When Lenny Gomes came to BYU, he didn't know what he was getting into.
The student honor code, for instance, was a complete surprise."I didn't know that I had to live according to the standards," said Gomes, the Cougars' senior noseguard. "I didn't see the standards rule until after I signed (a letter-of-intent), so I was stuck in a hard place. The guys who showed me around on my recruiting trip told me if I lived my own life, everyone would leave me alone."
Then Gomes smiled, looking as mischievous as an Outland Trophy candidate who weighs 265 pounds and can bench press offensive linemen can look, and added, "I was deceived, in a way."
Gomes can smile about that now, because the honor code is something he has come to terms with, along with the breakup of his family, the discovery of his real father, marriage and fatherhood. But long before all that, when Gomes came to BYU in 1989 as a freshman out of Santa Rosa, Calif., he was a rowdy.
"The environment I grew up in was a lot different than the good society of BYU, where everybody's perfect and everybody goes on a mission and nobody drinks or smokes or cusses," Gomes said. "Where I came from it was survival. Anything goes. When I came here it was culture shock."
Junior tackle Greg Pitts said his initial encounter with Gomes was an eye-opener.
"When I first met him, I thought, well, here's the stereotypical hard-nosed, crude, rude, gross noseguard," Pitts recalled.
That early impression wasn't far off the mark. Pitts says Gomes delighted then in letting everyone know that he was a wild man, on and off the field.
"He liked to see how crazy he could be without getting in trouble," Pitts said. "If anyone cut him off on the road or looked at him wrong at a dance, he was ready to take it to the parking lot and punch him out."
Gomes carried the same attitude into his first varsity games, as a freshman. If someone blocked him hard, he wanted to fight. He also liked to talk to opponents, the kind of talk that made his coaches cringe.
Indeed, most of Gomes' trouble at BYU can be blamed on his mouth. He has occasionally made the kinds of statements that end up on opponents' bulletin boards, like when he said after last year's New Mexico game that playing the Lobos was like playing the BYU scout team. During two-a-days this year he took it to the Cougar kickers, saying he didn't like the way they cavorted through games of touch football while everyone else worked hard.
All this makes it even more remarkable that Gomes is, by all accounts, a completely different person now.
"When he first came here, Lenny was just a fun guy, just interested in having a good time," said defensive line coach Tom Ramage. "He has goals now, he has purpose in life. He's made a lot of changes."
A lot has happened to Gomes to contribute to those changes. While in college, he saw his mother and stepfather separate and learned that his mother was an alcoholic.
"All that gave me a bitter taste," he said. "I didn't want to go home anymore. I started to see the other side, the good family life, how good values equal a good life and bad values equal a bad life."
Within the past year and a half, Gomes has tried to conform his life to many of those values. He got married, joined the LDS Church, and fathered a daughter.
"It's made me a lot more happy about my life," Gomes said of those important events. "I'm more focused and a better student."
Once an admittedly indifferent pupil, Gomes is now one semester from graduation and already taking some master's degree courses. He serves on an academic board comprised of athletes who are on the honor roll.
Another significant event in Gomes' life occurred when he met his real father for the first time. For years, Gomes thought his stepfather was his biological father. But his stepfather was 5-foot-7, part Portuguese and part Indian. And Gomes' brother and sister were smaller and darker-skinned than Lenny.
Gomes, who says he always felt out of place, had his suspicions aroused first by his wife, Carol. Shortly before their wedding, while visiting his family in California, she told Gomes that something didn't look right.
The suspicions grew. Last December, Gomes confronted his mother, telling her that, genetically, things didn't add up. His mother eventually admitted that his real father was Ed Gregory, but said she didn't know where he lived.
Gomes began to search for his father, even hiring a private investigator to help. But Gomes finally located him himself, by calling all the Gregorys in the Seattle phone book. In April, they were reunited.
The net result of everything that has happened to Gomes is greater stability. What hasn't changed is his ability to play football.
"He's always been a good player, but he's not so wild now," Ramage said. "He's become more disciplined, he's under control."
Gomes still has a desire to turn quarterbacks upside down, to create havoc against an offense, but he wages his battles these days with a new sense of purpose, a new sense of who he is.
"Now I don't have to pretend to be something I'm not," Gomes said. "I know who I am."