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WACO, Texas—It’s minutes after the game of his life, and Jared Crick is hesitant.
His ribs hurt, he’s tired and he just wants to see his family. But a man in a Cornhusker polo tells Crick that the media want him at the post-game press conference following Nebraska’s 20-10 win against Baylor on Saturday.
“Do I have to?” Crick asks.
The media relations professional explains to him that he had broken or tied two school records during the game and that yes, he’d have to.
Crick sits down in front of the television cameras and refuses to take credit for his five sacks, 13 tackles and one fumble recovery. He fields the next question, this one about the family members who were in attendance for his breakout game.
“I kind of went out and played a little harder today,” Crick said.
He was understated, as usual. He gets it from his parents.
What Crick didn’t mention in his answer is that he knew every sack would send so much joy through the body of his cousin Haley that she’d almost jump right out of her wheelchair.
That every time he fought through a block, he was showing his grandfather that the advice he was able to speak through cancer-riddled lungs three years earlier had been taken to heart by his grandson.
What he didn’t mention is that with five sacks, 13 tackles and one fumble recovery, Jared Crick gave 34 members of his family an early Christmas present they will never forget.
***
Jared Crick is in a car on his way back from cousin Samantha’s graduation ceremony in Burnet, Texas, and he can’t get the Nebraska fight song out of his head. That’s probably because his cousin Haley won’t stop singing it.
Two days earlier, Crick had received a call from Nebraska offensive coordinator Jay Norvell. Haley and Crick were walking on the field of Texas’ Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium during an unofficial campus visit when the coach offered Crick his dream scholarship.
He wanted to sound non-committal over the phone, but Haley kept nudging him with a wide smile on her face.
Now, Haley, who is two years older than Crick, is singing “There Is No Place Like Nebraska” while her dad, Dan Cornelius, is giving Crick grief about the offer he’d received from Kansas. It was an 18-hour car ride.
When Crick finally got home and made his decision, he didn’t call for a press conference. He went over to Haley’s house.
“There was a Nebraska T-shirt on my bed, and he said, ‘You know what Hayster? You get to wear this now. I’m a Blackshirt.’ That’s how he let us know,” Haley said.
She said she and Crick grew up together and have always been close. Haley adopted the nickname “J-Rod” for her cousin when he was 2 years old and said they’ve been together ever since, never living more than two hours apart. She said she spent so much time with her cousin that the Crick residence became like a second home.
Haley can’t bear to miss any of his games. She said she used to drive home from college in Lincoln to watch him play for Cozad High School.
There’s a natural bond between them, because with Haley at 6-foot-3 and Crick at 6-6, they’re the oddballs of the family.
“The outcasts,” Haley joked.
“Someone needs to run a DNA test on those two,” Grandpa Davidson said with a laugh.
Haley can remember lying down next to Crick, back when she didn’t need the wheelchair, and noticing how she was almost as tall as him. That was before she got on a jet ski on the Fourth of July in 2001.
***
Jared Crick is running, because Grandpa D told him to. Grandpa D is walking, because the doctors told him to.
The two are at Cozad High School’s football field during Crick’s senior year, going about their biweekly routine.
“I just told him ‘When I was a kid, I’d run all the time and I had good bones, and that’s what you’re going to need when you get to going,’” said Davidson, a gray-haired man with round glasses and a firm handshake.
On this day, Crick called Grandpa Davidson after he noticed some free time on his schedule between football and school.
When Crick had finished running the same drills he’d run a hundred times before, the same ones he ran on the same field at football practices, he came over to join Grandpa D on the surrounding track. He’d called his grandfather the other day to deliver a simple message. When Davidson answered the phone, he heard: “Grandpa, I’m a Husker.”
Grandpa D usually had advice to hand down during these walks, because wisdom and a way with words are a couple of Derold Davidson’s strong suits, and this day was no different.
“When we were doing our walking and running, I told him, ‘You’re a Husker now,’” Davidson said. “‘And you know all the little kids look up to Huskers.’”
The lesson that day was one of public service and responsibility. He told his grandson to set a good example for young fans, and to always give them his time. During Nebraska’s pre-season Fan Day this year, Davidson watched his grandson with pride as he heeded this advice.
“They have to go drag him off the field,” Davidson said. “Because the kids, they just come up and love him because he’ll spend time with them and talk to them.”
Crick never has been much of a talker though, not even at family events.
“But once in awhile, I’ll get to telling stories about when I was back in the service and Jared, he just sits there and listens and takes it all in,” Davidson said. “It’s pretty fantastic, really.”
***
Jared Crick is in the backfield, again. Minutes earlier, he was on his back. A crushing blind-sided block by a Baylor tight end had hurt Crick so badly, he told his family later that he thought his ribs had poked straight through to his organs. They didn’t, of course, and now he was on top of the quarterback for the fifth time in one game. In his sophomore season as a Husker, his first as a starter, Crick had just done something no one – not even legends like Grant Wistrom, Mike Rucker or Jason Peter – had ever done. And the 34 were there to see it.
