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Friday, September 03, 1999 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
The most celebrated linebacker in college football, the man whose scowling grimace graced the cover of Sports Illustrated's college football preview, the athlete who has dared to suggest improvements on Penn State Coach Joe Paterno's philosophies -- the bedrock principles that have become the foundation of the Nittany Lions over the past half-century -- is giving a tour of his room.
And, typical jock, he is proudly showing off the wall he has decorated with a magazine centerfold.
This two-page spread, however, features ... a blue butterfly.
Grinning from ear to ear, Penn State junior LaVar Arrington asked, "Isn't that just a beautiful butterfly?"
It is. But it's not the kind of observation anyone would expect from someone whose on-field persona seems to fit a character described in Pat Conroy's "The Great Santini:" If his head were mounted on a trophy wall along with cape water buffalo and sable antelopes, people would look at it and say, "That's a nice linebacker you have there."
Then again, Arrington is the linebacker who loves to listen to soundtracks from medieval themed movies -- "First Knight," "Man in the Iron Mask" and his absolute favorite, "Conan the Barbarian," which usually ends up in his portable CD player before games. "You have to respect music and hear it in its truest form -- I love soundtracks that you can feel," Arrington said. "You don't have to sit and think about the music, you can sit and create your own environment. Conan, it gets you pumped."
He is the best player on a No. 2-ranked Penn State team that hopes to give Paterno his third national championship. He is essentially guaranteed to be a first-round NFL draft pick -- some would say No. 1 overall -- whenever he decides to make himself eligible.
And no less a person than Jack Ham, who asked Paterno to present him into the NFL Hall of Fame, gave this endorsement when asked if Arrington will be considered Penn State's best-ever at the position: "Without question. I give the coaches credit for putting him in great position, but he's got athletic ability that I don't think has been at that position ever."
Arrington can play those roles to perfection, as he did when explaining why he finally opted to concentrate on football instead of basketball, the sport he grew up loving:
"If somebody elbows me in the face or does something crazy, I'm not the type who can sit there and not retaliate. In basketball, an elbow the next time down on the court, you get in trouble for that. You can only do that five times and you're out. Football, I think I heard Greg Lloyd say it's the only place a grown man can quote-unquote whip the hell out of somebody and not get in trouble. Specifically, abuse somebody and not get in trouble for it. As a matter of fact, people enjoy it."
But those characteristics are only part of why Arrington has become a magnet for such attention. Even Paterno, who has gone out of his way to downplay Arrington's abilities, mentioned during a closed-circuit interview with Larry King that one of his players -- he didn't say who, but he didn't need to -- possessed a charisma similar to Michael Jordan's.
Said Arrington's mother, Carolyn, "I can walk into church with him on my right arm, and he's got the babies, and the old ladies, and then Mother Allen, who's never seen a football game, now she's reading all the articles."
Said Penn State assistant coach Tom Bradley, "Did you ever walk across campus with him? It takes him 20 minutes to get across. Everybody stops to talk with him. I'm always on him about getting to class, but sometimes it's hard for him to get there. He stops to talk, and he holds court sometimes."
There's just something about a guy who has a knack for making the big play but can appreciate the little things in life, too.
Said North Hills High School football coach Jack McCurry, who knew him before the hype got so big: "They'll probably name a candy bar after him someday."
LaVar Rashad Arrington, known to his family as Shadie, has always been full of surprises. No one ever knows what he will do next. Jump over the center? Take the handoff from the opposing quarterback? Or how about this: take his free-spirited soul to play college football at a school that prides itself on subordinating the will of the individual to the needs of the team?
Arrington plays, speaks and lives like a jazz musician, making what he considers improvements on the usual by improvising where he sees fit. Paterno gets his musical pleasure from the rigid world of opera, in which the musicians are allowed to soar, but only within the strict confines of the script and the score.
If the North Hills High yearbook had pronounced one of its 1997 graduating seniors "Least Likely to Attend Penn State," Arrington would have won in a landslide.
"He's more a free spirit," McCurry said. "He's more a gambler than somebody who's going to sit there and play 500 pinochle. He's going high stakes and win it all."
Then again, opposites can attract.
"The Lord works in mysterious ways," said Arrington's father, Michael, a minister at the non-denominational Faith Center Church of God in Christ in East Liberty. "You just end up having a feeling that this is where you're supposed to be. The rough places are what smooth out the edges."
Arrington grew up rooting for schools like Florida State and Miami, which allowed their flamboyant players to express themselves. He wore a Lawrence Taylor jersey when he played ball in the street. It appeared that Arrington would fit right in down south.
By the time he showed up for the ninth grade at North Hills, he was already a schoolboy legend, so big that Carolyn Arrington kept his birth certificate in her purse to verify his age, so talented that the North Hills News Record began running a feature titled "The LaVar Watch" when Arrington was in the eighth grade.
He started as a freshman -- only the third North Hills football player to do so -- and commanded attention on a senior-laden team that won the PIAA state championship.
