Eric the Red
Team HuskerBoard
After you read this, I think I understand why Callahan took the blame and went out of his way to make sure everyone knew the first play of the game when Purify fumbled against NU was his fault. Purify's got so much running through his head, Callahan knew this type of thing could kill Purify's confidence. Purify's not a head case, just been through so damn much.
OWH: Purify catching on to life's unpredictable patterns (good read)... Reply
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Published Sunday
December 10, 2006
BY DIRK CHATELAIN
LINCOLN -
Dancing.
There is much to remember about home: Redwoods and tourists, disillusioned peers and untapped potential, loneliness and hurt.
Maurice Purify remembers dancing.
Each Sunday morning before he savored Mom's dinner, brothers and sisters too many to count moved furniture against the walls and started the music. One-by-one they shuffled out of the hallway to the middle of the living room until all had danced.
He remembers a video camera chronicling each move. Dad always had that video camera. Not just in the living room, but at baseball games and football games and every time Maurice got a hit or scored a touchdown or wanted to quit - he often wanted to quit.
Look at Maurice Purify through a camera today and you see a rangy NFL prospect whose receiving ability perhaps surpasses that of any Husker since his birth.
You see Zac Taylor's favorite target spring from the turf - rising above a defender - and grab the game-winning touchdown at Texas A&M. You see Mo Purify, a man going places.
Wait, though. A man going places naturally leaves places behind.
Purify left a California beach town where teenage dreams vanish like footprints on the beach. He left the cemetery where he spent Saturdays in the fall and the gym where his best friend buried 3-pointers and the house where he danced before Sunday dinner.
He left. Jumped in the car and drove to San Francisco. Now he's at Memorial Stadium on a glorious November afternoon overlooking a glorious green stage in which hundreds of dreams have come true. But as his breakout season nears completion, he talks of a journey incomplete, of a desire to push and push until he reaches the NFL - "I want to be Jerry Rice."
It's a long road, and a man going places leaves places behind. , He looks toward the field, at something far beyond it. He lifts his Nebraska football sweatshirt to his cheek and catches a tear racing from his left eye.
And, for a moment, Nebraska's rising star is once again a lost boy in Eureka, Calif.
Helping Mo
Singing.
There is much to remember about his father: shopping and arcades, football and basketball, tinkering with the Cadillac. Mo remembers singing.
"Old-school stuff."
Mo's parents each had children of their own before they married. All told, there were 13. Maurice was No. 14. But Bobby Ray treated him like a first-born. He taped all of Mo's Pop Warner and Little League games. He pushed him when Mo wanted to give in.
The boy was only 11 when Bobby lost his appetite. Wife Mary noticed it first. She told him to go to the doctor. He found cancer. He died within the week.
In 1997, the Purifys had relatives all over Humboldt County, Calif. - still do. Everybody pitched in to help with Mo. His brothers kept him in sports, even though he was no standout. They told him Dad would've wanted him to keep going. Mom sat down and tried to talk to Mo about what had happened.
"He really didn't understand," she said.
She started working more at the hospital to make ends meet. Mo stopped wanting to go to school. Kids would say one little thing and he'd want to fight. He got quiet. He cried. As he got older, anger replaced those tears.
"Everything fell apart," he said.
Meanwhile, Mo was fighting a learning disability. He can listen to a book on tape or a classmate reading aloud and effectively process information. But if he's the one with the book, he reaches the end of a page and can't remember what he just read.
When he was in elementary school, teachers placed him in "special day classes" that focused more on life skills than curriculum. He fell further behind.
"I think that really affected his self-confidence," said Jack Lakin, Purify's high school coach and mentor.
Sports offered him an identity. He grew to 6-foot-4 and became a high school star, just like his brothers.
On Friday nights, he caught touchdown passes for the undefeated Eureka High Loggers. On Saturdays, he picked up the newspaper. He took it to the cemetery. He laid down a blanket in front of Dad's tombstone. He opened the paper to the story about Friday night's game.
He started reading.
Rough road
Worrying. Jack Lakin remembers worrying.
You have to understand something about Eureka, says the coach. It's a beautiful tourist town of 26,000 that sits along the coastline 31/2 hours north of San Francisco. Charming, but isolated.
