Breaking Barriers at Texas A&M;

DALLAS — The time was up, and a Texas A&M; official was calling the linebacker, telling him to vacate the carpet at Sprague Field, where he was surrounded by kids seeking autographs for their Cotton Bowl posters, reporters seeking a story.

Over and over he wrote “Dat Nguyen, No. 9,” but one kid wanted more.

“Can you write your phone number?” he asked, and Nguyen dutifully wrote it under his name with a felt-tip pen.

Whether the kid would ever use it, only he knows.

Then there are the kids that Nguyen gets called about.

There was Quang Pham, for one.

“Dat had done some things for us in our athlete outreach program,” said John Thornton, who heads up student services as an assistant athletic director at Texas A&M.;

“[Teacher Jennifer Paderas] was a football fan and knew Dat from that and knew something about his background. She had a kid, a fourth- or fifth-grader, I think, from Vietnam who had just moved in. She asked if Dat could help.”

Quang Pham’s father had taken a construction job in College Station and sent his son to Mary Branch Elementary, where Paderas had him in her fifth-grade class.

But really didn’t have him at all.

Quang spoke little English, could barely read and held back from class functions and discussions.

He was a bewildered kid in a new environment.

“We got there, and it was me, Dat, the principal and Ms. Paderas standing just outside the class with Quang,” Thornton says.

“The principal said in English to Quang, real slow like, ‘Would you like to show Dat the school?’

“The young man didn’t understand a thing the principal said, and the kid looked puzzled. Then Dat spoke to him in his language and you should have seen his eyes light up. They talked a while in Vietnamese, then the kid showed Dat around the school.”

Paderas had expected the single visit, but Nguyen told her, “I’ll see you next week at the same time.”

And the next. And the next, four weeks in all, with time spent in the library, talking about Vietnam and playing games.

“About the second or third week,” Thornton says, “the young man had gotten a haircut and he went up to his teacher and said, ‘Ms. Paderas, Ms. Paderas, look. Hair like Dat.’ ”

Quang became more animated in class, and his reading level went from pre-kindergarten to second grade in a matter of weeks.

Nguyen had found an eager student in a new land.

“He just wanted a chance, like anybody else,” Nguyen says.

Like he and his family had wanted, 22 years ago.

*

Dat Nguyen could have used a Dat Nguyen.

He was born in a refugee camp near Little Rock, Ark., to parents who had escaped as South Vietnam was falling in 1975.

Carine Nguyen now lives with her sister Le in Stanton, in Orange County’s Little Saigon. In 1975, she was about 4 and Le was 7, but their memories are clear.

You don’t forget bombs. You don’t forget bullets.

“They were shooting at us,” Carine says of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army units sweeping through the south.

“We were living two hours south of Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City], and we were lucky to be living down by the coast. My dad had connections with someone who had a boat. We went through a swamp and climbed up on a boat. It was a small boat and there were about 50 of us.”

Says sister Le Nguyen: “We all felt very lucky to be alive. Our city was being bombed when my mother woke us up and said we had to leave. We were all still in our pajamas as we were getting on the boat and the bombs were going off. When you come from that kind of background, you’re just thankful to have a chance at a new life.”

Ho Nguyen had been a shrimper, and he owned a marine supply business that kept him in contact with other shrimpers who had boats and were getting away. And who were making more money loading boats with people than shrimp.

“My dad had a lot of businesses then and he knew if the Communists took over, he wouldn’t have any businesses,” Carine says. “He took us away for freedom.”

They went to Thailand, and then to Little Rock, where the family of five became one of six with the birth of Dat.

The family moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., to Dallas, to New Orleans and then Biloxi, Miss., before settling in Rockport, Texas.

Rockport is on the Gulf Coast, a few miles from Corpus Christi. It has been a fishing and shrimping town for generations. Those generations knew what a feast-or-famine business they had, and the last thing they wanted was competition from industrious people who knew shrimping but not English.

The Texans protested, and made things rough on the Vietnamese.

There has since been a resolution of sorts, and there is peaceful co-existence. Ho doesn’t go out after the shrimp any more, and he’s retired from his marine supply business. He and wife Tammy Nguyen have a Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant. It gives them more time for trips to College Station, to watch their son play football.

*

“I wasn’t into football,” Dat says. “I got into it in the eighth grade.

“I was running around, wasn’t coming home at night, and my mom threatened to send me to a boys’ school in Missouri. I wanted to stay with my folks, so I had to find something else to do.”

Football was an alternative to his other avocation, which was stealing.

It was hard at first. And Tammy Nguyen didn’t want her son to play football for fear he would be injured, but she didn’t want him stealing either.

Also, there is a question of size. Nguyen is only 6 feet 1, 213 pounds, although he was once 240, which is huge by Vietnamese standards. He played at Rockport-Fulton High with his brother, Hung, who was a 5-4, 140-pound center.

American food, eaten at the house of his friend, Jimmy Hattenbach, helped Dat put on weight. So did time in the weight room. As his body and his legend grew in South Texas, recruiters began to call.

One was from UCLA.

“I took a trip out there, and [former Bruin receiver] Mike Nguyen was my host,” Dat says.

The two aren’t related. The name Nguyen, in Vietnam, is like Smith in the United States.

But Mike Nguyen was ready to strike up a kinship. “He was talking about how Jackie Robinson started the black thing, the African-American thing out there at UCLA,” Dat says. “He wanted me to help him start an Asian thing there. It was a neat deal.”

But not neat enough. Nguyen told Michigan he was coming after visiting Ann Arbor, then reneged when he went to College Station.

Few are happier about that than R.C. Slocum, the Aggies’ coach.

“He’s a very high-strung guy who plays with a lot of intensity,” Slocum says. “He instantly seems to go in the right direction on a play, and when he gets there, you wonder where he came from.”

This season, Nguyen became the first player to lead Texas A&M; in tackles for three years in a row since Ed Simonini did it, when Nguyen was a babe in arms, in the refugee camp in Little Rock.

With a season to go, he already has 370 tackles, an average of 10.57 a game.

“What I do know is that without football,” Nguyen said, “I don’t know where I’d be, what would have happened to me.”

For one thing, he wouldn’t be at College Station, and Quang Pham might still be a lost kid in a new land.