A Grayshirt Season? : Kutztown’s 46-Year-Old Defensive Tackle Has Been a Media Sensation, but the Question Remains: Will He Play?

The sophomore they call “Iceman” rumbles through the crowded campus dining hall, stops to run his student ID card through a scanner, gets the go-ahead for dinner, grabs his tray and silverware and sets forth to do what college football players do best:

Eat.

The grub is typical dormitory fare. Tonight’s special is sweet potato pie . . . with spinach?

There’s enough starch on his plate to open a shirt laundry, but a man’s got to eat.

So, the Iceman loadeth. Then, on to the salad bar, where en route he joshes with teammates who threaten him with noogies.

Seated, Iceman says a silent pre-meal prayer, hopeful his signals will penetrate the din of a fingernails-on-chalkboard rock song blasting from an overhead speaker.

Asked if he could name that grunge tune, Chuck Roseberry reveals for a moment what he is--a 46-year-old grandfather of four.

“Music?” he says sarcastically. “I thought it was a noisy (ceiling) fan.”

*

Most thought Roseberry was nuts. Certifiable. It was one thing to make like Rodney Dangerfield and go back to school in his mid-40s, quite another to walk into the football coach’s office and ask for a tryout.

But that’s what Roseberry did last February. Al Leonzi, the third-year coach at Division II Kutztown University, almost split a gut.

“You’re at the wrong office,” Leonzi told Roseberry, “You have to go to admissions.”

Roseberry kept a foot wedged in the door and asked the coach to hear him out.

Leonzi told him to pull up a chair.

Roseberry successfully begged for the chance to live his life over. The first 45 years had gone bust. Roseberry had played his last football game Thanksgiving Day, 1965, but could never clear it from his memory.

His school, Warren Hills High of Washington, N.J., had defeated Hunterton Central.

“Great game,” Roseberry recalls. “At the end of it, I wouldn’t go out. I knew that was the end for me.”

A good enough linebacker to get recruiting nibbles from UCLA, Miami and Texas, Roseberry was, however, an academic failure.

“I used to get in trouble so I wouldn’t have to take my

finals,” he says.

Roseberry assumed he was stupid.

In 1965, no one considered dyslexia.

Resigned to his fate, Roseberry enlisted in the Navy, served in Vietnam, then pursued a career as a police and correctional officer.

But he always considered himself a social misfit. “If I could have had an operation to have the pain removed, I would have done it,” Roseberry says.

Three attempts at marriage failed.

“My drug of choice was alcoholic women,” he says between bites of meat loaf. Three grown daughters, all from his first marriage, don’t speak to him. “They treat me like a bum.”

In 1990, he joined the Army Reserves to take advantage of Uncle Sam’s post-service college plan, only to find himself smack-dab in the Persian Gulf War as part of the 402nd Military Police Unit, sucking sand in Saudi Arabia.

Stooped in a bunker, in a scene right out of “Forrest Gump,” Roseberry confided to a friend about his dumbness, explaining that when he read things, the letters were all jumbled.

“You’re not dumb,” the buddy said. “You’ve got dyslexia.”

Renewed, Roseberry returned home to learn that marriage No. 3 was over, except for the paperwork. Working out in a health club near his home in Pogelsville, Pa., he met Abbie Klapac, a perky 40-something aerobics instructor and personal trainer.

Klapac encouraged Roseberry to enroll in school at nearby Kutztown, founded in 1866 and a quaint jewel of a college town about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Kutztown U., which dropped the “State” a few years back, is tucked in rolling Pennsylvania Dutch farm country, where time stands still for Amish horse-and-buggy rigs that hold up traffic.

Roseberry enrolled last January.

“I dreamed the dream,” he says. “Abbie told me it was OK to live it.”

Playing football was his own idea.

“Walking in to ask to play was easy,” Roseberry says. “What scared me was walking back into an academic situation where I was never successful.”

