These are the highlights of Mike Anderson's strange football odyssey: Didn't play a lick of high school sports. Played in the marching band for four years instead. Flipped hamburgers at McDonald's. Joined the Marines. Saw duty in Africa. Discovered on a flag football team. Became recruiter magnet and overnight star.
Straight from Disney Productions, we give you Drummer in the Backfield . . . The kid from the marching band joins the football team and becomes a star. Imagine the possibilities: He can carry the ball and do the halftime show, too. He can lead the team in rushing and in the school fight song.Anderson, the University of Utah's new running back sensation from South Carolina, is the unlikeliest of football players and the surprise of the season for the Utes. He showed up at Utah for the first time in August without the benefit of spring practice. Almost nobody who misses spring practice sees much action the following season, but this was a small matter for a guy who didn't even play organized football for six years.
When the season opener came, Anderson was in the lineup. After the game he talked about having to adjust to the speed at this level of the game and to the large crowd and to a bad case of jitters. But while he was adjusting, he rushed for 150 yards and one touchdown in a win over Utah State while his mother sat in the stands wishing he was still playing the drums at halftime instead. In Saturday's win over Louisville - drum roll, please - Anderson ran for 122 yards and a touchdown.
Question: Does anyone at Fairfield Central High watch Anderson slice through defenses now and nudge his buddy.
What a waste.
Yeah, he was such a good drummer.
He did some great Sousa, man.
All those years he spent playing the quint drums in the marching band, there was a great football player lurking inside that nobody - least of all Anderson - recognized. Anderson is a natural. Forget hard work. Forget years of toil. There weren't any. He played drums, for crying out loud. He didn't play football, didn't play basketball, didn't run track. He didn't even play sandlot ball in the neighborhood. When he wasn't marching or going to school, he was wiping tables at Mickey D's. Yet somehow even all those years of inactivity weren't enough to erode his natural skills and atrophy his muscles. He rushed for 3,197 yards in two years of junior college football. He has rushed for 272 yards in his first two Division 1 games.
"My contention is, you ain't seen nothin' yet," Ute running back coach Sean McNabb tells you.
The coach proceeds to tell you that Anderson made six mental errors against the Aggies. He ran the wrong way on one play, fumbled on another, drew a penalty. "He did a good job, but he hurt us sometimes," says McNabb. "He'll get better. He's special. He's a talented young man."
Anderson was thrilled one afternoon last week because, as he proudly made a point of telling McNabb, it marked the first time he completed a practice without making a mistake. In the second game against Louisville he committed two mistakes, missing blocks both times.
"Just wait till he knows what he's doing," says McNabb. "He's like Jamal Anderson (now with the Atlanta Falcons) when he got here. You don't learn something as complicated as we're doing overnight."
Anderson, a junior who will turn 25 next week, gets by on natural talent and an attacking, fearless running style. He runs over tacklers, spins out of tackles, runs around them. Nothing sums up Anderson's running style so well as what McNabb said: "He runs with authority."
Anderson's football career actually began when he was a seven-year-old pee-wee player and then seemed to end when he was 14. He had been a running back throughout his little league years, but when he showed up for freshman tryouts at Fairfield Central High, the coach had other ideas. He took one look at this 6-foot-and-change, 200-pound kid and told him he was too big to be a running back. He would be an offensive lineman - a blocker. ("The guy's high school coach ought to have his head examined," says McNabb.)
Anderson quit rather than accept his new position, so he joined the marching band instead. He marched and played the drums at halftime, pep rallies, parades and once at a Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.
"I did it because it was really fun," says Anderson. "I really got involved. We did hip stuff, Christmas music, the usual band music."
After graduation, he joined the Marines "because I was looking for something to do with my life and I looked at it as a challenge," and reported to Camp Pendleton in California. He handled radio operations for an artillery unit and eventually saw overseas duty in Somalia and Kenya.
He never gave football a second thought until, in his third year in the Corps, he began playing on his unit's flag football team. In flag ball, of course, his size counted for nothing; it was all speed and finesse, and still he thrived. Some of his teammates urged him to play for the unit's full-contact team, but Anderson ignored them. Then one day the team's coach visited him in the lunch room to make a personal appeal.
"I thought, there's got to be something they see in me, so I decided to give it a try," recalls Anderson.
He rushed for 1,700 yards that fall, including more than 300 yards in one game in which he sat out the fourth quarter. Word spread. A junior college assistant who watched the Corps games kept returning to watch Anderson and convinced him to play for Mt. San Jacinto JC. In his first junior college game, he ran for 96 yards and one touchdown on 12 carries. "After that I got a feel for the game," he says. He broke a 23-year-old school record by rushing for 1,511 yards that season.
"I started really thinking my dream of going to a university could happen," says Anderson. "I thought if I could come back bigger and stronger, I could get a scholarship."
After spending the off-season in the weight room, Anderson broke his own record by running for 1,686 yards the following season, averaging some nine yards per carry.
"I've been recruiting 27 years, and when you recruit a guy you try to get as much background as you can," says McNabb. "You talk to a lot of different people about him, and when you do there's always some coach or someone along the line who has doubts about him. But not once did any of his coaches or opponents' coaches say anything like that. They all said, `You've got a great one.' They were all high on the guy."
With urging from Ute tight end C.J. Johnson, another San Jacinto alum and ex-Marine, Anderson visited Utah and chose the Utes over Missouri, Washington State and Arizona State.
"This is overwhelming," he said recently, as he sat pondering the turn of events in his life. "I've been rewarded for something I worked hard for. I'm very thankful to be here."
Anderson, a polite, thoughtful, guileless man with an open, friendly face, has one regret. His father died in December of liver poisoning, the result of years of hard drinking. "He never saw me play," he says. "Always before a game I say a little prayer. I feel like he's watching over me. I'm on this roller-coaster now and he's along for the ride. I just ask (God) for strength and to guide me. Without Him this would not be possible. This was His plan for me."
Anderson's mother, Emily Richmond, saw him play football for the first time when she flew from South Carolina to the Utes' season opener against USU two weeks ago. For a woman who used to show up at halftime to watch her son play in the marching band, it was an experience she was not quite prepared for. After each pileup she waited anxiously for No. 22 to get to his feet. It was the not the same as watching her son, say, bump into the tuba section.
"She was very nervous," says Anderson. "She was not used to seeing all these big guys trying to hit me. She told me after every play she wondered if I was going to get up. She was glad it was over."
The future is bright for Anderson. He has a promising football career, and he is making the most of his education, studying exercise sports science. "I know everyone can't make it to the NFL," he says, leaning back in his chair. "Maybe I can coach and work with kids."
Outside, the sun is shining and the Ute marching band is practicing on the football team's practice field nearby. Yes, Anderson has noticed. "Sometimes I get caught up in it," he says. "Sometimes I find myself listening." During the opening ceremony for the newly remodeled stadium, he was more absorbed by the band music than the ceremony. Then he is asked the obvious question.
"Football is a little bit more fun than the band, I must admit," he says with a smile.