gamecockfootball09
08-26-2007, 04:06 PM
When Cory Boyd peels back the sleeves and lifts the front of his T-shirt, he is not about showing off the muscles that bulge from his arms or rock-hard stomach that make him, pound for pound, one of South Carolina’s strongest football players.
Boyd is instead showing the chapters of his life through the dozen or so tattoos that adorn his upper torso. For starters, there is his mother’s name across Boyd’s stomach, the mother who spent her only son’s formative years in prison for drug dealing and died of a massive heart attack at age 40.
There are the two dog tags emblazoned on one forearm, one a tribute to his former girlfriend, the other a salute to his one and only childhood hero, Willie Graves. Both were killed by gunfire, Graves dying as Boyd knelt in a pool of blood on an Orange, N.J., street and pleaded for his cousin’s life.
There is the tattooed outline of Boyd’s home state of New Jersey with the addresses of the two apartments where he lived in the 108 Projects, a government subsidized housing development in Orange where surviving means making it to the grocery store to purchase a gallon of milk and returning with your life still intact.
There is the dragon face that symbolizes the fire that burns inside Boyd. There is the fire and smoke protruding from a panther that signals the beast that rages within him. There is the half-skeleton on his back whose face is peering through a crack in a wall. It says to Boyd that he can see his way out of his past.
Finally, there is the Gamecock logo on one shoulder, and it represents Boyd having found his paradise. He enters his senior season as the featured running back in Steve Spurrier’s offense. More importantly, he ventures into his senior year just four courses shy of earning a degree.
To know Cory Boyd and his life’s story is to know what a remarkable accomplishment it is for him to have found a way, found a purpose, found a light that guides him out of a checkered past and onto a path to success.
No one knows that better than Randy Daniel, Boyd’s football coach at Orange High.
“He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to make it,” Daniel says. “He was supposed to be locked up somewhere. He was supposed to be on the streets somewhere.”
That is why when Boyd shows off his tattoos he might as well be opening a book to his life, and what follows is a chapter-by-chapter account of a tale not many 22-year-olds would have survived to tell.
CHAPTER ONE: 108 PROJECTS
Dave DeGuglielmo first ventured into the 108 Projects on the northeast side of Orange, N.J., on a snowy evening in 2002. Most do not venture off I-280, a freeway that connects New York City to the east with the wealthy suburbs to the west in northeast New Jersey. You must have a purpose to stop in Orange, and DeGuglielmo’s on this day was to visit the home of high school running back/defensive back Cory Boyd.
DeGuglielmo got lost. To find the 108 Projects he summoned the support of a wandering pedestrian who rode with the South Carolina assistant coach. Still planted in DeGuglielmo’s head is the initial impression he got of the housing complex. He thought he was watching the opening to the 1970s TV series “Good Times,” where the camera scans a graffiti-stained neighborhood with homeless scattered about.
DeGuglielmo was escorted from his car to the first-floor apartment of Joan Boyd, Cory’s grandmother, by the prospect’s godparents, Lisa and Dennis Merriweather. DeGuglielmo could not help but notice a man smoking a crack pipe in one corner of the hallway, and another man sleeping in his own urine in another corner.
The door to the grandmother’s four-bedroom apartment was 4-inches thick, according to DeGuglielmo, and was secured with multiple locks.
After visiting with Cory and his grandmother, DeGuglielmo departed to notice the man who gave him directions was passed out in a snow bank just outside the building. He also left with an understanding of what kind of background Boyd was attempting to escape and what it was going to take to get him to USC.
“Do you understand what this guy walks through when he leaves this door to walk to school every day?” DeGuglielmo recalls Dennis Merriweather telling him. “There are plenty of opportunities for him to go astray, but for the most part he has kept himself in order.”
From that meeting, DeGuglielmo believed it would not matter what kind of weight room or practice facilities USC could offer Boyd. It would not matter what kind of training table USC had for athletes, or even that the Gamecocks competed in the mighty Southeastern Conference.
