Bradley Finds His Footing at Sonoma State : Acquitted of Rape in Arkansas, Tailback Sees Daylight Ahead

He was, for a time, spinning out of control, the victim of a blindside hit at a vulnerable moment.

But look how Fred Bradley has landed. Both feet planted, firmly in control, an open field ahead.

Sometimes you hit a good running back squarely and all it does is knock him into daylight.

Is that what has happened to Bradley? Certainly he has been rocked plenty of times, both on and off the field. So far, however, nothing has taken him off his feet.

At 23, he has been to hell and been a Razorback--he might say they are one and the same.

As a Hueneme High freshman, he ran with hoodlums, smoked pot, ditched school and flunked every class but weightlifting.

As a high school sophomore, he almost became homeless before being taken in and nurtured by George Machado, his football coach.

As a high school senior, he was a dominant player and coveted recruit who lacked the academic scores to accept a Division I scholarship.

As a sophomore at Moorpark College, he broke O.J. Simpson’s state scoring record and accepted a scholarship to play at Arkansas, near the place of his birth.

There, his improving fortunes took a dramatic turn for the worse.

Less than two years later, in April, 1992, Bradley was arrested and locked in a Fayetteville, Ark., jail, accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl. In January, a jury cleared him of wrongdoing.

So now he considers his future as he rests his head on the grass near willow trees and a lake in the serene, park-like grounds adjacent to the athletic offices at Sonoma State, in Rohnert Park, Calif.

It is here, at a tiny, little-known Division II school where he has one season of eligibility remaining, that he plots a comeback.

Bradley transferred to Sonoma in the fall and even though a knee injury kept him from playing tailback last season, he likes his future again. Even if one day soon it does not include football.

Those boring oratories offered by school counselors, coaches and other caring individuals ring in his ears.

Suddenly they all make so much sense.

“People can tell you that football is not going to be there forever, but when you’re good, you don’t really listen,” Bradley says. “You always think you’re the one, the exception.”

The world no longer turns on what he might accomplish between the hashmarks on a given Saturday afternoon.

Bradley thinks about his wife, Edith, and their young son, Svondo, living 400 miles away in Oxnard, and he considers a new set of priorities.

Yes, Fred Bradley would like to play football again, and maybe a year or two from now be paid handsomely for it. But he also has learned that there are no guarantees when the future can be determined by the judgments of others.

“I learned that lesson the hard way,” he says.

*

Sometimes a good running back gets hit squarely and is knocked to his knees. That’s what happened to Bradley after he enrolled at Arkansas in the fall of 1991.

He was first humbled, then humiliated.

For the first time he can recall, Bradley failed on the football field. Slowed by turf toe and a separated shoulder, he did not perform nearly as effectively as he had hoped.

Bradley finished the season having gained 197 yards--a total he might have accumulated in a decent game for Moorpark.

Arkansas Coach Jack Crowe had gained his reputation as Bo Jackson’s position coach at Auburn, but he seemed to lack patience with his new protege.

If Bradley made a mistake early in the game, he often was regelated to pacing the sidelines in the second half. Occasionally, Ken Rucker, the assistant in charge of running backs, succeeded sneaking him back into the game.

Disenchanted, Bradley requested a release from his scholarship. Only at Rucker’s insistence did he agree to stay at Arkansas to participate in drills during the spring of 1992.

That was a fateful decision.

On April 23 of last year, Bradley turned himself in after Arkansas football coaches told him police wanted to question him about the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl.

The previous morning, Bradley and his roommate, Derrick Martin, a Razorback teammate, had driven to a location adjacent to a Fayetteville junior high school where they picked up two teen-age girls.

Both men were accused of having sex with the 13-year-old and Martin was alleged to have fondled the other, age 14. In Arkansas, sex with anyone under the age of 14 is considered rape, even if by consent.

Bradley says he “never touched” either girl and is confident that his roommate did not, either. He believes the girls concocted the story when they were caught for skipping school.

In January of this year, a jury cleared Bradley and Martin of all charges. After nine months of delays, the trial lasted only a day and a half.

Bradley does not feel vindicated.

He spent several days in jail before John Everett, a local attorney, offered to step in and replace Bradley’s court-supplied public defender.

Everett says he contacted Bradley “because I felt like if he wasn’t black and a football player, he wouldn’t have been rotting in jail.”

Bradley and Martin both are black. Their accusers are white.

Race, Bradley claims, was a factor in his predicament.

He recalls Everett interviewing an older white man during jury selection and asking him if he believed Bradley was guilty.

The man said he believed Bradley was.

“Why is that?” Everett said.

“Because he’s black and he’s sitting here in this courtroom right now,” the man replied.

The juror was excused.

“I’m just glad he was honest about it,” Bradley says. “But it started me thinking, what if there’s someone in the jury who thinks the same thing but they aren’t as honest about it?”

In the meantime, university officials publicly distanced themselves from the players.

Crowe, who has since been fired, wasted no time announcing that both players would be stripped of their scholarships. His reason: They violated team rules by inviting females into a male dormitory.

Bradley was leaving anyway, but the accusation cost him something far more valuable than his football scholarship.

“My reputation was ruined because of their lies,” Bradley says of his accusers, “and they just walked away.”