In 2004, the year Mo graduated high school, Eureka's crime index was almost twice the national average. Seventy percent of students at Eureka High fall below the poverty line. Only 15 percent earn a bachelor's degree or better.
Some kids, like a few of Purify's brothers, graduate high school and go to College of the Redwoods, a two-year school in Eureka. Brother James did that. He could've made it big as a running back, but he found trouble and then a bullet found him - he lost an eye.
"There's nothing here for Maurice," Mary said. "His friends, they're good boys, but they never leave here. They never go anywhere. They always stay in Eureka. I want more for my son than that. He has more in him than that."
Lakin first realized his star receiver had a ticket out of town when USC called during Purify's senior year. Trojans coaches had been watching someone else on tape and picked out Mo. But suspect grades tempered college coaches' enthusiasm.
He committed to Weber State. But on signing day, he backed out, afraid to leave. Lakin didn't give up. A cousin whom everyone called "Big Mo" found Purify a place on the football team at City College of San Francisco. This time Maurice stepped forward.
On the day after his high school graduation, Little Mo, the kid who too often got in trouble for sleeping in, packed his Ford Expedition with clothes and a scrapbook, found the 101 and drove south until he hit San Francisco, leaving Mom and 13 siblings and dozens of cousins and streets and parks he knew by heart.
He became a star, earning junior college all-state honors in football and basketball.
"Sometimes I think when you grow up in a troubled life, every time you think something good might happen it gets shut down for some reason," Lakin said.
"I think while he was hopeful about that experience at San Francisco, he was always fearful something adverse was going to happen. When he went down there and found out he could play at that level, that was just a huge thing for him."
Slow start at NU
Seething. Mo remembers seething.
This starts with senior night back at the Eureka High gymnasium. Mo didn't have a parent there to accompany him during introductions. Since Dad died, overtime hours kept Mom away from almost all his activities. One time she came to a City College game, but cramps forced Mo to the sideline. He threw his helmet.
He intended to make amends against USC. National TV was nice, but, just as important, Mom was there. And according to Purify, Nebraska coaches had told him he'd break out at the Coliseum. According to coaches, Purify wasn't ready. He played three snaps the whole game.
Mo got back to Lincoln and wanted to quit. He met with receivers coach Ted Gilmore and vented. He called his brothers. Stick it out, they said. You made a commitment.
That's where things stood when Mo got a call the first Monday morning of October. When he heard the news from back home and spiked his phone to the ground.
Decision time
Shooting. Mo remembers shooting.
Each Sunday when he was home, he'd call Jorge and they'd go to the gym and shoot. They'd played AAU ball together and went to New Orleans for a tournament and stayed in touch even when Jorge lived in Monterey, Calif. Mo admired his friend. He led when Mo's instinct was to follow. When friends considered doing something stupid, Jorge persuaded them not to.
Jorge, a point guard at College of the Redwoods, taught Mo a game: You shoot, then get your rebound while I spot up. Make the pass, then go spot up. Alternate until someone makes 20.
"It's probably even," Mo says. "No, I'd say I'm up on him probably one or two games."
Two days after catching four passes for 91 yards against Kansas, Purify's phone rang. Jorge driving home from work . . . ran off the road . . . flipped his car . . . he's dead, Mo.
He smashed his only link to Eureka.
He stuck around campus that week and played at Iowa State, catching a momentum-swinging touchdown pass before halftime. He rode the bus back to Lincoln, jumped a flight west before sunrise and drove up the coast.
He walked into Mom's house Sunday night and went straight to her bedroom. Didn't come out until morning.
The next morning, she tried to talk to him. God's got a special plan for everyone, she said. He really didn't understand. Everybody he got close to was dying: his basketball teammate from San Francisco, a receiver friend from Eureka, now Jorge.
He went to the funeral. Afterward, friends were going out to party.
"I was scared," Mary said. "I didn't know what he was going to do."
Coach Lakin worried that day, too. Mo hadn't been home from Nebraska since summer. What if emotion overwhelmed him? What if he decided to stay in Eureka? What if he quit?
Mo thought about going out with friends. Instead, he went to school. He talked to Lakin and a counselor. The next morning, he left. Jumped in the car and drove to San Francisco.
"He wasn't a Eureka kid anymore," Lakin said.
Six weeks later, Purify sits in the Memorial Stadium press box in Lincoln, peering out the windows into the sunshine.
