PROVO -- All afternoon he'd had to search for open receivers, but the toughest thing that T.D. Croshaw did on his golden afternoon in Provo was find the old man. Greg Croshaw, the one who gave him that name, was somewhere in the masses rushing onto the field. T.D. did media interviews, shook hands with BYU players and celebrated with teammates, but where was his father?
"I looked for him, but I couldn't find him," he said, and then his dad stepped out of the crowd, and T.D.'s face broke into a wide grin. They wrapped their arms around each other, and there, standing on the grass of Cougar Stadium surrounded by thousands, they held their embrace as the son sobbed quietly into his father's shoulder."This is somethin' special, huh?" the old man croaked finally, his voice breaking, and they tightened their embrace.
Croshaw, a backup quarterback who had sat in the stands cheering for BYU for two decades, delivered the Utes to a surprising 20-17 win over the team of his youth. He was playing only because starter Darnell Arceneaux was sidelined with a concussion. Croshaw began slowly. He took in the crowd of 65,000 -- the biggest crowd he had played in front of -- and was struck by a bad case of "jitters." He rebounded from two interceptions and threw for 228 yards and two T.D.s to give Utah a share of a conference championship for only the third time in 40 years.
"A backup quarterback came in here and got us a victory," marveled coach Ron McBride.
Greg, the head football coach at Dixie College, had never seen his son play major college football until Saturday, when he stood on the sidelines wearing a red CROSHAW 3 sweatshirt. He was always too busy coaching his own teams to make it to his son's games. He followed his son's progress by watching a neighbor's videotapes of the games late into the night after he returned from road trips.
But this time he was there. For 24 straight years he and his wife Doris have made the trip to Provo to watch the annual BYU-Utah game, always cheering for BYU. On Saturday, Greg and Doris and their other children watched the 81st meeting of BYU-Utah with one of their own on the field, playing for the other side.
T.D. hardly looks the part of gridiron hero. His white-hair, blue-eyes, wiry build and wire-rim glasses he wears off the field give him more the look of an accountant than a Division 1 football player. But did he ever really have a choice to do anything else? His father was a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers in the early '70s until he blew out both knees. He then became a career coach.
"I was never pressured to play football," says T.D. "My father always said it was up to me."
But he did saddle him with that name. When the Croshaws had their first child 21 years ago, Greg wanted to name him T.D., as in touchdown. "I thought it'd be fun for a coach's kid," he says. Doris insisted that he also have a real name. His official name was Trace, although the family always called him T.D. Then one day T.D. complained that the kids at school were making fun of his real name. Greg did the paperwork and had the name officially changed to T.D. (Greg also wanted to name his first daughter P.A.T., but Doris put her foot down.)
T.D. grew up around the game, of course. He was allowed to travel with his father's teams if he got perfect scores on his spelling tests. He was only in ninth grade when he began to participate in seven-on-seven drills in Dixie College's spring practice. Maybe Greg was a former linebacker and maybe he did build a national JC powerhouse with a running game, but he was raising a quarterback. T.D. played one year for his father at Dixie and then was convinced to come to Utah without a scholarship.
The first and only pass T.D. threw for Utah last season went for a T.D. -- for the other team. Last spring, the Utes recruited a junior college quarterback to back up Arceneaux. The way the Ute coaches explained it to T.D., they just weren't sure he could get the job done. T.D. asked if they would grant him a release so he could transfer to another school; they said they would, but they convinced him to stay. T.D. wound up winning the No. 2 spot in spring practice. With Arceneaux in and out of the lineup with injuries this fall, T.D. played in every game except the opener and made four starts. He threw four T.D. passes against New Mexico, but he saved his grittiest performance for Saturday, producing two of the game's decisive plays -- a 70-yard touchdown pass to Clifford Russell and a four-yard pass to Donny Utu in the front of the end zone on third down.
"He's come a long way," said Greg.
After talking to more reporters on the field, T.D. hugged his brothers and sister and his fiancee en masse while his grandmother snapped a picture. "Never underestimate that dude," a teammate said as he walked past. Later, in the locker room after most of the crowd had cleared out, T.D. took a copy of the game program and placed it carefully in his travel bag.
"I've kept the four programs from the games I started, but this one is huge," he said. "It will go someplace special."