azgroover
Footballguy
This guy was one of the most exciting players from my early fantasy days. Good to see he's trying to set and example and get back on his feet.
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From FSU to Lake City -- the life and times of Vanover
Gregg Doyel July 12, 2007
By Gregg Doyel
CBS SportsLine.com National Columnist
LAKE CITY, Fla. -- See this story, the one you're reading right now? Tamarick Vanover had better not let his children see this story, because his children don't know the story. Not all of it. Not the worst of it. They don't know that, before there was such a thing as a Pacman Jones acting the fool and jeopardizing his NFL career, their father did the same thing.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough. Tamarick Vanover was basically the original Pacman Jones, a player so explosive that he could change games with a single touch of the ball, but a person so troubled that he could lose everything with a single bad decision. In five seasons with Kansas City in the mid-1990s, Vanover scored a team-record eight touchdowns on special teams -- four on kickoff returns, four on punts. He played only five seasons with Kansas City because in 2000, after returning two punts for touchdowns the previous year, he was sentenced to jail for helping finance a stolen-car ring and a marijuana distribution operation. He served two months in prison in Miami.
Vanover's sons, Tamarick Jr. and Dedrick, have been told their father was gone for a few months on vacation. They're only 8 and 6, too young to know the whole story. Which is fine. They'll hear it when their father thinks they're ready to hear it.
The shame here is that you -- yes, you -- know even less of the story than Tamarick's boys. They might not know what their father once was, but they know what their father has become. As for most of the rest of the world, you don't know. The last you probably heard, Tamarick Vanover was arrested for something, went to jail, was released by the Chiefs and then ... what? What happens to these knuckleheads, anyway? You think you know what'll happen to troubled Titans cornerback Pacman Jones, right? You think he'll grow old in prison, and maybe he will. Stupid young men often become stupid old men, if they're lucky enough to grow old in the first place.
Tamarick Vanover was a stupid young man. He might not be ready to tell his sons, but he's ready to tell almost anyone else. He was dumb, and he threw away a life that most of us can only dream of living. But he has wised up. He has matured. He is the head football coach of one of the smallest private schools in Florida, Lake City Christian Academy, a school that didn't play football until hiring Vanover last spring. LCCA is a series of small houses. The locker room is a bathroom. The football field is a baseball field. This is Vanover's new life, and humble as it is, it's a life that once seemed beyond his grasp.
"I know how lucky I am to be here," he says. "A lot of people didn't think I'd make it to something like this. A lot of people didn't want me to make it here. But I made it, and I'm not going back."
Lake City is a small town in the part of Florida nobody visits for vacation. It's not the panhandle with its beaches, it's not on either coast, and it's not Gainesville with its flagship state university. Lake City is an hour north of Gainesville, 20 years south of cool, and the perfect place for Vanover to start over.
For one thing, his wife is from Lake City, and for now, Deidra Vanover is the head of the household. Tamarick, Deidra and their kids live with Deidra's mother in a manufactured home near downtown Lake City.
"She's been carrying the ball," Vanover says of his wife, a mortgage broker. "A lot of men wouldn't be able to admit that, but I'm proud of her. I carried the ball a while, but now she's carrying it."
For another, Lake City is a place with few distractions. A man can get in trouble anywhere if he so chooses, but he'd have to dig deep into the underbelly of society to find trouble in Lake City, which seems to have a church on every corner and which values high school football like NFL cities value their professional franchise. Vanover says he's done digging for trouble like the kind he found in Kansas City, where a poor choice of friends and a poor choice of decisions led to his giving Chiefs teammate Bam Morris $35,000 so Morris could purchase pot in Texas in 1999. (Morris was sentenced to 30 months in prison.) Another Vanover friend, personal assistant Gregory Burns, was accused of running a nationwide drug and stolen-car ring and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; Vanover pleaded guilty to helping Burns move a stolen car from Kansas City to Tallahassee, Fla., where Vanover played at Florida State.
In Lake City, Vanover is not a fallen man. He is a man who fell, yes, but one who has gotten back up. He moves about town with a large smile on his round face, and it seems as if every teenager in Lake City knows his name and calls him "Vanover." Part of the appeal is his past, because as an All-American at Florida State and a star at Kansas City, he has name recognition even eight years after scoring his last NFL touchdown. Part of the appeal is what he has done for LCCA, which has benefited from a $15,000 grant Vanover received from the NFL Players Association to help stock the football program.
And part of the appeal is Vanover's personality, his ability to remember all the kids' names, his smile and his giggle. It's no wonder that Vanover was Bobby Bowden's ace recruiter at Florida State, put in charge of campus visits by the best of the best FSU recruits, helping seal the deal on eventual FSU All-Americans Peter Boulware, Peter Warrick and Andre Cooper. A single evening won't tell you all you need to know about Vanover or anyone else, but after spending one such evening with Vanover and his family, I simply had to ask him this question about his mistakes in Kansas City: Why?
"I don't know, I really don't," he says. "I wasn't raised that way. My mom had us in church three or four times a week. She taught us right from wrong. The hardest thing I had to do was call my mom and tell her I was in trouble."
Vanover finds it easier to say the same thing to his players at LCCA.
"He's told all of us what he did and what he put his family through," says LCCA receiver Jerry Thomas, whom Vanover says is a future star. "You hear it all the time from people, but when someone like (Vanover) tells you, you listen a little bit harder."
Tamarick Vanover has bigger dreams than this, of course. If he turns left out of his in-laws' driveway he can drive past a BC Bail Bonds, which offers 24-hour service, in less than a minute. If he drives to school with his windows rolled down, he can smell the horse manure from his principal's stable, which eats into the school's campus.
The principal offered Vanover the job in the car pool line last year. His kids were already attending LCCA, and Vanover was a volunteer assistant football coach at Lake City Columbia High, the big public school in town, when the LCCA principal asked Vanover to be coach and athletics director. Vanover accepted, and immediately a handful of parents raised their concerns about his past.
"I told them, 'Yeah, I did that. But I went though a process, and I've changed my whole life,'" Vanover says. "I paid my fines, I did my time. What can anyone say?"
The team went 3-7 last season against the kind of brutal schedule that faces most independent football schools in Florida, but this season LCCA will be in a small-school district with a chance at the playoffs. Vanover says he can see himself here for 10 more years, but his dream job is on the staff at Florida State, a job he knows he can't get without first getting a college degree. Thirteen years after leaving Florida State following his sophomore season, Vanover says he will start taking classes on-line this fall.
Between here and there, Vanover will have to travel a lot of road. He will coach a small football team and raise a small family and hopefully move out of his in-laws' home eventually and maybe lose the 20 pounds of stomach he has added since his last NFL season. He will tell his sons the truth about that vacation in 2000.
He will also have to stay out of trouble to have any shot at coaching at a bigger school than tiny Lake City Christian Academy, but nobody has to tell Tamarick Vanover that. He knows, and if he forgets he gets reminded of the stakes every time he drives the 80 miles from Lake City to Jacksonville's airport, a drive that takes him past not one but two massive correctional facilities with guard towers and prison yards and razor-wire fencing. Vanover has spent his time on the wrong side of that fence and doesn't want to go back.
As for the modern Pacman Jones, the one who faces prison time of his own? Vanover has never reached out to him, and has no plans to do so. But if one of you reading this story happens to be the Pacman Jones, Vanover has a message for you.
"Look, man, only a small percentage of people get to play in the NFL," Vanover says. "You're going to damage yourself? You're going to embarrass yourself? You can go from millions of dollars to zero, then spend all your savings, then have nothing left. You can be called a loser. You can go to jail, man. Is that what you want?"