DeGuglielmo knew Boyd needed to know that someone at USC would look after him, care for him, love him. He needed a father figure, and a mother figure. He needed to find a college where the coaching staff could serve as role models, since there were few in his life.
CHAPTER TWO: HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Cory wanted a new bicycle for his ninth birthday. That was his single request of his mother, Crystal Boyd, who usually found a way to provide for her only son. Cory never asked where the money came from, but he learned early on that there was good reason his mother spent as much time behind bars as not.
When that shiny new bike showed up in his grandmother’s apartment on Aug. 6, 1994, Boyd was the happiest boy in the four-building complex. His shouts of joy could be heard all the way to the sixth floor, where he lived with his mother.
The laughter quickly died in sorrow when his grandmother spoke those dreaded words: “We need to talk.”
“Dusty, Dusty,” Joan Boyd called to her grandson by the nickname she had pinned on him. “You need to know that your mother won’t be with us for a long time. Baby, you’ve got to make some choices.”
Or, at least that’s the way Cory recalls the conversation. This time, his mother was headed off to prison after one more drug deal gone wrong. He did not know for sure, but he had a good inkling the bike was purchased through her drug dealings.
“Instead of having my mother and a bike show up,” Boyd says, “I had a bike show up, and I had a story to go along with it. To this day, I never rode the bike. It seemed like I traded in a materialistic thing for that time with my mother, that time with the person who put me on this earth.”
The tradeoff actually brought some much-needed stability to Boyd’s life. Instead of hopping from one 108 Projects apartment to another with his mother, Boyd now had a permanent home at 97 Wilson Place, apartment 106, first door on the left as you enter the complex.
It also brought decision-making time to young Boyd. His mother’s drug dealing produced the kinds of clothes her son wanted to wear. His grandmother could not provide the same, instead promising the newest addition to her household only the necessities: food, shelter and bare-bones clothing.
Boyd’s options included joining the street game: drug trade for cash; choosing to pilfer whatever luxuries he so desired; or learning to hustle. He chose the latter. It started small, on the neighborhood basketball courts, and progressed to the recreation football leagues.
“Hey, I bet I can tap a backboard, and I’m not 6-feet tall,” Boyd would challenge a stranger and ask for cash in return.
“I’m pretty sure I can score five touchdowns today,” he would say to another prior to a middle-school football game.
Then he graduated to the street gangs and drug dealers, who always seemed to have bets going with rival gangs or drug dealers from a nearby town.
“They’d yell to me,” Boyd recalls. “Hey, Cory, come play with us. ... It’s a quick hundred. I’ll give you the ball the whole time. They smoke and drink, you can run around them all day. It was easy money for me. It was easy money for them.”
Soon, Boyd had quite the reputation around the 108 Projects, a reputation that kept cash in his pockets and the mean street at bay. There exists a hands-off regard, according to Boyd, afforded any young man or woman who has reasonable expectations of escaping the projects.
Even the crack heads and drug dealers who saw Boyd on the project grounds recognized him as the one who was going to play in the NBA, or maybe the NFL. So, they steered clear of Boyd, just as they had done with Willie Graves, Boyd’s cousin who by his senior year at Orange High had earned a full scholarship to play football at Villanova.
CHAPTER THREE: EVEN WILLIE COULDN’T ESCAPE
Boyd was watching TV at his grandmother’s house around Christmas 1995, one year after his mother changed her mailing address from the projects to prison. He heard the gunshots fired, several and in rapid succession, and within seconds his uncle barged through the front door.
Boyd raced outside to the telephone booth on Wilson Place. Graves was near death, his body sprawled on the street corner, the victim of mistaken identity. He had just turned 19, just become a father for the first and only time. He was just about to realize his dream of attending college.
“That was my only role model, ever. That’s how I tried to make myself,” Boyd says. “In football, the way he carried himself. ... It was a lot to see your role model, the person you look up to just dying right there in your arms. ... I sat next to him as he was bleeding, as he was dying. I felt worthless. I couldn’t do anything.”
Boyd soon wallowed in depression, and withdrew from even his grandmother. He stopped participating in sports. He stopped hustling. The street life had taken his mother, and now his hero. He feared for his own life.
