A good example
SABANETA, Dominican Republic -- The trek to Luis Castillo’s boyhood home begins where the paved road ends. So it’s not one you can take on a whim. “You’ll never make it in that,” Polinar Torrez, a cousin of the San Diego Chargers’ defensive lineman, says with a laugh as he points to a visitor’s car. “You’ll need a 4-by-4. Or maybe a motorbike.”
Or maybe a burro, because what road there was washed away in the recent rains. Plus, you will have to ford rivers, climb some pretty steep hills and . . . well, now even Torrez is having second thoughts.
“Are you sure you really want to do this?” he asks.
Castillo’s journey, after all, is one just one man has made. While hundreds of baseball players have found their way from the lush hillsides of the Dominican Republic to the major leagues, Castillo is the first football player to go from an extended childhood in the DR to the NFL.
And his trip was as eventful as it was historic, beginning with national honors on the field and in the classroom in high school and at Northwestern -- where he was just the fourth player in school history to win All-America and Academic All-America recognition in the same season -- before his selection in the first round of the 2005 NFL draft.
Yet the path from tiny Cidra de Tomas to success wasn’t one Castillo blazed. It was one he followed.
Years earlier, his mother, Maria, with little formal education and no business experience, turned a job as a door-to-door saleswoman into a million-dollar company. In comparison, Castillo’s journey to the NFL was a piece of cake.
“He didn’t have to go through hard times,” says Torrez, a man who has clearly seen his share of sacrifice. “She had him ready. She never wavered. She never left him alone.”
It’s not yet 8 on a chilly November morning when dozens of players, struggling to stifle yawns or rub the sleep from their eyes, file slowly into a classroom at the Chargers’ sprawling training complex for their first meeting of the day.
Castillo has already been here for hours. Just two days after surgery to repair a tendon in his right ankle, he is about to begin exhaustive therapy, a program that will cut weeks from his rehabilitation and get him back on the field before the end of the regular season.
It’s the second time in as many seasons that an ankle injury derailed what was shaping up to be a Pro Bowl season. But while that might cause doubt and frustration in some, Castillo again followed his mother’s lead.
“You look at what she achieved and it wasn’t because of education. It wasn’t because of luck or because she met the right person or because she had the right connections,” Castillo says. “It was just because she worked her butt off. And when you’re growing up and when you’re 7, 8, 9, 10 . . . and the example you have your whole life is someone who just dedicated themselves completely to their work, it’s hard not to follow in that, to live up to that.”
Hard work is all Maria Castillo has ever known. One of eight siblings growing up in a house without electricity or running water, she had to quit her studies in grade school to take care of her brothers and sisters. As an adult, she worked a number of jobs, managing to save enough money to make a couple of short trips to the United States.
On one of them she had a fling with a Greek immigrant and returned home pregnant. Determined to give her unborn child a better life than an uneducated single mother could provide in the Dominican, she secured another visitor’s visa and returned to New York eight months pregnant, hiding her belly by wearing a heavy jacket despite the sweltering July heat and standing as close to the INS official’s desk as possible.
On the day after her 40th birthday, Maria gave birth to a son, Luis, in Brooklyn.
Luis was in Cidra de Tomas by the time he was old enough to walk, though, left in the care of various aunts and cousins while his mother worked up to 16 hours a day hawking water filters door to door, hoping to earn enough to give her son a proper home.
“What I did, any mother who was alone with a child would do,” Maria says. “When a child begins to grow up worrying about the economic situation of his parents, he loses concentration in what he’s doing.
“What I did was work hard so Luis never worried about not having a father.”
But few of Castillo’s neighbors in New York’s Washington Heights barrio wanted her water filters. What many women would ask for instead was a favor: If she was heading to the Dominican any time soon, would she mind bringing back some shampoo?
Soon, Castillo was flying home with empty suitcases and flying back with bags stuffed with Dominican hair-care products. Today, her New Jersey-based company, Mimor Distributors, imports beauty products by the truckload, booking $1.6 million in annual sales.
“She’s definitely done well,” Luis says. “I’m still trying to catch up to her in some regards. It’s funny.”
Maria Castillo was always driven. But her son? Well, not so much.
“I’d come home and I’d just sit around and watch TV all day long,” says Luis, who rejoined his mother in the U.S. in time to start grade school.
That changed in junior high when his mother insisted Luis find a sport to occupy his free time. He chose football.
