TOP OF HIS GAME

You sense the best player in college football is not in this for the fight songs and alumni weekends.

Truth is, he does not want to be here: in this state, at this university, at this interview. If anything, he would like to turn back the hands of time.

Best years of his life?

“No,” he says, sitting at a desk wearing a Florida State T-shirt. “There’s nothing here for me.”

The 20-year-old phenom once recruited by Notre Dame and Florida now practices in a railroad town on a field across the street from “Huntington Hose and Hydraulics.”

The best player in college football once kicked a teenager in the stomach as the kid lay helpless on the ground.

“It was just like my temper took over,” he recounts, “like I was another person.”

The best player once smoked pot and did jail time.

He remembers nights by himself in his cell, thinking “how much hate I have for people,” and how “the hate’s always going to be there, just for the fact that people can’t let a person be 1952998761 The best player has two strikes against him and is hiding out in the Appalachians to avoid Strike 3. Once gregarious and approachable, he has put up a wall of insulation. He does not go out nights for fear that his name will end up in the paper.

The best player in college football is not Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning, who passed up millions to return for his senior year because he just couldn’t stand the thought of missing all those sticky-gooey, postgame alma mater renderings.

The best player is wide receiver Randy Moss, who returned for his sophomore season at Marshall University only because the school is upgrading to Division I-A, joining the Mid-American Conference, and Moss wants to show NFL scouts that last year’s one-man stampede through I-AA competition wasn’t a fluke.

Oh, and mark these words: Moss won’t be back for his junior season.

For Manning, perhaps, college is a love affair.

For Moss, it’s a holding cell.

“If I can have a decent year, half as good to the year I had last year, there would probably be nothing left to prove,” Moss says.

Last year?

Exiled from Division I-A after Notre Dame had turned him away and Florida State had given him the boot, Moss led Marshall to the Division I-AA title with 78 receptions for 1,709 yards. His 28 touchdown catches broke the all-divisions NCAA record of 27 set in 1984 by Jerry Rice at Mississippi Valley State.

In the title-game victory over Montana, Moss caught nine passes for 220 yards and four touchdowns. Marshall finished 15-0, with Moss scoring at least one touchdown in each victory.

“I think the competition for I-AA was not all that good,” Moss says. “It had its ups and downs.”

The raw data on him, however, is staggering. Friends call him “the Freak” because of his athletic skills. At 6-feet-5 and 210 pounds, Moss has Rice’s size and Deion Sanders’ speed.

In fact, Moss’ 40-yard dash time of 4.25 during 1996 Florida State spring drills ranks second only to Sanders’ 4.23 in school history.

“Runs like a scalded dog,” Coach Bobby Bowden said of Moss at the time.

Former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz once put it succinctly: “Randy Moss was the best high school football player I’ve ever seen.”

Bob Pruett, the second-year Marshall coach and former Florida defensive coordinator, recruited Ike Hilliard and Reidel Anthony, star receivers on last year’s national championship Gator team.

Hilliard was the seventh pick in last spring’s NFL draft, Anthony the 16th.

“I think they’re great players,” Pruett says of Hilliard and Anthony. “I don’t want to diminish them. But if you just take physically, [Moss] is five inches taller, he’s 20 to 30 pounds heavier, his vertical jump is probably four inches or more higher. He’s faster. And all three of them got great hands and great body control. Other than [Moss] being physically better in every way, they’re even.”

Moss is part myth, part magic, part hope and part hate.

Could one player possibly be so good?

After Moss made a mockery of the I-AA title game, Montana Athletic Director Wayne Hogan, a former Florida State associate athletic director, sent a note to Bowden regarding Moss, which read: “If you hadn’t kicked him off the team, we’d both be national champions.”

Don’t think Moss hadn’t considered it.

He watched Florida’s drubbing of Florida State in the Sugar Bowl and wondered if he could have been the difference.

He would have been in the Seminoles’ starting lineup Jan. 2 in New Orleans, had it not been for Strike 2, his testing positive for marijuana in the spring of 1996 while he was serving jail time for Strike 1, an assault charge stemming from a high school fight.

The two mistakes ended any hopes Moss had for major college experience.

