The Marvel
And God Created Noel Devine
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By ROBERT ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 20, 2006
Noel Devine is great. People tell him that all the time. He is great at football, specifically. A senior at North Fort Myers High School in Florida, he might be the top high-school running back in the country, the most gifted talent since Reggie Bush, last year’s Heisman Trophy winner, or maybe even since Barry Sanders. He’s that good. He hears it all the time.
“Noel, this is Coach Tony Franklin, offensive coordinator at Troy University. Give me a call when you get a chance. Give me a call because I got a plan for you. You’re gonna be the first person ever to win a Heisman Trophy as a sophomore. You’re gonna shock the world. You’re going to gain about 2,000 yards your freshman year. You might have everybody in the world on your case, but you’re gonna help us beat Florida and Oklahoma State, Georgia and L.S.U. your freshman year. Give us a call if that excites you. If not, then good luck to you, man, at U.S.C. or Miami or wherever you go. Just don’t forget, when you’re sitting on the bench your freshman year, you could be here getting about 2,000 yards. Take care.”
Devine receives as many as 75 pieces of mail a day at school alone, enough that two teachers have volunteered to sift through them for him. Even more mail arrives for Devine each day at home. College coaches and their assistants call and send text messages to Devine all the time. He saves the funniest messages, like the call from Troy University, in Alabama, which he replayed for me (and, given its appearance in an Orlando paper, at least one other reporter).
Top players often commit verbally to schools following their junior year. Devine has not, and he intends to take the traditional campus tours. He can see himself, after his senior season ends, strolling across quadrangles in Baton Rouge, Los Angeles and Lincoln. He wants to tour stadiums he has never seen, in states he has never traveled to. He plans to visit some schools in Florida, too, probably the University of Florida and Florida State, the alma mater of another North High graduate, Deion Sanders, the flamboyant former All-Pro cornerback, who once tried to adopt Devine and who remains an adviser of sorts.
Or maybe Devine will visit Troy. Or perhaps the University of Pittsburgh. Heading into the season, Devine has options. He’s in demand.
On a hot June day inside the North Fort Myers High Field House, a stack of shoulder pads stands in a corner. Familiar slogans are painted on the walls: “Just do It!” “No pain. . .no gain.” Boys slump in black plastic chairs, tossing rolls of athletic tape from one hand to the other, waiting for their coaches’ directions. Some of the boys are lean whippets, yet to fill out. A few look strong, like soldiers, growing into their masculinity. They grunt in low voices that bounce off the concrete walls. None look like Devine.
It isn’t his black tank top or his baggy red shorts or the thick gold chain, dangling down to his navel. It’s his body, the musculature dense as oak, striated and bulging even though he earned his nickname, Skittles, by eating so much candy. It’s his 43-inch vertical leap. His ability to bench-press 350 pounds. His acceleration.
“I think it’s God-given,” Devine says of his talent. “When I look at tapes of me running, it don’t seem like it’s me. I don’t plan my moves, I just do them. I think I have an angel on my shoulder, watching over me. There has to be something, because the moves and my runs, they just happen.”
Today is all paperwork, insurance forms, weights measured and heartbeats sounded with a stethoscope. Devine steps onto a scale: 165 pounds. Light, despite all the muscle. A tape measure is draped from his dreadlocks down to his red and black leather Air Jordans: 5-foot-8. Short for a football player, though not too short to scare off college scouts. Barry Sanders — who played for the Detroit Lions and is possibly the greatest running back ever — was short for a football player. Warrick Dunn, with the Atlanta Falcons, is short for a football player. Devine has been compared to these backs since he was 10 years old and the star of the Cape Coral Junior Dolphins.
Devine “is a special talent, one that comes along rarely,” Jamie Newberg, a recruiting analyst for SuperPrep.com, has written. Newberg rates Devine the No. 1 high-school running back. ESPN.com, in its tabulation of the top 150 prospects in America, ranks Devine fifth over all.