“I was scared to go outside because my mother had crossed people,” Boyd says. “I thought if they knew her, they knew me, and I didn’t want to catch a stray bullet because somebody was looking for her, or somebody was looking for somebody. I was 10.”
The No. 3 tattoo on Boyd’s forearm is tribute to Graves, who wore that same jersey number on the football field. Boyd wore No. 3 while rushing for 3,320 yards and 42 touchdowns during his junior and senior seasons at Orange High. He wears the same jersey number at USC.
CHAPTER FOUR: FINDING HIS WAY
By the time Boyd arrived on the Orange High campus, football coach Randy Daniel found an angry young man. His mother was taken from him. His father never was. His ex-girlfriend was shot and killed by her cousin. He was a rough kid, Daniel says, his toughness tested every day he walked the six blocks from the 108 Projects to the high school.
But Daniel says he saw something in Boyd that he seldom sees in kids from the 108 Projects. He was a leader, not a follower. The leather-tough skin he developed in the projects carried to the football field where he would punish opponents on runs, choosing to barrel over a defender rather than step out of bounds.
Following the ninth game of Boyd’s sophomore year, though, he decided to pass on the final game of the season. He wanted to join the school’s basketball team instead. No dice, Daniel told him. You leave the football team, you leave for good. No football during your junior year.
Boyd left, and came pleading to Daniel during the summer. Daniel relented, under a couple of conditions. Boyd had to lead his teammates in summer weightlifting sessions, and he had to set an example by attending all newly-formed summer study halls.
“He was a kid I couldn’t just kick off the team,” Daniel says. “It didn’t make sense to kick him off the team and give up on him.”
Boyd returned for his junior season as a team captain, and surrogate coach. Daniel had mysteriously lost his voice during most of Boyd’s final two seasons at Orange High. Before games, Daniel would share a few words with his team then depart the locker room, leaving the pep talks to Boyd.
During Boyd’s final game at Orange, a state championship encounter against West Essex, two of his teammates were felled by injuries on the opening series. Boyd would have none of it.
“I know you ain’t going out like that, get back in there,” Daniel recalls Boyd yelling at the players, who limped through the remainder of the game. They could not possibly let down their leader.
CHAPTER FIVE: FINDING A HOME
The same escort from their car door to the first floor apartment of Joan Boyd was afforded DeGuglielmo and Lou Holtz as they arrived for the official home visit by the USC coaching staff. This was an occasion in the 108 Projects, and all of Cory Boyd’s family and friends were there, about 15 people crammed into the 10-foot by 10-foot living room.
Most of the family stood as Holtz sat on one side of the room and DeGuglielmo on the other. Holtz, known in the coaching business for being one of the great salesmen, began his pitch. He was the master at closing the deal, and his fast-talking ways usually charmed parents of recruits and their families.
A couple of sentences into his spiel, Holtz was interrupted by Dennis Merriweather, a corrections officer in Newark and the godfather of Cory Boyd. Holtz and DeGuglielmo were aware of Merriweather and his influence on Boyd. Following Boyd’s recruiting visit to South Carolina — Boyd initially thought SC stood for Southern California and that he was headed to the West Coast — Holtz had told the young recruit that he could not play for USC unless he removed his dreadlocks.
Boyd at first refused, until DeGuglielmo smoothed things over by approaching Merriweather, who said no decision on a college was going to be based on Cory Boyd’s hair. Boyd trimmed his locks.
This time, Merriweather again intervened on his godson’s behalf. Merriweather said no recruiting pitch was needed by Holtz. What was needed was an assurance that Holtz had someone on his staff who would take care of Cory Boyd. Without pausing, Holtz said he had that person, and pointed to DeGuglielmo.
The deal was sealed. The remainder of the evening was a celebration of Boyd’s decision to play for Holtz ... and, more importantly, for DeGuglielmo.
“I’ve been in a lot of houses, with sons of CEOs, sons of police officers, sons of mayors,” says DeGuglielmo, now a New York Giants assistant coach, “but I’ve never been in a home visit as amazing and powerful as that. I could see with this kid that he and his family wanted to get him out of that environment.”