Dejected, he turned to Marshall, a Division I-AA power about an hour’s drive from Moss’ hometown of Rand, W. Va.

Because Marshall was I-AA, Moss did not have to sit out another season.

Suddenly, college became a business proposition.

“It’s not about football,” Moss says. “It’s just about work.”

*

If Moss could turn back the clock?

“If I could take myself back three years, I think I’d move,” he says. “I think I would have tried to find some family member out of state to go to. Try to start a career in that state. Just to start over, really, because I don’t think living here is for me.

“Three years, I think it just flew by, the time all the bad stuff was going on, I didn’t think it would ever end. Me getting out of jail. All the news cameras, my face was on TV in orange [jail coveralls], and the shackles, stuff like that. I didn’t really think that was going to end.”

Randy Moss was the most heralded athlete from West Virginia since Jerry West. His career at Dupont High in Belle, 15 miles southeast of Charleston, is the stuff of legend.

Forget football, Moss was the state’s player of the year in basketball his junior and senior seasons. And, for good measure, as a sophomore, he won the state 100- and 200-meter championships.

Asked if Moss was the best football player he had recruited, Pruett broke into broad grin and nodded the way a 4-year-old does when you ask if he’d like ice cream.

Moss had one recurring football dream: playing for Notre Dame. He and his brother used to fight over who loved the Irish more.

“Usually we’d start naming players, All-Americans, Heismans, numbers, ‘Back in this day who wore number so and so,’ ” Moss says, explaining the competition. “It was like a trivia game, really. Who likes them the most.”

Moss was in heaven the day Notre Dame sent him a questionnaire. There would be no recruiting war. Moss was going to South Bend.

But then came March 24, 1995. As the story goes, a black friend of Moss’ was sitting in class when a white student carved the N-word into a desktop and showed it to him.

Moss’ friend challenged the kid to a fight after school and asked Randy, also black, to provide backup.

Moss says of the 700 students at Dupont, only about 40 were black. He says racism was and remains a problem. Moss described a corridor on campus known as “Redneck Alley,” where groups of white students, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Confederate flags, hang out and taunt black students.

“My locker was right there,” Moss says.

When his friend asked for protection, Moss didn’t hesitate.

The fight was one-sided. Moss’ buddy knocked the white student to the ground and kicked him relentlessly.

Moss admits to kicking the student too, twice as the fight was ending. The boy wound up in the hospital with a torn spleen.

Moss’ friend was not charged with a crime because he was a juvenile. But Moss had just turned 18 and was slapped with a felony, “malicious wounding.”

Although charges were later reduced to misdemeanor battery, Moss was sentenced to 30 days in jail, even though he had no criminal history.

Moss was expelled from Dupont and finish his senior year at Cabell Alternative School.

How much did those two kicks cost?

Moss had signed a letter of intent with Notre Dame, but suddenly the Irish were not interested. Notre Dame officials maintain that Moss was not accepted because of academic deficiencies. Moss did turn in his application late and produced an admittedly woeful effort on the required essay.

Moss, of course, has his opinion.

“I think that Notre Dame really let me go just because of the fight,” he says. “That was the main reason. Notre Dame is a Catholic school. You come to a Catholic School, they want you on best behavior. If I’d went there, I’d have been, you know, going to court, prosecuted, things like that. There would have been some negative publicity at Notre Dame and I don’t think they wanted something like that.”

Moss says that was a disappointment, but it was not the end. Holtz called Florida State and suggested that Bowden take a chance with Moss.

After much heated debate, public and private, Florida State administrators agreed to admit Moss in 1995, provided he would sit out his freshman season as a redshirt.

Moss was so impressive at Seminole practices that quarterback Danny Kanell begged Bowden to activate Moss.

But Moss sat out the season, then turned in a spectacular spring practice in 1996 before returning home to finish his sentence at Charleston’s South Central Regional Jail.

Two days before he entered, Moss admits, he smoked dope with friends.

“That was really a pretty dumb mistake, smoking marijuana,” Moss says. “It was during my probation.

“So I was really being dumb, just hanging out really. I wouldn’t call it partying. I call it chillin. It was something I shouldn’t have done and I paid the price.”

