Jeremiah Masoli is forever under his own surveillance, start

[rebeljim]

I have long believed we are on our best behavior when guided by the humbling realization that we are part of something bigger than we are.

Losing it -- our cool or our reputation -- is much more daunting when we realize we may disappoint or embarrass our family, our church, our team or everyone who has our back.

If there is still work to be done to bring Jeremiah Masoli to the same understanding, he has come to the right place in the University of Mississippi.

"God moves in mysterious ways," Masoli said at last week's campus news conference, clearly rejuvenated that he has been handed one last chance to get it right on a Southern campus of stirring beauty, intense passions, and a complex and troubled history.

William Faulkner was once the postmaster here, albeit a lousy one who drank too much. The late Willie Morris -- a far more accessible writer and the editor of Harper's Magazine at 33 -- often took midnight pilgrimages to Faulkner's grave accompanied by a fifth of Jack Daniels and the conviction that "Mr. Bill needs a drink."

But the storied college town that is offering the University of Oregon's former quarterback a shot at redemption is far better known for the trials of a young African American, who arrived in Oxford two months after Faulkner's death in 1962, accompanied by federal troops and the National Guard.

That armed guard was required to ensure the tortured integration of Ole Miss, which the Meridian (Miss.) Star labeled "the battle of Armageddon between racial purity and mongrelization." Before James Meredith finally stepped into his first university class -- American History, 14 minutes late -- there was a literal battle at the heart of campus in which two people died and 160 soldiers were injured by rioters armed with guns, fire trucks and bulldozers.

That weekend, Morris once wrote, was "a shameful moment that caused many Mississippians to re-examine themselves and the character of the state they wanted here."

But the examination was an arduous one. In 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the immediate integration of 30 Mississippi school districts that continued to disdain the court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

It took another 28 years before the Rebels of Ole Miss liberated their home field, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, from the dominion of the Confederate flag.

Robert Khayat -- who led the nation in scoring as the Rebels' kicker in 1958 and 1959 -- headed up that effort. When Khayat became the university's chancellor in 1995, he hired a consulting firm to determine why student enrollment had dropped by 1,000 during the previous five years.

Its conclusion? "Our image was based on 1962, the Confederate flag and the fact that we were Rebels," Khayat told me Thursday. "And the symbol that was the most distasteful was the Confederate flag. While there were people who loved that flag for the right reasons, it had been appropriated by the KKK and the neo-Nazis. Grandparents of black kids were afraid to send those children here. It was an impediment to all kinds of progress."

Khayat and his supporters could not bar the flag from the stadium, so they came up with an inventive counter-move. "We banned sticks," Khayat said. "Hot dogs on a stick. Chicken on a stick. Umbrellas. And flags on a stick. We could not ban the flag but we could ban sticks as a matter of public safety."

By the time he retired in 2009, Khayat had raised the percentage of black students at Ole Miss from 5.8 percent to almost 20 percent, and stood proudly by while the university hosted a 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain.

And while no one here argues that Oxford is beyond the trauma and national confusion of race, Richard Howorth -- the mayor from 2001-09 and the founder of Square Books -- offers this:

"Oregonians and other Americans have the luxury of a sense of security that Mississippi is so much worse than their community. That gives them a sense of adequacy about their racial views and deprives them of the opportunity we've had to confront these issues and genuinely understand our history."

This, then, is where Jeremiah Masoli has landed.

A town that has a little experience with disgrace.

A town that knows what it's like to be judged by those who've never stepped into The Grove or dined on the Square, the downtown epicenter that combines the college-town quaintness of Chapel Hill and the upscale amenities of the Pearl.

A town that understands that you're not going to complete the road to redemption on a single tank of gas.

"1962? There's no way to describe how destructive that was to this university," Khayat says, even now. "It may be like a surgery. You may always have a scar. But every few years we make progress in putting distance between ourselves and 1962."

Masoli's challenge is similar in spirit if not scale. While in high school, he spent three months in a California juvenile facility for his part in an armed robbery. In his final months in Eugene, he pleaded guilty to burglarizing a UO fraternity house and was nabbed by Eugene police with marijuana in his car.

And even though last month's Sports Illustrated piece has clearly altered many opinions -- including mine -- about the depth of his involvement in these life-changing *beep*-ups, those incidents got him tossed from the Duck football team, canceled that fledgling Heisman campaign and put him forever in the debt of the coach, the Rebels' Houston Nutt, who offered him another chance to be part of something that's bigger than his problems.

