Out of his way!

Sporting News, The, August 18, 1997 by David Jones

No one had seen Curtis Enis in four days. He was officially a missing person. And he wanted it that way.

It was the summer after his senior year in high school. To everyone else, the future seemed to lie out for Enis like a beckoning highway on a sunny day.

Just months before, he had been named the Ohio High School Football Player of the Year and had accepted a scholarship to Penn State, pending his academic qualification. It seemed all the prodding and needling of his mother, Thelma, had worked.

Many years before earning stardom as Penn State's bread-and-butter tailback, Curtis would sit at the kitchen table in his family's tiny, three-room house located adjacent to the railroad tracks in Union City, Ohio, a town of almost 2,000 on the Indiana border about 40 miles northwest of Dayton. He would do his homework while his mother washed the dinner dishes. He was a little boy with big dreams.

"I'm going to be a basketball player and go to college," he'd say proudly.

"Oh, you're not gonna make it," she would reply, looking away as if disinterested, purposely goading him. "You won't work hard enough. You'll let all the white people stand in your way."

Little Curtis would go fuming out the door and run to the rickety basketball hoop out back. Oh, he'd show her. He'd stand out there and shoot 100 jumpers -- 200 -- until the stars came out in the pristine black sky of Darke County. All you could hear in the flatlands and cornfields were the thump-thump of Curtis' of ball, a far-off train horn and crickets.

As the years passed, Curtis played every sport. And he grew. By the time he was a senior, he stood 6-0 and had shaped his 225 pounds into a block of muscle. And it looked as if he would make it -- as a football player.

That last season at tiny Mississinawa Valley High School, he amassed 2,764 yards rushing and left as the state's career rushing leader. Enis (rhymes with Venus) seemingly had it all -- offers to play linebacker or tailback from Penn State and Ohio State and Michigan, townspeople talking about him non-stop, a chance to be the first person in his family to get a college education. And it was all because of football, a game he had grown to love.

He love the giddiness before games, the tension so deliciously intense that he would get sick to his stomach and be pleased knowing he was ready.

He loved looking in his teammates' eyes. They were the same teammates, the same white boys, who'd stuck up for him on the road trips when racial taunts showered from behind the facemasks of strange teenagers and from their drunken parents in the stands.

He loved the contact, the head-on collisions when he could eye a defender taking aim at him, focus his energy on that space and explode into it.

And he relished his football heritage, walking in the footprints of his older brother Victor, a star two years ahead of him at Mississinawa Valley, and his uncle Ric, a star tailback under Lee Corso two decades before at Indiana University.

But it was now the summer of 1994. High school was over and Curtis was standing in a crossroads of his life. He was scared.

After football had ended in the fall, it had occurred to him more and more what he was in this place: the Back Athlete. Nothing more. It was a persona he detested. Bright and eloquent, he felt like a specimen on display.

He had coasted through high school, had been allowed to graduate with D's and F's sprinkled across his transcripts and had been pushed through MVHS while the school reaped the fiscal benefits of the thousands who came to see him dominate on the field.

Enis definitely had taken an active part in his demise. He lied about nonexistent doctors' appointments to get out of class, did only enough homework to get by and scoffed at the few teachers who challenged him.

He used an after-school landscaping job an excuse to get drunk and smoke dope. He fell out of shape. He didn't even take the SAT on the last date it was available in May of his senior year. By the end of the school year in June, it became apparent he wasn't going to Penn State, the university he'd picked a year before. He wasn't going anywhere.

One Friday, he jumped in a car with a girlfriend and took off, driving down an open highway -- not to his future, but away from it.

Three days and nights of binge drinking and smoking grass in Richmond, Ind., brought him no closer to a resolution. And so, finally, Curtis did the only thing he knew. He drove back to Union City.

"Mom had just pulled in from work and go out of her car," Enis remembered. "I pulled into the lane and just started crying. I hugged her and said,`Mom, I don't want this anymore.'

"All she said was, `What do you want out of life, Curtis?'"

Curtis looked in his mother's eyes. This was a woman who had come to Ohio from Arkansas in 1966 as a migrant worker, She had never dreamed of college. Her existence was hand-to-mouth, day-to-day, in broiling heat at a time when treatment of migrants was so harsh it spawned Edward R. Murrow's landmark documentary, "Harvest of Shame."