Jets' Willie Colon Attends to His South Bronx Roots
By Chris Cascarano Back to the Bronx With Willie Colon: Willie Colon, the Jets' right guard who was raised in the South Bronx and recently revisited his old neighborhood, is intensely proud of where he grew up.
By BEN SHPIGEL
Published: October 11, 2013
The quarter-mile strip of asphalt and concrete connects the pillars of Willie Colon's life in the South Bronx. It does not have an official name. It is an access road that branches off Concourse Village East, a road that is now paved, not covered in dirt and dust and gravel as it was more than a decade ago, when it bridged the chaos of Colon's neighborhood and the structure of his school.
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Willie Colon, signing autographs at Jets training camp, joined the team in March. More Photos »
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It is important to Willie Colon, right, with his mother, Jean, that he maintains this bond with his old community in the South Bronx. More Photos »
In the mornings, he would leave his fifth-floor apartment in the Melrose Houses on East 156th Street to walk down that road for another day at Cardinal Hayes High School. In the evening, after football or basketball practice, he headed back, his size 17 feet dodging drug paraphernalia, discarded tires and the homeless.
He left the projects in 2001 when he went to Hofstra on Long Island. He left the New York metropolitan area in 2006, when he was drafted as an offensive lineman by Pittsburgh and spent seven seasons with the Steelers. He returned in March, when he joined the Jets, and soon began to exert his influence as a respected veteran in the locker room. Whenever his schedule allows — Fridays or Saturdays after practice, usually — he drives back to visit his mother, his relatives, his longtime family friends.
It is important to Colon, 30, that he maintains this bond with his old community. Early on, he realized that he could not, would not, succumb to the temptations and dangers that ensnared so many of his peers. He is grateful to those who raised him, who helped him leave and forge a better life, but intensely proud of where he grew up.
"I never wanted to feel like a visitor in my home," Colon said. "I never wanted to come back where those ladies on the bench didn't recognize me."
On a recent afternoon, Colon grasped the hand of his mother, Jean Davis, and together they walked along a path in the projects, outside their building. Shouts greeted him as they strolled toward a set of green benches, toward people who knew him, he said, when he was "knee-high from a butterfly."
He dispensed hugs and kisses and posed for cellphone photographs. Colon embraced Pat, the close family friend who lobbied for more outside playing time for him and his younger brother, Antonio. An older man, pretending to throw a football, told Colon that he once tossed four touchdown passes in high school. Colon smiled and said the Jets might need him.
"It's just eerie to come back here sometimes," Colon said, "and realize, you know, the same people are still here."
Davis, 64, has lived in the same apartment since 1952. She and her husband, Willie Sr., who died in 2008, raised three children there, and, despite Colon's coaxing, she does not want to leave — not yet, at least. He worries about her as she does about him, which is why although she attends many of her son's games — the Jets play Sunday at MetLife Stadium against her beloved Steelers — she does not watch them much.
"Too violent," she said.
Most of the storefronts on Courtlandt Avenue have changed. Gone is the bodega where Colon and Antonio would pool their change to buy the pile of penny candies that fueled their all-day basketball binges. The courts were packed in the summer, with boys seeking street cred and drug dealers loitering against the back fence.
The older boys bullied the younger ones, pushing them off the court. The best and toughest players survived. That first time Colon earned his way into a serious pickup game, he called it a rite of passage. He developed his snarl there, diving for loose balls, throwing elbows. Brawls broke out once, twice, three times a day. The rat-tat-tat of gunshots interrupted games but did not end them.
"For most people, that's like a year's worth of excitement," Colon said. "That was a Tuesday for us."
Their apartment looked out on to a park, and from the window, Davis would keep watch. Colon and Antonio, born 15 months apart, had strict orders: never leave without each other. From school. The playground. The pizza shop that sold dollar slices and 50-cent sodas, their lunch on Saturdays.
When gunfire one night disrupted their mission to fetch a Pepsi for their mother, they jumped behind the bushes together. They played on the same lines at Hayes, bumping chests after touchdowns. They were also outside that morning when Davis fell in front of their building.
