Aztec Ruins : San Diego State’s Jones Was a Heisman Candidate Before Season, but After Probe of HisCar Purchase, He Hasn’t Even Talked to His de Facto Family

The corner booth at Shoney’s in Greenville, S.C., may not rank with the last scene in “Casablanca,” but there sat Monnie Broome, explaining to George that if he didn’t get on that plane, he’d regret it. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but someday . . .

It was one of those father-to-son talks, muffled by clanking silverware, as George stared at the fork-in-the-road decision before him.

Monnie had the plane ticket, George the cold feet.

George could take the easy way out, stay in Greenville and clock in at the textile mill for the rest of his respectable, anonymous life.

Or, he could get on a plane to Bakersfield the next morning.

“Staying is just not an option right now,” Monnie told him.

So George Jones, knees quaking, boarded a plane for the first time, destined for nowhere--or close to it, he figured.

“Oh, man what was I doing?” he recalled last summer of the conversation he had with himself. “I was praying to God I wouldn’t mess up and that the plane didn’t crash.”

Jones came so close to not messing up.

Three years after touching down in California, two years after setting national community college rushing records at Bakersfield and one year after breaking Marshall Faulk’s single-season rushing record at San Diego State, Jones prepared for the 1996 season as a Heisman Trophy candidate.

But the star tailback has yet to play a down of his senior season while the school investigates whether he violated NCAA rules in February, when he bought a car through Rick Norton, a San Diego financial planner with ties to NFL players and sports agents.

It was Monnie Broome’s worst nightmare that Jones, on his own, would be taken in by unscrupulous types.

Broome worried about the agents and flesh peddlers who infiltrate college campuses and hire runners to make inroads with potential NFL players.

He went hoarse lecturing Jones on the subject.

Broome doesn’t know if his worst fears have been realized. He says he doesn’t know Norton from Adam.

Norton claims to have done nothing wrong and says of Jones, “I feel so bad for the kid you wouldn’t believe.” Norton says he is the subject of an anonymous smear campaign.

Jones has retained Sheldon Sherman, a San Diego lawyer who is taking the case pro bono.

“The kid is getting screwed,” Sherman says, “And I think the administration at San Diego State has finally come to that conclusion.”

Rick Bay, the school’s athletic director, has been trying to sort through a web of conflicting testimony before he prepares an appeal to the NCAA asking for Jones’ reinstatement.

“The university and its representatives come before any one coach or student-athlete,” Bay says.

Monday, two school officials were dispatched to Overland Park, Kan., to ask the NCAA for help in interpreting the information they have gathered.

Sherman wants Jones reinstated before the team’s game against Air Force on Oct. 5.

Bay says, “It’s realistic that the matter could be resolved.” But he wants answers first.

In the meantime, Jones sits out game after game, suspended indefinitely for rules he might not have violated.

His Heisman Trophy dreams are shot, his prospects of becoming a first-round NFL draft pick dwindling.

“He’s watching his life go down the toilet,” Sherman says.

What should have been one of college football’s most inspirational stories has taken a terrible turn.

In Greenville, Monnie Broome waits and worries.

“It’s no different than if it was my own boy,” Broome says of the situation.

Broome, in fact, is not Jones’ father. Jackie Broome not his mother, Nathan not his brother.

The Broomes are not foster parents or legal guardians.

Yet they are essentially the family that raised Jones, the only one he has publicly acknowledged.

Never mind the lack of legal paperwork.

Or that Jones is black and the Broomes are white.

“There’s no way to describe my feelings toward them,” Jones said in July. “I don’t know how I can repay them.”

*

How about with a simple phone call?

Since he was suspended Sept. 13, Jones has not returned one of Broome’s desperate messages.

That is curious, considering that Broome has always been the shoulder Jones leaned on in hard times. It was Broome who bought Jones’ ticket west, Broome who financed Jones’ apartment the summer he arrived in San Diego, Broome who paid $800 in restitution after Jones and two other Aztecs were suspended for the season opener Sept. 7 for improperly using rental cars provided by Phoenix Forte, a nonprofit charity organization headed by Norton.

But Broome has heard nary a word since Jones’ latest suspension.

The reason? It may be because Broome gave Jones $2,500 to buy a “clunker” to drive around campus but that Jones, apparently, wanted to upgrade to something a little more sporty.

The focus of the latest inquiry is a 1991 Mazda RX-7 Jones owned last February that was financed by Holmes Leasing, an El Cajon company operated by Norton.

“He saw this car, he liked the car, and that’s all that mattered to him at the moment,” Sherman, his attorney, explains.

