Bill Reynolds: Perry really ran with it (Providence Journal, Oct. 1, 2006)

Bill Reynolds: Perry really ran with it

Link to Providence Journal Article

Sunday, October 1, 2006

SMITHFIELD -- He was a junior in high school when his best friend, Joe Hector, was shot and killed, a night that still haunts him. Two years before that, one of his close friends also had been shot and killed.

Lorenzo Perry is a great football player at Bryant.

That's only part of the story.

The real story is all the running it took to escape the minefield that was his childhood, the streets of his Providence neighborhood where too many dreams lie bruised and broken. The real story is the journey that took him here to Bryant University and the Saturday afternoon cheers, the journey that took him to this college, to a future.

It's also a story with some heroes, no question about that. Maybe it's this simple: very few inner-city kids who grow up one of 10 kids, without a father, make it very far without some people who help them along the way.

In Perry's case it was his aunt, Robin Perry, who took him in when he was 10 or so, and it was becoming apaprent his mother was having trouble dealing with 10 kids by herself. His aunt who was strong-willed, and simply refused to see her nephew get seduced by the street. Then there was his uncle, Herlin, who first indroduced him to football.

It also was his cousin, Shannon Perry, three years older, who went to La Salle, where she became a huge basketball star. Shannon Perry, who became his role model, whether she knew it or not.

"I always had a supporting cast around me," Perry says.

And it's a story about football, too.

You don't think sports can save a kid?

Lorenzo Perry is testimony that they can.

Where would he now be without football?

"Typical inner-city kid," he says. "Hanging out. Not going to school. Doing whatever."

Football changed that.

Not all at once, certainly. But changed it nontheless.

He was just a little kid when he began playing for the Mount Hope Mohawks, the neighborhood team in the East Side neighborhood where he lived. But from the beginning he was the quickest kid, the kid no one ever seemed able to tackle. From the beginning he had a gift, regardless of his lack of size. From the beginning, if someone put a football in Perry's hands, he made something happen.

He was 14 when he began to hear that football could take him places, that you can ride football. He had seen Shannon ride basketball, both to La Salle and then on to Syracuse, and in the ninth grade he went to La Salle, too, even though he could have walked to Hope.

He was going from Nathan Bishop Middle School that was, in his words, 98 percent black, to a school that was 98 percent white. To a school where the overwhelming majority of his classmates had no clue what his life was like outside if school, no clue to the journey that had taken him to a place that so many of them took for granted.

But he knew La Salle, had gone to Shannon's games, had a certain comfort level. Football helped that, too, quickly gave him a circle of friends, an identity. He was an immediate starter on both sides of the ball that first year, good enough to be second-team all-division.

The next year Tim Coen was the new coach, and when the season was voer, La Salle was the state champions and Perry was All-State, the 5-foot-6 dynamo who was as hard to tackle in the Interscholastic League as he'd been in the youth leagues. The next year was more of the same. And he might have made it three state titles in a row, if not for an emergency appendectomy on the eve of the state title game against East Providence, a game La Salle ended up losing.

He ended the season with 29 touchdowns, ended his career as one of the most dominating players in the Interscholastic League in recent years, good enough to get a scholarship to UMass.

He was there for a year and a half, played on special teams for two seasons. He'd been recruited by Mark Whipple, but Whipple went off to become the quarterback coach of the Steelers, and Perry came to believe he was never going to get off special teams with new coach Don Brown, never get a chance to be a running back. So in the winter of 2005 he decided to transfer to Bryant, a Division II school where he'd be eligible to play without having to sit out a year.

"It's one of the best moves I ever made," he says.

Last fall he rushed for more than 1,300 yards, a school record. He now leads the Northeast-10 in rushing at 185 yards a game.

"He's the best football player I've seen at this level in my three years here," Bryant coach Marty Fine recently said.

But it's more than just Perry's accomplishments between the lines of a football field.

He has used football in so many ways. To get an education. To make a name for himself. Maybe more important, as safe passage away from the street and all it's troubles, the vast pit he's seen too many of the kids he went to middle school fall into, kids who had all kinds of potential. For he learned in high school that you can't have both football and the street life; it's one or the other.

"Football has taken me away from that," he says. "I'm not as vulnerable now as I once was. I consider myself very lucky."

Lucky, indeed.

He pulls up the sleeve of his sweatshirt where Joe Hector is immortalized in a tattoo on his right arm, a constant reminder of how fragile everything is. How two roads diverge in a wood, and the one you take makes all the difference. And maybe he's never more aware of it than on a Saturday afternoon, him running the ball for Bryant, making people miss the way he's always made them miss, and there in the stands is his family, his mother, uncles, siblings, cousins, maybe 20 people in all. All there to watch him play, as if his success is their success, too, as though when Lorenzo Perry runs he runs for everyone who helped him along the way, runs towards a future that once upon a time he never could have imagined.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340