He made his ESPN SportsCenter debut as a sophomore with a highlight play for the ages. Forced into duty as the punter when the starter got hurt, Arrington lined up, but the snap went over his head into the end zone. Arrington scrambled after it and returned it 107 yards for a touchdown.
"We saw him every day in practice, and every day he would do things that we'd say, 'Geez, regular athletes can't do that,'" McCurry said. "Some of his plays were so outstanding, but they became the norm for him. The exception became the norm."
By the time he graduated from North Hills, Arrington had twice jumped over the opposing offensive line to make a tackle, had become the first WPIAL running back to gain more than 4,000 yards and was named -- in a landslide -- Parade magazine's National Player of the Year, a distinction previously awarded to Herschel Walker and Emmitt Smith.
Said Michael Arrington, "I always say that for all practical purposes, he had a career at North Hills."
Not wanting to move far from his family and impressed with the players he met on his Penn State visits, Arrington picked the Nittany Lions. Like most cocky freshmen, he expected to play frequently -- if not start. He certainly had the credentials. But the coaching staff decided to use him primarily on special teams and to try him at a new position, defensive back.
"One of the hardest things was to get him to play back on pass defense because he's so aggressive and reckless," Bradley said. "His personality was much better suited to linebacker."
Still, once he moved back to his natural position, Arrington saw limited playing time. He called home, and he complained, but he never once thought of changing his mind.
"It's the Penn State way," Arrington said. "That's the way it's gonna be. Obviously. I work within it, because either you accept it and do that, or you don't and you leave. I'm not one to leave."
Meanwhile, those closest to Arrington couldn't believe what they were seeing. "I would ask the coaches, 'Why doesn't he play more?'" McCurry said. "I'm a coach, and I know how it goes -- every coach has an answer. It's always going to be that he wasn't following the defensive scheme, or he wasn't doing his particular responsibility or assignment. That's probably true in some sense. But that doesn't mean he still wouldn't have been the best player on the field."
The coaches made Arrington endure even more the next season. Although he was a preseason Butkus Award semifinalist, he didn't start the season opener. Not until the second game of his sophomore season did Arrington move past Aaron Gatten on the depth chart. But Arrington never complained publicly.
"In Scripture it says God works all things together for good," Michael Arrington said. "The good and the bad, not just the good. ... We didn't want him to find the perfect program. We wanted him to find the place he was supposed to be."
McCurry knows what the Penn State coaching staff was doing. "If it was a different person, I'd probably say humility is needed by everyone. But he didn't need a dose of humility. His family had already provided that."
Ah, yes, Arrington's family. Spend just 15 minutes with Carolyn and Michael Arrington, and everything that LaVar is makes sense. The intensity. The intelligence. The sense of humor. The genuine interest in people. The athleticism.
Carolyn Kyser grew up in Homewood with three younger brothers and one older sister. "I was more of a tomboy," she said, laughing, "so I played with my brothers. Whatever they played in the street, I went right along with them." And by all accounts, Carolyn could run. Fast.
Michael Arrington also went to Westinghouse High School, and he didn't play any organized sports. The gym teachers begged him to try out for a team, any team, but Michael always begged off.
"Sports were a luxury," he said. "My dad was from that background that you get a job, at least the boys who were older."
So Michael contented himself with street ball on the weekends. After school, he worked a variety of jobs, at a gas station, an Isaly's, a truck-rental company. His money helped at home, where he was one of nine children.
Michael's final job upon graduating from high school was learning to work the printing press at Gateway Press in Monroeville. Then he got his draft notice on Dec. 9, 1968, and by July 1969 he was in Vietnam.
He was 20 years old one evening when the Vietnamese attacked his base. Michael ran to his tank, but a sergeant told him to go to another one, which was short on crew members because a soldier had just been rotated back home. The tank's driver didn't realize Michael was working on top of the tank, and he pulled away.
Michael fell backwards off the tank, which ran over his legs. Then he got caught between the wheels, which spun him around and kicked him out the back. "When I hit the ground I looked and I saw my left leg standing up in front of me," he said. "I knew that was bad."
He went from under the tank to the nearest MASH unit, where his left leg was amputated above the knee along with his right foot, to Japan for recovery and to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was told that he would never walk without crutches again.
"But I was blessed with a crazy physical therapist, Scott," Michael said. "He's just one of those guys who challenges you."
Instead of having Michael try to learn to walk in the hospital halls, Scott took Michael outside in the gravel and dirt. "He'd push us down to make us get up," Michael said. "That's helpful, because you need to learn to negotiate that stuff and what to do if you fall. He did everything he could to help me feel independent, and I decided I'd try."
Michael Arrington's father was prepared to renovate the family home with ramps to make it easier for his son. He didn't have to. Michael came home walking with two wooden prostheses, moving so well that people in the neighborhood who had heard the bad news stopped and asked, "Did that really happen to you, or was that just a story?"
Michael met Carolyn, the best friend of his younger sister, when he was home on leave. He gave her a ride home. "We hit it off right away," Carolyn said. "We were soulmates, and we still are." Come October, they will have been married 24 years.
