Barbara Terrell, all 5 feet 5 inches and maybe 100 pounds of her, still strikes fear in the neighborhood. The little boys she once made cower, now large, grown men, instinctively drop their heads when they see her, give her a respectful hug and watch what they say.
She walks through the Jackson Ward Projects where she raised three children and lived most of her life until nearly five months ago and looks disgustedly at the trash littered about. “My mom wouldn’t stand for this,” says Charona, her youngest daughter.
Nor would she stand for kids playing in the glass-strewn dirt, which they do nearby, and she puts a quick end to it after gently scolding the mothers.
Once, her 6-year-old son David, now the top draft pick and heralded receiver for the Bears, came home crying that a big boy had threatened to beat him up. And so out she marched. “As big as you are, you’re going to hit my baby?” she said menacingly. “I know you aren’t going to put your hands on my son.'”
Barbara smiles smugly. “I haven’t had any problems with that boy since,” she says.
They still remember her standing on her balcony, calling for her middle child to come home. “You could hear her yelling for David two blocks away,” childhood friend Rodney Taylor says. “He didn’t even take his equipment off. He just ran.”
“Everyone made fun of him,” Barbara recalls. “They’d laugh and say, `Get in the house, get in the house.’ But look at what he has now.”
The phone call was the beginning, almost preordained since childhood and anticipated with more excitement than the NFL draft itself. “He called me on a Friday,” Barbara recalls. “He was still at school. He said, `Mom, pack your clothes. Leave everything else. Give it all away. You’re moving.'”
And so she did. Gave her furniture and virtually everything else she owned to any neighbor who wanted it and moved into a furnished condo about 30 minutes and a lifetime away.
“What kind of man would I be if I reacted any other way?” David Terrell says.
It is but a temporary stop until he can move his mother, 17-year-old Charona and older sister Tara, 24, into a house in the suburbs of Richmond for which he is currently shopping. “It doesn’t have to be 20 rooms,” he says. “It can be four rooms or five. But I want a big back yard.”
He is still trying to get his mother to quit her job at Interbake Foods, where she packs cookies, but she is conflicted. She likes being around people, but she wonders how the others will feel if she is taking a position that could be filled by someone needier than herself.
Her son, who has bank officers lining up to offer him a line of credit before he signs his first pro contract, stands to earn a salary of more than $1 million a season, along with a signing bonus in the neighborhood of $6 million.
Sudden money
Upon leaving Michigan in January to train for the NFL combine, Terrell purchased a townhouse in Boca Raton, Fla., and a Range Rover complete with three TVs and a DVD player. He also ordered a Mercedes. His uncle, Barbara’s brother Bruce Terrell, explains that David is establishing residency in Florida, where he will live in the off-season, in part because it’s a good tax state.
The Range Rover is already in Richmond for use by his family. The TVs? “They’re in the headrest. It’s really not expensive at all,” David says almost sheepishly.
Compared with other top draft picks’ splurges, these are modest expenditures, Bruce Terrell says, and David has already done enough off the field to pay for them. But they worry about David’s instinctive generosity and good nature making him vulnerable as a newly minted millionaire.
“My sister has been drilling that into him for years, that everyone can’t go along for every ride,” says Bruce Terrell, a mortgage broker in Orland Park and former high school and junior college football coach who coached David in high school as an assistant and was a major influence in David’s upbringing. “If he doesn’t make that clear, myself or my sister will.
“He’s going to get into some businesses, and if there are guys with potential business interests and ability to whom he can give an opportunity to make a living, he will. I’ve always told him, you can’t take care of everyone, but to give someone a means of supporting their family through employment, that’s giving someone everlasting life. That’s how you give back.”
Bruce and Barbara point to fellow Virginian Allen Iverson and the friends whom they see dragging him down, the “posse” that defines him in many ways. Terrell’s friends, bragging as much about young David’s solid grades as his prospects of being a better pro than Randy Moss, seem more enlightened than that, unselfish but nonetheless strongly connected.
“We’re not going to be like that,” says his buddy, Lin Wood. “We’re happy for him. David knows who has been there for him.”
And it’s clear he isn’t going to forget anytime soon. “I’ve been friends with them since I was a little boy,” Terrell says of a group of six who recently stood outside the Richmond recreation center, where they played basketball as boys, to talk about their friend for more than an hour.
“These are the guys I came up with, who knocked on my door on Christmas Day and we ran outside and played with our toys,” Terrell says. “You can’t get past that. If you turn your back, you’re going to feel guilty. I don’t want anyone saying I’m phony. These are the same guys when I’d get off the bus from practice at 7:30 at night, they’d say `Get in the house.'”
The old neighborhood
As in many poor urban areas, even the least law-abiding of those in the Richmond projects protected their own. “All the people in that neighborhood respected David, so consequently they respected his family and kept him from being involved in anything,” says Richard McFee, David’s coach at Huguenot High.
