The picture hangs on a wall in the unassuming brick house on Catalpa Avenue.
A visitor entering the house would find it there, past holiday lights still clinging to the roof, past the cherub holding a flower pot outside the front door, just beyond the four-paneled living room window.
Alma Fuller keeps her grandson where everyone can see him: Travis Hammons, Hubbard High School senior, arms in the air, an unbeaten state champion in a black wrestling singlet. Triumphant and perfect.
“You can see it in his face,” she says.
There is another picture that exists, elsewhere.
A mug shot.
Just head and shoulders, heavy eyelids and no smile. Everyone can see this too: Travis Hammons, 18, of Lynwood, charged with three counts of robbery and one count of attempted robbery.
Fewer than 10 months separate the two images. And still no one can reconcile the forces that channeled Travis Hammons’ boundless promise into a jail cell.
“I am shocked,” Alma Fuller says. “I don’t believe it.
“He’s never done anything. Never.”
The rise and lonesome fall
Travis Hammons became the first Chicago Public League wrestler to win a state title in 17 years on Feb. 19, 2005. He followed in April with a first-place finish at the Senior National Wrestling Championships in Cleveland.
By Dec. 7, Hammons was listening, head bowed, as an assistant state’s attorney described charges against him stemming from three alleged robberies in Homewood–charges that now include an alleged fourth robbery on Dec. 3 in Evergreen Park in which the victim suffered a compound fracture to his jaw, according to a police spokesman.
Turmoil tinted the space between those endpoints:
A rift between Hammons and his mother that left him effectively homeless, even before his state-title run; a transcript snafu that initially doomed his college eligibility; a living arrangement in North Carolina that at minimum stretched to the limit of NCAA rules; and, finally, a fateful return to Chicago, thanks allegedly to the father of one of the men with whom Hammons was arrested.
How those circumstances precisely conspired to affect Hammons is unclear. He was still in Cook County Jail last weekend and unavailable for comment. He pleaded not guilty to all charges last Wednesday and has a status hearing set for Feb. 21. His attorney, John Lyke, maintains Hammons’ innocence, asks for patience before drawing conclusions and says he would not guess “in a million years [Hammons] would be charged like this.”
Nevertheless, what is apparent is that Hammons is much more alone now than he was 11 months ago.
“No one is reaching out to my son,” says Tanya Hammons, the wrestler’s mother. “Everybody can talk about his character and what he was like before this trouble came, but no one is reaching out to him and trying to help save him and put him back on the right track, but his mother.”
It was not always so for Hammons, an individual considered gregarious, thoughtful and dedicated by those close to him. Hammons spoke just loud enough in Hubbard hallways to get noticed. He tugged on former coach James Brown’s dreadlocks to lighten practices and he was a precocious schmoozer.
“He would always go up to teachers and say, `You’re my favorite, Mr. So and So, Mrs. So and So,'” says Corine Jacklin, a Hubbard teacher who became a mentor and quasi-aunt figure for Hammons. “He had his way to try to make people feel good so he could have his little `in’ with them.”
He was loyal as well. When Jeff Franklin lost a match for the first time in his junior season–after spending a grueling night with Hammons cutting weight–Hammons consoled his friend and teammate while breaking down in the bleachers.
“Right then, he felt my pain,” says Franklin, now a sophomore football player at Central State in Wilberforce, Ohio. “He was just as upset as I was.”
Athletically, Hammons was always exceptional, from his first workouts with the Harvey Twisters wrestling club as a grade-schooler. He later balanced those physical gifts with a “superhuman work ethic,” in the words of current Hubbard coach Franklin Boyd.
Indeed, one day Boyd showed up late for practice and found the wrestlers with their tongues hanging. Hammons had had them run sprints because “it’s good for them,” Boyd recalls Hammons saying.
But nothing kindled Hammons’ fire like his wrenching quarterfinal loss in the state tournament as a junior, after which Hammons said he “felt like dying.”
Thereafter, he would practice with Hubbard, then join the Twisters for a workout later the same day. He also accepted Twisters coach Quintroy Harrell’s offer to dissect film of his matches on Sundays–no nuance left unlearned.
“We wanted to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s,” says Harrell, the Twisters coach since 1983. “He wasn’t 100 percent faithful the other years. But his senior year, he was Johnny on the spot.”