In his first two seasons at North High, Devine averaged more than 10 yards a carry. After his freshman season, videos of some of Devine’s best runs were posted online. On the blurry highlight reel, which can be found at youtube.com and elsewhere, Devine dodges tacklers as if he were a slalom skier. He challenges the notion that football is a contact sport, gaining 90 yards on one run without being touched by a defender. The video quickly went viral, much as a similar video of Reggie Bush’s high-school highlights had a couple years earlier. “Are you kidding me?” one online poster gushed. “Sweet pancakes, this kid is good. He’s agile, he’s fast, he’s got great vision, he’s got great balance, he’s got the stop/starts of Barry Sanders and he breaks tackles very, very well.” Devine’s name popped up on fan sites devoted to Ohio State, Texas and other elite programs. ESPN is planning to broadcast North High’s game this October against cross-town rival Fort Myers.
“The attention brings some good things,” North’s head coach, James Iandoli, says, “but I’ve seen it lead to big heads and big problems, too.”
Noel Devine was 3 months old when his father died of complications from AIDS. His mother also died of AIDS, when he was 11. Custody passed to his maternal grandmother, but he clashed with her.
“She’s, like, strict,” he told me. “I wanted a little freedom. I just didn’t want to listen to nobody. When my mama died, I felt like a part of me was gone, like half of me had gone away. It was hard for me to try and love somebody else. It was, like, I hate everything and everybody.”
Devine preferred to live with Liz and Robert Harlow Sr., parents of a former high-school teammate. The Harlows, who are white, reside in a concrete ranch house in a row of similar homes just outside North Fort Myers, behind a Quizno’s sub shop. Robert Harlow Sr. is an electrician. Liz Harlow works at a Lowe’s store just up the street. They first got to know Noel (pronounced no-EL) Devine when their son, Robbie, played on Devine’s Pop Warner football team.
“Noel was staying here on weekends and then on weeknights, too,” Liz Harlow says. “Eventually he asked me if he can move in. I was like, ‘Well, you’re already living here.”’
While living with the Harlows, Devine impregnated two girls within a seven-month span. His grades dropped, imperiling his college plans. In December 2004, he was present when a friend was shot and killed in a dispute with another teenager. The incident prompted his former high-school principal to contact Deion Sanders to see if the famous alumnus could step in as Devine’s mentor.
Sanders is a born-again Christian. He and his wife already have five children, but they were open to taking in another. “My wife would tell you all through our life together that I’ve talked about adopting a child and giving a kid a chance who otherwise wouldn’t have one,” Sanders told reporters last year. Sanders met with Devine in Fort Myers. He also met with Devine’s grandmother and with the mothers of Devine’s children. Collectively, they decided that Devine would move into Sanders’s home in Prosper, Tex., outside Dallas. With the grandmother’s blessing, Sanders hired lawyers and began the paperwork to legally adopt Devine.
The Harlows tried, unsuccessfully, to take legal custody of Devine themselves. On July 28, 2005, when Sanders flew into Fort Myers to escort Devine to Dallas, the father of a friend of Devine’s called 911 to report that Devine had been kidnapped. “I am calling for the possible abduction slash kidnapping of one Noel Devine,” the man can be heard telling the emergency operator on a tape of the phone call. “The person who is kidnapping — and this is not a joke — is Deion Sanders, the one and only famous Deion Sanders.”
A quick investigation determined that Sanders’s actions concerning Devine were both benign and legal and that Devine was traveling with Sanders willingly.
Once Devine had moved in with Sanders, he enrolled at Prosper High School and introduced himself to his new school’s football team. Sanders, who was still playing for the Baltimore Ravens, flew Devine to training camp in Maryland, exposing him to football at the professional level. In front of reporters, Sanders chastised Devine for chewing gum, which Devine then spit out. “I’m teaching him how to handle the media,” Sanders said. “I tell him to open his mouth, talk loudly and properly and have a good time.”
