Long before Luther Elliss arrived on the University of Utah campus, Ute football coaches were convinced they had found a special player.
Brad Childress, a Ute assistant coach at the time, first discovered Elliss while combing the back roads of Colorado and immediately called Head Coach Ron McBride: "There's a guy down here you're going to love," he said. "You ought to take a look at him."Another Ute assistant, Sam Papalii, the staff's designated recruiter of Polynesians, was dispatched to the scene. He watched Elliss in a basketball practice, watched him move through agility drills with the quickness and grace of a small man, and then called McBride.
"He's for real," he told his boss. "I've seen a lot of athletes. This guy is special."
And so it seems to be true. Elliss, only two years removed from high school, will start this season at defensive end for the Utes. There was just no keeping him out of the lineup. The only question was where to play him. Tight end? Linebacker? Defensive tackle? Defensive end?
"He could have picked a position with any school," says McBride.
At 6-foot-5 3/4, 260 pounds, Elliss can cover 40 yards in 4.8 seconds and bench press 385 pounds, and he possesses cat-like coordination and quickness.
"He could be a dominant player," says McBride. "He's a big-time talent. He was a player the first time he stepped on the field."
"We've got ourselves a diamond in this guy," says Papalii. "Physically, he's got everything. I can't say enough good about him. He was a spectacular freshman. They don't come along very often like that."
Elliss saw action on both sides of the ball as a freshman last season, as a tight end - the position Utah actually recruited him for - and a defensive lineman. When injuries thinned out Utah's defensive linemen early in the year, he was made a fulltime defensive end. It wasn't long before he was playing as much as the starters, and he finally did start in the season-finale against BYU. He finished his first season with 24 tackles (13 solo), 3 sacks and 9 hurries.
"Coach Mac wanted our best big athletes on the line," says Papalii. "They're the hardest to find."
Certainly, it wasn't easy to find Elliss. He grew up in Mancos, Colo., a tiny town of 1,000 tucked away in Southwest Colorado. "He lived up in the boonies," is the way Papalii puts it. To get there, Ute coaches had to fly to Denver, catch a prop plane to Durango, and then rent a car for the 45-minute drive to Mancos.
"That's why we were able to get him," says Papalii. "No one else wanted to go out there to look at him."
Actually, the University of Colorado looked at Elliss, but apparently not with the devotedness of the Ute coaches. "They figured they could get him just because they had just won the national championship," says Papalii.
Elliss, the son of an unemployed construction worker, lived with his parents and a brother and sister in a trailer on a small lot in Mancos. "He comes from a really humble environment," says Papalii. But whatever the family was short of, Elliss says, it wasn't familial love. "We helped each other," he says. "We're real close. No matter what went wrong, we knew we still had each other and a house over our heads."
Elliss, dark and handsome, is half Polynesian - his father met his mother while serving in the U.S. Navy in Samoa. It was from his mother's side of the family that he inherited his size, which seemed to come on him almost overnight. As a high school freshman he was 5-foot-9, 200 pounds. As a sophomore he was 6-foot-4, 230 pounds.
"Most of it happened in one summer," says Elliss.
He was growing so fast that parts of his body were struggling to keep up with the pace. Elliss was diagnosed with a case of Osgood Schlatters disease, which is marked by pain in the growth plates of the elbows and knees.
Because of this condition, Elliss was unable to play organized sports until his sophomore year of high school. Once he began his athletic career there was little stopping him. He was the state's top discus thrower and shot putter, although football recruiting visits prevented him from competing in the state meet. He was an all-state basketball player, who probably earned more attention for shattering two backboards than for the many points he scored. He played both ways in football - as an end or middle linebacker on defense, and as a tight end on offense. He was a first-team all-state selection and led the state in receiving, with more than 100 catches as a junior and senior.
But Elliss also was performing for a school that had only 100 students and competed in the Double-A classification - the next to smallest level of competition in Colorado. All of which made his performances difficult to evaluate. Elliss's coach, Kyle Graff, realized as much and began making calls to various colleges to advertise this undiscovered talent.
McBride himself finally visited Elliss to see what all the fuss was about. "I didn't have to see him play," he recalls. "All I had to do was see him run down the basketball court once, and I knew he was a real guy."
Elliss is clearly uncomfortable with all such talk, believing that it will erode his will. "If I start believing that stuff, I could fall behind," he says. "I've got to keep working."
And so he does. He's improved his strength in the bench press 70 pounds in the past year. In the classroom he's posted a 3.0 grade point average.
"I want to be a pediatrician," he says. "I love kids. They are fun to be around."
In high school, Elliss was as versatile off the field as on it. He did volunteer work with children - delivering anti-drug messages and instructing at basketball and football camps - he played in the school band (drums, trumpet, sax), took home ec, served as president of an anti-drug club, worked in student government . . . .
"He's a great person, to boot," says Papalii. "He gets along with all his teammates. He is caring and considerate of others. And he takes care of his business. We think he's a special player."