1:42 AM
Happy new year 2012
The father sells hope to the forgotten.
Every day Earl Lockette moves slowly through the halls of the Turner Job Corps Center in Albany, Ga., where he is a counselor advising those who don’t have a diploma or are have maybe been in trouble. It’s the last chance for many.
As he strolls, he tugs on the pass from the NFL’s scouting combine around his neck, a gift from his 24-year-old son and adjusts the combine cap on his head, hoping the pass or the hat can attract a curious look from one of the students, perhaps a question, allowing Earl a moment to engage.
“Oh you like football? OK. By the way, my son is playing football, he’s doing pretty good. You know, he’s got a chance to play in the NFL …”
Then he is into the story of his boy Ricardo; the one who loved football, the one who desperately wanted to be a professional football player. And yet the more Ricardo wanted to be a football player, the farther away he seemed to get. Except he never quit on his dream, pushing it until one day this winter a letter arrived from the combine telling Ricardo he was one of some 300 players in the country who had been invited. Suddenly the impossible fantasy of the NFL was on the verge of coming true.
And always Earl laughs.
“He’s the proof in the pudding,” Earl says.
He tells them how Ricardo desperately wanted to be a wide receiver at an SEC school but bad grades and low test scores chased the big-school coaches away, leaving him to run track at Wallace State (Ala.) Community College, then tiny Division II Fort Valley State. He describes how Ricardo won a national title in the 200 meters and barely missed the Olympic trials after a qualifying time was ruled to be wind-aided. He tells them too how Ricardo did play football at Fort Valley and how that career was nearly disrupted when he tested positive for a banned over-the-counter supplement at a track event and had to sit out an entire season after his junior year.
And then he always finishes with this: Ricardo came back for that senior year at Fort Valley and despite catching just 23 passes this past season, the NFL was still interested. In fact he might well be a late-round pick in next week’s NFL draft.
“I’m so proud of him,” Earl says.
He just hopes the students are listening. He wants them to believe. He wants them to trust that just like Ricardo, anything is possible.
“I always use Ricardo when I’m talking to them,” Earl Lockette says. He is on the phone, talking from Albany, where Ricardo was raised. His voice rises. “Even now, he hasn’t even made it to the NFL yet but he’s stuck to his guns. The greatest thing I’ve heard anyone say is ‘he’s going to be successful.’ With these kids I tell them: ‘if you don’t make it right away, keep working. You will make it. You will get your dreams.’ ”
Ricardo was once asked by a reporter: “Did speed run in your family?”
His reply: “No, determination did.”
Many times Ricardo Lockette wanted to give up football, throwing away his silly hope and finding something more substantial to do with his life. When the coaches at one SEC university supposedly told him he wouldn’t have the grades and test scores to get into school and suggested a year at a prep school, he was devastated and then defiant. He did not want to go to a prep school. He wanted college. He claims several schools told him they would give him a scholarship to run track. Fort Valley, which is where his father and grandfather went, would take him.
“I’ll just go to Fort Valley State and run track and go to the Olympics,” he told Earl.
When the qualifiers for the 2008 Olympics came and went and he wasn’t a part of it, he began dedicating his time again to football. He was always fast and though his skills weren’t as refined as someone who had been playing his whole life, he knew he was fast enough to get past defenses.
“I was a receiver by Division I standards,” Ricardo says by phone from Georgia where he has been training for the draft.
Lockette participates in drills at the combine.(US Presswire)
Just because it is a small school does not mean Fort Valley State is a football wasteland. Databasefootball.com lists 11 Fort Valley players who appeared in at least one NFL game, including former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd, onetime Raiders safety Eddie Anderson and receiver Tyrone Poole(notes). Ricardo says the coaches there welcomed him enthusiastically. He began to blossom in his junior season but then the positive test for a banned substance came in.
Ricardo will not reveal the substance. He describes it as something he bought at a national supplement chain and believed to be allowed by the NCAA. He says he has no clue he did something wrong until he got a letter announcing his positive result and a one-year ban from college sports for the 2009-10 academic year.
“It was tough,” Ricardo says of his season away from football. He thought about leaving school but for what? Instead he chose to make the suspension a test.
“You really learn about people in how they battle through adversity,” he says. “It caught me off-guard but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. I hope I can help people through my mistakes. I’m not ashamed of it at all. It’s an honest mistake that’s happened.”
For a moment he is quiet.
“It’s been a long road to hopefully get to the NFL,” he says.
At the combine Ricardo ran fast. There had been some talk he could break the all-time record of 4.24 seconds in the 40-yard dash tied three years ago by Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson. Instead he tied for fourth at this year’s combine with Abilene Christian receiver Edmond Gates with a 4.37, which is still very fast and helps make him a candidate to be drafted. He says the Cleveland Browns, New England Patriots, St. Louis Rams and Philadelphia Eagles have shown interest. Most who have talked to him say they see him someday returning kicks or playing on special teams.
At this point he’ll take anything.
And Earl Lockette has something more to tell the students at the Turner Jobs Corps.
“The significance of Ricardo is that I can give them something concrete, it’s real,” Earl says. “A lot of my students now know about Ricardo. But I show just as much energy as I do talking about Ricardo as I do when one of the kids who gets a diploma or a GED or they’re 50 percent through with GED work.”
Earl laughs one last time before he has to go back to work.
“The NFL would be great but I’m already at the point where Ricardo can’t impress me anymore,” he says. “Let his success be there for someone else to be inspired from.”
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