The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (53 page)

The next day Moos announced that Mike Leach would be WSU’s new football coach. Leach was at Disney World with Sharon and the kids when the news broke. A few days later Moos chartered a private jet to retrieve Leach and his family from Florida and deliver them to a press conference in Pullman. It looked more like a coronation. The fire marshal started turning students and alumni away after fifteen hundred people packed the ballroom at the student center. An overflow room with big-screen televisions was also packed. The marching band played and the cheerleaders chanted as Mike Leach and his family entered the room. Leach wore a gray suit and a crimson tie. After a raucous thirty-second standing ovation, he addressed the crowd.

“I know what you’re thinking. And the answer to that is yes—this is exactly how I dress in Key West every day.”

Laughter filled the room.

Leach kept his speech short but fielded lots of questions. “Do you have a five-year plan?” one reporter asked.

“My plan is to win one game a week,” Leach said.

The place erupted. Moos sat on the dais, beaming. In his entire career he had never witnessed such enthusiasm over the hiring of a coach. Overnight, the mood in Pullman went from despondent to euphoric. The payoff was instant. Within ten days, all twenty-one luxury stadium suites, including the $50,000 units, were sold. Donations started pouring into the athletic department. More than three thousand people became new season ticket holders.

Elson Floyd was in his office, taking it all in, when a member of his staff in charge of payroll entered. “Dr. Floyd,” she began. “We have a problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Our system can’t handle $2.25 million. We don’t know what to do.”

Floyd wasn’t sure what she meant.

She put it to him in simple terms. Washington State’s payroll software was not adequate to process Coach Leach’s salary.

Floyd laughed. The university, he assured her, would upgrade its payroll software. It was a sign that WSU had entered the realm of big-time college football.

I
t was the first week of August, days before the official start of the fall 2010 camp. All of BYU’s scholarship players were already on campus for unofficial workouts. Bronco Mendenhall was in his office, making final preparations and going over depth charts.

At one point Mendenhall’s secretary ducked her head in. His afternoon appointment had arrived, a potential walk-on named Ezekiel Ansah, an African student on BYU’s track team who supposedly had serious speed. Mendenhall wasn’t expecting much. Track athletes rarely panned out. Even at skill positions, football requires much more than just speed. Besides, the kid was from Ghana. They play soccer there, not football.

“Send him in,” Mendenhall said.

When Ansah appeared in the door, Mendenhall’s eyebrows shot up. This guy didn’t look like a sprinter. He was six feet five inches and 250 pounds, and his shoulders filled the doorframe. He didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat.

Mendenhall offered him a seat. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I want to play football,” Ansah said in a deep but quiet voice.

“Have you ever played before?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to play?”

“No.”

Mendenhall nearly laughed.

“But I want to try out,” Ansah continued.

Mendenhall cut him off. “I don’t know anything about you,” he told Ansah. “I don’t know how you are living. I don’t even know if you can make it through a workout.”

In broken English, Ansah gave him his background in snippets. Sophomore. Statistics major. Excellent grades. Mormon. Played soccer in Africa.
Runs track at BYU. Pretty fast—clocked at 21.9 seconds in the two hundred, good enough to qualify for the NCAA outdoor championship.

“And I go by Ziggy,” he said.

“Ziggy?” Mendenhall said.

“It’s my nickname.”

It was all a little much for Mendenhall to absorb.

“I promise I will work hard,” Ansah said.

“If you are serious about this,” Mendenhall said, “workouts start tomorrow morning. Our players get here at 5:45. We lift at 6:00.”

Getting up early was the easy part. Despite his size, Ansah had never lifted weights and had to be taught how to use the equipment.

It got worse when uniforms were issued on the first day of camp. When the equipment manager handed him a set of shoulder pads, Ansah just gave him a blank stare. He’d never worn equipment in his life. Jordan Johnson, a freshman defensive back from Springfield, Massachusetts, was suiting up next to Ansah. “He was trying to shove the thigh pad in the knee pad slot,” Johnson said. “He couldn’t figure out how to put on his shoulder pads. It was hilarious. But nobody laughed at him. He was too big to laugh at.”

Finally, Ansah tried on a helmet. He felt trapped, and his peripheral vision disappeared. In hopes of giving him encouragement, a couple guys smacked his helmet. “I told myself, this is going to be terrible,” Ansah said. “I didn’t know how I was going to run. The helmet felt so odd.”

It was August 7, 2010—the first day of practice—when Ansah walked out of the locker room wearing cleats, shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt and a helmet. BYU associate athletic director Chad Lewis, a former BYU star who went on to play in the NFL, was on the edge of the field, chatting with a few starters, when Ansah approached.

“Hey, who is
this
guy?” Lewis asked.

“His name is Ziggy,” one of the players said. “He’s a track guy. Real fast. He’s gonna give it a try.”

“Bro, I know you guys have been playing football all your life,” Lewis said. “But he’s already better than you.”

The players thought Lewis was being sarcastic. He wasn’t.

