Run of the Chill

In many ways, it has been just another football season.

There have been good plays and bad, good teams and bad. There have been moments to cheer. Then there was the moment when a pro player took a pen out of his sock and signed a football in the end zone.

The game is designed to trigger our emotions, and it seldom fails.

That’s why the Jake Porter moment made such an impression. If we have ever seen one like it, it has been buried, long since, under a pileup of cynicism.

What happened to Porter was a Hallmark moment. He didn’t win the Heisman but he won our hearts.

What happened that Friday evening, Oct. 18, in a small town in southern Ohio continues today, an emotional, inspirational snowball, rolling downhill with no bottom in sight.

Thursday, Toledo will play Boston College in the Motor City Bowl at Detroit. ESPN will televise the game. At halftime, the public address announcer will call attention to a group of young men on the field, high school football teams from McDermott and Waverly, Ohio.

Leading them will be their coaches, Dave Frantz of McDermott Northwest and Derek DeWitt of Waverly. Just before they are asked to step forward for a presentation, along with a wiry 17-year-old, a film clip will be shown on the stadium’s big screen. In it, the wiry 17-year-old, Jake Porter, will run for the most important touchdown of the season.

To some, it will be a familiar story. For many more, the story will be new. Old or new, though, it deserves to be told, and retold. The Jake Porter story, after all, is a perfect gift in a season of giving.

The Master Plan

Dave Frantz, in the ninth week of a losing season, was remembering something he had done for one of his players two years ago.

Jake Porter is developmentally delayed, suffering from a form of mental retardation called fragile X syndrome. Jake, though, had come to every practice and suited up for every game since his freshman year. His disability hadn’t stopped him from becoming a favorite at little Northwest High, enrollment 575. His freshman year, the senior homecoming queen had picked him as her escort.

But Jake, a senior, had played only once in a real game, two years earlier, against Waverly, the team Northwest was about to play. That time, Frantz had gone to Ed Bolin, Waverly’s coach at the time, and Bolin had agreed to let Jake take a handoff and kneel down late in the game, when the outcome was determined. That way, the young man would get to play, even carry the ball, but would not be in danger of injury.

Frantz knew his team didn’t stand much of a chance against Waverly, which was headed for Ohio’s Division 4 playoffs. What he didn’t know was how Waverly’s new coach, a large and intimidating former college player named Derek DeWitt, would react to the idea of letting Jake take a knee.

Frantz and DeWitt met Saturday, Oct. 12, to exchange game films. Frantz liked DeWitt immediately and felt comfortable enough to broach the question.

DeWitt was not unsympathetic, but it occurred to him that this might be some sort of psychological ploy. This was a new area to him, new people, new places, possibly new ways. At 32, he was a big-city guy from Los Angeles, a former star defensive lineman and 1988 graduate of Pomona Ganesha High. He had played a year for Eddie Robinson at Grambling and was a starter at Ohio University when doctors discovered, in checking a neck injury, that he had a serious narrowing of the spine, which, had he kept playing, could have resulted in paralysis.

His wife’s family is from southern Ohio, so DeWitt eventually took the Waverly job and was well into making his mark on the area football scene when Frantz made his proposal. At the time, it made little dent on DeWitt’s consciousness.

“I went back and studied the film and never gave it another thought,” DeWitt said.

Waverly team’s arrived earlier than normal before the game against Northwest, the last home game for seniors such as Porter. That gave DeWitt a chance to seek out Frantz for last-minute game details. In the midst of the conversation, Jake Porter, the player Frantz calls “my shadow,” walked up, still in street clothes. DeWitt was introduced, and talked to Porter for a while.

When Porter left, DeWitt looked at Frantz and said, “Now I see.”

At halftime, Waverly led Northwest, 28-0. On the way to the locker rooms, the coaches walked together and Frantz reminded DeWitt of his wishes for Jake to take a knee.

“Let’s get it done,” DeWitt responded.