Norton claims it was all legitimate, that the loan was secured through Jones’ mother, Ella Mae, who lives in Greenville.

Why would Jones go to his mother instead of Broome?

No one knows for sure. Jones did not return telephone calls.

But here’s a logical guess:

“One thing for sure,” Broome says of the loan. “I would not have done it.”

Jones had the Mazda less than 30 days before wrecking it, after which he returned it to Norton.

Some joy ride.

“He’s getting his butt kicked for having that . . . car,” Norton says.

San Diego State’s concern, and certainly the NCAA’s, is that Norton has ties to Mike Merkow, a former NFL agent, and handles financial planning for several NFL players.

It is against NCAA rules for players to retain agents before their eligibility expires or to accept benefits not available to the general student body.

Norton denies there was any quid pro quo arrangement with Jones once he turns professional. Norton says he has given San Diego State documents showing that the player’s mother paid for the car and to support that he has made similar loans to others.

Norton says Jones is a victim, “caught in the middle.”

Bay needs to determine whether Jones’ “long-arm” relationship with Norton is within NCAA bounds.

Bay says Jones, at best, was guilty of poor judgment.

Norton insists his charity was not a front for something nefarious, that Jones was heavily involved in charity for wayward youths. He says Jones, for legal purposes, subjected himself to fingerprinting and background checks to visit some of the hardened youths.

Broome is hurt, but not bitter.

“I’m assuming I’ll hear from him when everything is put to bed,” Broome says of Jones. “I would assume I would. I don’t know what his feelings are. Our relationship is unconditional. I’m not angry, or down on him. I wish it didn’t happen, but it did. The only thing I can do is pull for him.”

It is all Broome has ever done for George.

*

Jones was born Dec. 31, 1973, in Greenville, but after that the details get fuzzy. He won’t say much except that he stopped living with his parents around the sixth grade.

“I don’t think about it, I don’t talk about it,” Jones said in July. “Someone had to go through it. I happened to be the one who got through it. I don’t care how I was brought up.”

He lived with friends and relatives, bouncing from home to home, meal to meal, couch to couch.

“I grew up pretty early, yeah,” he said.

Nathan Broome recalls George living with an “Uncle Onion” for a while.

Nathan and George had little in common at first except sports. Nathan was from middle-class Greenville; George from the Woodland Homes projects. They met as pee-wee football teammates on the Eastside Dolphins.

They became fast friends, although it wasn’t a relationship of convenience. It wasn’t wise to drive into Jones’ neighborhood after dark, so Nathan’s mom used to drop George off at the top of hill; sort of a safety demarcation point.

Nathan remembers nights when rocks and epithets were hurled at him as he sped away.

But he kept coming back, to play street ball with George’s friends.

George told Nathan, “Don’t sweat it, I’ll take care of you.”

And he did. Once, a neighborhood bully pulled a gun on Nathan and demanded to drive his convertible.

Without thinking, Jones jumped the guy and disarmed him.

“I don’t know if he really was going to harm him, but Nathan didn’t know that at the time,” Jones said. “I just had to react. The guy was drunk, he was probably just playing around.”

Said Nathan, “I don’t know how brave it was, but it was a big relief to see him come over there.”

Jones kept crossing into Nathan’s world, even when it was uncomfortable.

“No one came out and said, ‘You shouldn’t be with that white guy,’ ” Jones says, “but you can sense that. People used to look at us funny.”

Monnie remembers how uneasy Jones first appeared sitting in his easy chair.

“You could tell he wasn’t used to being around a white family,” Monnie says. “He would watch me real carefully.”

Eventually the boundaries melted.

Nathan never met anyone as dedicated.

Jones lied about his age and took a job as a fry cook in a fish restaurant, Dundee’s Outback.

He was 12.

“I looked the age,” Jones said. “It was a pretty cool job.”

Nathan recalls Jones running a mile and a half each day to another job he took at a fast-food chicken joint.

“He went down there at 5 a.m. to make the biscuits, working 50 pounds of dough with his hands,” Nathan says.

In an attempt to keep a couple of teenagers occupied one summer, Monnie bought health-club memberships for Nathan and George. There, Jones fell in love for the first time--with a barbell.

“It got to a point where he got unbelievable with his strength,” Monnie remembers.

Nathan, the quarterback, and George, the tailback, became stars at Eastside High, leading the team as seniors to the playoffs for the first time in 15 years.

Monnie doesn’t remember when he became Jones’ “father.” He did find it strange that Jones’ parents never attended school functions, but Monnie didn’t think it was his business to pry.