Leonzi invited Roseberry to spring practice. If nothing else, the coach was going to get some psychological mileage out of it. If he can do it, you sure as hell can do it, Leonzi envisioned screaming at his 20-year-olds.

“That was in the back of my mind,” the coach acknowledges.

The Kutztown players didn’t know what to make of “Pops.”

“The first day I saw him, I didn’t know what he was doing,” senior linebacker John Mobley, the team’s best player, remembers. “I thought he was one of the coaches. I thought he’d be here a couple of days.”

Rob Holmes, the Kutztown quarterback, was quick to joke, “When he used to play, he folded his helmet and put it in his pocket.”

Roseberry, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound defensive tackle, took it all in stride and outlegged a dozen or so quipsters up the dreaded hill climb.

When fall practice rolled around, so did Roseberry. Matt Santos, the school’s sports information director, was sitting on a public relations powder keg and didn’t know it.

Skeptical of his chances, the coaches never told Santos about Roseberry, which explains why there is no biography of the school’s second-most famous player--Buffalo Bill receiver Andre Reed also slept here--in the media guide.

Leonzi cut 26 players to reach his final roster.

He called Roseberry into his office to tell him he was among the chosen.

“He made the team,” Leonzi says flatly, making clear he was not party to any public relations hanky-panky.

Roseberry remembers his emotions ranged from shock to happiness.

Matt Griffith, a freshman nose tackle at Kutztown, didn’t know what to think. His father, Bob, had played against Roseberry in high school.

“I’m not embarrassed to call it a mid-life crisis,” Roseberry says of his pursuit. “People can call it whatever they want. I call it a dream come true.”

*

Rennie Sacco, Kutztown’s trainer, could write a thesis on his season with Roseberry, known to many as Iceman.

He came by his nickname honestly.

“We got a new ice machine this year, double capacity,” Sacco said. “We’re using all of it.”

Sacco and Roseberry are all but joined at the hip. After a day of full contact, Roseberry retreats to the trainer’s room and emerges looking like the Abominable Snowman.

Sacco uses rolls of Saran Wrap to fasten ice-packs to most of Roseberry’s moving parts.

Roseberry hurts most of the time. He has tendinitis in both knees and his right shoulder needs a daily jolt of electronic stimulation.

After a Wednesday practice, he popped an antibiotic into his mouth before limping off to dinner.

“Gulf War syndrome,” he said.

Like others who returned from Operation Desert Storm, Roseberry suffers from undiagnosed maladies that include bloated stomach and aching joints.

“It’s like every day having a mild case of the flu,” he said.

Yet, every day he can, Roseberry drags himself to the practice field, something not all Kutztown players can say.

“We’ve accepted him,” Griffith, sidelined because of a shoulder injury, said as he watched practice. “I’m injured at 18. I took a pounding. Yet he’s practicing and I’m not.”

Sacco says few men Roseberry’s age would have lasted this long. The trainer says the difference is Roseberry has kept in good shape over the years.

“I wouldn’t want to see a lot of 46-year-old guys,” Sacco conceded.

When Klapac pushed her boyfriend--now fiance--back to school, she expected he would hit the books, not the blocking sled. Initially, she was against his idea of playing football.

“Chuck is a man of great heart and great tenacity,” she said. “He’s as stubborn as can be.”

But Roseberry constantly faces the question:

Why?

“I think at heart I never grew up,” he explains. “I’ve always been a kid inside. I’m like Peter Pan. I never wanted to grow up.”

Moreover, he could not escape the pain of past failures.

“We all have something we’d like to do over,” he said. “This was a bad experience, academically. Being a good player and not being able to play college football, that was a painful experience in my life. The Lord gave me a chance to do it over. He didn’t say, ‘You’ll be 22 again.’ ”

Roseberry is proud of his academic accomplishments at Kutztown. Although slowed by his learning disability, he has maintained a 3.0 grade-point average. He is carrying 12 credits this semester--cultural anthropology, history of civilization, theater and abnormal psychology.