The Midfield Meeting

There were five seconds left and Northwest had the ball on Waverly’s 49-yard line when Frantz called a timeout. His team trailed, 42-0, on its way to completing a 3-7 season. But for achieving what he wanted for Jake Porter, the situation was perfect.

The referee, Bernie Hensley, had been clued in and the Northwest team had practiced for Jake to take a knee, but it was still a touchy situation. Frantz and Hensley met in the middle of the field and DeWitt joined them. Hensley said his officials were ready. Frantz had reminded his players of what they had practiced, DeWitt had told his to just kind of lay off, that a kid on the other team would take a knee.

The timeout ended and the coaches headed to their sidelines.

Halfway there, DeWitt was hit by something he later described as a “bolt out of nowhere.”

“God used me as a tool,” he says now.

DeWitt turned to Hensley, called another timeout and motioned for Frantz to rejoin them.

“It’s not good enough,” he told Hensley and Frantz. “Just having him touch the ball, that’s not good enough.”

In the stands, people were wondering what was going on. From a distance, it looked as if a fight might break out between the coaches.

At first, Frantz said no.

“I was dumbfounded,” he said. “I wondered about the integrity of the game, if this was the right thing to do, so I said, ‘Let’s just go with him taking the knee.’ ”

To which DeWitt responded, loudly, “No, no. no. That’s not enough.”

Finally, Hensley stepped in and nudged Frantz.

“They want to let him score, Coach,” he said. “Let’s let him.”

So it was decided that Jake Porter would make a little history.

Frantz told his disbelieving team that Jake was not simply going to take a knee, but would run with the ball. No, they wouldn’t have to block for him. No, the other team wouldn’t hit him. “Just trust me,” he said.

DeWitt was direct with his team.

“If any one of you even touches him, I’ll kill you,” he said, explaining later, “By that time, there were a bunch of jayvees in the game and half of them were looking off somewhere else while I was talking and the other half were just dying to get in one good hit to impress me. I needed to get their attention.”

The Play

Liz Porter, the divorced mother of Jake and Seth, 13, was working at the concession stand when she saw the coaches at midfield, appearing to argue, and then watched her son go into the game. She knew the plan was for Jake to just kneel down, but she got chills anyway.

Along the Waverly sideline, linesman Chuck Delawder was confused. He had been told the Northwest player would be allowed to score, but it didn’t smell right. So he drifted among the Waverly players just before the snap and whispered to them to be careful, to protect themselves from unexpected hits.

“I’m a former defensive coordinator,” Delawder said. “I was having trouble with the concept of a coach giving up a shutout. Now, after all that’s happened, I’m ashamed I thought that way.”

Finally, the ball was snapped to the quarterback, who handed it to Jake Porter, who had practiced kneeling down all week and started to do just that. But it turned out to be kind of a curtsy, as his teammates, and the Waverly players, encouraged him to run.

From his officiating vantage, Delawder saw the handoff and saw Porter take the ball and kind of wipe his hand on his jersey while he was deciding whether to take the knee or run.

“It was one of those things special kids do,” Delawder said. “I used to teach special education. When I saw that, then I understood.”

Emboldened by the encouragement of the 21 other players on the field, Jake Porter started his touchdown jaunt. His mother watched in horror.

“I thought he had screwed up the play,” she said.

The Waverly team parted like the Red Sea, and Jake headed toward the goal line. As he made his way into the Waverly secondary, both teams started to follow, clapping. In the stands, where it all started to make sense, parents and students clapped and cried. Liz Porter sobbed.

“I still cry today, every time I think about it,” she said.

From his position as back judge, Andy Compliment watched everything roll toward him. It was his fourth game as a high school official and he had made the officiating team that night only because his brother, Tony, had been called in to work. But rookie or not, all those times when officials get together and discuss “mechanics” had not been wasted on him.

Compliment sprinted to the goal line, so that the moment Jake Porter, No. 45 for Northwest, crossed the line, Compliment was there to throw his hands in the air, signaling touchdown. If there were any questions whether this was real, it ended when Compliment’s arms lifted skyward.