CONCLUSION: THE DREAM GIVER
Boyd swears he experienced no culture shock by moving from 108 Projects to the more placid environs of the USC campus. There are indications otherwise. He was suspended from summer workouts during the Holtz years. He was suspended after reportedly slashing the tires of an SUV following a verbal spat with a female, even though charges were later dropped.
He was questioned about gunfire when USC players reportedly tussled with a Columbia gang, and again no charges were filed. He was suspended for the entire 2005 season for violation of team rules. And he couldn’t shake his heritage when he proclaimed on national TV during the opening game of the 2006 season that he was “back liked cooked crack.”
Boyd admits to facing a constant struggle with his past. As much as he wants to escape it, it keeps calling him back — haunting him — whenever something goes wrong in his life. The safe way for him is to concede he can’t make it. The tough track is to fight it and forge ahead.
During the 2005 suspension, Boyd considered transferring to Rutgers in New Jersey, or perhaps sitting out a couple of years. Then, he says, he realized that by returning to Orange, he was falling in line with so many others who attempted to escape but returned to the streets and the 108 Projects.
“He’s to be admired,” Steve Spurrier says. “He’s been through some rough times. He made the right choices along the way ... and he’s been a model student-athlete ever since.”
Not much of a reader, Boyd has taken these days to self-help books. He is reading “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy, and his favorite recent reading is “The Dream Giver” by Bruce Wilkinson. The back cover of the latter tells about the “story of Ordinary, who decides to leave the Land of Familiar to pursue his Big Dream.”
Boyd’s big dream is to play in the NFL, and Spurrier believes he has pro football qualities because he is elusive and can run with power. Beyond that, Boyd says he wants to work with children some day in hopes of helping others realize their dreams.
Oh, there is one other hope for Boyd, and it has to do with his 59-year-old grandmother. She works 40 hours per week as a machine operator at T&E Industries in Orange. She, as much as anyone, is responsible for Boyd escaping the 108 Projects where she continues to live.
Boyd would like to get her out of the projects and build her a home. He can find naked space on his body for another tattoo, one that resembles his grandmother’s new house.
Boyd is instead showing the chapters of his life through the dozen or so tattoos that adorn his upper torso. For starters, there is his mother’s name across Boyd’s stomach, the mother who spent her only son’s formative years in prison for drug dealing and died of a massive heart attack at age 40.
There are the two dog tags emblazoned on one forearm, one a tribute to his former girlfriend, the other a salute to his one and only childhood hero, Willie Graves. Both were killed by gunfire, Graves dying as Boyd knelt in a pool of blood on an Orange, N.J., street and pleaded for his cousin’s life.
There is the tattooed outline of Boyd’s home state of New Jersey with the addresses of the two apartments where he lived in the 108 Projects, a government subsidized housing development in Orange where surviving means making it to the grocery store to purchase a gallon of milk and returning with your life still intact.
There is the dragon face that symbolizes the fire that burns inside Boyd. There is the fire and smoke protruding from a panther that signals the beast that rages within him. There is the half-skeleton on his back whose face is peering through a crack in a wall. It says to Boyd that he can see his way out of his past.
Finally, there is the Gamecock logo on one shoulder, and it represents Boyd having found his paradise. He enters his senior season as the featured running back in Steve Spurrier’s offense. More importantly, he ventures into his senior year just four courses shy of earning a degree.
To know Cory Boyd and his life’s story is to know what a remarkable accomplishment it is for him to have found a way, found a purpose, found a light that guides him out of a checkered past and onto a path to success.
No one knows that better than Randy Daniel, Boyd’s football coach at Orange High.
“He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to make it,” Daniel says. “He was supposed to be locked up somewhere. He was supposed to be on the streets somewhere.”
That is why when Boyd shows off his tattoos he might as well be opening a book to his life, and what follows is a chapter-by-chapter account of a tale not many 22-year-olds would have survived to tell.
