Damien Rhodes leans back in a metal folding chair, his fingers clasped behind his head. Reporters sit at the surrounding tables, chatting with teammates.

‘Hey Damien,’ quarterback Troy Nunes barks from a neighboring table. ‘Got any nicknames yet?’

Rhodes smiles. A half-smile. The one his mom calls irresistible. The one that still forces her to call him ‘baby-boy.’

‘He’s got this little charming thing about him,” his mother, Toni, said. “He just smiles at you and you love him.”

Damien Rhodes, a running back from Manlius who this season could become just the seventh freshman to play at SU in the last four years, looks at home in Syracuse.

But home wasn’t always this comfortable.

Five minutes later, Rhodes sits down with reporters. He’s done this plenty of times before. You don’t rack up 2,102 yards, 33 touchdowns and become one of the most sought-after running backs in the country without a little attention.

He speaks intelligently. He speaks softly, almost mumbling. He looks down at his knees and rubs his knuckles.

‘I don’t like to talk about myself a lot,’ Rhodes said. ‘I don’t like to get credit.’

He wasn’t always this quiet Damien’s father, Dwight, said.

Rhodes’ parents aren’t sure why the shyness set in. But part of it can be explained by his childhood in Manlius, a mostly-white community 20 minutes from Syracuse University.

‘The first incident?’ Toni asks. ‘In kindergarten, someone called him the N-word.’

Things became so bad that the Rhodeses debated leaving the Fayetteville-Manlius school system. But through sports, Rhodes found the support necessary to stay.

Sleepovers and dinners with teammates were the norm, and parents dropped by the Rhodes’ house at random. The experience forged a bond that brought Fayetteville-Manlius a winning team.

‘He had some good friends in high school,’ Toni said while watching her son’s close friend, Elliot Goode, play his first college game for Wisconsin on television. ‘He hung out with these same guys every night.’

During their senior year, Rhodes and Goode brought F-M a sectional championship the school was never supposed to win. Then, the Hornets won a regional championship, which high school football aficionados still say a more-talented Corcoran squad should’ve won.

And all the while, Rhodes, beloved by most, resented by some, was at the helm of the team.

***

Dwight turns on his TV and plays a 10-minute, senior-year highlight tape. It’s one of more than 30 surrounding the TV.

The tape collection houses nearly every moment of Rhodes’ football career, starting from his second birthday. It’s complete with one-handed catches, breath-taking runs and ankle-twisting moves.

The only tape missing is of Rhodes’ final game, a 44-18 defeat to Webster High in the state championship. Not even his 170 yards ease the pain of that loss. He tossed the tape in the garbage.

Rhodes is driven by winning. From elementary school, when Toni put him to bed after finding him screaming at video games. To last year’s Kickoff Classic, when he sat at Giants Stadium as the Orangemen lost to Georgia Tech muttering, ‘I know I can help us win,” before he’d even committed to SU.

The tapes also lack one other detail — touchdown dances. Rhodes doesn’t celebrate after scoring. He usually places the ball in hands of an official. He then darts to the sidelines, gathers the offensive line and slaps their shoulder pads in thanks.

During high school, Dwight explained to Rhodes that he couldn’t afford to celebrate, that those who resented him would call him arrogant and cocky. Dwight reminded his son that there were people waiting for him to fail.

‘We’d go and we’d be excited, but we knew there was this undercurrent,” Dwight said. “You could tell from the way certain people would talk to us that they weren’t genuine and sincere. That was part of why Damien conducted himself the way he did. I told him don’t give anybody any ammunition.’

‘I don’t know if it was racially motivated,” Fayetteville-Manlius football coach Paul Muench said. ‘But people were envious of the attention Damien got.’

Rhodes’ every action was scrutinized in his hometown. When he signed a letter of intent to play with Syracuse, he ensured that the region would scrutinize him for four more years.

Like former Michigan star Marquise Walker and Penn State’s Cordell Mitchell, Rhodes won Central New York’s Player-of-the-Year Award. But Walker, Mitchell and countless others have fled the region and the pressure of being a hometown hero.

Rhodes, however, seems not to feel pressure. He beat out Tim Washington, who will redshirt, for the third-string running back job and is currently listed with Barry Baker on the depth chart. Coaches say he’ll carry the ball in every game.

‘I always believed that I’d have the ability to play right away,’ Rhodes said. ‘I knew I could play with these guys.’

After all, Rhodes has never sat on the bench in anything. Not during a year of basketball, three of track or a single lacrosse campaign, where he starred, prompting friends to tell him that All-America midfield honors were in his future.

Rhodes stopped playing lacrosse to run track and improve his speed. Inside he knew he was born to play football.

‘It’s a part of me,’ Rhodes said. ‘It was passed down in my genes.’

Rhodes’ father was a star high school running back in Rochester. At Rhodes’ second birthday party, Dwight, who also played semi-professional football, held one of the 15 footballs that had been given to his son as presents. Rhodes waddled up to his father, stripped the football out of his grasp and motored across the lawn.

‘Touchdown, touchdown,’ he cried, spiking the ball and raising his hands.

***

One of the 15 balls never left his hands. He cradled it when he watched a tape of Super Bowl XX between the Bears and Patriots. When the game ended, Rhodes rewound the tape and watched again. The cycle repeated until he had every piece of play-by-play memorized.

‘He watched that game every day, sometimes two or three times,’ Toni said. ‘It was on Beta, thank goodness, and the Beta died.’

After the tape ended, Rhodes would tell his father that Walter Payton was the greatest running back ever. His dad disagreed, citing former Orangeman Jim Brown.

Years later, upon signing with Syracuse, Rhodes was offered Brown’s number, the prestigious 44, but declined it.

‘I felt honored,’ said Rhodes, who will wear No. 1. ‘But I wanted to start something new.’

Rhodes has enough pressure to deal with, anyhow. He’s heard the stories about local athletes struggling at Syracuse, and he knows fellow F-M alum Matt Roe transferred to Maryland.

‘The thing with pressure is, no one can put any on Damien,’ Dwight said. ‘He puts more on himself to be the best than anyone else can.’

Rhodes’ family said he runs like O.J. Simpson and Gale Sayers. Syracuse running backs coach David Walker said he’s the spitting image of Marcus Allen. Muench said Rhodes doesn’t fit a mold and in 10 years there will be a fleet of running backs who coaches swear run just like Damien Rhodes.

***

‘That’s the first time he was ever caught from behind,’ Dwight said, pointing as the VCR shows Rhodes break a 20-yard run on an injured ankle. ‘He was always just so much faster than everyone else. No one could catch him.’

They still can’t. For the last eight years, despite interest in Boston College and Michigan State, Rhodes seemed destined for Syracuse.

He participated in Syracuse head coach Paul Pasqualoni’s camps each summer. He used to run into Pasqualoni at Wegman’s, where the coach would refer to Rhodes as ‘Manlius.”

Rhodes won both his sectional and regional football titles on the Carrier Dome’s carpet, taking his first handoff under the roof for a touchdown.

‘We were in (SU’s) locker room,’ Rhodes said. ‘After that, I figured I could get used to coming in there. I just felt comfortable. I felt right at home.’

Published on August 29, 2002 at 12:00 pm