Moss’ probation was revoked, Florida State kicked him off the team and he was sentenced to an additional 90 nights in jail on a work-furlough program through spring and summer of 1996. The sentence was later reduced to time served through July 26.

Moss says his jail stay was relatively uneventful.

“I stated as soon as I got in there that I’m not coming in here looking for no trouble and I hope nobody tries to make a name for himself to try to hurt me or get hurt,” Moss says. “Everything was cool from there on out.”

His jail time completed, Moss called Pruett, who had recruited him unsuccessfully at Florida but had just taken over at Marshall.

In his year in Huntington, a town of 60,000 on the West Virginia-Ohio-Kentucky border, Moss’ behavior has been reported as exemplary.

“We’d not had any problems with him,” Pruett says. “I think he’s got a bad rap.”

Moss says he’s sorry for what happened at Dupont, but only because a boy was seriously injured.

“I think I regret it from that standpoint,” he says. “But from the fight, and the racial slurs and all that, I don’t regret that.”

Moss paid for his act but says the larger issue of racism at Dupont and in West Virginia has been glossed over.

“I think that I had to just get it off my back,” he says. “I still, to this day, don’t regret it. The racism in that part of the country is still going to be there.”

Moss has no plans of returning to Dupont, even after he makes it big in the NFL.

“I really do hate the school with all passion,” he says. “It had to take somebody like me to get it done, whatever, to get it out to the public, really to the whole state.”

*

Moss can’t wait to leave Marshall. He dreams of cashing an NFL paycheck and buying a big house on a hill somewhere not in West Virginia, overlooking water, “where I can just look out and about, where I’m separated from everybody else; get me some big land, fence around it, and be my own person.”

Moss knows he’s different at Marshall, still “the Freak.”

He says he senses some resentment on the team and thus chooses to keep his distance.

“Even though I hate to say it, I think there’s really a little bit of hatred on the team,” he says. “Just for the fact, I came in with all this publicity. God blesses every few people with talent, you just use it to the best of your ability.”

Not everyone agrees.

“Talent-wise, Randy is on another level,” sophomore quarterback Chad Pennington says. “People-wise, I don’t think there’s a distance between him and the players. . . . Everyone knows this is Randy’s last stop, he wants to make the best of it.”

Marshall center John Wade says he likes Moss.

“Randy’s a good guy,” says Wade. “He doesn’t put himself on a pedestal. But, obviously, his talents are different from others’.”

Moss insists he is not a loner, that he constructed his cocoon out of necessity.

“It’s not really about lonely,” he says. “It’s just being protective.”

The college life Moss envisioned, running into Notre Dame Stadium or playing wide receiver for Bobby Bowden, ended with two parting kicks to the gut on March 24, 1995.

All Moss wants now is to be left alone until he’s in the NFL, when there will be ample time for talk and gawk.

“I can’t do the things or go the places that I would have done in Florida,” Moss says. “Now it’s time to keep to myself.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How Moss Ranks

Most touchdown passes caught, season.

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Player Year School Div TDs 1. Randy Moss 1996 Marshall I-AA 28 2. Jerry Rice 1984 Mississippi Valley St. I-AA 27 3. Manny Hazard 1989 Houston I-A 22 4. Chris Perry 1995 Adams St. II 21 5. John Aromando 1983 Trenton St. III 20 6. Ed Bell 1969 Idaho St. II 20 7. Stanley Flanders 1994 Valdosta St. II 19 8. Desmond Howard 1991 Michigan I-A 19

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Most receiving yards, season.

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Player Year School Div Yds 1. Chris George 1993 Glenville St. II 1,876 2. Alex Van Dyke 1995 Nevada I-A 1,854 3. Barry Wagner 1989 Alabama A&M; II 1,812 4. Howard Twilley 1965 Tulsa I-A 1,779 5. Chris Perry 1995 Adams St. II 1,719 6. Randy Moss 1996 Marshall I-AA 1,709 7. Sean Munroe 1992 Mass.-Boston III 1,693 8. Manny Hazard 1989 Houston I-A 1,689 9. Jerry Rice 1984 Mississippi Valley St. I-AA 1,682

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