He wishes he was able to talk to him now. Just shoot the bull. Ask his advice. Tell him how right he was.
It was spooky how much they looked alike. Same face, same widow’s peak, same voice, same tippy-toed walk.
They called him Billy, though his given name was Simon. Simon Engram. Same as his father. Same as his youngest son, whom they called Bobby.
Billy coached Bobby in football and baseball and basketball and life. He was the moral center of his family, authority figure to 35 nieces and nephews as well as to his own three children. If there was a problem, the aunties would call him and there he’d be, straightening everything out. You didn’t mess with Uncle Billy.
One day, at Bobby’s first baseball game his senior year at Camden (S.C.) High, the scouts were out in force, eight or nine strong. They said the kid could be a big-leaguer. Still do. And on this day he did not disappoint, hitting two home runs and playing a great game in center field.
They surrounded Bobby afterward, telling him what he longed to hear. Until his pop walked up. “You can all go home. My son is going to college,” Billy said. “You don’t have to worry about scouting him.”
One scout showed up at the next game.
Three years into a pro football career, Bobby Engram laughs about it now as he gazes off in the distance, replaying the incident in his mind, picturing his dad doing his business.
No, there was no messing around with Simon Engram. He was a postal worker in South Carolina for 20 years. Started out delivering mail by bike, gradually worked his way up to postmaster. Except there weren’t many postmaster jobs available for African-Americans down there at the time, so Billy took what he could get, which meant waking each morning at 4:30 and driving nearly two hours to work.
Bobby says he didn’t fully appreciate how his pop sacrificed for the family so he and his older brother Darrell and sister Devona had Nikes on their feet and decent clothes and some name-brand stuff every now and then.
The prep football star, after much ado, was off to Penn State, where he made the travel squad as a freshman, where he was preparing to go down to Georgia Tech to play the defending champs in the season opener, when everything came crashing down.
It was Aug. 22, 1991.
Billy Engram was on his way to work in the wee hours of a foggy, hazy morning when he approached a railroad crossing. There were no lights. No signs. Just the rumble of a train coming in the dark, around a curve, looking like it was coming right toward him.
Suddenly, he lurched the car forward, probably, they said later, thinking he was avoiding the train. Except he pulled onto the tracks and into its path.
That morning, Bobby’s academic adviser called him out of class and led him to Joe Paterno’s office, where the fatherly Penn State coach would break the news. “My life was changed instantly,” Engram said quietly. “Forever.”
He leans against a wall at Halas Hall, managing to smile as he recalls the toughest days of his young life.
You can do that when you have finally emerged as the top pass catcher on your team. Emerged from the initial grieving process–he would also lose his maternal grandmother that winter–and from the days of uncertainty. Engram is a father now himself, daughter Bobbi Simone gracing his and wife Deanna’s life on June 1.
“You realize what’s really important,” Engram said. “To see my wife go through the pregnancy, to see Bobbi come into this world . . . there’s no way you can be the same person. No way. My whole outlook on life is different.”
Not that long ago, he wondered if he had any outlook at all.
He won’t blame his father’s death for the problems that would follow, but he will say that none of it would probably have happened if he were alive. “I would have been too scared of him.”
He calls it “stupidity,” a “knucklehead” move. “When you’re young, you do some stuff and you don’t think about the consequences,” Engram said.
Engram and some buddies went looking for a friend that spring of his freshman year and ended up breaking into an apartment they thought was his. Once there, it was suggested, that they might as well help themselves to a few things–a few CDs, some shirts, the stereo.
“It was something that should have never happened . . . a situation I definitely should have handled better than I did,” Engram said.
The repercussions came quickly. Because he was a first-time offender, the charges were dropped after Engram paid a fine and did community service. But he was suspended from the team and from the university, spending the next semester in a run-down apartment in town, working at a restaurant and dealing with Penn State, which was angry with him for tarnishing the school’s image.
“The worst part, though, was disappointing my family,” Engram said. “I’m from a pretty small town. Everybody knew my father, my family. I didn’t want people looking at my family. I didn’t care how people looked at me.”
