Full Steam Ahead

Sporting News, The, March 13, 2000 by Kyle Veltrop

A perspective fresh enough to knock you off your Rocker.

"Freight Train" is how Morris was known at BYU, and when you carry a moniker like that, you leave the biggest, widest tracks after you're gone. Provo has his markings all over it.

Morris redshirted a year after his mission to get back into football shape, but when he returned to game action, it was like he was back on the fields of Nampa. The next three seasons, the Freight Train arguably was the best middle linebacker in college football. BYU officials sent out wooden train whistles--with the inscription "Official Butkus Award Candidate of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers"--before Moms' senior year.

He never was a top contender for the award that, like his dog, was named after one of his heroes because he missed four games with an abdominal injury. When he came back, it probably was too soon, and the Cougars' 8-1 start regressed to an 8-4 finish. But Morris' BYU legacy should not be an injury. Just the opposite, in fact.

"Rob would always practice when he was hurt," Tait says. "There were some days he probably shouldn't have been out there, but he would be because he didn't want to set a bad example. Rob is a guy always giving for the team. He'd sell out his body to win. He had a total disregard for himself when it came to accomplishing things as a team."

Morris was a difference-maker, someone who brought unbelievable toughness to a team known for its finesse offense. Nothing cheap, mind you. But playing dirty, well, that's a different side of the street. If the guy Moms was going up against had a chance to retaliate, then anything was fair.

"You have to flip that switch where you have to be willing to tear someone's throat out," Morris says. "Gotta be mean, gotta be tough. Football is a tough game played by tough guys. You gotta be a fighter; you can't be a weenie."

Though Moms is part Steve Young, there also is a dash of Jim McMahon. Moms has been known to dye his hair--"I usually tried blond, but it usually came out orange"--or shave it off Writers coveting BYU staked him out for his shock-value observations. Morris and one of his college roommates dressed up like the heavy-metal band AC/DC and videotaped themselves jamming on broomsticks they used as make-believe guitars. "Anything to make the day a little different," Moms says.

In another chapter of the "Adventures with Rob Morris," he and Tait went on a trail that knifed between swamps in the Florida Everglades. Though most visitors opt for a tour bus, Morris and Tait rode bikes. Moms wanted to get a shot of himself next to an alligator, so he got off his bike and, with Tait imploring him to get closer, Moms tried luring the gators by taunting them with a stick. Later, Tait and Moms read that their camera-shy friends could run faster than 3 0 miles per hour. Not the smartest thing Morris has done, but he got his shot and that videotape is in the four-star section of his movie collection.

Then there's his thing with heights; he doesn't like them. Which explains why he has jumped off the roof of his apartment building into the complex's 8-foot-deep pool, gone parasailing in Key West and been strapped into a high-rise swing in Las Vegas that dropped him multiple stories at face-stretching speed.