Driving Ms. Dorsey
Road trip? This one puts fraternities to shame.
Fire up the motor home, toss in a few kegs, hit the highway and follow your team out of town for the weekend?
That’s child’s play for Maggie Dorsey, who moved across the country to watch her child play. She fired up the motor home, hitched a Honda Civic to the back, tossed in a dog, two newborn cats and her computer, and hit the highway to follow her younger son and his college football team for two months.
Ken Dorsey could have played at California, five miles from his home in Orinda. Instead, he picked Miami, 3,000 and five miles away. So Mom drove for five days, stopping every three or four hours to bottle-feed the kittens, lumbering along Interstate 40 at 12 miles per gallon, passing Flagstaff, Ariz.; Gallup, N.M.; Amarillo, Texas, and Clinton, Okla.
She set up camp, literally, 20 minutes south of the Miami campus, using the 30-foot motor home as her office. She drove around town, and back to her space in the campground, in the Honda. And she never saw her son lose a game.
Ken Dorsey, finalist for the Heisman Trophy and quarterback of the only undefeated college team in America, chuckles at the antics of his mother.
“She is a crazy, crazy woman,” he says.
He says it with love, and with pride. When he returns to campus after the Rose Bowl, she will not be there.
“I’m going to miss her,” he said. “I’m thinking I didn’t spend enough time with her.”
Maggie and Tom Dorsey, the father of her boys, Ken and older brother Adam, divorced long ago; the boys remain close to both parents. Maggie runs her own business, developing data bases that help emergency response crews locate the precise spot a 911 call was placed. So long as she packs her computer, modem and cell phone, her business is portable.
Adam attends Florida State, defiantly wearing Miami gear around campus and driving eight hours, each way, from Tallahassee to Hurricane home games. And for one month in 2000 and two months this season, Maggie Dorsey followed her sons and moved her life to Florida.
“Their whole family situation is like a storybook,” said Dorsey’s roommate, center Brett Romberg. “Everybody is so loving. The mother is so nurturing. The brother drives down for every game.
“They talk to each other like they’re on a TV show. It’s like, ‘Oh, hi, Kenny, how are you doing?’ and ‘Hi, Mom, how’s it going? You’re awesome!’
“I know it’s not fake, but if you were an outside party you’d be, like, ‘Are you sure that’s the way they act?’”
Must be. Maggie stopped by to watch practice once or twice a week, to chat with Ken’s teammates and coaches. One night during the week, and sometimes two, she shared dinner and a movie with Ken--and his girlfriend.
Time out: From the time the first zit appears, most boys are embarrassed to be spotted with a parent. Most boys would be mortified if they went away to college and their mothers followed them.
“Even in middle school, I’d drive up to school and my boys would let me give them a kiss, and their friends would be standing right there,” Maggie Dorsey said. “It would never faze them. They’re very, very affectionate. They’re so loving. I’m just so fortunate.
“Kenny has no problem. I don’t take advantage of him. I give him and his girlfriend plenty of space.”
Not long after the Miami coaches wooed Maggie Dorsey’s younger son away from USC and Cal, they wondered whether they had made a mistake. The kid was exceptionally thin, but they could send him to the weight room to work on that. He was exceptionally quiet too, and they weren’t sure what they could do about that.
“We were worried about him,” Coach Larry Coker said. “We thought this guy may not be tough enough to take charge. Boy, how wrong we were.”
The leadership and competitive fire emerged slowly, and not always on the practice field or in the weight room, where the 6-foot-5 Dorsey bulked up to 200 pounds.
Running back Clinton Portis noticed how intensely Dorsey competed at video games, how he couldn’t play just for fun.
“He always gets whipped,” Portis said. “There are some video game fanatics around here. He comes out with a game plan, even on video games. But you can’t execute a game plan on the video game, so he can’t beat me.”
Said Dorsey, “I hate losing, more than anything. To go out and play those guys is the most miserable thing, because I think I’m doing well but I’m really not, and they end up killing me. It’s such a nightmare.”
