To begin with, there was his color. Not white, but not black either. It was a question of hues and bloodlines, and where did that leave Curtis Marsh? Even within his own family he was literally a marked man.
But he was many other things that made a complex whole. A high-school dropout. An angry, violent youth. A teenage father. The son of an alcoholic and absent father. A guest of juvenile hall. The scourge of a half-dozen schools. A gifted but temperamental athlete.It was Marsh's natural athletic ability and football that motivated him to turn his life around, but even on the gridiron there were more obstacles. He never played high school football - for that matter he rarely even attended high school and never earned a diploma. And then there was the year he couldn't catch a football, which is certainly a useful thing for a wide receiver.
Yet here he is somehow, a senior at the University of Utah, an unlikely college football player, racing toward a degree and the end zone with equal haste.
In four games Marsh has caught 19 passes for 287 yards and 5 touchdowns for the unbeaten Utes, all of which isn't bad for a guy who couldn't catch anything but a cold last year. Roll the highlight film, please. See him make just two catches in last week's league opener against Wyoming. See him turn both of them into touchdowns covering 42 and 43 yards.
Now watch him work as a possession receiver against Oregon, catching 9 passes for 82 yards, which was more receptions than he had all last season. And don't forget to take in his most spectacular play, in which he made a running, one-handed catch of a short pass thrown behind him, then performed a 360-degree spin, shook off two tacklers and ran away from a third for a 40-yard touchdown against Idaho State.
Afterward, Marsh stood in the end zone and raged as teammates swarmed around him and Ute fans cheered. "That's what I'm talking about! That's who I am!" he shouted, as his tried to break free of his teammates to further express a combination of anger, relief and vindication.
A year ago those same fans were jeering, not cheering, Marsh, while watching him drop precisely as many passes as he caught. "Who recruited (No.) 18?!" fans yelled. "You stink."
"You're terrible." Even his fiance wanted to know: What's the matter with you?
But to know that, you have to go back, way back.
His father, Leslie, was a blond white man from the Bronx; his mother, Curtis, a black woman from Tennessee. They were both accountants, and they married and eventually settled in Simi Valley, Calif. Curtis Jr. was their only offspring. He was mocha colored with greenish-blue eyes and curly brown hair - a pleasing mix to the eye except to those who chose their loyalties along racial lines. His coloring made him suspect. It made him the target of cruel names. Half-breed. Oreo. Throughout his life, the questions would be the same. "What nationality are you?" "Are you mulatto?" "What are you?"
Marsh wasn't always sure himself. Was he black or was he white? His stepfather was black. His mother was black. His half-sister and half-brother were black. The people who rented a room in their house were black. But Marsh was somewhere in between, and the neighborhood they lived in was mostly white. You're black, his family told him. Don't ever believe you're anything else. You got one drop of black blood in you, you're black. But for young Curtis it wasn't that simple and it never would be.
"No matter where I go people react the same, because I'm different," says Marsh. "I act different. I look different . . . I always had to deal with not being accepted. People were not comfortable with you. They didn't know how to come at you. I always had to prove myself."
There was always a trial period, a time when new acquaintances checked him out. Who was this dude? What was this dude? Was he a brother, or a white boy? It mattered to Marsh. He needed identity. He needed a crowd to relate to. In the end, he hung with blacks because he was most comfortable with them, but he always struggled to find his place beyond his immediate circle of friends.
That was enough for any young man to deal with, but the rest of Marsh's life was another complex mix of circumstance. His father was an alcoholic who left the family when his son was four and died eight years later of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.
"We were tight, but then when I needed him he was gone," says Marsh.
His mother worked full time. His older brother, whom Marsh says was often high on angel dust and in trouble with the law, was no desirable role model.
Predictably, such circumstances helped to mold an angry, rudderless youth who was alternately charming, moody and violent. He punched out classmates. He punched out teachers. He punched out coaches. He was kicked out of two elementary schools and four middle schools.
"I was pretty much uncontrollable," he says. "I was always angry."
Marsh was a fighter, but he was also a quitter. Midway through his third year of Pop Warner football, at the age of 12, he walked off the field in a fit. He wouldn't play the sport again for eight years. He went down swinging in Little League baseball - swinging at the coach - and never did take up the sport again, finished at the age of 13.