"Right now, I'm still like, 'Is he really gone?' Because I didn't really get to see him, and I'm not there. I remember when my dad died, the next day I came home from school, I ran back and saw his car out there. Oh, he's not really dead. I opened the door and went into his room, and oh, he's not there. Right now, I'm not in Eureka to be like, oh, I'll call Jorge, see if he wants to play basketball; to call his dad and be like, is Jorge there? 'Oh no, Mo, he's dead.' So I'm not really there to go through it every day. It's not real."
He arrived back in Lincoln that Tuesday and caught four balls for 73 yards at Kansas State the next weekend. Coaches gave him the game ball. Since, he's emerged as the Huskers' go-to wideout. He called Lakin recently and told him things are getting easier in Lincoln.
"What he's a part of is much bigger than just himself," Lakin said. "I think he's come to appreciate that a lot more."
Mom made her first trip to Lincoln on Thanksgiving. Purify's acrobatic 31-yard grab along the sideline set up the go-ahead touchdown in a 37-14 win over Colorado.
Under his No. 16 jersey, he wore a T-shirt dedicated to his friend, as he always does. He wrote Jorge on his wrist tape. When the season's over, Mo will take the newspapers back to Eureka. He'll return to the cemetery. He'll find his friend.
"Hopefully, I can read some articles to him and share with him and lay down on his grave and just think about all the stuff we did."
The catch
Thinking. Lakin remembers thinking in the back of his mind, maybe, just maybe . . .
He was out of town the day Nebraska beat Texas A&M. He heard what had happened - a last-minute touchdown catch - and had a feeling Mo had caught it.
A late bloomer, Lakin calls him. In every sense, a late bloomer.
Purify and some teammates visited a middle school this month. They talked to kids and answered questions. Some 200 kids wanted his autograph, he said.
The teacher said no, instead asking Mo to sign a piece of paper. She'd make copies of it.
"I felt kind of bad," he says. "Copies are nothing like the real deal."
Following the Colorado game, Purify stood outside Nebraska's locker room engulfed by fans half his size. He was a man going places. Dinner was waiting - so was Mom. But the kids weren't leaving. They handed Mo programs and pens and asked for a signature.
He signed every one.
OWH: Purify catching on to life's unpredictable patterns (good read)... Reply
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published Sunday
December 10, 2006
BY DIRK CHATELAIN
LINCOLN -
Dancing.
There is much to remember about home: Redwoods and tourists, disillusioned peers and untapped potential, loneliness and hurt.
Maurice Purify remembers dancing.
Each Sunday morning before he savored Mom's dinner, brothers and sisters too many to count moved furniture against the walls and started the music. One-by-one they shuffled out of the hallway to the middle of the living room until all had danced.
He remembers a video camera chronicling each move. Dad always had that video camera. Not just in the living room, but at baseball games and football games and every time Maurice got a hit or scored a touchdown or wanted to quit - he often wanted to quit.
Look at Maurice Purify through a camera today and you see a rangy NFL prospect whose receiving ability perhaps surpasses that of any Husker since his birth.
You see Zac Taylor's favorite target spring from the turf - rising above a defender - and grab the game-winning touchdown at Texas A&M. You see Mo Purify, a man going places.
Wait, though. A man going places naturally leaves places behind.
Purify left a California beach town where teenage dreams vanish like footprints on the beach. He left the cemetery where he spent Saturdays in the fall and the gym where his best friend buried 3-pointers and the house where he danced before Sunday dinner.
He left. Jumped in the car and drove to San Francisco. Now he's at Memorial Stadium on a glorious November afternoon overlooking a glorious green stage in which hundreds of dreams have come true. But as his breakout season nears completion, he talks of a journey incomplete, of a desire to push and push until he reaches the NFL - "I want to be Jerry Rice."
It's a long road, and a man going places leaves places behind. , He looks toward the field, at something far beyond it. He lifts his Nebraska football sweatshirt to his cheek and catches a tear racing from his left eye.
And, for a moment, Nebraska's rising star is once again a lost boy in Eureka, Calif.
Helping Mo
Singing.
There is much to remember about his father: shopping and arcades, football and basketball, tinkering with the Cadillac. Mo remembers singing.
"Old-school stuff."