And so he embarked on his historic state title run with plenty of company. James Brown, the Hubbard wrestling coach in 2004-05, says “the whole school” traveled to Champaign for the championships. So did Public League wrestling coordinator Mickey Pruitt. Real Pro Wrestling CEO Toby Willis–to that point the last Public League champion, having won in 1988 for Morgan Park–sent Hammons an encouraging e-mail.
“That wasn’t Hubbard’s kid,” says Brown, now the coach at Corliss. “That was the public schools system’s kid.”
The support didn’t end there: Hubbard held raffles and Brown took out a loan to finance Hammons’ trip to Cleveland for the nationals. Ultimately, Hammons defeated the nation’s No. 2- and No. 3-ranked wrestlers to earn the 160-pound title.
But nothing proved more vindicating than that state championship. It harmonized all that Travis Hammons had endured and worked for into a buoyant crescendo.
“It was a big burden off a lot of the people who supported him,” Harrell says, “because this was long overdue.”
As Hammons climbed into the crowd after his victory in the title match, he found Harrell and embraced his longtime club coach.
“If I knew it felt this good,” Hammons told Harrell, “I would have been working hard a long time ago.”
With that, Quintroy Harrell smiled.
A tangled web
Perhaps blurred by the afterglow of a historic accomplishment–or perhaps blocked out by the mercy of the moment’s joy–was the unrest in Hammons’ life.
Thanks to an unexplained rift with his mother, Hammons was not living at home at the time of his state title, instead staying with friends, coaches and even Jacklin, the Hubbard teacher.
Tanya Hammons declined to comment on difficulties she may have had with her son. But before the state title, she was quoted in a Tribune story as saying her son was “training like Rocky did” for the championship.
“In today’s society, there’s not a lot of mothers like her,” Harrell says. “Once Travis turned 18, he felt he was a little grown, and like a typical boy, he wants to try things on his own–that’s what led to him basically moving out. He loved his mother and she definitely loved him … but he wanted his way, and his mother wasn’t going for it.”
Says Jacklin: “When he was doing really well, she wanted to step in and be there for him. When he wasn’t doing well, she kind of disappeared, and he felt like, `She only wants to be here when I’m doing good.’ He went back and forth with that issue.”
Still, Hammons was not deterred. On May 21, 2005, North Carolina State announced he had signed a letter of intent and would join the Wolfpack’s recruiting class of ’05. In the early morning of Aug. 12, he joined Obie Simpson, a St. Rita wrestler also headed to N.C. State and his would-be roommate, for the drive to Raleigh, according to Simpson’s mother, Mazola.
But Hammons could not shake the specter of trouble. According to Brown, some of Hammons’ credits from Thornwood High School–which he attended as a freshman before transferring to Hubbard–were “misquoted.” Brown said Thornwood didn’t give Hammons extra credit for taking honors classes, but the evaluators of Hammons’ transcript assumed the extra credit existed.
So what Brown assumed was a qualifying record for Hammons–a 2.5 grade-point average and a 17 on the ACT, he says–fell short. The NCAA Clearinghouse, essentially the sentinel by which collegiate student-athletes must pass to be eligible, did not certify Hammons.
That marooned him without a scholarship or housing, unable to enroll. It was a depressing setback for Hammons, Brown says. But the alternative of returning to Chicago and tempting fate was, by consensus, no alternative at all.
The plan was for Hammons to remain in North Carolina and work toward gaining eligibility for January’s second semester. And so badly did his handlers wish to keep him trouble-free, they tiptoed along the fine line of NCAA regulations.
For a time, he lived with N.C. State wrestlers at an off-campus dwelling, Wolfpack coach Carter Jordan confirmed. Depending on many specifics–whether he paid rent, whether he was still technically a recruitable athlete–Hammons’ arrangement could have attracted the NCAA’s attention. Jordan says he involved the N.C. State compliance office to ensure no rules were broken.
“He was only here a couple of weeks and kind of bounced around,” Jordan says. “As long as he was paying his way, we weren’t doing anything to mess up his eligibility. The first thing I made sure of, I asked him how much money he had. I told him, `Look, that’ll last maybe a month, then you need to get a job.’ I talked to [Brown], he said, `Don’t send him back up here. You send him back up here, he’s going to get into trouble.’