They wore black shirts with Crick’s name and number on the back, created a sign that read “Crick or Treat,” and had pulled strings with a Nebraska booster to reserve a section for the family at Baylor’s Floyd Casey Stadium. Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa D, uncles, aunts, cousins and second-cousins – four generations represented – all there to watch Jared’s coming-out party.
The whole package cost Grandpa and Grandma D more than $1,000 to bring the 34 in from three Texas cities: Austin, Houston and Wolfe City. It was their Christmas present to each member of the family, but it was Crick who delivered the gifts.
Haley had the best seat in the house. She sat in the wheelchair-accessible area right behind the Nebraska bench. She’s paralyzed from the bottom of her chest down.
Haley caught a glimpse of the oncoming boat before it hit her jet ski eight years ago, but it was too late. The blades from the boat’s propeller slashed into her back seven times, cutting her spinal cord in half.
But watching her cousin play football makes Haley forget all about that. She called Saturday “phenomenal.”
“I was just screaming in the middle of Baylor fans who kept looking at us like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” she said with a laugh. “Because I’m the one who gets really, really excited, and we were right there in front.”
At Haley’s side was Grandpa D. After surviving cancer and two separate surgeries that removed chunks from his lungs, the 77-year-old man had persevered long enough to watch his grandson’s brightest day.
“I never thought I’d ever see a day like yesterday, not in my lifetime,” Davidson said Sunday morning. “It was about as good a deal as me becoming an astronaut, and I always wanted to be an astronaut. Yesterday was beyond that, really. In fact, I was still shaken last night at 9 o’clock.”
The rest of the family was further back in their reserved section – the 34’s “black hole.”
Up there were the cousins who can remember wrestling Jared to the floor when they were little and calling him by his nicknames: “Tink” and “Punkey-doo.” They said they wouldn’t dare mess with Jared like that anymore, and think their little cousin has worked his way to being an NFL Draft prospect down the road.
Aunt Chris said the family doesn’t get to see each other as much as she’d like, but Jared brings them all together. The 34 can’t make it to all of the games, but Chris always orders the games on television and throws a viewing party. She said she can remember when all the boys were little and how each of them would come up to her and brag about their athletic conquests in the backyard. Each of them except one.
And then there was his mom, Cindy, the third-grade teacher who cuts out stories from local papers about Roy Helu Jr. and Marcel Jones so that she can send them to their families out west. She is soft-spoken, just like her son, but couldn’t hold back her enthusiasm about Jared’s big day.
“It was kind of unbelievable that he did that well,” Cindy said. “I always knew that he had talent and the drive to do it, but it was just kind of a wonderful feeling.”
Her husband, David Crick, said he remained pretty quiet during the game. That’s just how David, the Nebraska truck driver, is.
“But all of these guys were in the groove, hooping and hollering,” David said with a smile.
He called Saturday the game of Jared’s life, and said he couldn’t be more proud.
Cousin Jeffrey brought over a laptop computer to the table David was eating breakfast at Sunday morning and played the video of Jared’s post-game press conference. About halfway through it, David showed that he cares for those media settings just about as much as his son does.
“They just go on and on, huh?” David said.
And also like his son, David was quick to deflect credit away from himself. He said that while Jared might have been motivated to play well in front of the family, his son always plays inspired.
But there was something different about Jared on Saturday.
His defensive coordinator Carl Pelini called it Jared “coming into his own.” Grandpa D called it “cutting it loose.”
***
It’s 2007 and Jared Crick is lost.
Head coach Bill Callahan is leading Nebraska during one of the worst seasons in school history, and Crick doesn’t know how to help. He hadn’t been taught how.
Defensive coordinator Kevin Cosgrove is asking him to do things he never learned at Cozad High.
“And Cosgrove, he decided that if you don’t know it, well then you’re just out of luck,” Grandpa D said.
Crick started to doubt his own abilities. It was like senior year of high school all over again. Back then, Crick was invited to attend a high school all-star game in Florida, but he didn’t think a little kid from a little school in Nebraska could be that good. He went anyway and found a coach there who taught him things Cozad High couldn’t offer. After the game, Crick was ranked one of the game’s top 11 all-stars.
Whatever confidence came along with that success was gone now. He didn’t know what to do or how to do it. So he decided to hold back and focus on not making mistakes.
And then he found two coaches who taught him things Cosgrove didn’t offer.
Bo and Carl Pelini replaced Callahan and Cosgrove after the 2007 season, told Crick what he was doing wrong and rejuvenated his football career.
“He just keeps taking coaching,” Carl Pelini said of Crick. “He works as hard as any guy I’ve ever coached. He’s really coming into his own. I love the guy.”
Up until Saturday, Grandpa D said he felt like Crick was playing conservatively because he was afraid of overstepping his bounds and making a mistake. But with the support of his family in the stands, Crick put his guard down.
Grandpa D had reminded his grandson a week before the game that the 34 would be there to watch him. He told Crick then to make sure “you crank it up a notch or two.”
“And I guess he did,” Davidson said with a laugh. “He might have got it full-throttle; I don’t know.”
krisknowlton@dailynebraskan.com
