HIGH TECH

By CHRIS DUFRESNE

Oct. 11, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. —

They try to act as if nothing has changed.

In Blacksburg, Michael Vick traipses around campus with his baseball cap turned backward--a kid with a backpack and classes to attend.

Back home, Vick’s mother, Brenda, stands in line on a Tuesday at Gildersleeve Middle School, completing paperwork as she awaits her annual bus driver’s physical examination.

At Warwick High, Vick’s prep coach, Tommy Reamon, sits in his cramped office between two-a-day practices as a stationary fan pushes the smell of dirty socks around the room.

In fact, everything has changed, irrevocably.

Transcendental moments occur only rarely.

The Beatles had Ed Sullivan, Neil Armstrong had the moon, Joe Montana had Dwight Clark.

Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick’s world changed Jan. 4 in New Orleans during a 17-point loss to Florida State in the Sugar Bowl game.

In the national title game, on national television, Vick mesmerized in defeat, accounting for 322 of his team’s 503 total yards.

With his team trailing, 28-14, at the half, Vick rallied the underdog Hokies to a 29-28 fourth-quarter lead before running out of gas and gasps.

Vick sent two Florida State defenders, Thomas Polley and Roland Seymour, to surgery without being touched, the power of a quarterback’s jukes sufficient to buckle two knees.

Florida State players lined up afterward to pay homage to the losing quarterback.

“Who out there is better than him?” Seminole safety Sean Key said. “Who out there is close?”

A new Michael mania was born.

Sporting stars converged on Vick at the ESPY awards in March--Mark McGwire, Jerry Rice, Peyton Manning, Michael Irvin.

“Here’s a freshman, sitting with those big shots, and the thing that shocked me is that they were all coming up to me,” Vick says.

Irvin told Vick he would change the sporting landscape. Manning gave him tips on how to handle himself in public.

All because of one game?

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone leap higher or faster,” Virginia Tech Coach Frank Beamer says of Vick’s vault to fame.

Vick didn’t understand what he had done until he got back to Blacksburg and popped the Sugar Bowl tape into his video cassette recorder.

He reran plays over and over just to make sure.

“I did some things in that game that, when I look back on it, it was like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Vick says.

“Freak” is the word used today to describe a player with extraordinary skills.

They may need a new word for Vick.

At spring practice, Vick was clocked at 4.25 seconds in the 40-yard dash.

As a quarterback package, he has Steve Young’s speed, Barry Sanders’ moves and Dan Marino’s arm.

Barring injury or a poor season, Vick will almost certainly turn pro after this, his redshirt sophomore season.

Vick has led Virginia Tech to a 5-0 start and a No. 3 ranking. In a 49-0 rout of Rutgers, Vick added a spectacular 63-yard run and a flying leap into the end zone to his highlight reel.

Going into Thursday night’s Big East game against West Virginia, Vick has completed 45 of 89 passes for 635 yards and is averaging 8.2 yards a carry.

With his poise and personality, Vick has the upside of a skyscraper. At 20, his name has been brazenly mentioned with sporting icons.

“The thing that’s gone beyond what I knew was how he’s responded to competition,” Beamer says. “Special players do that. Tiger Woods does that. Michael Jordan does that.”

Woods and Jordan?

Vick is ready to walk the walk.

“It’s right there for me,” he says. “I just have to get it. That’s what excites me. It’s all sitting right there for me.”

Vick does not shy from comparisons to Jordan and Woods.

“They are the greatest at what they do,” he says. “I want to get to that level.”

The problem is, Vick’s market value is running way ahead of his academic standing. The world already considers him a commodity, refusing to wait until he turns pro.

Virginia Tech has assigned Sharon McCloskey, an associate athletic director, to help manage Vick’s rapidly changing life.

“The motivation behind it was to allow him to be a college student and not this autograph-signing superstar,” McCloskey says.

She has had to issue cease-and-desist orders to those who have tried to pawn Vick memorabilia on the eBay Web site.

Each day, an athletic department staffer does an Internet word search on “Vick” to make sure the player’s NCAA eligibility is not being jeopardized.

McCloskey tracks nearly all pertinent links short of Vicks VapoRub.

“We let that one go,” she chuckles.

Vick has achieved almost rock-star status at the rural campus about 40 miles outside Roanoke, Va.

The Hokies have had sports stars before--Bruce Smith, Antonio Freeman, Don Strock--but no one stood in line for those guys.

“Every day, every hour, every minute,” Vick says of the public’s appetite for him. “Sometimes you have to tell people no, sometimes it’s inappropriate. But I try to give anybody an autograph who asks for it.”

The demand for Vick is such that the school has limited his time with reporters to an hour a week.

Then there are the agents, who vie for Vick with the subtlety of process servers. At the ESPYs, one sports agent tossed a business card at Vick and ran.

Vick says the agents call constantly, with no regard of possible NCAA ramifications.

“They don’t care,” he says. “They go against all the rules. They just want a piece of you.”

Ride to the Top

Brenda Boddie’s life once took a dramatic turn.

She was 15 when Ferguson High administrators kicked her off the cheerleading squad because she had become pregnant with Christine, her oldest daughter.

Michael arrived two years later.

“I don’t think about how much I missed,” she says of being a teenage mother. “When I was a child, I always thought I had a good life.”