Masoli -- who was not available for interviews after the Monday news conference -- has not yet taken the Ole Miss practice field by storm.

"I think he's found out this is a faster league than the Pac-10," said Chuck Rounsaville, who has covered the Rebels for 29 years and rules the roost at OMSpirit.com. "He's not coming in and taking over. The guy who took his team to the Rose Bowl and beat USC is having to fight."

But Nutt and his teammates are impressed with how Masoli continues to handle himself.

"You can tell he's played a lot of football. He's smooth and he's making things happen," Nutt said. "Jeremiah is raising everyone's intensity (but) he has a calm about him. That huddle presence."

In the intense competition for snaps at quarterback between Nathan Stanley, junior college standout Randall Mackey and Masoli, Nutt cautions the trio, "If something bad happens, you have to have a short memory." But he understands that Masoli must bear a different attitude off the field, given the burden of his past and the disappointment he's caused his family.

"That name is important," Nutt said Thursday night as practice ended beneath the sliver of an orange moon. "You can't embarrass that name ever again. I think he understands this is his last opportunity. He's been very humble. He wants to do right."

It might be a stretch to connect James Meredith and Jeremiah Masoli across the historic and racial divide of 48 years. But late on a humid afternoon in Oxford, I found John Ciardi's postscript to Charles Eagles' history of Meredith, "The Price of Defiance."

Writing in 1963, Ciardi said this about what Meredith endured after he reached Ole Miss:

"God knows what it must cost a man inside of himself to plod that course, to keep himself forever under his own surveillance, to realize that he must present himself in public not as a man but as an image, and that the least impetuous gesture from inside the man might destroy what that image must accomplish."

Masoli plods a similar course. He can not dodge the spotlight in his final college season or survive another impetuous gesture. This is a small town. "You can't be anonymous here," Howorth said, especially when you're the quarterback.

"Being a quarterback it wouldn't matter if he were a Swede," Khayat said. "He'll be scrutinized. The past he brings with him will only intensify that."

But if Masoli holds up at Ole Miss as well as Meredith did, he will reclaim far more than his reputation. Forty years after Meredith entered Ole Miss, his son, Joseph, graduated from the university as the most outstanding doctoral student in the School of Business Administration.

That's what mattered to James Meredith. "That," he said, "vindicates my whole life."

And that's because for Meredith, there was something far bigger than what happened to him in the battle of Ole Miss:

What was possible for those he loved -- his family, his church, his defenders, his son -- because he understood responsibility, opportunity and mystery, and embraced them all.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonia ... r_und.html

[Leibniz]

Masoli is here to play football and get a masters. The article is well intended but, it has little to do with football.
It fact it uses the Masoli situation to further the reputation of Khayat as well as throw dirt on the University of Mississippi in a supposedly nice way. Are we trying to start a debate?

Lets stick to football.

No offense intended to the poster as he did not write this.

[Chucky_38]

Masoli is here to play football and get a masters. The article is well intended but, it has little to do with football.
It fact it uses the Masoli situation to further the reputation of Khayat as well as throw dirt on the University of Mississippi in a supposedly nice way. Are we trying to start a debate?

Lets stick to football.

No offense intended to the poster as he did not write this.

Totally agree. Never a need to mention events from over 50 years ago. I don't remember reading anything about Bama's forced integration when they signed a kid with a chekered past.

Let it go sportswriters. Its the 21st century.

[done]

It's crap....unnecessary, meaningless crap...they store this crap in a file and whenever Ole Miss does something questionable they pull it out. Lazy, lazy crap!

[felicianareb]

Thanks Rebchuck, your purgation was entirely appropriate.

[rebelliousb]

even the writer says: [It might be a stretch to connect James Meredith and Jeremiah Masoli across the historic and racial divide of 48 years./

[------------------]

It's crap....unnecessary, meaningless crap...they store this crap in a file and whenever Ole Miss does something questionable they pull it out. Lazy, lazy crap!

^^WHAT HE SAID....^^

[TheUnsub]

What a bunch of crap. Tired, tired, tired of this type of stuff.

[cacreb2000]

AAAAAAAMEN to the above posts. And Chuck, would you pass the gravy please?

[done]

AAAAAAAMEN to the above posts. And Chuck, would you pass the gravy please?

Unfortunately it is all over the table...got so fired up I accidentally knocked the whole gravy bowl over

[badmotorfinger]

I'd rather shove a screwdriver in my ear than read all of that BS!!

[spoole]

Keep it simple stupid.