Derrick Henry has always been big in little Yulee
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Version 0 of 1. Heisman Trophy winners have hailed from Adel, Iowa (pop. 4,000), from Springhill, La. (5,269), from Hooks, Tex. (2,769), from Wrightsville, Ga. (2,195) and from Tuttle, Okla. (6,019). They have hailed from Cleveland, the one in Oklahoma (3,249), and from Miami, the one in Oklahoma (13,570). [Three finalists for Heisman, but it’s a two-horse race] Come Saturday night, the announcement of this year’s winner figures to alert us to the continuing presence of Yulee (11,491 in 2010), which sits in that little notch at the very northeastern corner of Florida. It’s named for David Levy Yulee (1810-1886), the son of a Moroccan immigrant and the first Jewish U.S. senator. “The town isn’t incorporated,” said Bobby Ramsay, the well-traveled, 36-year-old head coach of the Yulee High Hornets. “There’s no town council. No mayor. There’s no real downtown. The joke used to be that this was where people from Georgia would come to get lottery tickets. . . . We’re the last thing you hit on [Interstate] 95 leaving Florida and the first thing you hit coming in.” In 2008, when Ramsay arrived, a running backs coach from the middle school team kept telling him about this large lad, Derrick. Then one day, as Ramsay drove from the school grounds, he looked over at the middle-school field. “They’re all about 5-foot-4, and all of a sudden there’s this spike in the middle of them. I equate it to having a stock having a good month on a chart.” The middle-school games, he said, “were a cross between comical and pathetic.” “Certain things,” he said, “you kind of keep looking at, and you think, ‘Am I seeing this right?’” Ramsay said all this as he awaited his weekend trip to New York, because that eighth-grader has become the 21-year-old front-runner for the 81st Heisman Trophy. Alabama running back Derrick Henry gained — no, really — 12,124 yards with 153 touchdowns at Yulee, and 1,986 this junior season, a record in a Southeastern Conference with a long history of yearning to establish the run. A fearsome sight at 242 pounds and 6 feet 3 — his height pretty much since Ramsay first saw him — he already won the Maxwell Award for top college player and the Doak Walker Award for top running back. [Army-Navy game: Reynolds has chance to stand alone in rivalry history] Alabama Coach Nick Saban, not a careless raver, has raved so effusively that Ramsay said happily, “It’s like a bromance, you know.” Here came bromantic language from Saban just after Alabama’s victory over Florida in the SEC championship game last Saturday: “I don’t know that I’ve coached many players that actually set a better example to affect other people. He doesn’t really do it for himself. He does it for them. [A player] that has as much work ethic, that doesn’t get frustrated, can overcome adversity, and really sets the best example every day not only on the field and how he practices and what he does, but how he lives his life, how he goes to school, how he does in class. He’s not afraid to tell somebody else, ‘This is a better way to do it.’ So he is a really good leader, sets a great example. I don’t know that there’s any player on the team that the team means more to them than it does to Derrick.” At one point in that same news conference, Henry uttered music to the ear of any coach when he said, “I’m still not where I want to be with pass blocking.” “He plays for the right reasons,” Ramsay said. “One of the reasons I got into coaching was I loved being part of a team. You see in that as good a player as he is, he’s not playing because he’s got some touchdown celebration innovation to do. In our locker room, he could mess with the players and they could mess with him.” The tide, Crimson and otherwise, shifted toward Henry on the night of Nov. 7, when he gained 210 yards on 38 carries in a 30-16 win against then-No. 2 Louisiana State, while then-front-runner Leonard Fournette got 31 on 19 carries. From there, as Henry posted two more 200-yard games to bring his total to four (among nine 100-yard games), chatter has centered on his workload, with its 90 carries in the last two games, 46 against Auburn and 44 against Florida. “I just kind of chuckle,” Ramsay said. In a Godzilla game his senior year at Yulee, Henry carried 57 times for 485 yards and six touchdowns. One game in ninth grade, he rushed 46 times, and while Ramsay did not call those plays, he said, “I remember hearing that total and thinking Child Protective Services was going to come lock me up.” So now, they’ve had a buzzy week at Yulee, such that the receptionist answers the phone at the high school, hears a question and says with a clear wink, “You mean our superstar at Alabama?” As the Heisman Trophy could go from Honolulu (home of Marcus Mariota, the 2014 winner) all the way across to Yulee this time, it could go to a player from a school that did not exist from 1965 to 2006. Yulee High closed for 41 years, the would-be Yulee students sent to nearby Fernandina Beach. When at last it returned, a 1957 graduate, Mary Lou Tucker, said to Mary Hurst of the Florida Times-Union, “After the school closed, Yulee lost its identity as far as a community. After 41 years, Yulee will have its community and its school again. I think it’s wonderful.” Fernandina Beach “was never ‘our’ school. The Fernandina Beach kids called us ‘Yulee coolies’ and all that stuff.” Yulee, 25 minutes from the middle of Jacksonville, is not so much like Adel, Iowa, or Springhill, La., or, Ramsay said, the Mayberry of TV fame. “It’s a little bit of everything,” he said. “It’s got a suburban element. It’s got its rural element. It’s got its beach element. It’s got its transient element. It’s certainly a place you could come back 25 years later and you wouldn’t even recognize it because there’s still a lot of land to be built on.” It’s just that one guy from the fold grew so rapidly that he conjured a stock chart, and he cared so much that Saturday figures to be a fun night in Yulee. |