Carolyn went on to college, majoring in English until she had the opportunity to work with some special needs kids, and she felt herself being called. She went on to get a master's degree in special education, and for the past 24 years she has taught emotionally disturbed children at Northview Heights Elementary School.
Much has been made of Michael Arrington's influence on his son, and Carolyn is sure that her Shadie gets his drive and determination from his father. Michael, however, isn't so sure.
"The intensity and drive with which she teaches her students -- she's not settling for anything less than the best they can give," he said. "If she has to be hard on them, she's hard on them. If she has to get down on the floor to motivate them, she gets down on the floor. She does whatever it takes. I see that in LaVar."
And LaVar himself? He thinks he gets his aggression from his mother and his deep thinking from his father.
"I'm a lot like both of them," he said. "It depends what mood I'm in."
In most moods, Arrington doesn't worry about how the public perceives him. More than any Penn State player in recent memory, he speaks honestly. "I know who loves me," he said. "As long as they're happy and they're proud of what I'm doing, I know I'm doing something right."
All the same, Arrington sometimes wishes for just one more vote of confidence. "I'm just like any other athlete on the team," he said. "I just want to hear something positive from my coach."
Paterno, however, has been unwilling to oblige.
"It's starting to bother me," Arrington said. "Not for me, because I know what I'm capable of doing. But for my family. My family shouldn't have to read that. It seems like every time I'm in the paper, and there's a quote from someone, I get put down. My family's tired of it. They're the closest ones in my life, and I don't want to see them getting upset over things being said about me."
Upset might be overstating the case a bit. But Carolyn and Michael Arrington don't understand why Paterno -- who did, remember, cut short a stay at the White House and hurry back to campus when LaVar and his parents arrived on an unofficial recruiting visit -- speaks of their Shadie the way he does.
The Arringtons can understand Paterno's hesitation. Truly, they do. Plenty of times after a game, Carolyn and Michael find themselves asking the same questions. What are you doing jumping over the center? What are you doing taking the handoffs?
"He's a chess player," Carolyn said. "He's a thinker. You may not realize the thought process behind what he does, but when you ask him, you realize there's a lot of thought behind it. He plays the same on the field as he does in a chess game."
So the way Carolyn and Michael see it, credit should be given where credit is due.
"When it doesn't balance out, it's like raising a child and only pointing out the negative and what he does wrong, no matter what he's doing well," Michael said. "There's no balance there."
"And there's no wisdom when you do that," Carolyn added. "If you don't have anything good to say, then just hold your tongue and don't say anything. Then you won't have any regrets about saying something that may not seem so bad at the time, but once you think about it you can't go back and take the words back. You've already said them."
Paterno is unrepentant. He continues to dole out praise equally among his starting linebackers, Butkus Award semifinalists all, Mac Morrison, Brandon Short and, yes, Arrington.
"I haven't been tough on him," he said. "I've been realistic. People want me to say things about LaVar that aren't appropriate. He's a great athlete, but you want me to put him in a class with linebackers that he's not there yet. I told LaVar, 'A lot of people tell me you're a great linebacker, but you're not there yet.' He's an easy guy to coach; he doesn't take a thing personally. He's as competitive as anyone we have. I keep bringing [Morrison and Short] up because I'm not sure they're getting their just due."
For the most part, Arrington is content. And why not?
He has fun playing with his dogs -- the mutt, Bruin, and the two pit pulls, Logan and Bishop. Only Bishop, the newest dog, lives full-time in State College. "He's the most like me of all of them," Arrington said, scratching Bishop's ears. "He just hangs out, he just goes with the flow."
He exercises his brain by playing chess with his teammates; his board is set up in the corner of his room, ready for a game at a moment's notice. "I was in the chess club in high school," he said. "I come in with a game plan, you know? I pretty much stick to it unless something bad happens. But I beat those pocket-protector kids."
And he enjoys meeting his fans, signing the photos they thrust his way and asking, sometimes, for the photographer to send him a copy. Those pictures, he tapes to the walls of his room, along with the blue butterfly and the inspirational religious story "Footsteps," which also hangs in his parents' entry hall.
"All I know is, football's a show," Arrington said. "The minute you get away from thinking that this isn't a show for the public, that it's all about you, you're getting away from what it's played for. If there was no crowd, if people didn't come to see football and all the glory that goes along with it ..."
Arrington trailed off, as he does frequently. He thinks about the game, about its philosophical connotations, more than most players do. (His father's influence, again.) Sometimes, he just doesn't finish one train of thought before embarking on another. This time, after a pause, he continues on the same topic.
"People that are involved in sports, I think they have something inside them that needs people to see what they're doing. They need praise from people. People who are involved in sports have egos, that's the bottom line of it.
"I wouldn't play if there weren't crowds. If crowds didn't come see me and see the team, if they weren't there Saturday and Friday in high school and Saturday in pee wee league, I wouldn't have played. I love to show off. You can call me a showoff. But I do what it takes to be able to show off."
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