At 16 years old he quit school as well. He wanted to play football that year, but he reported to practice late and the coaches told him "no." Two months later he dropped out of school. That rendered him ineligible to play football the following year, so he attended an alternative school for problem students two hours a day, mostly to use the school's basketball court and weight room. He took summer school the following year to become eligible for football, but again coaches at two different high schools rejected him. A couple of months later he dropped out of school again and for the next 21/2 years he did nothing.
He simply hung out. He slept till noon, then counted the hours until four o'clock, when friends returning from work and school would meet him at the local playground for pickup basketball games. He had no job and no money, but the girls he dated paid his way. He spent his nights in clubs, dancing and girl-watching, and at 16 he fathered a son, Curtis Jr.
"I did nothing constructive; I just ran the streets," says Marsh, who served two stretches totaling six weeks in juvenile hall for petty crime.
His life was hoops, clubs, girls and hanging out, but a longtime friend, Von Herron, saw something better for Marsh. He had recognized his superior athletic ability through the years and urged him to pursue his athletic career at nearby Moorpark Junior College.
Marsh, who would turn 20 that fall, took the advice and asked Moorpark coaches for a tryout. That year he caught only 13 passes but averaged 28 yards per catch. A year later he caught 48 passes for 1,030 yards and 11 TDs and was an honorable mention JC All-American. UCLA, Washington, Florida State and Colorado all recruited him until they realized he wouldn't obtain his associate of arts degree in time to attend their spring practice. Utah signed him anyway.
"We're lucky to get him," said Utah's All-American receiver, Bryan Rowley, at the time. "He's good. I saw film of a JC game where Marsh ran across the field and leaped above everyone to snag the ball out of the air with one hand."
Everyone who saw Marsh in practice raved about his pure athletic ability, but he was still a raw football player and he resisted coaching efforts to refine his game. He reasoned that he had succeeded at the JC level, so why change anything. He was frustrated by the Utes' attempts to teach him a complicated offensive system, how to read coverages and advanced technique. Frustration mounted and one day he got into a fistfight with receivers coach Fred Graves.
Marsh redshirted the season, then joined the team again last year, but the experience nearly destroyed his fragile psyche. An ankle/achilles injury forced him to miss three games, and when he returned to action he was not the same player he had been in training camp. He caught eight passes last season - and dropped eight passes, most of them while committing the fundamental error of running before he had caught the pass.
"I was so anxious to show people what I could do that I would turn before I had the ball," he says. "All the things I feared came true. People thought I stunk. I told the coach, I don't want to be out there. I was miserable. I was so depressed. My GPA dropped to .69 that quarter."
The heckling and the boos continued. So did the drops, including one near the goal line that nearly cost the Utes a win in the closing minutes against San Diego State.
"I started to doubt myself. I thought, `Maybe I don't have good hands,' " says Marsh.
Then came the regular-season finale against BYU in Provo. "I didn't want to play in that game either," he says. "I just wanted to get it over with."
Marsh, who was the team's fifth receiver and played rarely, found himself on the line of scrimmage early in the fourth quarter with the score tied. Seeing the BYU defense in a man-to-man press, quarterback Mike McCoy called an audible that made Marsh one of his primary receivers. Marsh was terrified.
"This is BYU," he told himself. "It's the fourth quarter. The score is tied. Don't screw up again. This would be worse than San Diego State."
Marsh gave his defender a fake to the outside and broke inside. "I was thinking, `Please don't throw me the ball,' and then here it came. I thought, `Oh, no, Curtis, here it comes. I don't care if you fall down, just catch it, or they'll run you out of Utah.' I looked it all the way in. I could read the writing on the ball. But once I had it I knew I was gone."
Marsh raced 84 yards for the touchdown. "That let me know I could be good," he says.
Marsh's gifts of size (6-2, 210), speed (4.4 for 40 yards), strength (a 500-pound squat) and leaping ability (a 36-inch vertical) have taken this high school dropout far in a short time. He hopes it will take him farther. "The first day I stepped on the field at Moorpark my goal was the NFL," he says.
"He's got NFL ability," says Rasnick. "He's fast and powerful. He just has to be more consistent. Physically, I have a hard time believing there are many guys more talented in the country."
Marsh, who will turn 24 next month and now father of a second son, should have other things to fall back on this time if he is forced again to give up football. He says he'll graduate next spring with a degree in exercise and sport science (he pulled a 3.9 grade-point average last spring quarter).
Asked what he would be doing these days if he hadn't returned to school four years ago, Marsh replies, "Probably the same thing as my friends back home who are doing nothing with their lives."