Carter safety
Q: When you think of the '88 team, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
A: Salt of the earth. I grew up with most of them from elementary on. It was one of the greatest experiences that I've ever had in my life.
I was a quiet guy. I just played football and competed every day. As I grew up, I kind of got more vocal and more nostalgic about everything that happened. I want to tell it to somebody because you cannot explain what we were going through. Like 17 and 18 year old kids being in the paper every day. Girls come up to you like you're a rock star. All the dopers wanted to hang out with us. Just crazy.
Q: You are good friends with Gary. Can you talk about what he went through that season?
A: I will tell you, we shouldn't have gotten our title taken. Note-taking and grade-scoring, as a kid, you don't know, but as a grown-up. ... grades had different values?
Come on.
This is nothing like what South Oak Cliff and Roosevelt went through. That was ludicrous. That was a farce. Being an adult, you see it now.
They can take it away from the books, but they can't take it away all the memories on the field and what really happened out there.
Q: How many years did you play in NFL?
A: I was in the league for six. I got, I believe, five active years. Started for about 2½. Oilers 93-94. '95-96, Jacksonville, started for them for two years. Started for Oilers for half of that second year. Was out a year, then finished up with Redskins.
Last year was 1998.
Q: Now you're a Dallas policeman?
A: I left one and went straight to the other. June of 1999.
My neighbor where I was living was an officer. We were good friends. He thought I would make an excellent officer. I thought, 'Nah, not me.'
Nothing bad about it, but I just thought I'd never be a police officer.
I tell you this is where God wanted me to be because I had no idea. I had no doings with picking up the application. My friend stayed on me for two months. Finally I filled it out and was going through a separation with my wife. I had that factor. I wasn't doing anything else. Had put some feelers about coaching and teaching. I'm just mowing my yard and getting fat, figured might as well give it a try.
About two months after filling out the application, they called me for an interview and I kept passing all the tests. Until one time they said report to the police academy June 11. I was like, 'OK.'
Q: Do you have a beat?
A: I patrolled seven years in East Dallas off of Park Lane. When they opened this new station down south, closer to my home, I just now transferred to the Highland Hills area.
Q: How did your Carter teammates react when you became a policeman?
A: I think a couple of them find it fascinating that I'm a police officer (laughs). Some of them find it funny. I've always pretty much kept to myself anyway, though.
Q: I'm guessing some readers might find it interesting that Gary, having been on the other side of the law, and you are good friends. I wonder if that kind of speaks to Gary as a person.
A: In high school, we were friends, but I think it was more after high school because when he got out of jail, he went down to Texas Southern. I was playing for the Oilers. You're in the league and you don't know anybody. Me and Gary and Carlos got close because they went to TSU and I was playing for the Oilers.
I used to go and get him and we'd go hang out just to show him good time. I could imagine what he'd been through. He house-sat for me while I was in training camp. We just became close. We were always associates in high school, plus we played in the same defensive backfield. He was a cornerback and I was a safety. We had a relationship, but it turned into a friendship when we were in Houston.
Q: Same with Carlos?
A: Me and Carlos grew up together, elementary, junior high. Gary met up with us in high school.
Q: What is Carlos doing now?
A: Carlos is cutting hair and he works in a 24-hour store. He has a solid job and is doing well.
Q: When I called you originally, mention of the '88 season seemed to jostle some strong emotions for you.
A: You realize as you get older that you've done something most high school people will never do. You have a certain perspective that a lot of people will never see because back then, there hadn't been a team to win a state championship in Dallas.
This is like a big buzz and the newspaper columnists, all of them who have gone to New York and Washington, they were covering us. Dale Hansen had just gotten on the scene. It was a pretty big thing here in Dallas.
That '87 (Carter) team was probably better than us, with Darren Lewis and all those guys. We were on that team, we were sophomores on that team playing. We just had more discipline and more dedication to the sport than what they had.
It was just a magical time. Every day you had college recruiters coming up there to the school. I remember postering my whole room with letters from colleges. Not just the walls, but the ceiling. I mean my whole room. Being young, I never even knew anything about the situation. I just thought it was cool.
All my life, I wanted to be a Nebraska Cornhusker, but that didn't pan out. I remember Tom Osborne coming into my living room and them telling me I was their first choice. I said I wanted to take my trips. The recruiting coordinator said I had to commit or they would go with their No. 2 choice.
Guess what, I went to Hawaii. That was one of the best times I've had in my life. I'm surprised I even made it back home.
Q: When your teammates talk about the '88 playoffs, one of the first things they mention is the Marshall game and when you leveled their running back, Odell Beckham.