“Everyone knew David was different, that he was special,” says Taylor.
As an athlete, Terrell excelled at basketball, drawing Division I scholarship attention, and football. His high school teachers say he could have been a straight-A student if he applied himself a little more. As it was, Terrell was a B student who took upper-level math courses and liked tutoring other students when he wasn’t driving everyone crazy.
“Playful” is the operative word used by teachers, coaches and friends alike. “He did the kind of things that would pluck your last nerve,” says Jacqueline Parker, his former algebra teacher. “About three weeks ago I’m standing at my overhead during sixth period, and out of nowhere I hear this bang so loud that the first thing I thought was that it was a gun. The kids didn’t know whether to scream or drop to the floor.
“I walked to the door, my heart thumping, and there’s David Terrell with a big smile on his face. When the kids realized who it was, they were like, `It’s just David. But you can sue him now, Mrs. Parker.'”
“The thing about David,” says Delores Middleton, another math teacher, “was that he always knew how far he could go. And he was not going to take it over the line. You could never be mad at him.”
At football practice, even stern taskmaster McFee acquiesced more often than he scolded his star receiver/defensive back. “If he was supposed to be checking you, he was in your face talking to you so you couldn’t concentrate,” McFee recalls. “But it worked. And he had a great sense of humor about it.”
He got away with his shenanigans because he was eminently coachable and a tireless worker. “The hour after school was study hall,” McFee says, “and David would finish his homework and run a mile every day before anyone else set foot on the practice field.”
Michigan and beyond
His toughness, honed in the neighborhood during bloody games of street football, was on display at Michigan when he played his entire junior year with a stress fracture in his foot. In the Wisconsin game, he also had an infection in his forearm that left it grotesquely swollen. Matched against Jamar Fletcher, one of the best cornerbacks in college football, Terrell caught five passes for 96 yards, including third-down conversions of 21 and 20 yards on Michigan’s final drive, and the 15-yard, game-winning touchdown over three defenders, including Fletcher.
McFee says he didn’t know about the stress fracture, but he was hardly surprised, inasmuch as Terrell played an entire season at Huguenot with a separated shoulder.
“The day before his junior season he dislocated his shoulder, and that first game I could see him on the field holding it in place,” McFee says. “We were down two touchdowns in the fourth quarter and he said, `Coach, you’ve got to throw me the ball.’ I said, `David, they have two and three guys checking you.’ He said, `Coach, I can catch it.’ David jumped up between three people for the first touchdown and made two more plays just like that, and we ended up winning the game.”
But it’s not the war stories that seem to draw people to David Terrell.
Ask who knew him best in high school and he names twice as many teachers as coaches. Talk to him about his father, who attended his games but had little involvement emotionally or financially with his son, and you find an elder’s sensibility inside a 22-year-old’s body.
“God says to respect your mother and father, and I can respect him for being my father,” Terrell says. “Other than that, he doesn’t have to be a part of my life. But it’s fine. I don’t have anger built up inside me. I grew up a good kid and I’m OK now, so why be angry and upset for the rest of my life? That’s not going to help me.”
Terrell didn’t protest when his father included himself in the group of family and friends who attended the NFL draft in New York. If his father has done anything for him, Terrell says, it’s to make clear what he wants for his own son, 2-year-old David Jr. He shares custody with the child’s mother, who lives in Richmond.
“I just want him to be a good kid, stay out of trouble, go to college,” Terrell says. “My biggest thing is just to be there for him, to encourage him to be the best he can be at whatever he does. It doesn’t have to be sports. If he wants to be a doctor, be the best doctor.
“Just knowing I’m a father, knowing I have to take care of him, is really something.”
But it’s certainly nothing new and but one of the many pressures he feels as the NFL beckons.
“A lot of this stuff, the fear of the unknown, of failure, is scary, but I have to be confident, be the person I am,” Terrell says. “I think if you prepare well enough, you won’t fail. But being chosen that high [seventh overall] is how fans perceive you, how you perceive yourself, and a lot of people don’t know how much pressure that can bring.”
For a kid who was always the man of the house, that pressure is almost a birthright. “Handling that shows you’re a man,” Terrell says.
“A lot of our games at Michigan had us coming back at the end. In high school, there was the same type of pressure. Just knowing my mom’s situation, I know I still have a lot I have to do, and the only way to accomplish that is by playing good football. So that’s what I’ve got to do.”
He vows to complete his liberal arts degree by taking eight more hours at Michigan. His mother is waiting. “I want that paper in my hand,” she says, and who’s about to argue?
“He still listens to me,” Barbara Terrell says. “He’ll say, `Mom, why are you always fussin’ with me? I’m 22 years old. I’m all grown.’ And I say, `You’re not grown till I tell you you’re grown. Maybe when you’re 35.'”
She winks, knowing it’s a lie.
