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Omari Walker's long run - continued

Walker's junior and senior years were spent at Mansfield High School. Walker's teachers at Mansfield, to whom, he says, he owes a great deal for their caring and support, began to see the change in Walker as he found a new focus during his senior year.

Says reading teacher Tony Modica: ``A wife and kid don't come with a set of directions. Omari was very young, but he was somehow able to balance a heavy load. He took on an awful lot of responsibility.''

Ellie Leveroni had had Walker in her English class during his junior year. ``He was not really into homework,'' she says, ``but on his own, Omari began looking for ways to express himself. He was angry a lot of the time, too, mostly at his father. And he would write and write about that anger.''

Vestiges of that old rage persisted after he entered BC in 1993. Walker preserved an extra year of eligibility by sitting out his freshman year with the football team, but his intensity took no such sabbatical. Anyone who dissed him on the practice field had a fight on his hands. When an upperclassman urinated in Walker's car, the freshman confronted the player and administered a street-corner pummeling. Gradually, though, the anger subsided. Derrion was born in July of 1994, and Omari and Tina married that summer. When Tina went to work, Walker, who had lived on campus his freshman year, stayed home with the children. A man and two babies.

``It was the first time I really connected with them,'' Walker recalls. ``At first it was frightening, because I had played such a minor role in my daughter's life up until then. But that summer I bonded with her - and this little baby I was taking care of.''

He stopped lifting weights and running, setting back his conditioning schedule. When he moved back to campus for pre-season camp his sophomore year, an out-of-shape Walker was demoted by coach Dan Henning to third-string running back. Homesick and living in a dorm, he started missing team meetings and was summoned to Henning's office for a heart-to-heart discussion. Henning told him to go home for a couple of days and think things over.

``It made all the difference,'' Walker says. ``I knew I was going to finish college, that was my goal. I didn't have $30,000 a year to do that. There was no time for self-pity.''

He came back to enjoy a solid 1994 season as back-up halfback. By the next year, Walker was starting, and starring, in the Eagles backfield. But the spotlight would truly intensify on him in the 1996 season, when the junior co-captain stood tall - very tall - during what proved to be a hideous year of Fear and Fumbling at the Heights.

After the BC-Syracuse game (a 45-17 loss for the Eagles at the hands of the Orangemen), Walker, one of four team co-captains, was approached in confidence by three teammates. There were rumors circulating, the players said, that a group of BC players - possibly a large group - had wagered up to five-figure sums against their own team. Walker relayed the information to the coaching staff. Orders were issued, he says, to call a team meeting with the captains. While[ many players identified themselves as bettors, none admitted to betting against the Eagles. The Middlesex DA's office was alerted. With threats by a campus bookmaker to release the names publicly, BC played Pittsburgh that weekend and was upset, 20-13. Henning was furious.

A round of closed-door meetings between coaches and the co-captains resulted in another team-only meeting, addressed principally by Walker. The choices were clear, he told teammates. Step forward, or Henning would cancel all practice sessions and wait for the DA's office to make arrests. Walker read off the names of the suspects - including one who turned out to be uninvolved in the scandal - and all hell broke loose.

The press, waiting outside the locker room, pounced on the story. Some of the players fingered Walker as the team snitch. To many more, he was a stand-up guy during their darkest hour, one of the veteran players they could go to in private for advice and moral support. Publicly, the press was in Walker's face constantly. Every word he uttered made the papers. With the team disintegrating around him, Walker demanded the football and the microphone both.

Craig Genualdo, a senior linebacker from Lynn, watched Walker walk off the field after that week's BC-Notre Dame game. The betting bombshell had just exploded; Walker, standing at media Ground Zero all week, rushed for 158 yards and two TDs in a 48-21 loss. It was a singular - even a heroic - performance.

``I looked up at Omari and said, `Oh, man,''' Genualdo says. ``What else could you say? Of all the extraordinary things that happened, the most extraordinary was Omari's performance.''

The Eagles finished the season with a dismal 5-7 record. Walker finished his bachelor's degree in English last June and seriously considered walking away from football, forgoing his extra year of eligibility. He planned to find a teaching job. ``I was so done after that, there was no way I was coming back,'' says Walker. ``When you can't trust your own teammates, and you're losing, and the media is down your throat, and the coach gets fired, you consider hanging up your shoes.''

He was not alone. Henning and BC athletic director Chet Gladchuk both resigned in the wake of the scandal. Tom O'Brien arrived in November to take over Henning's job. Walker sought him out immediately for a private chat.

