University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Parker Plays Through The Pain
June 25, 2002 | Football
June 25, 2002
By Adam Lucas
TarHeelBlue.com
Leave off the lights and lock the door behind you. You want to know about Marty? This is where you find out about him.
Willie won't tell you much, of course. You have to listen to what he's not saying in addition to what he is saying. Talk to some other people and they'll tell you how much Willie Parker hurts, tell you why it is that a couple weeks ago, Jeff Connors happened by the Kenan Football Center and found his junior running back lifting weights all alone in the middle of the night.
"Coach Connors got all happy," Parker said with a smile. "He said, 'That's what I'm talking about!' and said he didn't want to bother me."
Last year at this time, the junior from Clinton might not have been in the weight room. He might have been at home with his best friend, Jamar Smith, who everyone called Marty. But Parker doesn't go home much anymore. Not since the shooting.
Just a couple of weeks before the Tar Heels were to take on Oklahoma last summer, Smith was driving his Jeep Cherokee down Rowan Road near Clinton. Parker had been in that Jeep too many times to count. They were buddies, man. More than buddies. Brothers.
Then Smith was dead, shot by a man leaning out of an oncoming car.
"There was a lot of stuff that led up to it," Parker said. He doesn't talk about that stuff anymore. He doesn't want to go back there, either literally or metaphorically.
"He just kept saying, 'I can't believe my man is gone,'" fellow tailback Andre' Williams said about those days following the shooting. Parker didn't make it to practice the Tuesday that his father told him that Marty was dead, and Williams stopped by his dorm room after practice to make sure his teammate was OK.
You want to know the truth? He wasn't. He was talking about not caring about football, about not knowing what he was going to do next.
He went home for the funeral, saw his best friend in a casket. It was right about then that he knew his life was going to be different. He went back to football, carried the ball eight times against defending national champion Oklahoma. Marty hadn't played football. If he had, he might have been elsewhere that August night. Willie played, played from the time he was six years old and his parents shoved a football in his hands and made him keep playing even after he cried through a whole week's worth of practices.
Thirteen years later, he wrote "Marty" on his gloves and on his shoes, and went out on the field carrying the football and the memory of his friend. If this is the Disney Channel, then Parker runs for 1,000 yards and makes All-ACC.
This isn't the Disney Channel. Some nagging injuries slowed him down, and he didn't carry the ball at all in several midseason games. But then Williams hurt his back, and it was Parker who scampered through the Auburn defense for 131 yards in the Peach Bowl.
That gave him bragging rights for trips home to Clinton, where the population loves football with a passion. If you're a football player, they ask you about football constantly. You going to start this year, Willie? How many yards you going to get, Willie? What bowl you going to this year, Willie?
So Parker tuned out that noise the only way he could. He decided not to go home. He went home for Mother's Day, went home for Father's Day, but never inbetween. Instead, he turned out the lights and lifted weights. It's not that hard, really, to bench press a few hundred pounds in the air conditioned Football Center. Not after you spent your high school years pulling logs in workouts designed by your high school coach.
Logs, Willie?
"Yeah," he said. "Our coach got these logs with straps on them and we would pull them on the football field. You kind of have to see it to understand it."
But there are some things that just can't be understood. When you can't go home anymore, you have to find a new home.
"I don't go home because of what happened," Parker said. "I don't have any friends like we were. We knew everything about each other. I won't ever put myself close to anybody like that."
So if you happen by Kenan Stadium late one night this summer and hear the weights clanking, don't call the campus police. It's just a young man who has always had a gift for running, trying to outsprint memories that are impossible to shake.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com