Once Liz Porter learned how all this had happened, she sought out DeWitt.

“I walked up to him and he is just this huge man and I was a little afraid,” she said, “but I told him I was Jake Porter’s mom and thanked him and he laughed a little bit and said I shouldn’t be thanking him, that he should be thanking us for letting him be part of this.

“I cried a little bit more and I think he did too.”

The Cub Reporter

The local paper reported Jake Porter’s touchdown as if it had been a normal play in a normal game by a normal teenager: “Senior Jake Porter scored on the final play of the game on a 49-yard run....”

It was not until late the next week that the Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch, daily circulation 36,000 with a sports staff of six, told the world about Jake’s touchdown, under James Walker’s byline.

Walker, a 2001 graduate of Temple University’s journalism school, had interned at Atlanta and Philadelphia, but the job market for big papers was tough. The Herald-Dispatch had hired him to cover area high school sports.

Walker hadn’t covered the Northwest-Waverly game, though. Another staff writer told him about Jake Porter. And even though McDermott, Ohio, isn’t in the Herald-Dispatch’s prime circulation area, Walker correctly decided that this story had no boundaries. So, a few phone calls and interviews later, the news, although belated, was out.

“I eventually went to McDermott and met all the people and they were very special,” said Walker, who described Porter as being “full of energy.”

Quickly, the story moved, to major papers, to Internet sites, to local television, to the networks, to the consciousness of many sports fans.

Walker said it was his most important story ever -- “ever” meaning about a year -- and Liz Porter said that she was amazed when she met Walker because he didn’t look much older than Jake.

The Aftermath

There have been interviews, from Katie Couric to Jim Rome.

Jake Porter, who will turn 18 Jan. 30, has become, in the words of his mother, “more confident now, less hesitant to do things.”

Jake has also seen so many tape recorders and microphones in the last two months that he asked for both for Christmas.

There have even been calls from Hollywood, and Liz Porter, whose other son, Seth, also has fragile X syndrome, has sought and received help from the National Fragile X Foundation in San Francisco.

On Dec. 8, Jake, Liz and Dave Frantz were invited to the Waverly football banquet, where the team gave out its awards. One special one went to Jake Porter of Northwest, who received a Waverly T-shirt, signed by all the members of Waverly’s team. On the back: PORTER 45.

“Everybody from Waverly wanted to talk to Jake,” Liz said. “It was like family.”

There was another awards event recently in Cleveland, and when a woman named Sheila Friedman heard the Jake Porter story, she called her friend Ken Hoffman, the executive director of the Motor City Bowl in Detroit, and insisted that a story so close to this bowl should be told at halftime. Hoffman scrambled to find a sponsor to pay for the trip, and the joint Waverly-Northwest family will be together again, a convoy of four busloads, heading north.

Life, of course, goes on.

Now, Frantz can have fun with the story and not offend anybody. Seth Porter will be on the Northwest team next year. Frantz said he may have Seth emulate his brother’s taking a knee, “but this time I’ll do it when I’m only five points behind.”

In early December, Bolin, the coach who preceded DeWitt at Waverly and was the first to let Jake take a knee as a sophomore, died. About the same time, a Northwest girl, a 15-year-old volleyball and basketball player, died in a car crash on one of the nearby country roads. Just as the school had celebrated Jake, it mourned her loss.

“Those things are hard on Jake,” Liz Porter said. “He sees everybody so sad, and his nature is to just take care of everybody, make them all feel better.”

All along, there have been detractors, people writing to Walker’s newspaper or calling Rome’s radio show to complain that the Jake Porter story was much ado about nothing, and that in doing what he did, the integrity of the game suffered.

To that, DeWitt seemed to have the best answer, and Walker quoted him in the Huntington newspaper Nov. 10:

“No one will remember the score 10-20 years from now, but they will remember what Jake Porter did.”