212 yards against SMU, 183 against Baylor and 181 against Rice. He was a first-team All-American and the Southwest Conference Player of the Year. He broke Eric Dickerson’s Southwest Conference career rushing record. He is the fifth leading career rusher in NCAA history.

On the field, he puts on quite a show. Off it, he isn’t much of a showoff. Never has been.

When Lewis was young, his father, Isaac, would take him to the park to play basketball. They would shoot for a while, but Darren would stop when somebody would come over and ask to join them. He would take the ball and sit on it until the new face went away.

This season, Lewis ran into a lot of new faces, more than ever before. Everybody wanted a minute to talk.

He did the interviews, but he tried to stay a step ahead of the publicity. He didn’t pick up a sports section until the regular season was over.

Not once.

“Really,” he said. “I’m serious. I’m dead serious. I just sat back and just really listened. . . . I hear people say I was ranked No. 3 (in rushing). I went from six to three. . . . Whatever the people tell me, I just listened to it and just practiced hard and just kept getting better each week.”

At the press conference, Texas A&M; linebacker William Thomas sat next to Lewis. Someone finally ventured over to talk to Thomas. He was asked about Lewis. Thomas confirmed that Lewis isn’t much for self-promotion.

Behind the cool shades and gold chains is a 22-year-old who knows he plays a good game of football. He doesn’t need to talk about it.

Before too long, Thomas looked over at the crowd surrounding Lewis and smiled.

“Like this right here,” he said, pointing. “He’s not going to say much.”

The Lewis family moved to Oakcliff, a suburb of Dallas, when Darren was 8. Darren noticed immediately the kids playing football at the park down the street and told his mother, Lillie, he wanted in on the action.

She checked with one of the youth coaches and was told it was too late to sign up. Darren would have to wait until the next season.

The following year, Lillie had him at the park the first Tuesday in August. The coach liked what he saw right away. He looked at the muscles on Darren’s arm and said: “We may have something here.”

And he did. Darren ran past almost everybody. When he wasn’t running with the ball, he was clobbering the guy who carried the ball for the other team. They started calling him “Tank.” That is still his nickname. A lot of people think he got it because he would run over defenders, but Isaac says it was because he hit so hard on defense. He did it in games and in practice. His coach had to tell him to ease up so he didn’t hurt his teammates.

By the time Darren was in eighth grade, jealousy began to surface. He ran for 2,600 yards that year at Hulcy Middle School. Isaac remembers watching him play and hearing people say: “Wait until he gets to Carter.”

That was Carter High School. They didn’t think he would make such a big splash against stiffer competition. Then he went to Carter. As a sophomore, he rushed for 1,300 yards. As a junior, he rushed for 995 yards in six games before he broke his leg. As a senior, he rushed for 1,658 yards and was a Parade Magazine All-American. They retired his jersey at the end of the season.

So much for talk.

Still, Isaac kept hearing it. When Darren was a senior, people began saying: “Wait until he gets to college.”

Isaac heard it a lot. He said it came from parents whose kids didn’t get to play.

Isaac let it go without rebuttal.

“I never said nothing,” he said. “I never have been one to pop off. I would just sit on the sidelines.”

Now Darren Lewis is one of the best college running backs in the United States.

“I don’t hear nothing now,” Isaac said.

After Darren Lewis had completed his sophomore year at Texas A&M;, talk about the Heisman Trophy began to circulate. It seemed logical. After all, he gained 1,692 yards in 11 games. No telling what was in store for his junior season.

But maybe the yards had come too easily. Lewis moved back home with his parents that summer and indulged in quite a bit of Mom’s home cooking. He didn’t skip too many meals. He did skip too many workouts.

“I just got lazy, really,” he said. “I’d work out one day, skip two or three days. I thought I could play myself into shape.”

When he returned to College Station, his teammates saw the difference. He didn’t quite look like the same guy who had dazzled everybody the previous season.

“You could tell,” Thomas said. “His sophomore year his legs were big, but they were, like, toned. His junior year they were a little bigger, but they didn’t look as toned. He really wasn’t moving like he was his sophomore year.”

So, after he gained about 15 pounds, he gained only 55 yards the first game, 52 yards the second and 45 the third. It wasn’t until the fourth game against Southern Mississippi that he got rolling and rushed for 127 yards. He had six solid games after that and then his season ended with a knee injury.

It turned out to be more than a football season. It was a lesson on the benefits of dedication and the perils of complacency.

“I felt like I cheated myself and cheated my teammates by not performing to the best of my ability,” he said. “I felt my senior year I had to be in good condition, I had to be weighing less and contribute to the team.”

He gained 1,691 yards. His coach, R.C. Slocum, took him out early in games in which the Aggies were comfortably ahead. In the second halves of the first four games he had a total of only 11 carries.

Imagine what he might have done.

Ninth?

If you find it hard to believe that Darren Lewis could accumulate all those yards and wind up so far back in the balloting for the Heisman Trophy, just ask him what he thinks. He’ll take the blame.

The elbow. If only he hadn’t thrown the elbow.

It happened in the first quarter of the LSU game Sept. 29. There was no score. Lewis was given the ball, he gained five yards and was pushed out of bounds by LSU safety Derriel McCorvey. Way out of bounds. A photographer got caught in the middle of the collision and his tripod went flying.

Then came the exchange.

Slocum says McCorvey got up in Lewis’ face after the tackle. Lewis gave him a forearm. The whistle blew, the flag flew and Lewis was thrown out.

“In my opinion, it should have been offsetting fouls at most,” Slocum said. “Both players should have been allowed to play.”

Against North Texas the week before, Darren heard a lot of talk. Players would tackle him and then say: “I’m going to break your leg.” He would get up and go back to the huddle without saying a word. Pretty soon the talk stopped.

Against LSU, he lost his cool. Simple as that. Isaac Lewis watched the whole thing from the sidelines: the tackle, the words, the elbow, the aftermath. Darren spent a few minutes kicking things out of his way in frustration. Then Isaac came up and said: “Man, that was bad. You’ve got to keep your head in the game.”

And Darren knows that. That was the first time he had ever been ejected from a football game, and it bothered him. It wasn’t so much that he was angry, it was really that it gave him a guilty conscience.

“It hurt my feelings,” he said. “Plus, I hurt my team.”

Perhaps that was the worst part of it. Texas A&M; lost the game, 17-8. Slocum had a talk with him afterward and told him he needed to learn to keep his poise. Lewis apologized.

“He recognized that he should have been more mature than to allow that to happen,” Slocum said. “He felt like he had let his teammates down.”

They could tell.

“He really felt bad after that game,” Thomas said. “He was quiet all the way back. He didn’t say a word.”

He apologized to them in practice the following week.

“They understand,” Lewis said. “We have a lot of respect for each other, and they gave me all due respect. There’s never something that’s going to be hard to do in front of your teammates. They go down with you.”

Lewis contemplated turning pro after his junior season. The money is always attractive.

Slocum told him the money wouldn’t be that great because his statistics weren’t particularly unusual that season. Lewis probably would have been a middle-round pick. If Lewis came back and had a good senior season, Slocum told him he might be a first-rounder. Signing bonuses for fifth-round players are usually between $50,000 and $100,000. Signing bonuses for first-round players average about $1 million.

Lewis talked it over with his mom, who teaches sixth grade at a grammar school in Dallas. Darren told her he would do what she advised. She told him to stay in school and get a year closer to earning his degree.

So he did.

“I really appreciate that she helped me to make that decision,” he said. “A lot of good things happened to me this year.”

AAAAAAA-men .