Jones ended up spending most nights at the Broomes, even vacationing with them.

“We’d go to the mountains, stay two nights, and he never made any calls,” Monnie recalls. “It was an indication to me that he was on his own, so to speak.”

Monnie says Jones never gave him one lick of trouble.

When it became obvious that Nathan and George were good enough to play college football, Monnie started nagging the boys about keeping up with their schoolwork.

Nathan earned a football scholarship at Newbury College, a Division II school in South Carolina, where he stayed two years before transferring to Clemson to play baseball.

Jones’ grades weren’t good enough coming out of high school, so his only option was junior college.

A friend of a friend of George had played at Bakersfield, which was enough for George to sit down one day and pen a letter to a faraway place.

“I’d never heard of it,” Jones said.

Actually, Bakersfield Coach Carl Bowser had been tipped about Jones by Arizona State, which had been hot to sign Jones until they saw his transcripts.

Monnie, who’s in the textile business, told George he would assist Jones financially, even buy his plane ticket west, if Jones promised to give school his best effort.

It was while filling out financial aid forms--Monnie told George he couldn’t leave blank questions about his parents--that Monnie discovered the truth about George’s past.

“He told me what happened, but he didn’t want me to discuss that,” Monnie says. “I’ve honored that.”

His first year at Bakersfield was country-song lonely, but Jones eventually grew to love the place.

He wasn’t a bookworm, but became a respectable student.

One day, Bowser got an impromptu visit from Jones’ biology teacher.

“He said, ‘Coach, George Jones is one of the finest students and finest men I’ve ever been around,’ ” recalls Bowser, who retired from coaching in 1994 but remains as athletic director.

Jones worked hard on his game too. Nathan remembers that George cut off the wrong foot in high school.

Bowser corrected those flaws, and was rewarded the night Jones scored six touchdowns, breaking O.J. Simpson’s junior college record. Afterward, Jones gave Bowser the game ball and asked to be photographed with his coach.

Bowser, in kind, recommended Jones to an old college chum, Ted Tollner, San Diego State’s coach.

Tollner could trust Bowser.

On Oct. 29, 1960, while they were teammates at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Bowser pulled Tollner from the wreckage of a charter plane that crashed, killing 22 passengers, 16 of them players. Bowser and Tollner were two of 26 survivors.

“We’re more than just coaching friends,” Tollner says.

Arizona State was still in the hunt for Jones, but renewed interest too late.

On advice from home--home meaning Monnie--Jones chose San Diego State.

Tollner got more than he expected.

Last year, Jones was the nation’s third-leading rusher, averaging 153.5 yards a game. He ran for 1,842 yards and scored 23 touchdowns, breaking by 212 yards the school yardage record Faulk set in 1992.

“He’s outworked everybody I’ve ever seen in my life,” Nathan says.

At 5 feet 9 and 210 pounds, Jones can bench press more than twice his body weight. Aztec coaches have actually had to chase Jones out of the weight room.

The weight room, though, nearly was Jones’ undoing. Coaches thought Jones was a bust when he arrived from Bakersfield because he couldn’t make it through successive 100-yard wind sprints.

It turned out Jones was hamstrung because he had amassed too much bulk in his legs. After they streamlined his workout, a genie head-butted his way out of the bottle.

Jones is not stopwatch fast--he has been timed at 4.42 seconds in the 40--but is Jerry Rice fast, meaning no one ever seems to catch him from behind with a football in his hands.

Tough?

He played the final three games last season with a broken jaw, sucking food through clenched teeth.

“I must have been nuts for doing that,” he said.

With jaw wired, he rushed for 384 yards and four touchdowns.

*

Monnie Broome doesn’t know why he devoted time, heart and money to someone else’s child.

“It just sort of evolved,” he says. “It wasn’t anything that I can say occurred. We just got to know him, and love him. It was knowing he had, I believe, the potential for having a better life.”

If Jones would ever return his calls, Monnie would tell him the dream is not over. He would tell Jones to stay in school, get his degree, to keep his chin up.

He would tell him the suspension is a setback, not a death sentence. Nothing like the Greenville streets. He would tell him winning the Heisman isn’t everything. He would tell Jones that he can still make it to the NFL, make it in life.

He would tell him it’s OK to see a fancy car and want to have it. OK to call his mother, a mother Monnie Broome has never met, to get the financial backing.

“This is a sad, sad situation we have here,” Monnie says. “My hope and desire is that George will be able to realize his dream, although it is somewhat damaged. I have confidence in him that he will put this behind him. I think he will work hard, drive hard, and still achieve his dream.”