Santana Moss, Turn the page. Bennie Blades, next article, please. Tremain Mack, check out the NFL department in the back of the magazine. None of you are going to like this.
Do we even want to go there? Do we want to strike this match in the middle of a hot Miami summer? Well, yeah. Because all those guys will speak up for themselves. All those guys will stake their claims to being the fastest Cane ever. But the one Miami player who might very well deserve the belt is the one guy who won't say a word.
"He's not bigheaded about it," says teammate Anthony Reddick. "That makes him different. You can't tell who he is." Folks who do recognize him actually walk up to this college junior in the street and tell him he's the quickest football player in Miami history. "I hear that a lot," he mumbles, staring down at his baby back ribs and Friday's fries on this muggy July afternoon. Antrel Rolle calls him the best athlete ever to roll through Coral Gables. Deion Sanders-the pride of Florida State-called him before the Virginia game last year, telling him he reminds Prime Time of, um, Prime Time. Our guy beams and says, "That was like catching a home run ball from Babe Ruth!"
His fiancée, sitting right next to him at lunch, says she caught him. And our guy just smiles. Yes, dear. But wait. We're not talking about the nicest, most polite Cane ever. We're talking about the fastest. We're talking about Devin Hester.
What's that? His 40 time? Willis McGahee ran a 4.24. Hester clocked an is-he-there-yet 4.28 earlier this year. Argument over, you say. But how often does a football player run 40 yards with the football? Once a game, if he's all-world?
Hester's a corner, a return man. So let's talk about the 10 time or the five time. Let's talk about cutback speed and closing speed and recovery speed. Let's talk about playmaking speed, replay-making speed. "That's what's so impressive," says coach Larry Coker. "He gets his speed so quickly. Immediate, explosive speed."
So many players have track speed, and so few have football speed. So few strike with the suddenness that throttles opponents and amps up teammates and gets fans back from the beer line in time for the second-half kickoff. So few can win unwinnable games and save unsalvageable seasons with one head-fake, one move. "Only a handful of guys have what he has," Deion says. "A handful. One hand." To find them, just look at the top of the preseason polls. Bush, Young, Breaston, Ginn. And Hester. Above all, Hester. Take it from Leroy Nelson: "Nobody can beat Devin in the 20-yard dash. Nobody. If they put Maurice Greene on Devin, hands down I take Devin." Who's Leroy Nelson? He's Devin Hester's closest childhood friend. And while best buds don't make objective sources, they do carry secrets-like where Devin Hester got his football speed.
MICHIGAN GREAT Anthony Carter was the fastest man ever to come out of Riviera Beach, Fla. Probably. See, Carter never raced Lenoris Hester. A round-faced man with a throaty voice, Hester ran high school track … for a while. "He was speedy but not athletic-minded," says his sister, Gwen. "He was like, 'It's hot, I don't want to be out there all day.' " So Lenoris raced strangers, cars, horses, often in bare feet. According to local legend, he challenged the reigning Florida state 100-meter champion to a sprint. Lenoris got his match and-as the story goes-got such a jump that he spun around and backpedaled the last five meters, grinning all the way. Midway through the inevitable rematch, Lenoris slapped his rival's backside before blowing by.
And that was Lenoris Hester summed up: stunning start, a little bit lax on follow-through. He met a girl named Juanita in 1980, married her and had two sons-Lenorris (adding an "r") in 1981 and Devin in 1982. Devin has his daddy's everything: his speed and his shortcomings, his face and his shy but coy smile. Relatives took one look at the boy and told Lenoris: "It's like you spit him out!" Devin remembers how his dad used to look him square in the eye, smile affectionately and say, "You know you're an ugly little child!" Even now, after Deion's call, Devin considers it the best compliment he's ever gotten.
Devin ran everywhere-at recess, away from his mom's stern hand, even to the store to get juice. Devin still pumps his fists when he tells stories of playing Toss-Up and Tackle with boys much older than him, where he'd catch a lobbed football and dart away from lumbering schoolmates. After movie outings, Leroy Nelson would exit the cineplex and challenge his buddy to a race. "Naw, naw," Devin would say. "You don't want none of this … GO!" Devin's aunt Sareasa to this day calls him Run.
Lenoris and Juanita got divorced when Devin was little, but father and son stayed tight. Devin and Lenorris watched Dad pull on his sneaks and jog out into the street to challenge anybody willing to a foot race, and they remember him winning every time. But Lenoris wasn't there to watch Devin's first Pop Warner touchdown.
IT'S MAY 1995. Devin's 12. Juanita shows up at his school right in the middle of the day. "Y'all hurry up!" she warbles. "Dad is in the hospital." Devin wordlessly climbs into the backseat of Mom's car with his older brother. His eyes water and his bottom lip trembles. Is Daddy dying?
Devin walks into a bright hospital room and sees wires everywhere. Internal bleeding, the doctor says. An hour or less to live, the doctor says. Juanita bends over and whispers: "The boys are here." Lenoris jerks up in his bed, but the tubes hold him and he slumps back down to the pillow. He shakes his head, tries to say something. The kids crane, but no words come. Devin sees the anguish in his dad's face. Then Juanita grabs her first love's wide hand and prays for him. Lenoris' eyes close. Juanita looks down and sees tears dripping down her boys' brown faces, onto their shirts.
