Devoted to the cause

Raw eggs and messages from God.

If you could spend a few minutes with J Leman, see him grin, listen to his stories one after another, then what you are about to read might not seem so outlandish.

Tarzan hair and one short leg.

If you could hear his laugh or watch him joke around with teammates, it might be easier to understand.

“That’s all right,” he says. “I don’t need people to think I’m sane.”

At the very least, Leman can hit you with some concrete football reality. As middle linebacker for Illinois, he averaged 10 tackles and wreaked havoc against the likes of nationally ranked Missouri and Ohio State, earning All-American honors.

As team leader, he all but willed the 13th-ranked Fighting Illini to a Cinderella season and a Rose Bowl berth against sixth-ranked USC on New Year’s Day.

“You can just feel his confidence,” USC Coach Pete Carroll said, adding: “He’s tough and runs all over the field and makes plays everywhere.”

But football is a small part of the narrative with this 22-year-old hometown hero from Champaign, Ill. For the good stuff -- the olive oil and the infomercials -- you have to sit and chat awhile.

Start with a couple living a few hours south of Chicago in the late ‘70s.

Happy Leman (pronounced Lay-man) sold insurance and Dianne taught school. Doctors told Dianne that she could not get pregnant.

An acquaintance suggested they pray, so they did. And they began having kids. Five in a row.

“The joke is, once we got started, we didn’t know how to stop,” Happy said.

Which brings us to J’s unusual name. Jeremy Jacob Leman was the fourth-born and the family shortened his name to a single initial. As a boy, he did not know whether to put the period before or after.

“Then I put it underneath and that was just altogether wrong,” he said. “So I got rid of it.”

By then, his parents had quit their jobs to start a church in Champaign, preaching a laid-back, come-as-you-are brand of Christianity. They home-schooled the kids through fourth grade, Mom teaching them to be kind and Dad, the disciplinarian, teaching them to set goals.

Those goals often involved sports. Among a family of athletes, Leman stood out because of his stubborn work ethic, his eagerness to practice dribbling or partake of some other daily training.

“I always tried to get him to think in terms of, ‘Do the right things, do them long enough and things will turn out well,’ ” his father said.

Everyone figured Leman for a basketball career, but in high school he stopped growing and filled out, looking more and more like a linebacker.

At that point, he says, God promised him that he would play for the Illini. His mother pitched in, fasting and praying before games.

But halfway through his senior season, only Illinois State had offered a scholarship.

“You’re running out of time,” he recalled. “You think, God, is it going to happen?”

You’ve seen it on television a thousand times. A reporter asks an athlete about the game and the athlete starts his answer by praising God.

Leman doesn’t do that.

“If someone asks me, ‘How’d the game go?’ I’ll never say ‘I just want to give thanks to God’ because the question had nothing to do with God,” he said.

“Some athletes do that a lot . . . and that just loses its meaning,” he said. “Goes in one ear and out the other.”

But ask him specifically about his faith and you’ll get an earful. His favorite topic -- no surprise -- is the power of prayer.

“My life, my birth, is evidence of that,” he said.

Leman says that when he prays, thoughts pop into his head and he parses them to discern if they are his own or a message from God.

God promised he would go to Illinois and that’s what happened, the Illini offering a scholarship a few games before his high school career ended. When he suffered back pain heading into his freshman year, the result of one leg being slightly shorter than the other, he asked others to pray for him.

“I got prayed for 30 times and nothing happened,” he said. “Then a guy said ‘Let me try one more time.’ I checked my leg length, and it was the same length. It took a couple of months, but, since then, I’ve been fine.”

These stories roll out of him excitedly but not the least bit heavy-handed. There is no ulterior motive because Leman does not demand that you believe; the young man is merely telling you what he believes.

Last winter, he underwent ankle surgery and could not seem to heal, the pain causing him to sit out spring practice. Finally, Leman says, God told him to ignore the injury. Just run.

He did. And it hurt. But over the next few weeks, he says the pain subsided and by summer training camp, the ankle had recovered. The team trainers “just wrote it off to me coming around and finally healing up,” he said. “But I knew.”

One more thing: Leman says he was passing the football stadium one day when God told him to expect something special this season. Expect the impossible.

There is something about a man who feels comfortable in his own skin. An air of poise. A charisma. But this quality is not measurable, not like the 40-yard dash.

So when Ron Zook took over as the Illinois coach three years ago, he and his staff scanning the roster for players who could revive a struggling program, they looked right past Leman.

Though he stood 6 feet 3 and 243 pounds, a starter at linebacker for the better part of two seasons, his foot speed was hardly spectacular.

“He didn’t stand out,” co-defensive coordinator Dan Disch said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, this is going to be the guy to get us there.’ ”

It probably did not help that, on further inspection, Leman seemed a bit oddball. He loves infomercials. The descendant of farmers, he favors a diet loaded with red meat, olive oil and raw eggs, a dozen or more each day.

“The first time I saw that, I was like, is he eating raw eggs?” fellow linebacker Martez Wilson said. “It was a little strange at first, but, as his roommate, you get used to it.”

There is also the issue of his hair. Shoulder length. Rarely, if ever, combed.

“And he dresses in old clothes,” his father said. “It’s like, he’s a big, tough guy and he doesn’t need to do anything he doesn’t want to.”

But nobody could question his devotion to football. Over time, the Illinois coaches noticed his comprehensive grasp of the defense, knowing where every player should be in every situation. They saw a linebacker who tried to win every sprint in practice, every one-on-one drill.

“J just wouldn’t go away,” Disch said. “He acquired respect.”

Zook was so impressed -- “The most unselfish guy I’ve even been around” -- that he moved Leman from the outside to the middle, making him the focal point of the defense.

Leman responded with an all-conference season in 2006, his 152 tackles ranking third in the nation. He also graduated with a degree in speech communications and started on a master’s in human resource education. Of his future, he said, “I just want to do something where I can talk to people.”

This fall, his football numbers dipped, in part because the talent around him improved, but he had 20 tackles against Missouri and an interception at the three-yard line that helped secure a victory over Penn State. Late in the season, his 12 tackles contributed to an upset of top-ranked Ohio State.

Just as important, coaches and teammates say, his unwavering passion fortified a team that was 9-3 this fall after winning a total of eight games the previous four seasons.

“He comes off as goofy,” center Ryan McDonald said. “But he’s always enthusiastic, always running around, and guys love it.”

That is what the Trojans figure to see on New Year’s Day. They expect to face an active middle linebacker, smart enough to read plays, strong enough to shed blocks.

“He always has a good instinct for where the ball is,” USC offensive lineman Chilo Rachal said. “And he gets there.”

So, if you don’t get a chance to meet Leman, to chat with him, just watch him play football.

Watch him make tackles. Watch him on the sideline, going from teammate to teammate, firing guys up.

All the other stuff won’t seem as odd.

david.wharton@latimes.com