But when Lewis asked around camp, no one seemed to know how Ansah ended up at BYU or what led him to try out for the team. Even Mendenhall didn’t seem to know.

Ken Frei spent six days a week walking the dusty roads of Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in search of people interested in learning about Mormon-ism. On his off days the twenty-year-old BYU sophomore from Idaho Falls played pickup basketball with fellow missionaries at a private K–12 school called Golden Sunbeam. It had one of the few courts in the city, and the headmaster—a Mormon—allowed the missionaries to play there.

Ansah, then eighteen, worked at the school as a teaching assistant. One afternoon in December 2007, he was hanging around the basketball court. Frei invited him to join in a game of two on two. A five-foot-nine former high school point guard, Frei matched up against the big local. Though he gave up nine inches and nearly a hundred pounds, Frei wasn’t concerned; Ghanaians aren’t known for their hoops prowess.

As if to prove the point, Ansah got the ball and flung up a wild shot that slammed off the glass. Frei expected as much, but he did not anticipate what happened next; Ansah elevated, snatched the rebound and threw down a two-handed dunk, his elbows nearly hitting the rim. Frei was speechless. Ansah grinned. “LeBron James is my favorite,” he said, before adding, “One day I hope to play in the league.”

Frei and Ansah bonded over their love of basketball, and Frei learned about Ansah’s life. The youngest of five children, Ansah had been raised in a crowded, working-class neighborhood of Accra. His father, Edward, was a sales manager for a petroleum company, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a nurse.

Ansah’s teenage years revolved around school, sports and religion. To stay in shape for track and soccer, he ran two to three miles through the busy streets each morning before school. At night he’d spend hours on a basketball court with his older brother practicing “LeBron” moves. Like most Accra families, the Ansahs didn’t have cable TV, but a friend did, and Ansah would go there whenever the Cavaliers were on.

Raised an Anglican, Ansah attended a charismatic church—an all-black congregation with a passionate minister, soulful music and a rollicking atmosphere. He was devout, and religion became a regular topic of conversation between Frei and Ansah, who was already familiar with Mormon beliefs from working at the school. The pair spent hours discussing the Book of Mormon, and within six weeks, despite strong opposition from family, Ansah asked Frei to baptize him.

A few months after Ansah converted, Frei completed his mission and returned to BYU, but not before giving his new friend some advice. “I told
Ziggy that if he was serious about playing basketball, he should come to BYU and try out for the team,” Frei said.

Ansah went to the headmaster at Golden Sunbeam, who had put two sons through BYU. With the headmaster’s help, Ansah gained admission. A couple weeks before the start of the fall semester in 2008, Frei received an unexpected call: Ansah had just landed in Utah, and he needed a roommate.

Utah was a huge adjustment. Ansah had never seen snow, shopping malls or fast-food restaurants. When he wanted chicken back home, he’d go buy a live one at the local market, bring it home to slaughter, then cook it. Nobody pulled chicken from a freezer and popped it in a microwave. But the biggest change was being around so many white people. “At first I couldn’t handle it,” Ansah said. “Whenever I’d see a black person, I’d say hi to them, because it might be the only black person I’d see that day.”

But that fall, Frei took Ansah to a BYU football game. It was the first time the Ghanaian had ever seen American football. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Ansah said. “I was cheering when everyone else was cheering, but I didn’t know why.” He also thought the game was way too violent. “It was intense—everybody hitting each other,” he said. “I said to my roommates, ‘I don’t think I ever want to do that.’ ”

Instead, he tried walking on the basketball team. Despite his thirty-nine-inch vertical, ferocious dunks and study of LeBron, he got cut. The next fall he tried again. He got cut again. But he had made the track team and was tearing up the intramural basketball league on campus, which is where a few football players spotted him and insisted he try out for football. Frei kept saying the same thing. So did the track coach. Finally, Ansah got up the courage to go see Mendenhall.

Kyle Van Noy hadn’t been formally introduced to Ansah. He’d seen him in the locker room and heard people referring to him as Ziggy. But on the first day of full contact in fall camp, Van Noy was in no mood for pleasantries. He was looking to make an impression. At one point Ansah was sprinting down the field, oblivious to what was happening around him. Van Noy tattooed him. Ansah went airborne. When he hit the ground, he rolled like an SUV that had been hit by a semi.

“I was just running,” Ansah said. “I didn’t see it coming. Kyle hit me—oh my goodness—I fell on the ground and rolled a few times.”

Chad Lewis wasn’t surprised. Van Noy was like an assassin. He was taking
guys out all over the field. It was obvious he was a special player. Ansah, on the other hand, looked raw. It was obvious he had not grown up with the game. He didn’t know how to move on the field, how to initiate contact and create leverage.

“He was not lowering down and gearing up to hit someone,” Lewis said. “He was just running. That allowed him to hit opponents with a speed that they were not prepared for. But he also wasn’t naturally protecting himself the way football players do. So he was taking blows to his body that most guys would never be able to endure.”