1 voice, 1 heart, 1 decision
Lymon’s college choice is solely his, but his dad will always have his ear
By Ben Smith
The Journal Gazette
The kid’s an open book.
He comes at you today in a shrieking red shirt and two studs in his earlobes that could double as disco balls, and, sure, you’ve seen this before, it’s all familiar ground. Everything about him comes fully formed from the Blue-Chip High School Athlete training manual, or so it seems. Everything screams Look at me, because, well, everyone is looking at him.
Selwyn Lymon: You know him, right?
Michigan wants him and Purdue wants him and Ohio State wants him, because he stands 6-foot-5 and runs the 40 in a couple of eyeblinks, and, when he wraps his hands around a football, look out. Seven-yard slants turn into 60-yard touchdowns. Quiet square-outs become shouting gamebreakers. He’s the prototype from which Randy Moss sprang, from which half the NFL’s best receivers sprang.
The recruiting Einsteins at Rivals.com rank him the No. 1 college prospect in Indiana. They rank him No. 80 nationwide, No. 8 among receivers. Joe Tiller was on his doorstep the first day he could start visiting recruits; he gets four or five letters a day from colleges, and has two boxes of them stashed away at home.
Selwyn Lymon, from Harding High School. Yeah, you know him.
But did you know he hasn’t even bothered to open some of those letters he has?
And did you know that, in quiet moments, he says all this Blue-Chip High School Athlete noise “starts to wear on you a little bit”?
And did you know that, when you look at him, it’s more than just him you see?
The father was an athlete, too.
He came to the North Side varsity football team as a 145-pound sophomore in 1977, sat behind 1,000-yard rusher Tim Hines the next fall, and then, when Hines went down with ankle injury early that autumn of 1979, stepped in and rushed for 305 yards against Elmhurst one wondrous night. That led to an SAC title for North Side. That led to a football scholarship to Ball State.
Two seasons of glory followed. Little else but heartache followed that.
The father led Ball State in rushing as a sophomore and junior – when he left, he was No. 2 on the school’s all-time rushing list, and he’s still No. 8 – and then, inexplicably, he was switched to receiver before his senior year. He spent the fall running lonely routes out there on the wing, while the football went to everyone else but him.
Then he went to Canada, where he played one season with the Montreal Concordes, tore up a hip flexor, came home. Waited for the phone to ring. Waited in vain.
“I’d kind of lost a step there, and I think that was pretty much the culmination of my career,” he says now.
And then came the son, of course.
Then came Selwyn Lymon. Terry’s boy.
The kid’s an open book. Everything about him you could learn from listening to his father, because the kid himself does.
And so when the recruiters from Ohio State came to Harding football coach Sherwood Haydock not long ago, all but demanding to know why Selwyn Lymon hadn’t hitched himself to the Buckeyes yet, all Haydock could say was he was still trying to decide. What he didn’t say, but could have, is that he was doing exactly what his father told him to do.
“I just simply tell him, ‘Stay objective throughout,’ ” Terry Lymon explains. “Don’t be fast or quick to commit. Sit back and listen, do some research. Listen to what the coach says, and see if he holds to what he says.”
And so Selwyn does. The letters pile up, and he listens. The visitors, two or three a day sometimes, come to Haydock’s classroom in a steady stream (“It got to the point where we had to stop that because I wasn’t getting a chance to teach,” Haydock says), and he listens.
Partly this is because he knows his dad’s story, knows how promises get made and then, for no apparent reason, get broken. And partly it’s because ... well, it’s his dad talking.
“I think he’s the biggest influence in my life right now,” Selwyn says. “Everything that he has done, I want to do.”
Of course, these things are never exact. Like his dad, Selwyn started out as a tailback, ran wild in Metro ball and at Lakeside Middle School – and then, like his dad, was moved to receiver his freshman year at North Side. But this time the move wasn’t inexplicable. This time the move was made because the kid had gotten too tall to play tailback, and yet still had that leggy sprinter’s speed.
“Yeah, I was unhappy because I was real good at what I was doing at running back,” Selwyn recalls. “It was hard. But then it got easy because, I guess from playing running back, I had some sort of field vision and it helped me out.”
And what was Terry’s reaction, watching the past repeat itself?
“Selwyn made the move because Selwyn had outgrown the running back position,” he says. “It was a move to the benefit of Selwyn. So I can’t say it was déjÀ vu.”
None of it ever is, completely.
The father was a father. So what was he gonna do about his son?
He’d pried the PlayStation away from him and enrolled him in Metro ball when he reached the minimum age of 7, and now the boy was dragging his feet. Coming home from practice all 7-year-old surly. Complaining it was too hard.
The boy’s mother thought he was pushing him too hard, and truthfully he himself had started to wonder that. And so he went to the boy’s Metro coach, a man named Buford Majors. Said, look, the boy’s not enjoying this. Said maybe he should pull him out.
Majors just laughed.
“Oh, they all start out like that,” he said. “We get him in a game, you’ll be surprised at what happens.”
And so the father agreed to wait. And the day of the game came. And the first time the boy got his hands on the football, the game stole his heart.
“He fell in love with it,” the father says now.
Wonder of wonders.
The son was an athlete, too.
The kid’s an open book. But his book is not the same as his father’s.
Where Terry is outgoing, never at a loss for words, Selwyn turns down a quieter path. He enjoys writing, his dad says, has an imaginative eye. Though he accepts the limelight that has become his, he has never fully embraced it. His coach, Haydock, says Selwyn enjoys the attention he gets, but, almost alone among the elite players he’s coached, seems immune to Press Clipping Flu.
“He’s one of the only guys I’ve had who’ve had big articles about him and still had a good game afterward,” Haydock says. “I think he just ignores a lot of it. He won’t open up 90 percent of his mail.
“This time last year when he came over to us (from North Side), and I saw how good he was really gonna be, I said, ‘Do you have any preference of any college, what kind of college?’ He said ‘I never even thought about it.’ It just doesn’t go to his head.”
And so he let his coach and the recruiting geniuses and the college scouts who’ve seen him live or on film rave about his speed, his after-the-catch athleticism, the fact that he’s barely scratched the surface of what he can be. Let the letters come, from Purdue or Ohio State or even LSU. Let his coach talk about his great acceleration; let his father say that, ultimately, whatever decision Selwyn makes about colleges is going to have to be Selwyn’s alone, because “you’re the one who’s gonna have to be there, and you’re the one who’s gonna have to put in the work.”
Selwyn will listen to one voice. It is the voice he has always listened to, and always will.
“I have my father to tell me, you know,” Selwyn says. “I’ve got him helping me out every day. He tells me not to get the big head.
“And so I’m still trying to get better and improve. Developing my hands, because I’d never worked on them until I moved to receiver. Just trying to ignore most of the attention and just do my thing, and try to be a leader.”
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Using his Xbox, Lymon said he created players for both sides of Harding’s season opener matchup with Snider. He got the entire Panthers’ roster, and put it together with the Hawks’ players.
He wouldn’t say who won the game, but did say the outcome was “tight.”
“I usually play (Xbox) on weekends,” Lymon said.
Not to be outdone, one of Lymon’s friends has created the entire SAC as video game matchups. It is unclear whether or not using a video game helps Lymon