A: He was something to behold. I remember him getting the ball, running to his left, my right. I'm coming up and filling in and he had more speed than what I thought. I wound up catching him at the collar kind of like Roy Williams. Instead of dragging him down, I torqued my body and picked him up off his feet. And as I turned my body, I slammed him on his head with his feet straight up in the air.
Matter of fact, they had it on the news. Kind of like a rag doll, I slammed him down. I surprised myself. I ran back to the huddle and he was furious. The guys said, 'LeShae, that guy's looking at you.'
Q: Some of your teammates mentioned that some guys talked quite a bit on the field.
A: Oh, yeah, but that was everybody. To this day, if I'm competin' you're going to hear me. That's all part of the mind game.
Nothing about being cocky. It's about probing the person's mental weaknesses. Because if I can get to you mentally, the physical stuff is going to be easy. If you get all wrapped up in it, that's going to fire us up even more.
Yeah, I could talk some noise. I wasn't as bad as Derric, because Derric and Jessie could talk a lot of noise. Back there in the secondary, you have to stay a little humble. But when it came to talking noise, I could talk, too.
Q: Gary said that during the playoff run, none of his teammates held the grade issue against him.
A: Nobody ever that I saw, that never even crossed our heads. I mean, to this day, I don't have any regret toward him. Anything. Had you been there, like I told you, it was all a farce. To do grade-keeping, and I forgot his name now, to do it with different symbols, and different symbols did different things on different days. All depends on if you made him mad or not.
Gary has never been the smartest person, but he wasn't the dumbest, either. Coach James and coach Vonner were like fathers to us. They stayed on our grades. Back then, you got a paddling. They had boards and they weren't afraid to use them.
As you grow up now, you realize, 'Man, he (Edwards) must have been going through a lot of stuff. Because I have kids now, too. But back then, you're just in the moment.
Getting on and getting off those busses, that was one pressure like none other. That's like having your dream snatched from you every time you get off that bus. By you being a senior, that's it for you.
Not only that, we were fighting tradition at Dallas Carter because we were always known for losing in that first and second round. And we had to be in school, make sure we were perfect, and then come out in the community and make sure we were perfect, with all the attention, with everybody watching us. That was tremendous pressure that actually made us gel more as a team because we didn't want to let anybody down. If somebody broke out on one side, and I'm just speaking for the defense, you would have 10 other people chasing him.
The Judson game, they had one of the fastest running backs in the state. He broke out early in the game and we had six or seven guys run him down. After that play right there, I think that scared them more than anything.
It wasn't just athleticism. It was fear of letting each other down. The fear of losing. The fear of having everything that's been put on the line dropped. That's how we beat Marshall. We just willed that.
After they scored. Jessie grabbed me on the sideline and said, 'Don't worry about it; we're fixing to score. When it time came, he grabbed coach and said, 'Throw me the ball.' I remember it just like it was yesterday.
Q: When some of the players got in trouble after the season, were you surprised? Did you know what was going on? Do you think the pressure you just talked about had any part in it?
A: When you say the pressure, it was more like we were superstars. People going to schools at other schools, the city of Dallas.
That emotional high and that adrenaline rush of stardom that we got every day, it came to a crescendo and all of a sudden it stopped. These days they would try to have counseling, someone to mentor these kids.
We were just let loose on the city.
And everybody made their own personal decisions to do what they did, so I'm not blaming it on anybody else. But what else did you have to replace that rush? It was addictive. Out of all the great teams at Carter, and we knew all the great teams at Carter, they had never done what we had done.
It was over. What do you do?
Jimmy Johnson coming down and the head coach at Tennessee coming down and Osborne and Michigan, 'SC and Houston and A&M and Texas, what do you do? You have an image to uphold, but you didn't have any money. I mean, I can only imagine what they were thinking.
I just know how I felt. I had all that energy and nowhere to put it. I had all this energy and luckily, my uncle, he's a pastor, I had left home to go stay with him. He kept me grounded, a whole lot.
Q: Your uncle's name?
A: Joe Patterson. He's a Baptist pastor.
I stayed with him for the whole summer of my senior year and the whole football season, and probably until February. After I took my trips and committed, I moved back home with my mom, just because we just had some internal turmoil.
I had an older brother who was on drugs and my younger brother getting into trouble, at the time. They're all fine now, have family and jobs. And all three of us have houses and doing well. But back then, my brother was going through a time when he was on drugs and my mom had to raise all of us.
It was three boys, my mom, my grandmother lived with us, my aunt who is a paraplegic, she has severe cerebral palsy. And a cousin. We were all in a three-bedroom house.
That's a humbling experience to have to take care of somebody and to feed them. My mom was going through all that so my aunt could have a bedroom, then the other three in the other rooms. It was crowded and stressful. I told my mom, 'You have a lot going on right now.