CHAPTER ONE: 108 PROJECTS
Dave DeGuglielmo first ventured into the 108 Projects on the northeast side of Orange, N.J., on a snowy evening in 2002. Most do not venture off I-280, a freeway that connects New York City to the east with the wealthy suburbs to the west in northeast New Jersey. You must have a purpose to stop in Orange, and DeGuglielmo’s on this day was to visit the home of high school running back/defensive back Cory Boyd.
DeGuglielmo got lost. To find the 108 Projects he summoned the support of a wandering pedestrian who rode with the South Carolina assistant coach. Still planted in DeGuglielmo’s head is the initial impression he got of the housing complex. He thought he was watching the opening to the 1970s TV series “Good Times,” where the camera scans a graffiti-stained neighborhood with homeless scattered about.
DeGuglielmo was escorted from his car to the first-floor apartment of Joan Boyd, Cory’s grandmother, by the prospect’s godparents, Lisa and Dennis Merriweather. DeGuglielmo could not help but notice a man smoking a crack pipe in one corner of the hallway, and another man sleeping in his own urine in another corner.
The door to the grandmother’s four-bedroom apartment was 4-inches thick, according to DeGuglielmo, and was secured with multiple locks.
After visiting with Cory and his grandmother, DeGuglielmo departed to notice the man who gave him directions was passed out in a snow bank just outside the building. He also left with an understanding of what kind of background Boyd was attempting to escape and what it was going to take to get him to USC.
“Do you understand what this guy walks through when he leaves this door to walk to school every day?” DeGuglielmo recalls Dennis Merriweather telling him. “There are plenty of opportunities for him to go astray, but for the most part he has kept himself in order.”
From that meeting, DeGuglielmo believed it would not matter what kind of weight room or practice facilities USC could offer Boyd. It would not matter what kind of training table USC had for athletes, or even that the Gamecocks competed in the mighty Southeastern Conference.
DeGuglielmo knew Boyd needed to know that someone at USC would look after him, care for him, love him. He needed a father figure, and a mother figure. He needed to find a college where the coaching staff could serve as role models, since there were few in his life.
CHAPTER TWO: HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Cory wanted a new bicycle for his ninth birthday. That was his single request of his mother, Crystal Boyd, who usually found a way to provide for her only son. Cory never asked where the money came from, but he learned early on that there was good reason his mother spent as much time behind bars as not.
When that shiny new bike showed up in his grandmother’s apartment on Aug. 6, 1994, Boyd was the happiest boy in the four-building complex. His shouts of joy could be heard all the way to the sixth floor, where he lived with his mother.
The laughter quickly died in sorrow when his grandmother spoke those dreaded words: “We need to talk.”
“Dusty, Dusty,” Joan Boyd called to her grandson by the nickname she had pinned on him. “You need to know that your mother won’t be with us for a long time. Baby, you’ve got to make some choices.”
Or, at least that’s the way Cory recalls the conversation. This time, his mother was headed off to prison after one more drug deal gone wrong. He did not know for sure, but he had a good inkling the bike was purchased through her drug dealings.
“Instead of having my mother and a bike show up,” Boyd says, “I had a bike show up, and I had a story to go along with it. To this day, I never rode the bike. It seemed like I traded in a materialistic thing for that time with my mother, that time with the person who put me on this earth.”
The tradeoff actually brought some much-needed stability to Boyd’s life. Instead of hopping from one 108 Projects apartment to another with his mother, Boyd now had a permanent home at 97 Wilson Place, apartment 106, first door on the left as you enter the complex.
It also brought decision-making time to young Boyd. His mother’s drug dealing produced the kinds of clothes her son wanted to wear. His grandmother could not provide the same, instead promising the newest addition to her household only the necessities: food, shelter and bare-bones clothing.
Boyd’s options included joining the street game: drug trade for cash; choosing to pilfer whatever luxuries he so desired; or learning to hustle. He chose the latter. It started small, on the neighborhood basketball courts, and progressed to the recreation football leagues.
“Hey, I bet I can tap a backboard, and I’m not 6-feet tall,” Boyd would challenge a stranger and ask for cash in return.