Mo's parents each had children of their own before they married. All told, there were 13. Maurice was No. 14. But Bobby Ray treated him like a first-born. He taped all of Mo's Pop Warner and Little League games. He pushed him when Mo wanted to give in.
The boy was only 11 when Bobby lost his appetite. Wife Mary noticed it first. She told him to go to the doctor. He found cancer. He died within the week.
In 1997, the Purifys had relatives all over Humboldt County, Calif. - still do. Everybody pitched in to help with Mo. His brothers kept him in sports, even though he was no standout. They told him Dad would've wanted him to keep going. Mom sat down and tried to talk to Mo about what had happened.
"He really didn't understand," she said.
She started working more at the hospital to make ends meet. Mo stopped wanting to go to school. Kids would say one little thing and he'd want to fight. He got quiet. He cried. As he got older, anger replaced those tears.
"Everything fell apart," he said.
Meanwhile, Mo was fighting a learning disability. He can listen to a book on tape or a classmate reading aloud and effectively process information. But if he's the one with the book, he reaches the end of a page and can't remember what he just read.
When he was in elementary school, teachers placed him in "special day classes" that focused more on life skills than curriculum. He fell further behind.
"I think that really affected his self-confidence," said Jack Lakin, Purify's high school coach and mentor.
Sports offered him an identity. He grew to 6-foot-4 and became a high school star, just like his brothers.
On Friday nights, he caught touchdown passes for the undefeated Eureka High Loggers. On Saturdays, he picked up the newspaper. He took it to the cemetery. He laid down a blanket in front of Dad's tombstone. He opened the paper to the story about Friday night's game.
He started reading.
Rough road
Worrying. Jack Lakin remembers worrying.
You have to understand something about Eureka, says the coach. It's a beautiful tourist town of 26,000 that sits along the coastline 31/2 hours north of San Francisco. Charming, but isolated.
In 2004, the year Mo graduated high school, Eureka's crime index was almost twice the national average. Seventy percent of students at Eureka High fall below the poverty line. Only 15 percent earn a bachelor's degree or better.
Some kids, like a few of Purify's brothers, graduate high school and go to College of the Redwoods, a two-year school in Eureka. Brother James did that. He could've made it big as a running back, but he found trouble and then a bullet found him - he lost an eye.
"There's nothing here for Maurice," Mary said. "His friends, they're good boys, but they never leave here. They never go anywhere. They always stay in Eureka. I want more for my son than that. He has more in him than that."
Lakin first realized his star receiver had a ticket out of town when USC called during Purify's senior year. Trojans coaches had been watching someone else on tape and picked out Mo. But suspect grades tempered college coaches' enthusiasm.
He committed to Weber State. But on signing day, he backed out, afraid to leave. Lakin didn't give up. A cousin whom everyone called "Big Mo" found Purify a place on the football team at City College of San Francisco. This time Maurice stepped forward.
On the day after his high school graduation, Little Mo, the kid who too often got in trouble for sleeping in, packed his Ford Expedition with clothes and a scrapbook, found the 101 and drove south until he hit San Francisco, leaving Mom and 13 siblings and dozens of cousins and streets and parks he knew by heart.
He became a star, earning junior college all-state honors in football and basketball.
"Sometimes I think when you grow up in a troubled life, every time you think something good might happen it gets shut down for some reason," Lakin said.
"I think while he was hopeful about that experience at San Francisco, he was always fearful something adverse was going to happen. When he went down there and found out he could play at that level, that was just a huge thing for him."
Slow start at NU
Seething. Mo remembers seething.
This starts with senior night back at the Eureka High gymnasium. Mo didn't have a parent there to accompany him during introductions. Since Dad died, overtime hours kept Mom away from almost all his activities. One time she came to a City College game, but cramps forced Mo to the sideline. He threw his helmet.
He intended to make amends against USC. National TV was nice, but, just as important, Mom was there. And according to Purify, Nebraska coaches had told him he'd break out at the Coliseum. According to coaches, Purify wasn't ready. He played three snaps the whole game.
Mo got back to Lincoln and wanted to quit. He met with receivers coach Ted Gilmore and vented. He called his brothers. Stick it out, they said. You made a commitment.
That's where things stood when Mo got a call the first Monday morning of October. When he heard the news from back home and spiked his phone to the ground.
Decision time
Shooting. Mo remembers shooting.
