Dayne’s Uncle Deserves the Heisman

“Uncle Rob, for never making me feel like a nephew, but always making me feel like a son, for that, Uncle Rob, you win the Heisman. Love, Ron Dayne Jr., 33.”

*

Tears welled up in Rob Reid’s eyes when his wife unfolded a piece of paper and read the speech by Ron Dayne Jr. It was called “The Heisman.”

It was a tribute to Reid, Dayne’s uncle who helped raise the young man who would grow up to become the most prolific running back in college football history. Dayne couldn’t be there to deliver it, but his words made a haunting impact.

“He talked about the things I did in his life and how it affected him, and then he said, ‘For that, you win the Heisman,” said Reid, who invited Dayne into his home and treated him like a son after divorce and drugs ravaged the family when Dayne was only 15. “I felt like melting.”

Dayne, who became the NCAA’s career rushing leader for Wisconsin three weeks ago, may culminate his career by winning the Heisman Trophy next week in New York. His story is about much more than football.

After Dayne’s parents divorced, his mother succumbed to depression and drugs. He and younger sister Onya went to live with separate relatives, without whom they would have faced a bleak future.

“It was hard, but I never let them know that,” said his mother, Brenda Dayne. “Whenever I talked to them, I was all right. That was his only concern. ‘Mommy, are you OK?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine.”’

It has been a long road to recovery and forgiveness, tracing a path of near-destruction from Virginia to South Jersey and finally to one of sport’s most honored stages.

“Just to see him achieve it has been like a family reward,” said Reid, whom Dayne still regards as a father. “It’s a dream come true for him, and for it to happen to this kid has been tremendous.”

Ron Dayne Jr. was born in Blacksburg, Va., on March 14, 1978. Not even that was easy. The 7-pound, 13-ounce baby was nearly strangled by his umbilical cord. Brenda Dayne was in labor for 18 hours.

The early stories sound as though they come from the typical childhood of a mischievous boy, except for young Ronnie’s size. He appeared to be 7 years old when he was only 3, grew to 5-foot-10, 240 pounds by the seventh grade and “was always the biggest kid everywhere he went,” Reid said.

“I told him he didn’t have to fight,” Brenda Dayne said. “He just had to appear.”

Ear infections harmed his hearing and forced him to wear tubes in his ears until he was 12. At the same age, he had to wear braces on both knees because he was growing too quickly. He wore the braces grudgingly, because his mom told him, “No braces, no football.”

There were broken-down Big Wheels, the typical fights with other boys from the neighborhood, hilarious dress-up games with his mom and younger sister, Onya.

“Whoever was dressed the funniest, they’d go get pizza,” Brenda Dayne said. “Ronnie would always win. Sometimes he’d come out like a sumo wrestler. One time he came out with a stretch dress on with his face made up. We were dying.”

When Dayne was going into ninth grade, something went terribly wrong at home.

Brenda Dayne said marital problems careened out of control when her husband, Ron Sr., “hit me just once.” She loaded Ronnie and Onya into a car and left.

Around the time of the divorce, Brenda Dayne’s mother died of cancer. She was trying to raise two children on a teacher’s meager salary. The pressure built. When the kids went home to Virginia to visit their father, Brenda said her oldest brother introduced her to the quick, mind-scorching high that can be achieved with crack cocaine.

It served its purpose, to obliterate reality, but it nearly wiped out much more. Brenda Dayne, daughter of a minister, was now a crack addict.

“All the time, it was like a buildup in me, not knowing it was going to explode like it did,” Brenda Dayne said. “But it did, and when it did, it was ugly.”

She lost her job as a teacher at the Lakeland Youth Center, where her brother, Rob, still works. Despite what the crack did to her, she had the presence of mind to let her children go. Ron moved in with his uncle Rob, wife Debra and children Rob Jr., Jaquay and Joel in Berlin, N.J., about 20 miles from Philadelphia.

Onya, about two years younger than Ron, moved in with relatives around the corner because they had a daughter about Onya’s age.

“I wanted them to have as normal a childhood as possible,” Brenda Dayne said. “They could be with me, see me. It’s not like me ever lost contact. But I knew it was a better environment for both of them.”

In his written tribute to the uncle who became a father, Dayne recalled the very first night he spent in his new home.

“The first thing we did was have a family meeting,” Dayne wrote. “All of us were sitting around the kitchen table--you, Aunt Deb, Rob Jr., Jaquay and Joel. You announced that no one was going to get any new clothes until I had as many outfits as everybody else.”

“I treated him like he was my son, and he treated me like I was his father,” Reid said.

Dayne’s practice throughout his senior year has been not to give interviews. He is fiercely protective of his family. After guiding Onya to college, Dayne has a daughter of his own, 2-year-old Jada.

“He doesn’t really talk,” said Onya Dayne, a freshman at Wisconsin.

It was with a solemn sense of duty that Dayne kept the house in order and looked after his sister, hiding their mother’s drug abuse from her.

“I’ll never forget the first time I went to his home to visit him,” said Wisconsin scout Bernie Wyatt, who recruited Dayne. “When I got there, he was doing the housecleaning. That hit me and I said, ‘We’ve got a good kid here.”’

Brenda Dayne said she used drugs for about a year and a half and spent a year in a voluntary rehab program. She says she has been clean ever since--about six years--and now works in a Toys ‘R’ Us store in Burlington, N.J. She attends meetings every week and speaks out about addiction and depression.

“I’m just now coming to grips with everything that happened in my life,” she said. “It’s constant, even now.”

Attempts to reach Dayne’s father, Ron Sr., at his Richmond, Va., home were unsuccessful this week.

“It’s been a relationship they’ve had to work at, I guess is the best way to put it,” Reid said.