“My first couple of days, I hated it,” he said. “They took me from sitting around on the couch doing nothing to running around, sweating, making me lose weight. And I wanted to quit.
“I remember seeing other kids quit and miss practices and things like that. And I’m like ‘Why can’t I? Why can’t I quit if I don’t want to play?’ But it was never an option. My mom . . . [she] said you know when you start something, you finish it. And then after that it was just that accountability of whatever you start, you don’t let somebody down.”
That attitude carried over to the classroom where Castillo, a “C” student as a freshman, made the Honor Roll and National Honor Society as a senior at New Jersey’s Garfield High. And it carried over to college, where Castillo won academic honors on his way to a degree in economics, making him the first member of his family to earn a college diploma.
“If you have to study 10 hours to make sure you do all right on this test and you’re accountable to the people that helped get you here, then you’ve got to do it,” he says, explaining how he approached his schoolwork. “I’ve realized now as an adult why I am where I am. And it wasn’t like it happened overnight. It was a process that came about because of that great example and because I always had somebody there that I knew was going to hold me accountable and was going to push me through every step of the way.”
Castillo displayed that accountability two weeks before the NFL draft. After testing positive for steroids at the scouting combine following his senior year at Northwestern, Castillo sent a letter to all 32 NFL teams admitting he had taken androstenedione to help speed recovery from an elbow injury.
Castillo’s stock rose quickly after the apology; he wound up going to San Diego in the first round, the 28th selection overall.
And he displayed that accountability again by working his way back from injury in each of the last two seasons. Last winter, the 6-foot-3, 290-pound defensive end returned from a midseason injury to his left ankle to start in the AFC divisional playoffs against New England, hurrying the Patriots’ Tom Brady into a third-quarter interception. Then, last month, six weeks after surgery on his right ankle, Castillo came back to help key the Chargers defense in wins over Denver and Oakland, leading into Sunday’s AFC playoff opener at home against Tennessee.
“You can tell he was raised by a good woman,” says fellow defensive lineman Jacques Cesaire. “The way he acts and the way he carries himself. And how hard he works and everything like that. You can tell she had a lot to do with that.”
Maria, 64, deflects such praise, saying she’s not surprised by either her son’s success or tenacity.
“If you talk to any of my sisters, his aunts, they’ll say the same thing: we always thought, since he was in a crib, something really big, something really nice would happen to Luis,” she says.
Back in the Dominican Republic, Castillo’s name is well-known even though the sport he plays isn’t.
“You mean the big guy, the American football player,” a Santo Domingo taxi driver says at the mention of Castillo, taking his hands off the wheel to strike a bodybuilder pose.
Even baseball Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, who grew up not far from Castillo’s family in Monte Cristi, is a fan. A lot of people in the Dominican, he says, are following Castillo.
That’s something Castillo takes seriously, returning to the Dominican for two to three weeks each spring to visit family and give football clinics for children. And as one of just 29 Hispanic players on NFL rosters this season, he has also reached out to people in this country.
“It’s a huge opportunity to introduce the game to a culture that maybe really likes it but hasn’t had many people to focus on or hasn’t had many links to the game,” says Castillo, who is featured on the cover of Spanish-language version of the Madden ’08 video game.
“[And] it is a huge responsibility in the community to really go out there and do things that other players can’t do. To be able to go out there to some of these Spanish shelters or Spanish after-school programs and be able to talk to these kids and let them know ‘Hey, I came from the same background as you.’ ”
That could lead to a career beyond football. Although Maria had hoped her son would someday manage the family business, Luis, 24, says he has started thinking about a future in politics.
“Obviously, being an Hispanic that’s in the public eye, maybe [there’s] an opportunity at some point to get involved in that and be able to change things,” he says. “[But] there’s so much I want to achieve on the football field first. The focus right now is just to be the best football player, to feel like I achieved everything that I could. Not to feel like I had a good career and did OK. I want to feel like I left nothing on the table.”
Helping the Chargers through the playoffs would certainly go a long way toward accomplishing that. But, Polinar Torrez says, it wouldn’t change anything in the Dominican Republic, where Castillo’s reputation is secure.
“The common perception is that Luis Castillo is a humble person,” says Torrez, who has two framed photos of his cousin hanging in his living room. “And with his humility he’s a dignified representative of this county.
“Here the people already know who he is.”
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