Cornerback Mike Rumph was astonished when, during a pickup basketball game, the supposedly mild-mannered quarterback was knocked to the ground, got up and threw the ball at the player who committed what Rumph thought was a meaningless foul in a meaningless game.
“I was like, ‘That’s the kind of quarterback we need,’” he said. “He’ll get in your face. He ain’t no scaredy-cat in the face of linemen.”
In November, in his second full season as the starting quarterback and with the Hurricanes two victories away from the Rose Bowl, Dorsey staged his own little leadership seminar. The Hurricanes had lost their spot in the national championship game last season when they were beaten at Washington, and now the Huskies were headed to Miami. In the only other meeting between the schools, in 1994, the Huskies had strutted into the Orange Bowl and ended Miami’s NCAA-record home winning streak at 58 games.
At a news conference five days before the game, with cameras and microphones transmitting his every word across the country, Dorsey ripped the Huskies for an alleged blizzard of cheap shots and late hits in last season’s game.
What was this? The polite and soft-spoken young man was talking smack, calling out the opposing team for all the world to hear, making himself an inviting target in the process.
Hey, whatever works: Miami 65, Washington 7.
After the game, Dorsey sheepishly apologized for his comments. Today, he readily admits those words were meant for the ears of his teammates.
“I definitely said those things for a reason,” he said. “To get guys going and let everybody understand how big a rivalry Miami and Washington was. We’ve only played two games besides that, but they were an intense two games. I wanted to make sure everybody realized it was going to be tough and fire guys up.”
As the Miami quarterback, Dorsey follows in an illustrious line--George Mira, Jim Kelly, Bernie Kosar and Heisman Trophy winners Vinny Testaverde and Gino Torretta. The Miami quarterback still wins, but he no longer throws for 3,000 yards in a season, as Torretta did twice, as Testaverde and Kosar did, as Craig Erickson and Steve Walsh did.
Under Butch Davis, who replaced Dennis Erickson as coach in 1995, and under Coker, promoted from offensive coordinator when Davis left for the Cleveland Browns, the Hurricanes diversified their offense. No longer is the quarterback the undisputed glamour boy and the running back strictly a bit player.
In the seven seasons since Davis and Coker restructured the offense, Miami running backs have rushed for 1,000 yards five times, among them Portis this season. In the previous 70 seasons of Miami football, only once had a player rushed for 1,000 yards--Ottis Anderson in 1978.
Said Coker, “I tell our recruits, if you want to come to our school and become a passing genius, you’re probably going to the wrong school.” Dorsey threw for 2,652 yards this season. Florida’s Rex Grossman, another Heisman finalist, threw for 3,896, averaging 354 yards a game, tops in the nation and better than Dorsey’s career-best 344. Insert Dorsey for Grossman into Steve Spurrier’s pass-happy Florida offense, and Coker insists Dorsey could produce the same numbers.
“He’d throw for a million yards and a million touchdowns, and he’d win a lot of games,” Coker said. “It wouldn’t be any different. Look at what’s happened at Florida; has it changed since Coach Spurrier has been there? Look at all these guys and what they’ve done. They’ve all thrown for a million yards. That’s the system they have.”
As Torretta could tell you, or as Florida’s Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel could attest, throwing for a million yards in college does not necessarily translate to NFL success.
Said Dorsey, “It definitely is a luxury to be able to go out and wing it. It would be nice. At the same time, there’s always that one game where you need that run game to be able to win. There are games where I’ve had bad games but the run game has been there, and vice versa. When it’s all clicking, that’s when we have a great day. The biggest thing to me is winning. That’s why I came here, to win games.”
That he does. As the Hurricanes’ starting quarterback, Dorsey is 26-1. If Miami wins the Rose Bowl game, and the national championship with it, Dorsey might be tempted to skip his senior season and try his luck in the NFL.
“It’s still a decision that I have to think about, and talk to my family about, but right now I’m set on coming back,” he said.
He’d better. Maggie Dorsey plans on going back to Miami next fall. And staying for the entire season.
