The legend of Tim Stratton reached new heights the day he chest-slapped Purdue coach Joe Tiller at a team meeting earlier in the season.
“Coach Tiller likes to poke fun at me and from time to time, I’ve had to attend study table to maintain my grades,” said Stratton, the 6-foot-4-inch, 252-pound winner of the John Mackey Award, emblematic of the nation’s top tight end. “One day he called me `Captain Study Table.’ That’s when I instinctively gave him one of those [World Wrestling Federation] shots.
“There were a lot of wide eyes in the room, and nobody could believe what they had just seen. Lucky for me, coach just kind of laughed it off.”
That Stratton plays with the same impetuous spontaneity will keep nearly 100,000 Rose Bowl spectators and a national television audience glued to his every move Monday afternoon when the Big Ten champion Boilermakers confront Pac-10 titlist and No. 4-ranked Washington.
“A story on Tim Stratton?” Tiller said with a chuckle during a media session leading up to the New Year’s Day event. “Oh, is that what he is, a media darling? Well, I’m glad he’s somebody’s darling.”
The Oak Brook native and former football, basketball and volleyball standout at York High School is often the darling of All-American quarterback Drew Brees because he catches everything in sight.
“Tim is such a fun guy to be around because he says things only he can get away with,” Brees said. “Once he steps onto the field, he’s all business. We have this thing where I’ll know exactly where he’s going to run his route, even if he changes in the middle of a play.”
He aggravates opposing players and incenses their partisans in the stands with his signature referee-like move of thrusting his arm upfield after catching a first-down pass.
He bypassed an opportunity to join a fraternity because, “I’m half Greek. Why should I pay money to be Greek?”
Then there’s the helmet episode. It seems Stratton was so carried away with the Big Ten-title clinching celebration after the Indiana game that he handed his helmet to a stranger and jumped into the middle of a goalpost-climbing mob.
Later, of course, both the helmet and its “attendant” were missing. Tiller told Stratton he couldn’t play until he recovered it.
Students made it a campus-wide emergency to find that gold-and-black headgear. A local Burger King offered 89 Whoppers–Stratton’s jersey number–to the perpetrator for its return, no questions asked.
Finally, a Purdue student came forward and returned the helmet.
That will allow Stratton to roam the field (“as tight end, the middle of the field is mine”) and add to his totals of 56 catches for 579 yards and two touchdowns.
With two receptions in the Rose Bowl, he will surpass the 57 catches he made at York in his senior year when he also averaged 19 points a game in basketball and set eight school records in volleyball.
At 6-4, 208 pounds, he was lacking speed and rarely had seen the inside of a weight room as a high school senior. Because of that, Stratton wasn’t an easy sell for now-retired Dukes coach Gary Grouwinkel to make to Tiller.
“I tried to get [ex-coach] Gary Barnett to take him at Northwestern, but he said he already had a couple of skinny, possession-type receivers like Tim,” said Grouwinkel, who played on Iowa’s 1957 and ’59 Rose Bowl winners and is in Pasadena to watch his former player.
“I called my friend Danny Hope, the offensive line coach at Purdue, and told him I have a sleeper. He looked at the films and said, `We’ll recruit him.”‘
What the Boilermakers got was a player who epitomizes Tiller’s affection for the unpredictable and his knack for mining hidden gems among second-tier recruits.
“In a lot of ways, he is the identity of this team,” Purdue offensive coordinator Jim Chaney said.
“Just like our offense, he does the unexpected. We want these kids to be robots on Saturday afternoons and to stay robots the rest of the week. Tim is a human being and a free spirit who enjoys life to the fullest.”
Stratton sent the NFL a letter of inquiry for an evaluation his draft prospects.
With Brees graduating along with breakaway receiver and best friend Vinny Sutherland and four of five offensive linemen, Stratton seriously is considering entering the draft after his junior season. By May, he will be just two classes shy of getting his degree in history.
In addition to his pass-catching ability, he is an accomplished long snapper.
“If I’m projected to go in the first three rounds, I’m there,” Stratton said. “Maybe even in the fourth round because tight ends aren’t usually taken that high.
“I’ll sit down with my parents after the Rose Bowl and make a decision. My dad (Bill Stratton) played for the Green Bay Packers for almost two seasons in the early ’50s before he got hurt in the Korean War.”
Tiller thinks Stratton needs to be more physical at his position to be successful at the next level. In the past, Tiller would address that shortcoming by hollering: “You block like a volleyball player!”
Actually, dude, Stratton would fit right in at a southern California beach volleyball pit.
“All my life, I’ve liked being a kid,” Stratton said.
“My parents let me get away with more, being the youngest of their four children. Everyone is so serious in a game. Forget that. You have to enjoy yourself.
“I take life one day at a time and have as much fun as I can. People get all worried about the future. I don’t believe in that. What if you get into a car accident, or worse? Have fun while you can.”