“I’m pretty sure I can score five touchdowns today,” he would say to another prior to a middle-school football game.
Then he graduated to the street gangs and drug dealers, who always seemed to have bets going with rival gangs or drug dealers from a nearby town.
“They’d yell to me,” Boyd recalls. “Hey, Cory, come play with us. ... It’s a quick hundred. I’ll give you the ball the whole time. They smoke and drink, you can run around them all day. It was easy money for me. It was easy money for them.”
Soon, Boyd had quite the reputation around the 108 Projects, a reputation that kept cash in his pockets and the mean street at bay. There exists a hands-off regard, according to Boyd, afforded any young man or woman who has reasonable expectations of escaping the projects.
Even the crack heads and drug dealers who saw Boyd on the project grounds recognized him as the one who was going to play in the NBA, or maybe the NFL. So, they steered clear of Boyd, just as they had done with Willie Graves, Boyd’s cousin who by his senior year at Orange High had earned a full scholarship to play football at Villanova.
CHAPTER THREE: EVEN WILLIE COULDN’T ESCAPE
Boyd was watching TV at his grandmother’s house around Christmas 1995, one year after his mother changed her mailing address from the projects to prison. He heard the gunshots fired, several and in rapid succession, and within seconds his uncle barged through the front door.
Boyd raced outside to the telephone booth on Wilson Place. Graves was near death, his body sprawled on the street corner, the victim of mistaken identity. He had just turned 19, just become a father for the first and only time. He was just about to realize his dream of attending college.
“That was my only role model, ever. That’s how I tried to make myself,” Boyd says. “In football, the way he carried himself. ... It was a lot to see your role model, the person you look up to just dying right there in your arms. ... I sat next to him as he was bleeding, as he was dying. I felt worthless. I couldn’t do anything.”
Boyd soon wallowed in depression, and withdrew from even his grandmother. He stopped participating in sports. He stopped hustling. The street life had taken his mother, and now his hero. He feared for his own life.
“I was scared to go outside because my mother had crossed people,” Boyd says. “I thought if they knew her, they knew me, and I didn’t want to catch a stray bullet because somebody was looking for her, or somebody was looking for somebody. I was 10.”
The No. 3 tattoo on Boyd’s forearm is tribute to Graves, who wore that same jersey number on the football field. Boyd wore No. 3 while rushing for 3,320 yards and 42 touchdowns during his junior and senior seasons at Orange High. He wears the same jersey number at USC.
CHAPTER FOUR: FINDING HIS WAY
By the time Boyd arrived on the Orange High campus, football coach Randy Daniel found an angry young man. His mother was taken from him. His father never was. His ex-girlfriend was shot and killed by her cousin. He was a rough kid, Daniel says, his toughness tested every day he walked the six blocks from the 108 Projects to the high school.
But Daniel says he saw something in Boyd that he seldom sees in kids from the 108 Projects. He was a leader, not a follower. The leather-tough skin he developed in the projects carried to the football field where he would punish opponents on runs, choosing to barrel over a defender rather than step out of bounds.
Following the ninth game of Boyd’s sophomore year, though, he decided to pass on the final game of the season. He wanted to join the school’s basketball team instead. No dice, Daniel told him. You leave the football team, you leave for good. No football during your junior year.
Boyd left, and came pleading to Daniel during the summer. Daniel relented, under a couple of conditions. Boyd had to lead his teammates in summer weightlifting sessions, and he had to set an example by attending all newly-formed summer study halls.
“He was a kid I couldn’t just kick off the team,” Daniel says. “It didn’t make sense to kick him off the team and give up on him.”
Boyd returned for his junior season as a team captain, and surrogate coach. Daniel had mysteriously lost his voice during most of Boyd’s final two seasons at Orange High. Before games, Daniel would share a few words with his team then depart the locker room, leaving the pep talks to Boyd.
During Boyd’s final game at Orange, a state championship encounter against West Essex, two of his teammates were felled by injuries on the opening series. Boyd would have none of it.
“I know you ain’t going out like that, get back in there,” Daniel recalls Boyd yelling at the players, who limped through the remainder of the game. They could not possibly let down their leader.
