Freestone County, Texas


Sporting News, The,  March 19, 2001  by Bill Minutaglio


Just plain Big - Leonard Davis, offensive tackle for University of Texas 
football team


From his dimension (6-5 7/8, 370), to his family (21 brothers and sisters), to 
his potential in the NFL, everything about Texas offensive tackle Leonard Davis
is [big].

There is a house, a simple white farmhouse, high on the hill in central Texas ... and 
immediately outside the front door, not 20 feet from the edge of the porch, are endless 
rows of headstones, each of them flowing downward and to the east like a thousand granite
teardrops.

Here is where Prezell Thompson is laid to rest. Mae Ola Cox. Celester Carter. Delma 
Moning. PFC George Harper-U.S. Army WWII. And the hundreds and hundreds of others buried
under the tombstones fashioned from the pink stone unearthed from the Texas Hill Country 
and then finally taken to this hidden town called Wortham.

As the the last of his parents' 22 children, long before he was predicted to be one of 
the first 10 picks in the NFL draft, Leonard Davis would stand on the front porch and 
stare at all the ghosts in his yard. It was as if they were stretching from the place 
where his family has lived for over a half-century, stretching all the way to Tehuacana 
Creek, past the railroad tracks, past Porter Chapel, Central Presbyterian, First Baptist
and First Methodist and the restaurant known as Nan-Nan's Place.

Davis' parents were widow and widower when they married-and his father, L.A., brought 11
kids to the marriage, his mother, Sammie Lee, brought 10. They had one child together: 
Leonard Davis.

His father, a mighty preacher at the clapboard Primitive Baptist Church, had been rocked
to his core when he peered into the crib one day. The infant had somehow pushed himself 
up, craned his neck and fixed his father with an unrelenting gaze. It was something the 
man of God would never forget. The preacher had learned long ago to coax life from the 
land, to survive as a farmer in the middle of unforgiving Texas--and to never ignore the
signs. There was something about his last son. "I think the boy had a special message," 
the preacher told the boy's mother.

And the mother saw it, too. She told people that the boy was unnaturally quiet. He was 
quiet in a way that ran completely counter to the way the boy was physically maturing. At
the age of 3, he clambered into the seat of the family tractor and was allowed to drive 
it across the 160 acres of corn. He was a 300-pound waterboy in the seventh grade. By the
time he became a teenager, he was well over 6 feet and 50 pounds shy of 400. In awe of 
the big child from the gigantic Davis family, people began to simply call him "Big."

Big was growing up deep in the deepest part of the country. He grew up with thick oak 
trees dotting the family farm, those bulls and cows waiting to be conquered, sisters 
whose hands turned maroon from shelling bushel after bushel of purple peas.

At the sprawling family reunions, set under the canopy of trees on the farm, the endless
parade of children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles would all 
assemble--an instant Davis City, a rolling and splendid gathering of the enormous Davis 
clan. There was laughter, there were the salutes to the parade of sweet potato pies 
crafted from the prized Freestone County yams. It was unfettered and wide open, and 
people joked about the fact that there were enough children to field two football teams.

In the middle of it all, Big was usually quiet. He was the same, really, even when all 
his sisters and brothers began growing up, moving from home and leaving Leonard alone. 
And for some people in this part of Texas, he was too quiet.

"He was different," says his sister Betty, 35, also a minister and the person who taught
him at Sunday School and coached his youth league basketball games. "He didn't need a lot
of people around him. He was quiet, but he was always listening."

He was quiet, maybe in the way a graveyard is silent. Anyone who has pulled to the side 
of a road, beckoned for some reason to explore an ancient cemetery, knows what it means.
There is a bottled-up kind of quiet, one that actually is filled with the silent roar of 
memory, emotion, birth and death.

And, one day when he was still a toddler, Leonard Davis made a decision to finally step 
off the porch and walk toward the headstones. He would go there, willing himself to do it,
even if his mind was frantically pulling him back. He pushed forward, a little man all by
himself, aiming for the tombstones and the eternal prophecies etched on their faces:

"Now their work has ended, and they have laid down to rest.... I seem to hear their 
whispers: `Oh, Lord, we have done our best.' Well done my faithful servant, I know you've
struggled hard ... that's why I thought to call you from labor to reward."

It was something he would never forget--moving one foot and then another off that porch 
and advancing into the gigantic, heavy stillness.

"I think," says Leonard Davis, 22, in his slow, sonorous voice, "that was the last time I
was ever scared."

In the old days, when Big got dressed, it sometimes meant that he was putting on 
something durable ... something that he could wear when his father had shaken him awake
and somberly noted that it was time to go and castrate the bulls.