Because of his dyslexia, Roseberry tapes all of his lectures. He bought two sets of books for each class so that Abbie can read along with him. Roseberry plans to graduate in 1997.

It hasn’t been easy for Klapac, educated in East Coast boarding schools.

“I’ve never met anybody with fewer study skills,” she said. “I told him, ‘Studying does not mean watching the Eagles game.’ But he can listen well. And he’s used that.”

The pace is starting to take its toll, however, as national newspaper reporters and television crews descend onto the campus to chronicle his story.

Santos estimates that Roseberry, through mid-October, had granted more than 50 interviews.

Roseberry has already received seven or eight movie proposals from film producers.

He can’t discuss his financial future, though, without fear of breaking NCAA rules.

So that he is not tempted, all business proposals are referred to the school president’s office. Adhering to Section 12.3 of the NCAA Division II Operating Manual, the college formed a sports counseling panel to advise Roseberry about future endeavors.

Still, the world can’t get enough of him.

In a photo opportunity made in heaven, People magazine last Sunday paid to fly Mona Cohn, the recently crowned 48-year-old University of Kentucky homecoming queen, to Kutztown to be photographed with Roseberry in a 1962 Chevrolet.

*

Everyone is dying to know.

At TC’s, a popular steak house near campus, a student is overheard talking to a friend: “You think he’s going to play this weekend?”

Only one man knows: Leonzi.

To date, the 52-year-old coach has not seen fit to put Roseberry in a game. One theory suggests that Leonzi is milking the story for all it’s worth. Once Roseberry plays, the theory goes, the fairy tale ends and the camera crews go home.

The real concern, Leonzi said, is that he is in the midst of turning the program around and can’t afford to take chances.

Coming off a 2-9 season, Kutztown has won four games in a row after two losses and Leonzi is clearly focused on the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference schedule.

“I have an obligation to coach football,” Leonzi said on the practice field as he prepared his team for last Saturday’s game against archrival Millersville, a team Kutztown hadn’t defeated since 1980. “I can’t jeopardize whether we win a football game. When the decision is appropriate, then I’ll do it. I don’t want to jeopardize anybody or make a mockery out of this.”

But Roseberry is running out of games. He did not, in fact, play in the 12-7 homecoming victory over Millersville.

At another recent home game, fans started chanting Roseberry’s uniform number, “Seventy-two, Seventy-two,” in a vain attempt to sway the coach.

Klapac was leading the cheers.

“I guess the coach didn’t hear me,” she said.

The bad news: Three of Kutztown’s last four games are on the road, and Roseberry does not travel with the team. His last chance to play at home will be Oct. 29 against Shippensburg.

Kutztown players, some of whom might have resented his publicity at first, have clearly rallied around Roseberry.

“It’s been nothing but positive,” quarterback Holmes said of Roseberry’s publicity. “We’re excited about all that’s gone on. He’s our way of putting us on the map.”

Roseberry has a comfortable, albeit different, relationship with his teammates.

“They went away to college to get away from their parents, not to hang out with someone old enough to be their dad,” Roseberry said.

And Roseberry is not totally uncool . He wears his graying brown hair long in the back and even has an earring.

To his credit, Roseberry has not complained about not playing, but he knows time is running out. Despite overtures that he will be invited back next season, Roseberry said there are few tomorrows for him.

“I’m done this year, no doubt about it,” he said.

Sacco, the team trainer, thinks Roseberry is physically able to play in a game.

But that decision is not his.

Leonzi promises Roseberry will get his shot.

“People say, ‘Why not put him in on the kickoff team? Then we could say he played and we could put balloons in the air,’ ” the coach said. “But it’s got to be legit. It’s got to be real. I want to put him in for more than one play. If he can play the whole quarter, he’ll play the whole quarter.”

So, until further notice, it’s Shippensburg or bust.

“I’m ready to play,” Roseberry said. “I can play. If I’m good enough to play against the first-string offense at Kutztown, I’m certainly good enough to play against an opposing offense. I can play. I need the chance to show I can.”