Welcome Back, Morgan
By Hannah Gordon
May 28, 2003 9:00 p.m.
Steve Morgan has a story to tell. It is one of his favorites,
and as he sits he’s riveted, too.
You can see that this will be one his students hear when he
returns to Dallas to become a teacher.
“So we’re barely winning and in the last few seconds
of the game, the quarterback throws a pass and the receiver ““
this is a receiver, mind you ““ he jukes out a couple players
and he’s running for the end zone,” UCLA’s former
defensive tackle recalls of the 2000 Arizona game.
The kids will no doubt sit still, as if listening to their
grandfather rather than just another teacher. The energy Morgan
tells the story with is contagious.
“If he gets a touchdown, we lose the game. There I am,
this big ol’ d-lineman, and I catch him.”
“That was our last win of that season, so we would not
have gone to a bowl game without that win,” he adds
gleefully.
Morgan graduates this June from UCLA with a B.A. in sociology
after playing defensive tackle for the last five years for the UCLA
football team. But like most college football players,
Morgan’s playing career ends here. Instead of the NFL, Morgan
will move back to his native Dallas to be a teacher and possibly a
high school football coach.
“I think it is absolutely wonderful,” defensive line
coach Don Johnson said. “A young man setting goals and
objectives for himself, that is just wonderful.”
“I can see him being a teacher. He’s good at talking
to kids,” fellow defensive tackle Rodney Leisle said.
Morgan sat in a high school classroom not so long ago. Like
every recruit, he had dreams of starting in college and making the
next level.
“But coaches instilled in me that less than 1 percent of
high school players make the NFL,” Morgan said. “I knew
it was slim-to-none in the first place. It took me five years to
get my degree, and that is why I stuck with it.”
Many young players do not realize that fact and fail to prepare
for a future after football. This is another lesson Morgan has to
teach. Many of Morgan’s teammates in the past have left
school after their final season to train, only to not get
drafted.
Morgan learned how fickle football is the hard way. He would
have had a chance to make an NFL training camp as a free agent
after an injury-free and solid career. Then he tore his ACL in the
last three minutes of the last game of his senior season at the
Vegas Bowl.
“On Christmas of all days,” Morgan said. “I
was devastated.”
His high school players will no doubt hear this story as well.
They would be wise to listen. The national college football
graduation rate was 51 percent in 2001.
“He had to reset his priorities after the injury. If most
student athletes had a plan, they would be successful,”
Johnson said.
Morgan has not entirely let go of his dream of making an NFL
roster someday. He is currently rehabilitating his knee in case
“anyone comes calling.”
Morgan led the defensive line in tackles his senior season with
37, and had eight tackles for loss, and four sacks.
“I learned a lot from coach Fields, coach Johnson and
coach Snow,” Morgan said.
“People helped me get where I am, but I feel a lot of
people don’t have that. I want to be an inspiration and help
people to aspire to better things,” he added.
So perhaps he will tell his students some of his other
stories.
“This is my favorite personal highlight,” Morgan
says, looking straight forward, as if he is seeing it unfold before
him on an imaginary field.
UCLA, playing Oregon on Oct. 12, 2002, is down by one point when
Ducks tailback Onterrio Smith hits a hole and then jukes a
corner.
“This is a legitimate 4.3 (second) 40 (yard) runner in
Onterrio Smith. He was gonna score a touchdown for sure which would
have made it an eight-point game and ended awful.”
As Smith takes off, a lumbering lineman behind him changes
direction and suddenly comes charging. Morgan throws his arms
around Smith, as if Smith were a child instead of one of the best
athletes in the league, and brings him down.
“After about 45 yards, I chase him down and we stop him on
that drive,” Morgan says. The exact time and yards of the
play grow in Morgan’s telling, but it doesn’t
matter.
Someday Mr. Morgan’s students will stare at this
6-foot-3-inch, 300-pound former defensive tackle, trying to imagine
him chasing down a Heisman-quality tailback. Imagining the
impossible and aspiring to it.
