Here he is, walking on with North Carolina’s special teams, jamming his foot through the tradesman’s entrance to Division I football. It’s the job no one wants, sprinting with the abandon of a runaway train through a minefield of brawn. “Mack,” says Luke Paschall, Hollins’ special teams and scout team coach, “Effort’s going to be how you get on the field. It may not be receiver, but special teams. And effort.”
Effort? No sweat. “Mack’s one of the hardest workers on the team, easily,” says senior Luke Heavner, a fellow walk-on and receiver. “Outwork everybody” served as the coda to Richard’s text exchanges with his son. Put your head down, do your job. Someone will notice. Everyone soon warms to the guy who, as Richard says, would give them the shirt off his back. The upperclassmen give him nicknames, chat him up, wrap their arms around him, elect him special teams captain in 2013, see him win a scholarship and soar up the depth chart this week to No. 2 on the weak side. He’s the walk-on who is far less an outsider than a brother.
Easy, there. Can’t be that easy for The Unlucky Kid, he who wears No. 13. He who gets kicked off his football team in Rockville, Md., during his senior year for defending himself against an antagonistic teammate. He who clears his name after a month-long court dispute when the lineman’s parents file assault charges. He who takes a three-month football sojourn after high school to Virginia’s Fork Union Military Academy when no D-I program calls.
“You’re just out here in no man’s land trying to function and taking orders and marching,” says John Shuman, Fork Union’s football coach. The day before he leaves for UNC’s training camp in 2012, Mack sprains his ankle hopping off of his Rockville patio. Richard shakes his head. “You can’t make the club in the tub, man.”
Yes, this is more like it. Two years before the scholarship lands, Mack takes out loans and pays for out-of-state tuition. For room and board at Craige North his first year and Odum Village his second. Buys a meal plan and scarfs down ramen noodles and PB&J in between practices, film sessions and classes.
Here’s Mack: trying to claw his way onto the team, trying to leap from special teams chum to the Kenan Stadium turf, trying to impress a group of coaches that barely recall this 6-foot-3-inch, 200-pound unknown. And he’s worried, above all, how his parents will afford the cost of out-of-state tuition. Richard, an assistant fitness trainer at Life Time Fitness and Karyn, who works in sales, toil to keep oldest son Brian at Stanford and Mack at UNC, with youngest son Drew helping the cause by opting for the Marines. But that’s the deal, Richard would tell them: Don’t you worry about a thing. We’re doing our job — you do yours. Two years later, they’d drive six hours down from Maryland to thank the coaching staff in person for awarding Mack his scholarship.
The job of the walk-on isn’t for the faint of football. Richard knew it, having roomed with one in the early ‘80s as a wide receiver at West Virginia. “It’s not going to be easy,” Richard always said.
Neither is switching positions, from safety to wide receiver in 2013. Or learning a new playbook. Whatever’s necessary to sniff the roster.