“[Hammons] kind of flopped at a couple of kids’ houses. I guess when his money ran out, he went down to Florida–his grandmother was down there. That was maybe mid-September.”
Brown says Hammons had work at a fitness club; Jacklin says Hammons told her he was seeking work as a bouncer. But within weeks Hammons had left Raleigh.
Travis Hammons was again without an anchor.
“I wasn’t there, [Brown] and Franklin [Boyd] weren’t there,” Jacklin says, adding she didn’t “pick up” that Hammons was having trouble. “We don’t really know what he was doing. Was he doing anything? Were these people being as helpful as we thought they were? I don’t know.”
At least one Hammons confidant painted a bright picture. “When I went to school, he was telling me how N.C. State was, and he sounded like he was living the life down there,” says Levi Amison, a former Hubbard wrestler now attending Western Illinois.
Amison says he spoke with Hammons several times each week. “He sounded like he was having fun to me. I was telling him I wanted to visit.”
Which made the scene last Oct. 28 so perplexing and agonizing for Brown, as he coached the Corliss football team in a playoff game against Hillcrest:
Travis Hammons, back home and among the crowd of spectators, without so much as a phone call’s worth of notice.
“He had no business being back here,” Brown says. “Granted, he probably did get lonely, but he needed to grow up. He got back here, he started making kid’s decisions again.”
While the reason for Hammons’ return remains unclear, the means for his return might be less so: Brown alleges Hammons received either a plane ticket or money for a ticket from the father of Will Franklin, one of the individuals also charged in the robberies. The elder Franklin did not return messages seeking comment.
A Tribune story Dec. 8 reported that the younger Will Franklin and Hammons are cousins. Whatever their relationship, it became a much more ominous connection on Dec. 4, as midnight neared. According to authorities, Homewood police stopped a car containing Hammons, Franklin and 17-year-old Landon Smith. They were in possession of a purse matching the description of a bag reported stolen earlier that night.
On Dec. 7, the assistant state’s attorney said Hammons and Franklin admitted to four robberies between Nov. 11 and Dec. 4, targeting Homewood commuters as they walked home from their trains. By then, the epidemic of shock and disbelief had struck coaches, mentors and friends, each struggling to square staggering reality with the place Travis Hammons occupied in their lives.
Like Corine Jacklin, who recalls Hammons’ voluntary visits and motivational lectures in her classes for students with learning disabilities and behavioral disorders.
“His general theme was, `Think about what you’re doing and how you’re affecting your life and other people’s lives,'” Jacklin says. “Being so young, I think sometimes they don’t take their own advice.”
`He wasn’t a demon child’
Hammons’ friends are scattered. His former coaches can only visit a thinner, dejected champion. Hubbard has little to say about Hammons. Principal Andrew Manno–whom Brown calls “probably one of the greatest individuals at Hubbard High School” for his involvement in the Hammons support net–said little before insisting the Board of Education handles these matters. A board spokesman said it had issued no directive.
“No. 1, as a principal, you have over 1,700 kids in the school,” Manno says. “I really didn’t know him on a personal level. It would be inaccurate for me to comment on him. That’s all I’m going to say to you about him.”
There are some words that nonetheless live on for Travis Hammons. As a local poetry slam approached last March, Franklin Boyd suggested Amison, a spare-time lyricist, write a poem honoring his friend Travis’ triumphs.
Surreptitiously completed during two English classes, Amison’s words were then transposed onto a T-shirt–pictures of Travis Hammons on the front, earnest sentiments evoking his journey on the back:
So look deep inside
Try to find that extra stride
The only path to victory
Is about what is inside of you
When Amison returned for his winter break, he and Hammons had planned to go to Nitro, a local club. They would revisit the joy of a time when it seemed they and their friends ruled a fiefdom fertile with possibility.
Instead, Travis Hammons slept that night in a jail cell. His friend was left to contemplate the undone promise of that evening, and others yet to come.
“I wouldn’t say he was God’s gift to the world, a saint or something like that, but he wasn’t a demon child,” Amison says. “Everyone makes mistakes. But not mistakes like this.”
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bchamilton@tribune.com