Colon was 5, maybe 6; he does not recall. He does remember being terrified, and he does remember that it was the same day that his older sister, Joy Smith-Jones, now an assistant principal at Middle School 45 in the Bronx, was to leave for SUNY Fredonia. Davis was ferried to the hospital, where she later had a stroke.
The cause, she learned, after nearly two years of misdiagnoses, was lupus. The disease sapped her strength, ravaging her kidneys and knocking her into a wheelchair for a few months. She left her job, as a drug counselor at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. She had to relearn how to walk. She also summoned the energy to walk her boys to elementary school, to attend their 8 a.m. games.
"A pit bull in a skirt," Colon called her.
It was crucial for Davis and Willie Sr. that their sons attend Hayes, the all-boys Catholic school that produced Regis Philbin, Martin Scorsese and Don DeLillo, to reinforce the discipline they instilled at home. She paid regular visits to William Lessa, Colon's guidance counselor at Hayes, to ask about grades, SAT dates, financial aid forms.
"There was no way these guys weren't going to go to college and be educated," said Lessa, now the principal at Hayes, as Colon nodded along in his office. "There was no way that they would be anything less than successful."
C. J. O'Neil, the football coach, interjected. "And live."
"And live," Lessa said.
On his first day at Hayes, Colon was ordered to line up outside with his classmates. Anyone who had not shaved was sent home. He stayed. Many of his classmates did not.
More than 500 boys started in his freshman class, he said. About 100 graduated with him, the rest leaving because of behavior problems or tuition costs or other reasons. Those who remained drew closer, Colon said, as he stood beneath the balcony of the Regis Philbin Auditorium, where Mass was said and plays were staged.
"This place would be rocking," Colon said. "Everybody would be singing."
Colon had not visited Hayes in a few years — possibly, he said, since the day after he was drafted. He had not seen the large mural in the basement gym that, inside the "S" of Cardinals, the school's nickname, depicted Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger jumping into his arms during their Super Bowl XLIII victory.
Davis, who had what Colon called a boy-band crush on Franco Harris, was in the stands that night in Tampa, Fla., sitting in the corner of the end zone where Santonio Holmes caught the winning touchdown. She never saw it, she said, because she was reading the Bible.
At Hayes, Colon seemed a bit disoriented after entering Lessa's office.
"This used to be the old detention room, wasn't it?" Colon said. "That's why I keep looking at it."
His transgressions were minor — lateness, mostly. Davis said she would warn him every morning. He would tell her not to worry. Why?
"My feet are big enough," Colon would tell her. "I'm going to get there on time."
And to think, as a boy Colon, called Little Willie, was afraid that he would never grow. Eventually, Davis would tell him.
As a freshman, he stood 5 feet 11 inches and weighed about 250 pounds. One season at fullback — "I was a part-time bus," he said — preceded three on the offensive and defensive lines, where he maximized his size if not colleges' interest in him.
"People don't come in the Bronx to recruit football players," O'Neil said.
At the time, the field at Hayes was as shabby as the road that ran behind it. O'Neil, who was then Colon's position coach, stationed a water cannon in one section to control the dust while players practiced on the dry areas. The field had no lights, but when fall arrived and darkness fell earlier, they benefited from the glow cast by the blimp hovering above playoff games at Yankee Stadium.
On this day, no blimp was overhead, just sunshine. Colon stepped onto the refurbished practice field, with its pristine turf, and watched the linemen thump one another. To Colon, they looked different, smaller — "like two pencils fighting," he said — but still familiar.
He was just like them, a football-loving boy on the edge of manhood, forced to grow up fast. The neighborhood pulled at Colon, and Hayes tugged right back. It was getting late, and Colon had another stop to make. He hugged O'Neil and hopped in his sport utility vehicle. He backed out of the faculty parking lot and shifted into drive, accelerating as he drove up the hill he used to walk, toward his mother, toward his home, again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/sports/football/jets-willie-colon-tends-his-south-bronx-roots.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&pagewanted=all
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