Mr. Farrey,
For whatever reason, you have chosen to demonize Coach Tressel in your YSU, Ray Isaac story. I'm curious why you didn't tell the rest of the story in the relationship between Tress and Ray? Here it is in an article written over a year ago. You have brought up nothing new in your piece and left out so much. Coach Tressel has done a lot of good for the young men he has coached and been involved with. I'm sure that there are some things that happen at Ohio State with boosters, local merchants, etc. that are questionable (what school doesn't), but I cannot imagine why ESPN has decided to single out Tressel and the buckeyes. Perhaps you have an explanation.
Before Clarett there was Isaac
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By Tom Archdeacon
Dayton Daily News
He says a lot of things about Jim Tressel.
That his former football coach was the only one who took his phone calls from jail.
That he was the one who told him to tell the truth in his FBI interview and everything would work out.
He said Tressel's the one who helped him return to college and get his degree and then pushed him to start work on his master's.
And now, he said, the Ohio State head coach has invited him to come to a Buckeyes game in Columbus next month so he can meet -- and maybe even minister to -- the OSU players.
"Jim Tressel loves Ray, and Ray loves him," Ray Isaac said. "Coach Tressel is the best friend I have in the whole world. He's a great human being -- someone I let down -- and I want to repay him any way I can."
Asked how he ever could square the debt, Isaac -- in one of several phone conversations last week from Johnsonville, S.C., where he lives with his wife and one of his five children -- thought for several moments:
"I wish I could talk to Maurice Clarett. I don't know him personally, but I do know him. I probably know the real him a lot better than some of the people who actually do know him. He is molded almost exactly like I am."
Clarett -- the OSU tailback who was the preseason favorite to win the Heisman Trophy -- is suspended from the Buckeyes this season after allegedly accepting thousands of dollars in illegal benefits from a so-called hometown "father figure" and then lying to NCAA investigators about the matter.
Isaac, who quarterbacked Tressel's 1991 Youngstown State team to a national championship, was found to have taken more than $10,000 and gotten several cars from a hometown supporter, who also happened to be the YSU board of trustees president who now is serving a lengthy prison term on a fraud and embezzlement matter.
Though Clarett and Isaac are but two of hundreds of Tressel athletes -- most of whom have kept their noses clean, gotten their educations and gone quietly about their lives -- they are a couple of his highest-profile players. Both have garnered national headlines and provoked some of the most heated, thought-provoking debate in college football.
• • •
People wonder how a guy such as Clarett could risk everything. The 33-year-old Isaac -- now a substitute teacher, an assistant football coach at the local high school and a Bible study instructor at the White Chapel Free Will Holiness Church -- thinks he knows the answer.
It happened to him, too.
"The more I learn about Maurice, the more it reminds me of myself," he said. "If you listen to Maurice talk, you can tell he's got a chip on his shoulder. He wants to make sure he's not gonna be worked over. He says things that are inappropriate because he's trying to defend his manhood, defend his race, his right to be independent.
"Right now, Maurice is caught in two worlds. That's the biggest thing black athletes -- especially successful black athletes -- have to deal with. You have to put on two faces. You have to be white when it's time to be white and black when its time to be black. You act one way when you're on campus or when you're with coach Tressel, or he's taking you someplace like the Youngstown Country Club to speak about being a quarterback. But you act a different way when you come back to your neighborhood, back to the 'hood. It's tough to do both.
"In the 'hood, the big thing among your peers is that you don't let the man (white establishment) use and abuse you. Don't be a dumb jock. Don't be exploited. You hear all the stories from the past. About the field Negroes and the house Negroes. About the Harlem renaissance and black men exploited for their music. So it's hammered into you: 'Whenever you can get something from the man, you take it.'
"And if you don't -- or if you don't look and act the part when you get home -- people say you're a phony, that you sold out."
Isaac certainly doesn't speak for all black athletes. And you could say he "sold out" when he started taking cash and cars from jailed supporter Mickey Monus and his friends. Isaac doesn't argue the latter.
"I knew we were doing wrong, and I think Maurice knows he did wrong, too," Isaac said. "The thing is, you have an ego and it gets out of control. You're constantly praised and that breeds arrogance, flamboyance. I got to the point, where if I'd gotten $100 one, two and three times, why wouldn't I get it a fourth, too? You keep going back for water until the well runs dry, and it never did."
While Isaac said Tressel let "Ray be Ray" -- he "knew where I came from and what I was about, that on my mom's side there had been criminal backgrounds; on my dad's, I had four aunts with (college) degrees" -- Isaac claimed the coach "never, ever" knew anything of his rules-breaking involvements.
"Mickey assured me Tressel wouldn't find out and I don't think he did. I didn't stick it in his face," Isaac said. "I wouldn't drive the fancy cars around campus or in the white suburbs. If I was going to Boardman or Poland or someplace like that, I'd have a smaller car, a Subaru, an Acura. But when I was going out of town, say like to a George Clinton concert in Pittsburgh or coming down to Central State for a block party, I had the big cars. You think somebody there was gonna call Jim Tressel?
"It was the same when you go back to the 'hood to go to clubs or chase women or just talk about the NFL. Back there, everybody applauded me for gettin' something from the man. I was a celebrity. The rumors were that I was a right-hand man to the mob, and even though it wasn't like that, I didn't say otherwise. I played the part.
"It's the whole thing of living in two words."
• • •
Although NCAA investigators later found that most of Isaac's teammates were questioning where the quarterback got the money for the lifestyle he led, the allegations of Isaac's improprieties didn't surface publicly until 1994, two years after his career had ended. YSU -- at the NCAA's request following a tip -- did an in-house investigation and found the charges "baseless." Soon after, Isaac -- back on campus to finish his degree -- was on Tressel's staff as a student coach. But in 1998 -- with Isaac now playing in the Arena Football League -- the dirty details came to light with a jury-tampering charge that involved the quarterback.
"I was playing for Memphis and we'd just flown back from a game in Tampa," Isaac said. "As our team got off the plane, there's six FBI agents waiting for me."
This time, YSU again investigated and finally instituted self-censure because the NCAA statue of limitations was past. Still, the NCAA criticized the school for lack of institutional control. Meanwhile, Isaac dodged prison and got five years' probation. For three years, he said he was blackballed from resuming his professional football career.
During his exile, he said he began to look differently at things, especially the peer pressure of the 'hood: "I didn't want to be a part of it anymore. Once it snatches you, it's a death grip."
In contrast, Isaac lives a more subdued life now. He said he's happily married and he and his wife have a 2-year-old son, Jordan. He has four daughters by two other women. Those children live with their mothers in Memphis and Ohio.
Last season -- after three years as the quarterback of the Charleston (S.C.) Swamp Foxes -- he was an assistant coach with the Myrtle Beach Sting Rays of the National Indoor Football League. He's currently coaching offense at Johnsonville (S.C.) High School, the fifth prep program with which he's worked.
Johnsonville High coach Curtis Middleton sings Isaac's praises and Tressel now does the same. That's one reason Isaac said the Buckeyes' coach has extended an invitation for either the Michigan State or Purdue game.
And if he has a chance to talk to the team, what would Isaac say?
"Fame is like a vapor -- it's here and gone," he said. "You need to get something more out of life."
Publication Date: 10-07-2003
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