Q: What is your mom's name?
A: Nell. She got really mad and told me to go. Looking back upon it, I was one of the things that she could hold onto that was positive. I just saw myself as another mouth to feed, another worry for her. Plus, I was craving mental leadership, too. Because my father died when I was 7. I never even knew him, anyway.
And my uncle, he was the man who was always in my life. I had to go stay with him and she wound up kicking me out almost.
I remember waking up in the morning and catching the bus because I didn't know if I was going to have to transfer schools. Coach James was like, 'No, no. I'll just come get you in the morning.'
I remember waking up early in the morning, Coach James coming to pick me up, me walking down to catch him on his van. I got used to catching the bus. People didn't know, after practice and everything was done, if Coach James stayed at the school until 8, 9 nighttime, I would have to catch the bus just to go home. I would wake up every morning at 5 o'clock so I could be walking down the street at 5:30 because Coach James had to be at school at 6 a.m.
I was pretty disciplined until I got a car and I kind of went crazy a little bit. But the car was at my uncle's house and it was under his condition and I wound up getting a job and everything. I just had male leadership at the time.
When all that stuff stopped, I still had to go to the reverend's house.
Guess what. You don't go to the reverend's house drunk. You don't take whores the reverend's house. You don't do this or that. He's reasonable, but he was a man who I feared. To this day, I don't want to disrespect him. I told him a couple of months ago, `You scare me to this day.'
That's what I needed. That's what he gave me. He probably saved me because, again, I grew up with most of those guys. No telling where I would have been.
Q: Did you know that stuff was going on?
A: No, I didn't. My best friend was Chris Calhoun. If it wasn't with Chris, it wasn't going to be with anybody. Me and Chris weren't into anything except hanging out and going to parties and trying to get girls' phone numbers. Girls and partying. We scratched up whatever money we had for gas and we would pile in my car and ride out.
Q: When you heard about it, were you surprised?
A: I was more just like, 'Whoa, am I in trouble? Are they going to be trying to say I did it? I was surprised by Carlos because Carlos is a kind-hearted guy. He wouldn't hurt a fly. Gary, that didn't seem nothing like Gary. He was scared to get in trouble like that.
How do I explain it? Gary came from a newer house. The houses I grew up in were older homes that had been there, single parents. We were the ones that were rough on my side of the block. We didn't grow up North of Camp Wisdom. We grew up South of Camp Wisdom and East of Polk Street. That's Woods City.
Over there, that's where Darren Lewis grew up. Chet Brooks grew up there. You had houses that were older. We were kind of rougher. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen over there. You've got the dope houses. We grew up fighting and stuff. Gary didn't grow up like that. Gary was always a nice dressing, fun-loving guy.
When that happened, it was just shock, fear, awe. And then, 'They've got to be stupid.' You're riding around, sticking up blockbuster, why did you ride in the car. Not just doing it at all, but why would you do it this way?
I remember reading about it and people calling me and then all of a sudden I got a call from Baylor because then I guess everybody was checking, 'Are you involved in this?' They called me for like two days asking me. Pretty soon they just said, 'Pack your stuff, son, come on down to Waco, so you don't get into trouble.'
I packed my stuff. Me and Robert Strait were the first ones down there. I guess they called in all the high-risk people and put us all into one little deal.
After that, you're fighting a perception now. Because you're going to college and you've got to fight guys saying, 'Hey, get out of my house; I don't need you in here.' You're like, 'Man, I'm no thief.' I had to fight that for four years down there.
Q: Just because you were from Carter and they figured you were trouble?
A: Yeah, and I went to school with Mike Winchell, he was the quarterback of Odessa Permian. He came down to Baylor trying to get a scholarship, so I played with him. You just have to go against that persona, and then just proving yourself.
Q: Since you brought Permian, I wonder how you feel about the book and movie?
A: The way I look at it, we were so good, they had to make a movie about us. But the only thing about it is, I wish there was somebody who would tell our story on camera. Our story, and actually get what all of us were going through. That was untrue.
No, I don't feel bad about it. Matter of fact, I even got the movie and I tell my kids and I tell my Pop Warner kids, 'I was on that Carter team and they're talking about us, but it's not a true story.'
Q: Do you coach your son?
A: I have two sons, LeShai Jr. and I had coached him a couple of years. Now I'm coaching Landon. LeShai is 12. Landon is 10.
The team's name is Oak Cliff Redskins. I grew up in that organization. They were called the Oak Cliff Chiefs. When I came back and had kids, you don't trust your kids to just anybody. I've got nephews, cousins, I've got my whole family over there.