Each Sunday when he was home, he'd call Jorge and they'd go to the gym and shoot. They'd played AAU ball together and went to New Orleans for a tournament and stayed in touch even when Jorge lived in Monterey, Calif. Mo admired his friend. He led when Mo's instinct was to follow. When friends considered doing something stupid, Jorge persuaded them not to.
Jorge, a point guard at College of the Redwoods, taught Mo a game: You shoot, then get your rebound while I spot up. Make the pass, then go spot up. Alternate until someone makes 20.
"It's probably even," Mo says. "No, I'd say I'm up on him probably one or two games."
Two days after catching four passes for 91 yards against Kansas, Purify's phone rang. Jorge driving home from work . . . ran off the road . . . flipped his car . . . he's dead, Mo.
He smashed his only link to Eureka.
He stuck around campus that week and played at Iowa State, catching a momentum-swinging touchdown pass before halftime. He rode the bus back to Lincoln, jumped a flight west before sunrise and drove up the coast.
He walked into Mom's house Sunday night and went straight to her bedroom. Didn't come out until morning.
The next morning, she tried to talk to him. God's got a special plan for everyone, she said. He really didn't understand. Everybody he got close to was dying: his basketball teammate from San Francisco, a receiver friend from Eureka, now Jorge.
He went to the funeral. Afterward, friends were going out to party.
"I was scared," Mary said. "I didn't know what he was going to do."
Coach Lakin worried that day, too. Mo hadn't been home from Nebraska since summer. What if emotion overwhelmed him? What if he decided to stay in Eureka? What if he quit?
Mo thought about going out with friends. Instead, he went to school. He talked to Lakin and a counselor. The next morning, he left. Jumped in the car and drove to San Francisco.
"He wasn't a Eureka kid anymore," Lakin said.
Six weeks later, Purify sits in the Memorial Stadium press box in Lincoln, peering out the windows into the sunshine.
"Right now, I'm still like, 'Is he really gone?' Because I didn't really get to see him, and I'm not there. I remember when my dad died, the next day I came home from school, I ran back and saw his car out there. Oh, he's not really dead. I opened the door and went into his room, and oh, he's not there. Right now, I'm not in Eureka to be like, oh, I'll call Jorge, see if he wants to play basketball; to call his dad and be like, is Jorge there? 'Oh no, Mo, he's dead.' So I'm not really there to go through it every day. It's not real."
He arrived back in Lincoln that Tuesday and caught four balls for 73 yards at Kansas State the next weekend. Coaches gave him the game ball. Since, he's emerged as the Huskers' go-to wideout. He called Lakin recently and told him things are getting easier in Lincoln.
"What he's a part of is much bigger than just himself," Lakin said. "I think he's come to appreciate that a lot more."
Mom made her first trip to Lincoln on Thanksgiving. Purify's acrobatic 31-yard grab along the sideline set up the go-ahead touchdown in a 37-14 win over Colorado.
Under his No. 16 jersey, he wore a T-shirt dedicated to his friend, as he always does. He wrote Jorge on his wrist tape. When the season's over, Mo will take the newspapers back to Eureka. He'll return to the cemetery. He'll find his friend.
"Hopefully, I can read some articles to him and share with him and lay down on his grave and just think about all the stuff we did."
The catch
Thinking. Lakin remembers thinking in the back of his mind, maybe, just maybe . . .
He was out of town the day Nebraska beat Texas A&M. He heard what had happened - a last-minute touchdown catch - and had a feeling Mo had caught it.
A late bloomer, Lakin calls him. In every sense, a late bloomer.
Purify and some teammates visited a middle school this month. They talked to kids and answered questions. Some 200 kids wanted his autograph, he said.
The teacher said no, instead asking Mo to sign a piece of paper. She'd make copies of it.
"I felt kind of bad," he says. "Copies are nothing like the real deal."
Following the Colorado game, Purify stood outside Nebraska's locker room engulfed by fans half his size. He was a man going places. Dinner was waiting - so was Mom. But the kids weren't leaving. They handed Mo programs and pens and asked for a signature.
He signed every one.
. It's hard to believe that his closest friend died before that Iowa St game and he still played great even with all those things going through his head and I couldnt believe he was going to quit after USC game :hmmph . Mo is a great person who you can tell is really learning a lot from his experience at Nebraska.