Devine told reporters that Sanders was “like a dad” to him. He described their relationship to The News-Press, in Fort Myers: “Deion will help me get into college. He knows things that I don’t know. He’s going to get me some extra help. He already knows what to do.”
One week later, however, on the day he was supposed to attend his first practice with the Prosper High football team, Devine took a Cadillac Escalade that belonged to Sanders’s wife, drove himself to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and left the keys in the car. A plane ticket back to Florida was reportedly waiting for him at the airport. Devine immediately re-enrolled at North Fort Myers High, rejoined the team and moved back in with the Harlows.
“Now I understand what his grandma was going through for years,” Sanders told The News-Press. “Some people don’t want to be helped.”
Devine is begrudging with details about his time in Texas. When asked who paid for his plane ticket home, he replies, “I don’t want to talk about none of that.” But then he continues: “My kids were, like, a couple months old. It’s not just about me, it’s about them, too. I know it would have made it better for them” — financially, if he were living with Sanders — “but at the same time, who knows?” The mothers, he adds, “could find other boyfriends and the kids would be calling them Daddy.”
After Devine returned to Florida, Sanders rescinded his offer to assume legal custody, but he continues to talk to Devine several times a week. Devine’s cellphone is clogged with text messages from Sanders. “He talks to me about selecting colleges and stuff,” Devine says. “He talks to me about God.”
Devine turned 18 in February. He still lives primarily with the Harlows, where pictures of his young daughter and son stand in frames on a living room coffee table. Liz Harlow refers to Devine fondly as her son, as the one she “left in the oven a bit too long,” accounting for his dark skin.
Despite the off-season drama, and despite concerns about a lack of structure at the Harlow house, Devine thrived in his junior season at North Fort Myers. Although he was often pulled early from blowout games, he still amassed gaudy statistics: 1,933 yards and 24 touchdowns on 173 carries. In one game alone he scored four touchdowns and gained almost 400 yards. A scouting service spliced together another highlight video, which also caught fire on the Internet. Devine sometimes goes online to read the comments viewers have posted about his tapes.
“It’s funny,” he says. “I’ve seen one where they be, like, ‘Oh, that’s poor tackling.’ Some people talk trash, and some people talk good. I try not to let any of it get to me.”
In the field house, near Coach Iandoli’s office, a line of teammates wait to have their paperwork stamped by a notary. With forms in hand, Devine ambles over to the queue. He hops atop a small, square table, pushing aside yearbooks from schools that would love to have him play for them: Auburn, Kansas and dozens of others.
The interest from colleges, while strong, is also guarded. Devine’s grades are poor. His transcript includes some remedial classes. His SAT score, after a recent attempt, is about 100 points below the score he needs. There is a real chance he’ll fail to qualify academically to play Division I-A football.
“Most schools are taking a wait-and-see approach with him,” Iandoli admits. To help his star player advance to college, Iandoli has set up a support system of tutors and academic advisers. Together they have mapped out the classes Devine must take.
“I know I can get the job done,” Devine says. “I can focus. Senior year’s your best year to make everything up if you have bad grades. I know what I’ve got to do, and I’m going to get it done.”
He notes that he has been by himself since he was 14. “Other kids my age might need someone to guide them,” he says, “but I know what I need to do and what I got to do to get to where I’m trying to get to.”
Devine flips his paperwork between his palms. Iandoli notices that he still needs a release signature from his legal guardian.
“We’re probably going to have to take a drive down to Grandma’s house to get a signature, O.K.?” Iandoli says.
Devine’s face falls. He shakes his head, rattling his dreads. “But I’m 18,” he says. “I am 18.”
He is 18, an adult, officially a man. He is a senior in high school, and one of the best football prospects in America. This is going to be an important year. He looks at his mobile phone. There are several text messages, more than one from college coaches. The messages are the same. Noel Devine is great. Everyone says so.
