Title: The Turtle Island Sunday Night One-Hit Wonder Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 22, 2009 Author:YouTube Post Date:2009-02-22 20:05:37 by Turtle Keywords:None Views:389 Comments:12
At Penn State home games, 110,000 of my closest friends sing this song at the end of every 3rd quarter. For those pleasant Fall afternoons in the mountain air, the NWO is non existent.
Jarvis Redwine last visited Nebraska for a game in September 1999.
Redwine was among a group of former players who were to be introduced before the Southern Miss game as new members of the Nebraska football Hall of Fame.
Redwine attended a dinner for the inductees the night before the game. But when he arrived at Memorial Stadium the next morning, he encountered a problem shared by many in Lincoln - where to park? He had stayed in Omaha and was running late, having underestimated the time it would take to travel the 50 or so miles to Lincoln, driving in the bumper-to-bumper traffic that clogs the west-bound lanes of Interstate 80 on home football Saturdays. He had made it, but with little time to spare.
He settled on a space near the since-razed Big Red Shop on the stadium's west side. Pleased with his good fortune, Redwine pulled into the space, but was quickly warned the vehicle would be towed.
"I'll be right back. I'm not going to stay for the game," he said.
That didn't matter, he was told. So he backed out of the space, pulled onto the interstate and returned to Omaha, where he spent the day with former Cornhusker teammate Brent Williams before returning to his home in Los Angeles.
The moral? Not much bothers Jarvis Redwine, who has learned to roll with life's punches.
"We had a good time," says the 44-year-old Redwine, who works in the Northwest Airlines ground services department at Los Angeles International Airport and coaches at Culver City High School, assisting with the varsity football team and the freshman baseball team and working for new mentors Jerry Chabola, the Culver City AD, and head baseball coach Rich Prieto.
Redwine was a good enough baseball player to be drafted by the Oakland Athletics out of high school, as a left-handed hitting outfielder. He still plays in a competitive senior league.
He also has invested in real estate in the Los Angeles area. "I'm not a millionaire," he says. "It's not a lavish life. But I'm not poor. I've always given a shout-out to God. That's what keeps me going. No matter how bad it seems to be, somebody's got it worse. I'm blessed."
Redwine has always exhibited that attitude. That's how he ended up transferring to Nebraska in the fall of 1978, after two seasons at Oregon State. The Beavers had won a recruiting battle for Redwine, whose running ability with a football at Inglewood (Calif.) High School had attracted attention from several Division I-A schools, including UCLA, Arizona State and Notre Dame. He picked Oregon State because of the opportunity to play immediately. But the opportunity came at a price. The Beavers rarely won.
Losing put pressure on the coaches, who put pressure on the players. "So I did the unorthodox thing. I dropped out of school," says Redwine. "I thought it would be better if I did something else."
"Something else" was construction work in Corvallis, which quickly lost its appeal. Redwine decided to try football again, at a different school. And that school turned out to be Nebraska.
His interest in the Cornhuskers was coincidental. He picked them primarily because of Gene Huey, currently an assistant for the Indianapolis Colts who was Nebraska's receivers coach at the time. Huey had tried to recruit Redwine out of high school while an assistant at New Mexico.
The story goes that Redwine was watching the 1977 Nebraska-Oklahoma game on television when he saw Huey on the Nebraska sideline and decided he would be a Cornhusker. But Redwine remembers it now as being less dramatic. He called New Mexico and found out Huey had gone to Nebraska.
A long distance phone call to Huey was all it took for him to transfer. "Gene told me, 'Hey, you'll be at the bottom of the totem pole,'" Redwine says. "They didn't offer me anything."
Actually, Nebraska did offer him a new lease on his football life. In contemplating a transfer, "I got down on my knees and prayed," says Redwine. "And my prayers were answered."
Nebraska has long been a haven for walk-ons, and Redwine joined that largely anonymous group, practicing with the scout team while sitting out the 1978 season as a transfer.
Then he quickly shed the anonymity. In the third game in 1979, a nationally televised 42-17 victory against Penn State, he came off the bench to replace an injured Isaiah Hipp and rushed for 124 yards.
Despite not starting until the fourth game, and being hampered by a knee injury suffered in the eighth game at Missouri, Redwine finished with 1,042 rushing yards, becoming only the fifth Cornhusker to reach 1,000.
His first season's performance earned him an endorsement from then-coach Tom Osborne as Nebraska's best chance at a Heisman Trophy winner since Johnny Rodgers in 1972. Redwine suffered a broken rib midway through his senior season, however, and dropped out of the Heisman race. Even so, he was the first Cornhusker to rush for 1,000 yards in back-to-back seasons, gaining 1,119.
Because of the injuries, and an undeserved reputation for being a problem, the soft-spoken Redwine wasn't selected until the second round of the NFL draft, despite the rushing yardage and a 7.1-yards-per-carry average for his career. He was the 52nd pick overall, by the Minnesota Vikings.
Though he describes Bud Grant as a "class coach," his experience with the Vikings wasn't good. Almost all of the action he saw in three NFL seasons was on kickoff returns. "I was at Nebraska, a cold-weather school, but I'm a southern California guy. They (the Vikings) knew that," Redwine says. "Here you have this hotdog - I was portrayed as that - going from one strict program to another. I went from wearing white shoes to black."
The Vikings drafted him with the idea of playing indoors, on an artificial surface at the Metrodome. But they still played outside at Metropolitan Stadium, on grass, his rookie season. And opinions regarding his ability were based on that. "This guy can't run in our offense," they concluded. "I wasn't suited to that team," he says. "I look at it like this. I went from a team that ran 90 percent of the time to a team that passed 90 percent of the time."
That's not to say Redwine holds a grudge against Grant. He considers himself lucky for having played for men like Osborne and Grant. "I was fortunate to be around some good coaches," he says.
His final NFL season was 1983. By then, he had an NFL lifestyle, but not a college degree. He still doesn't have one. But he hasn't dismissed the possibility of returning to Nebraska to finish. "That's what I want to do," he says. "But you get your feet planted in life, in a certain structure."
In the years after he left the Vikings, Redwine worked various jobs in the Minneapolis area. He coached. He worked at a halfway house. He counseled sex offenders. He worked for a Catholic Charities service, dealing with battered women. And he worked in a behavioral achievement center. At one point, "I was working close to five jobs," he says.
In 1988, two years after he began with Northwest Airlines, he and wife Frances divorced. And in 1991, he transferred to Los Angeles, to be close to his parents. His father is in a care facility now. His mother still lives in the house in which he grew up in Inglewood. "I weathered the storm, went through a lot of stuff," he says. Leaving Minneapolis "was a chance to get my life together."
In addition to earning All-America honors, Redwine was twice selected as "the Most Popular Cornhusker" in voting sponsored by a Lincoln grocery chain. Nebraska fans also gave him the nickname "Marvelous Jarvis." The decision to return to football after dropping out of Oregon State "was the best thing that could have happened," Redwine says. "The people (at Nebraska) are great. I'd do it again.
"Nobody in the world could get me to say anything bad about Nebraska." Not even the threat of a tow outside Memorial Stadium.