Did O'Brien know Omari as more than a big-play running back? ``I don't even remember knowing he was a father, which is unusual,'' replies O'Brien. ``In 15 years, I've only coached one other player in Omari's situation. What he's trying to accomplish - with school, family, and sports - is mind-boggling.''

Walker, says O'Brien, was on ``a fact-finding mission'' during their private discussion. ``We didn't talk about the scandal. We talked about what direction I wanted to take the program in. I guess he liked what he heard.''

For Walker, the clincher was getting into graduate school despite a 2.9 grade point average. (His GPA in his first year of grad school was 3.9.) Tina endorsed the decision, supported by the couple's parents, who agreed to help with finances and child care. In fact, Tina's mother and stepfather had moved to their Mansfield house to be closer to the young family. Tina and Omari moved out of their apartment in Watertown, where they had lived most recently - Walker's scholarship provides $800 monthly for room and board - and into his parents' home, in Mansfield. Tina quit her job as a research assistant for a Wellesley psychiatrist and set up a home day-care practice.

``When I get out of college, I need a job right away,'' Walker says. ``A master's degree means I can make more money.''

Besides, he notes with a laugh, tuition is really not free. ``I'm paying it with my sweat and blood.'' Pro ball? ``It's not a big priority,'' he says. ``If I get a shot, I'll take it. There are other things I want to do.''

Two weeks before BC's season opener this year, Walker sits in the BC players' lounge, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He smiles at a question about his poetry, which he has offered to share with a reporter. The poetry is angry and dark and crackling with energy, the stylistic antithesis of the Omari Walker who glides across campus with a smile on his lips for everyone he meets.

BC writing teacher Sue Roberts first met Walker through the Options for Education Program, a remedial course for incoming minority students. Walker, she says, displayed the usual arrogance of an 18-year-old, blue-chip athlete.

``BC is rather insulated and homogeneous,'' says Roberts, ``so much so that I joke with students to get ready for the Great White Wave. In comes this tornado named Omari, saying what he thought about the world. It upped the ante for everybody.''

In his junior year, Walker took Roberts' prose-writing seminar, producing a series of searing, and unsparing, autobiographical essays. ``He was incredibly honest on the page,'' says Roberts. ``A star of the class.''

Poetry teacher Suzanne Matson had Walker in three courses. ``Omari was waking up to a range of possibilities,'' she says. ``He gave himself permission to tell the truth about himself and disciplined himself to find the right words.''

The right words, and the right context, which for Omari Walker omeant a journey of discovery into his father's past and its legacy of abandonment and abuse. For Roberts, he wrote a body of poems grouped around multigenerational themes. Only one borrowed from Walker's experience as an athlete. Its central image: a football player being watched by his father.

His BC writing teachers have pushed him to higher standards, says Walker, introducing him to contemporary poets like Rita Dove and Sharon Olds while demanding that he polish - and repolish - his own work until it glows with the effort.

``I'm probably the most aggressive student in any of my classes,'' says Walker, ``but only the people who really know me see that side of me.'' How hidden is it? ``My mother hasn't read my poems,'' he says, grinning, ``if that's any indication.''

In coming days, Walker will revisit what he once called, in a poem, ``the delta of misfortune.'' A few days into camp, he injures his hamstring; more painfully, his teammates do not elect him co-captain. While BC captains almost never serve two terms, Walker wonders if he's being penalized for his role in the betting scandal and can scarcely hide his disappointment. Calling home, he gets a warm pep talk from his father, and some of the hard feelings melt away. You don't need the title, his father tells him. You're a leader. A man.

The Eagles open the season with an upset loss to Temple - ``the worst game of my career,'' Walker says. The next Saturday, 100 of his friends and relatives show up for a tailgate picnic before the home opener against West Virginia. The smell of barbecued ribs wafts over a campus parking lot. Joe and Elaine Walker greet friends in matching Eagles T-shirts and caps. Tina Walker wears one of Omari's game jerseys. Briena and Derrion have stayed behind with friends in Mansfield. ``I took them to the Temple game,'' she explains, ``and spent the whole afternoon chasing them around an empty stadium. Not today. Today, I plan to enjoy myself.''

Not exactly. Walker carries the ball 18 times for 89 yards in the first half. With seconds to go, however, he collides awkwardly with a defender and crumples to the ground. The Alumni Stadium crowd grows hushed. Tina, who has never seen her husband injured on the football field, watches him limp off to the dressing room. The Eagles rally furiously to beat the Mountaineers, 31-24, but Walker can do no better than stand on crutches and cheer from the sidelines.

It is a coin tossed each time an Omari Walker takes the field. Heads, a winning touchdown run. Tails, an injury that could end a game, a season, or a career. Walker decided some time ago not to make life a game of chance. So far, the vital signs look good.