THE FIRST THING you should know about Kevin Feterik is the Saturdays.
Saturdays were work disguised as play. While his friends were lying on the beach tanning or curled on the couch watching cartoons, Feterik and his father were conducting their private training camp.They began the morning with basketball. Feterik went through a practiced routine of free throws, dribbling drills and jump shots under the direction of his father, Michael, a former NBA draft pick.
Then they would work on baseball: pitching, fielding, hitting. After a couple of hours of that, they turned their attention to football. Kevin performed agility drills and sprints and threw passes to Michael. On Sunday, they would do it all over again.
For years, this was how they spent their weekends. Even when a sport was in season, they worked on the other two sports before his game.
Michael was determined that his only son would be an athlete, and, fortunately for him, Kevin enthusiastically endorsed the plan. On week-day mornings, Kevin and Michael went to the gym at 6 to practice whatever sport was in season at the time before school started. That evening they might meet again for more practice.
"Yeah, I felt like I was being pushed," Kevin said, "but I liked it. And I always knew that it made me the best player on the team."
At the very least, he was the best player on the team. When Kevin was 6 years old he played in a baseball league for ages 6 to 8. He was named the league's Most Valuable Player. That's the way it always would be.
Kevin followed Michael's plan like a road map, but not without a few unexpected turns. The kid was supposed to be a basketball player, like his father, but he wound up as a quarterback and outfielder. It was fine by Michael. Any sport would do. In the eighth grade, Michael made a deal with his son: If Kevin got an athletic scholarship, Michael would buy him a new car.
The younger Feterik has since taken up residence in Provo as BYU's starting quarterback. Only a sophomore, he's still the young guy playing with older kids. He is the first quarterback since Jim McMahon to become the starter under LaVell Edwards in only his second year at BYU. Feterik, by the way, tools around town in a new Ford Tahoe. His father made good on their deal.
To understand the son, it helps to understand the father. To understand what would drive a kid to shoot 600 jump shots at dawn every day, it helps to know the father - the man who escaped the steel mills through his own singular dedication to sports and later applied the same work ethic to become a self-made millionaire.
Michael, whose grandparents immigrated from Croatia, grew up in McKeesport, Pa., a small town 25 minutes from Pittsburgh. The Fe-te-riks were poor, but they didn't know it because everybody else was poor, too. There were largely three professions in town: coal mines, steel mills and the railroad. Michael's father worked a variety of jobs on the trains that ran into and out of the steel mills. He was a switchman, conductor and brakeman. It was long, hard work, followed by long stretches of idleness forced by layoffs or strikes, during which Michael's mother sold cleaning products to survive. All Michael knew was that he wanted nothing to do with McKeesport.
He staked his ticket out on basketball. He was only 5-foot-9, but what he lacked in height in made up for in determination and work. He played seven to eight hours a day on the playground or in a gym. To improve his jumping, he jumped up and touched the back board 100 times, in sets of 20, and despite his lack of height he could dunk a basketball.
He also melted iron into a metal Band-Aid box and had his mom sew it to the top of his high-top Converse. Wearing the weighted shoes, he ran three miles on the railroad tracks, being sure to step on each tie. He timed his run so that he placed himself in the path of the afternoon train just as he neared a narrow bridge.
"The train would be about 100 yards behind me, and the bridge was about 100 yards long," recalls Michael. "There was only room for one of us. It was good motivation." Michael got his ticket out of town. He played basketball for Harbor City College in California, then landed a scholarship to play for Coach Jerry Tarkanian at Long Beach State. His basketball career seemed destined for more - he was drafted by the Detroit Pistons in 1971 - but he blew out his knees in training camp, ending his career.
Michael wasted no time sulking about it. He obtained a master's degree in industrial psychology from the University of Michigan, moved back to California and took a job as a manager in a box container factory. Nine years later he became vice president, and then he started his own business - Orange County Container.
He began with four employees; today he has 900. He owns seven plants - two in Los Angeles and five in Mexico. They make shipping and custom as well as the large cut-out displays you see in theaters advertising upcoming movies.
Michael and his wife, Terri, whom he met in California, settled in Los Alamitos, a relatively small, well-to-do community 30 minutes south of L.A. The Feteriks have lived in the same neighborhood for 24 years, albeit in three different houses. Here they have raised their two children, Kevin and Kimberly.