*

If not for the resolve of a trusting wife, the charges might also have cost him his family.

The Bradleys were married July 28, 1991, just before Fred left for Arkansas. After a few months, Edith joined him in Fayetteville, but she later returned to Oxnard to have the baby in a more familiar setting.

“She is strong, real strong,” Bradley says of his former high school sweetheart. “She never did question me about it, asking me if I did it or anything like that. She knew me better than that.”

Still, Everett required Bradley to pass a lie-detector test before he would agree to represent him.

Bradley says that there were girls who checked directory listings for the dorm rooms of Arkansas athletes. He claims Martin was first introduced to the 13-year-old girl--who said she was 18--during one such call.

Bradley’s private habits have been a topic of controversy around Oxnard for years.

Machado, the Hueneme coach, has heard reports that Bradley is father to as many as six children. Bradley acknowledges three: Svondo, and twin girls born to a classmate during his junior year in high school.

Bradley was so popular as a teen-ager, his surrogate father says, that the Machado family made a chart of his girlfriends and taped it to their refrigerator.

Girls, initially, were not his only weakness. Bradley succumbed to almost any temptation that would take him away from school. After moving to the Southland from Arkansas, he lived with a sister, Earnette, now 34, who had four children of her own and little time to check on her younger, impressionable brother.

Bradley’s mother died when he was young and he saw his father only occasionally while growing up in a small town on the backroads of rural Arkansas.

“I used to see my dad once in a while, but he was with another woman and they had kids,” Bradley recalls.

His father gave him money to buy shoes and clothes, but what Bradley truly yearned for was his attention. “He just wasn’t around to be dad, someone to go play catch with or sign you up for football or baseball,” Bradley says.

Machado, who took over the Hueneme football program in 1986, was Bradley’s first father figure.

The coach brought Bradley--and two trash bags full of his belongings--home one day during Bradley’s sophomore year of school. Bradley had come to him requesting help because Earnette had decided to move back to Arkansas and he did not wish to accompany her.

“You go there, you stay there,” Bradley said of rural Arkansas. “It’s one of those kinds of places.”

Eventually, Machado became Bradley’s legal guardian.

“Coach helped open my eyes and show me what was really going on in life, and that it wasn’t about partying and going out and ditching school,” Bradley says.

And if he hadn’t?

“I don’t know,” Bradley says. “I might be in jail, or on my way there.”

*

Machado has moved to Racine, Wis., where he is football coach at Horlick High, but he stays in close contact with Bradley, as does Jim Bittner, the football coach at Moorpark College.

When Bradley needed money to fly to California and back for the trial, his former coaches both chipped in for air fare. They also encouraged him to seek a place to play football and continue work toward a college degree.

Cal State Northridge was Bradley’s first choice, and he asked a friend to contact coaches there and give them his telephone number.

He never got a response.

Bradley then turned his attention to Sonoma State, where his brother-in-law, Don Young, played in 1992.

During a conversation with Young, Bradley mentioned that the Northridge coaches hadn’t called. “Coach (Frank) Scalercio would call you in 10 minutes,” Young said.

Try him, Bradley replied.

Young did. “And he was wrong,” Bradley says. “Coach called me in five minutes.”

Even so, the Sonoma coach was not convinced Bradley would be interested in playing for the Cossacks once he knew more about their situation. Sonoma plays a small-time schedule and does not offer athletic scholarships.

Scalercio advised Bradley to enroll in school, begin attending classes, find a place to live, get a job and then discuss playing football.

In what the coach considered a mild upset, Bradley did exactly that.

“I’ll never forget our first team meeting,” Scalercio recalls. “Fred sat two rows back, right in the middle, and the whole time I was up there talking to the team, his eyes never left me. I knew right then he wasn’t going to be a problem.”

Yet, after all that trouble, Bradley’s first season ended after only one game in which he gained 24 yards in five carries.

A knee injury Bradley sustained in a pickup basketball game and aggravated during spring practice required arthroscopic surgery last summer. The healing process took longer than expected.

Bradley tried to play, but his knee kept swelling and causing him discomfort. After his only game action, a brief stint against St. Mary’s, the knee ballooned again and the decision was made to rest it the remainder of the season.

Scalercio says he saw enough of Bradley to anticipate great things once his knee has mended.

“Even with his knee 70%, he was virtually unstoppable in practice,” Scalercio says. “We didn’t have to block for the guy. He just made people miss or ran them over. He’s the whole package.”

*

Bradley is hopeful that with a big senior season he might still attract interest from NFL teams. But through his ordeal, he has gained additional perspective.

“Football, that’s a good thing to have, and if it works, it works,” he says. “But my main thing right now is to get my degree (in psychology) because that’s something I know I can have.

“With football I could go out there and play one game and get a wicked tackle and football is done for me.”

When is playing days are over, Bradley would like to return to the Oxnard area as a coach and counselor.

“So many people helped me out,” he says. “I’d like to do the same thing for the kids coming up.”

More than anything, though, Bradley says he is committed to his family.

“I want to be a good dad and be there all the time when my son wants to go play,” he says. “No matter what, I want to be there for him to make decisions with.”

Sometimes a good running back gets hit squarely and it knocks some sense into him.