Life figures to get better and, still only 37, Brenda braces for the future.

“Sometimes I think about it and it scares me,” she says while waiting in line for her bus driver’s physical. “It’s a good feeling, but it scares me too. It takes my breath away, almost.”

She has just started her fourth year as a driver for the Enterprise Academy bus line in Newport News, and there is nothing like being Michael Vick’s mom to calm a load of unruly teenagers.

“They ask a lot of questions,” she says of the kids. “They really respect me for being his mother. They act so much better.”

Michael Boddie, Michael’s father, has been a peripheral figure. He married Brenda nine years after Michael’s birth, but was not around much in the early days.

Michael chose to keep Vick, his mother’s maiden name.

Last year, Brenda drove school bus No. 121 but may soon be riding her son’s No. 7 to a better place.

She hates the limelight--”I don’t like interviews,” Brenda says--but she understands incursions into her personal life may become standard operating procedure.

“It’s not normal, but we deal with it,” she says.

Is it worth it?

“I want all his dreams to come true,” Brenda says of Michael. “And this is what he wants.”

Stargazer

Tommy Reamon is going to make sure Michael gets what he wants. The coach is the man behind the player, Vick’s confidant and protector.

The coach did not discover Vick but he knew, as soon as he saw him, what he had.

“The first time he threw the ball, I said, ‘Wow!’ ” Reamon says. “It was the flick of the wrist that has now kind of become famous.”

Reamon was a running back at Missouri in the 1970s and kicked around a few years in the NFL before embarking on an acting career, landing the role of Delma Huddle in “North Dallas Forty.”

Before Vick arrived at Ferguson High, Reamon coached quarterback Aaron Brooks, who starred at Virginia.

It was Reamon who pulled the trigger on Vick, inserting him as starter in the seventh game of his freshman year against Phoebus High.

“I threw him to the wolves,” Reamon says. “We lost. And he just got creamed, and he was introduced to high school football.

“The next week, though, I’m a great coach. He goes 13 for 15 for 436 yards and four touchdowns.”

When Ferguson closed after Vick’s sophomore year, Reamon and the player moved down the street to Warwick.

Vick was an outstanding player, but his career was overshadowed by rival Hampton High’s Ronald Curry, a two-sport phenom who signed with North Carolina.

Reamon did not let recruiters play Curry against Vick.

“If you insisted on that, you had to walk right out that door,” Reamon says.

Schools interested in Curry could not visit Vick.

It was also Reamon who insisted that Vick redshirt his freshman year in college.

“It was an understanding in negotiations,” Reamon says.

Virginia Tech agreed to the terms and stuck to them even after it lost both starting quarterbacks during Vick’s redshirt season.

The irony of Vick’s becoming a redshirt freshman star is that he didn’t plan it that way. He’d thought a redshirt season would keep things in check.

“I knew it was going to be tough,” Vick says, “going to college, having to go to class, having to get used to a whole new environment. I didn’t think things would happen as fast as they did.”

Despite an ankle injury that forced him to miss three quarters of the Hokies’ opener against James Madison and the following week’s game against Alabama Birmingham, Vick finished the year with 1,840 yards passing, 12 touchdowns and five interceptions. He rushed for 585 yards and eight touchdowns.

Vick’s 180.37 efficiency rating set an NCAA freshman record and ranks second in NCAA history to Shaun King’s mark of 183.3.

Against Rutgers last year, Vick accounted for five first-half touchdowns, completing 11 of 12 passes for 248 yards and four touchdowns, and rushing for 68 yards and a score.

Vick says, “After four or five games I was saying to myself, ‘This is kind of easy.’ ”

Be Like Mike

Reamon knows Vick can be more than a star. He sees a player with transcendental qualities. Reamon, the former actor, has tutored Vick about playing to the camera and projecting a positive persona.

He told Vick to be like Mike and Tiger: “They’ve got the greatest smile in the world and great charisma, and you’re not going to take anything less.”

He told Vick, “You are now a product. Your private life is over. You have to handle yourself in a different way.”

Reamon knows how the system works, how the media can raise a player up and tear him down.

“If he throws two interceptions, you’d cut him up,” Reamon tells a visiting writer. “You’d throw him to the dogs. Is this the sophomore jinx? The SI jinx? I have to deal with him as a person.

“The sky’s the limit on Michael. However, that’s not the objective today.”

In the days when Ronald Curry was stealing the headlines in Virginia, Vick said a quiet prayer every night.

“I always asked God, ‘One day I’ll have my chance. Maybe someday I’ll have my chance.’ ”

Vick has his chance.

The rest is up to him.

“I just have to continue to make good judgments, be smart about the people I hang around, be smart out there on the football field, make plays,” Vick says. “I think it will all come together for me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Michael Vick by the Numbers

Statistics for Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick. He redshirted in 1998:

PASSING

*--*

Year Games Att. Comp. Pct. Yards TD Int. 1999 10 152 90 59.2 1,840 12 5 2000 5 89 45 50.6 635 5 4

*--*

RUSHING

*--*

Year Games Att. Yards Avg. TD 1999 10 108 585 5.4 8 2000 5 59 484 8.2 7

*--*

15-1 Tech’s record with Vick as starting quarterback