CHAPTER FIVE: FINDING A HOME
The same escort from their car door to the first floor apartment of Joan Boyd was afforded DeGuglielmo and Lou Holtz as they arrived for the official home visit by the USC coaching staff. This was an occasion in the 108 Projects, and all of Cory Boyd’s family and friends were there, about 15 people crammed into the 10-foot by 10-foot living room.
Most of the family stood as Holtz sat on one side of the room and DeGuglielmo on the other. Holtz, known in the coaching business for being one of the great salesmen, began his pitch. He was the master at closing the deal, and his fast-talking ways usually charmed parents of recruits and their families.
A couple of sentences into his spiel, Holtz was interrupted by Dennis Merriweather, a corrections officer in Newark and the godfather of Cory Boyd. Holtz and DeGuglielmo were aware of Merriweather and his influence on Boyd. Following Boyd’s recruiting visit to South Carolina — Boyd initially thought SC stood for Southern California and that he was headed to the West Coast — Holtz had told the young recruit that he could not play for USC unless he removed his dreadlocks.
Boyd at first refused, until DeGuglielmo smoothed things over by approaching Merriweather, who said no decision on a college was going to be based on Cory Boyd’s hair. Boyd trimmed his locks.
This time, Merriweather again intervened on his godson’s behalf. Merriweather said no recruiting pitch was needed by Holtz. What was needed was an assurance that Holtz had someone on his staff who would take care of Cory Boyd. Without pausing, Holtz said he had that person, and pointed to DeGuglielmo.
The deal was sealed. The remainder of the evening was a celebration of Boyd’s decision to play for Holtz ... and, more importantly, for DeGuglielmo.
“I’ve been in a lot of houses, with sons of CEOs, sons of police officers, sons of mayors,” says DeGuglielmo, now a New York Giants assistant coach, “but I’ve never been in a home visit as amazing and powerful as that. I could see with this kid that he and his family wanted to get him out of that environment.”
CONCLUSION: THE DREAM GIVER
Boyd swears he experienced no culture shock by moving from 108 Projects to the more placid environs of the USC campus. There are indications otherwise. He was suspended from summer workouts during the Holtz years. He was suspended after reportedly slashing the tires of an SUV following a verbal spat with a female, even though charges were later dropped.
He was questioned about gunfire when USC players reportedly tussled with a Columbia gang, and again no charges were filed. He was suspended for the entire 2005 season for violation of team rules. And he couldn’t shake his heritage when he proclaimed on national TV during the opening game of the 2006 season that he was “back liked cooked crack.”
Boyd admits to facing a constant struggle with his past. As much as he wants to escape it, it keeps calling him back — haunting him — whenever something goes wrong in his life. The safe way for him is to concede he can’t make it. The tough track is to fight it and forge ahead.
During the 2005 suspension, Boyd considered transferring to Rutgers in New Jersey, or perhaps sitting out a couple of years. Then, he says, he realized that by returning to Orange, he was falling in line with so many others who attempted to escape but returned to the streets and the 108 Projects.
“He’s to be admired,” Steve Spurrier says. “He’s been through some rough times. He made the right choices along the way ... and he’s been a model student-athlete ever since.”
Not much of a reader, Boyd has taken these days to self-help books. He is reading “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy, and his favorite recent reading is “The Dream Giver” by Bruce Wilkinson. The back cover of the latter tells about the “story of Ordinary, who decides to leave the Land of Familiar to pursue his Big Dream.”
Boyd’s big dream is to play in the NFL, and Spurrier believes he has pro football qualities because he is elusive and can run with power. Beyond that, Boyd says he wants to work with children some day in hopes of helping others realize their dreams.
Oh, there is one other hope for Boyd, and it has to do with his 59-year-old grandmother. She works 40 hours per week as a machine operator at T&E Industries in Orange. She, as much as anyone, is responsible for Boyd escaping the 108 Projects where she continues to live.
Boyd would like to get her out of the projects and build her a home. He can find naked space on his body for another tattoo, one that resembles his grandmother’s new house.