Devin still doesn't know what took his dad at age 33. His family doesn't talk about it. (The obit mentioned "an extended illness.") He doesn't know what his dad tried to say as he died. But he has an idea. "What he always told me," Devin says. "Be somebody. That helps me stay motivated. I want to make it for him."
So from that day on, Hester has tried to finish every task-something his dad never quite mastered. Devin became a Parade All-America thanks to performances like the one in the California-Florida All-Star Game, in which he returned a kick 85 yards for a score and added a pick and three tackles. He signed with Miami early so he could be close to his mom (who nearly died in a car accident in 1993) and his brother, now at Florida International. Then, a crushing false start: soon after he moved to campus in the summer of 2002, the coaching staff told him he'd have to sit out a year for academic reasons. Devin rode home bawling. He thought he had done everything he needed to do to play out his dream, including his schoolwork. Now he was asking himself through the tears whether his future had ended right there.
He stayed in bed for two weeks. Then Juanita marched into his room and told him: "Get out of the house." Devin went down to his elementary school and did what he always did. He ran. Ran and ran and ran. And by the time he was ready to return to campus in 2003, he was the same age, 20, as his dad was when he was born.
People at the corner stores and supermarkets in Riviera Beach would stop cold when they'd see Devin. They'd put their hands to their hearts and wonder aloud if Lenoris had somehow come back. Lenoris' mom, Samantha, would stare at Devin and then gather him into a hug to keep the tears from bursting from her eyes. They would anyway.
THURSDAY NIGHT football. Last October. Louisville's up 31-27 on Miami, eight minutes left. Devin's downfield, waiting for a punt and thinking, "We're gonna lose this game if somebody doesn't do something." He looks for the ball, expects to watch it sail out of bounds. Then he sees it, small, then bigger and bigger. "Just get it and go," he tells himself. He gathers the punt, and his eyes fall onto the blur ahead. White road jerseys. Small, then bigger and bigger. A wall, and no crack. No time. Devin bursts straight ahead.
A crease. Barely. Too small, but he has nothing else. He hits the hole … and feels nothing. Suddenly, the sight of a single man. The punter. "Slow him down," he thinks. "Square him up." His stride lengthens as he stares at the punter beginning to squat, readying. Devin takes a half-stride one way, then a full stride the other. The punter collapses. Fans scream and Cards slump. Watching on TV up in Baltimore, Deion's eyes widen.
Maybe Devin Hester isn't only the quickest Cane ever. Maybe he's also the most TiVo-worthy. No east-west, no swings to the outside, no dancing. "Most people are scared of running up the middle," he says. "It gives me more options."
And Devin's done some things at "The U" even old-timers can't remember seeing before. Like the very next week, against NC State, when Devin took all of 12 seconds to blaze 104 yards-as if he'd clocked it on asphalt with no shoulder pads or tacklers. Like scoring on a "punt-safe." That's a return formation so conservative that it's basically a fair catch without the arm wave. The return team puts up a wall of blockers and the deep man runs right into it, like a lemming off a cliff. The Canes called a punt-safe against Louisiana Tech last year. Hester caught the kick on the 8, his blockers set up the wall … and Hester darted right through it and didn't slow until the end zone. Says special-teams coach Don Soldinger, "I ain't seen too many people do that."
Nor has anyone seen too many people block a kick against an overload formation. Miami was down 10-3 to Florida State in last year's home opener with less than four minutes left. The Noles rumbled down the field and set up for an easy three from the 17. They stacked Hester's side of the field with one extra blocker. Then Devin beat his guy. Beat another guy. Beat everybody. Left the ground. Blocked the kick. "I had never seen that," says Coker. "The field goal is a chip shot. We don't block it, we're not going to win."
Come to think of it, Coker can name three Devin-sent wins last season-Florida State, NC State and Louisville-that kept a three-loss season from becoming a six-loss disaster. Miami's average start came at its 38-yard line, mainly because opposing booters chose to squib instead of taking their chances with "Anytime" Hester. The guy played not one down of defense in five of 12 games last season and still led the team with four interceptions.
The last came in the Peach Bowl win over the Gators. This time, Devin skittered out of bounds after 28 yards instead of trying to turn it upfield. His fiancée, Tamara James, who by the way, is the only women's basketball player ever to lead the Big East in scoring as a freshman, screamed at him for loafing. "I was tired," Devin says.
So how come someone so talented didn't play more last season? Devin struggled at first to pick up defensive schemes. He didn't know he needed to ramp up his self-discipline. He's still not listed as the starter at corner, partly to motivate him, partly because the senior ahead of him, Marcus Maxey, is talented in his own right. "Devin can be great," says Deion. "But I want to make sure. Now everyone's going to be expecting it from him. It's going to take conditioning, technique, little things like staying low." Devin needs to finish what his dad helped him start.
Deion helps. They speak often by phone. Tamara helps. Devin put a ring on her finger at Game 5 of the Heat-Pistons series. "I want coaches to say, he's never lazy, never slouching," she says. "He's almost there." Now it's up to Devin. He spent the summer intent on becoming the first legitimate twoway player in Miami history. (Make it three-way if you count returns, and four-way if you count kick coverage.) At a school where even the best athletes sometimes have to divvy up playing time, Devin might log more snaps than any Cane ever.
Even Clinton Portis might want to read about that.