He thought about packing it in and going home, but his mother urged him to stay. “She wouldn’t let me come home,” Engram said. “She said, `There’s nothing here for you. You’re pursuing your dreams. Stay up there and play football and everybody will be OK back home.’ “
He called it a “major break” that Penn State let him come back, but the university benefited just as much. Engram would be a model citizen upon his return, a 3.0 student, and, as it turned out, a pretty good wide receiver.
In his first game back, in the Big Ten opener against Minnesota, he scored four touchdowns. “I just remember the first play,” he said. “I said to myself, `If I get my hands on this ball, I’m not stopping until somebody pulls my helmet off.’ “
Engram would become a second-team All-American, breaking school records for receptions (167), receiving yards (3,026) and touchdowns (31) and ranking among the leaders in punt returns and all-purpose yards. But NFL scouts weren’t overly impressed with his size (5 feet 10 inches, 190 pounds) or speed.
“Everyone wanted to ask how fast he was and I would tell them he’s as fast as he has to be,” said Penn State assistant coach Bill Kenney, who recruited Engram out of high school. “They’d say, `Can he run a 4.4?’ And I’d say, `Yeah, he’s run a 4.4.’ And they’d say, `Can he go 4.3?’ And I’d say, `Yeah, at times out there he’s probably run a 4.3.’ He’s a ballplayer.”
The Bears liked Engram enough to take him in the second round of the ’96 draft, using him as a kick returner and a third-down receiver behind Curtis Conway and newly signed free agent Michael Timpson. “He was the most mature rookie I have ever been around,” Bears coach Dave Wannstedt said. “We gave him as much to do from a responsibility standpoint as any rookie ever, and he handled it well because he has that presence about him.”
Though he had the best rookie season by a Bears receiver in catches (33), yards (389) and touchdowns (six) since Willie Gault in 1983, Engram’s first two years are largely forgettable.
For starters, he never saw himself as a third-down receiver. “The hardest thing in the world for me to do was come off the bench cold and spot play,” he recalled. “I’m at my best when I’m out there in the middle of the game, in the heat of battle.”
His second year was a blur, obscured by a 4-12 record, an ankle injury that caused him to miss a game–five in all–for the the first time in his life and a quarterback shuffle that left the offense out of sorts. “It just seemed like everything went wrong,” Engram said. “I had 45 catches and it didn’t mean a thing, really. I probably couldn’t remember two or three of them.”
Engram entered this year’s camp in the best shape of his career and has shed the label of possession receiver with 33 receptions for 579 yards and four touchdowns through nine games. He was elected one of the offensive captains for the remainder of the year.
If Bears coaches were once apprehensive about going deep to Engram, they no longer are–four of his catches have gone for 79, 54, 48 and 33 yards this season. “He changed everybody’s mind this spring,” Bears receivers coach Ivan Fears said. “After (mini-camp), we were hoping people would start pressing because we knew he’d beat them like a drum.”
Engram does not consider himself a finished product on the field. “If you want to call yourself a good receiver, if you want to be one of the best in this league, you make plays in crucial situations,” he said. “I want to be one of those guys for the Bears.”
The Bears have had preliminary talks with Engram’s agent, Joel Segal, about a contract extension, and it’s an easy assumption that the team would like to tie him up for the next several years.
For Engram the feeling is mutual, though he and Deanna would eventually like to settle in Pittsburgh, her hometown.
“We love Chicago,” Deanna said. “Bobby has a lot of faith, a lot of belief in himself and his teammates. He still thinks the team can be 10-6 and make the playoffs. That’s how he is.”
Bill Kenney says wherever Simon Engram is, “He smiles on Bobby daily,” and Bobby likes to think his father is watching over him, that he knows how he has grown into a pro, into a man.
“The thing that’s tough sometimes is that he didn’t get to see me do a lot of the things that he really put me in a position to do,” Engram said.
“If he were alive, I could see him flying into Chicago. I would go pick him up at the airport and we’d talk and he’d say, `You’re doing a good job.’ That would be all he’d say. `I’m proud of you, son.’ “