It was for many reasons that Mike wanted his son to be an athlete. Athletes had made an indelible mark on him as a child. He grew up in the shadow of Pittsburgh, where the local heroes were all athletes - Bobby Layne and John Henry Johnson of the Steelers and Roberto Clemente of the Pirates.
Mike determined that his son would stand out like that, too; he would be an athlete. Young Feterik threw himself into the job.
He ran with weights strapped to his legs and wore them all day at school (does any of this sound familiar?). He began lifting weights in the ninth grade. The difference between the father's boyhood regimen and the son's is that the son had a training partner and a sponsor.
His father supplied bucketfuls of baseballs, basketballs and footballs. He purchased a weight machine for the garage and mem-ber-ship in an athletic club. He paid for clinics and private coaching. And he gave him his time.
Michael coached most of Kevin's little league baseball and basketball teams, and Terri was the team mom. "Kevin was the driving force," says Michael. "I wanted him to be an athlete but not unless he was having fun.
"Football was the hardest," says Michael. "I had to be the receiver. He'd just kill me. My hands got so sore." The family fully expected Kevin to be a basketball player, not a football player, but when he reached his sophomore year the demands of the sports forced him to choose. It was no contest. He played football in the fall, baseball in the spring.
By now, Michael had concluded that his son needed more advanced training than he could offer. He sent him to clinics and, as luck would have it, Steve Clarkson, a California football guru, called and asked if he could work with him.
Clarkson made numerous adjustments in his throwing technique and tinkered with his dropback and footwork. With Clarkson, Feterik worked side by side with other star students, including Jim Druckenmiller (now with the San Francisco 49ers), Pat Barnes, John Walsh and Steve Sarkisian (who went on to stardom at BYU), as well as non-quarterbacks such as J.J. Stokes and Dar-nell Autry.
Feterik played for powerhouse Los Alamitos High School. As a senior, he passed for 3,205 yards and 29 touchdowns, and for a time Los Alamitos was ranked No. 1 in the nation by USA Today. Feterik's record as a prep quarterback (counting a year on the freshman team): 44-2.
In baseball, he broke most of the school hitting records set by J.T. Snow, who now plays for the San Francisco Giants. He was a pitcher for two years, but a sore arm forced him to play first base and outfield as a senior. Feterik hopes to play baseball at BYU.
Letters and phone calls from colleges began to arrive early, but the Feteriks did their own recruiting work, as well (are we surprised?). After his junior season, Kevin and Michael flew around the country to inspect some of the top football schools - Kansas, Kansas State, Texas, Cal, BYU, UCLA, USC - much the same as Ty Detmer did a few years ago before settling on BYU.
"My dad loved it," says Feterik. "He came home after work each night and sat down and waited for the phone to ring. He got to talk to Lou Holtz, LaVell Edwards, Bruce Snyder, Terry Donahue, John Robinson. He was thrilled."
Feterik, who is Catholic, had few reservations about attending Mormon-owned BYU, especially after the school received high recommendations from Walsh and Sarkisian, two other non-Mormon California quarterbacks who played for the Cougars. Feterik recalls, "People would say, `You're going to BYU? What about the Mormons?' I'd say, `What's so bad about Mormons? How bad can they be?' It has been no problem."
Everything has gone according to plan at BYU for Feterik, although he panicked for a moment when he wasn't named the starter for the season opener against Washington. He says, "I wondered, What am I going to do? Will I ever get to play here? Did I make the right choice? Should I transfer?" Feterik didn't remain on the bench long. He started the second half against Washington and has been the starter since, with the exception of an injury-forced layoff.
He suffered a hairline fracture in his ankle during the fifth game, against Rice. Told by doctors that he would be sidelined for five weeks, he was back in four. Feterik, supported at each game by an entourage of 20 to 40 friends, relatives and family members, has produced a fine rookie season, although it has been largely overlooked in a so-so season (a 6-4 record). In seven games, he has thrown for 1,692 yards, 11 touchdowns and only 4 interceptions. So it has all worked out. Feterik is an athlete of renown, as his father hoped. He is standing out.