http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar...030362/1035/SPT</p> </p> <span class="headline">Back from the brink</span> <span class="deckline">Hard-knock life for UC's Gilyard</span> </p> <span class="byline">By Josh Katzowitz Post staff reporter</span> <p class="body">Marty Gilyard thought about quitting.</p><p class="body">He'd try to get comfortable for a night of sleep in his car or he'd stretch his legs at 6 a.m. the next morning ready for another full day of work, and the thought of returning home to Florida crossed his mind.</p><p class="body">He'd have to deliver a pizza or he'd be forced to watch the University of Cincinnati - his teammates and brothers - from the stands, and he thought about leaving town.</p><p class="body">He'd work backbreaking construction or he'd ponder the debt, rather than the opposing cornerback, he was facing, and he thought about igniting his car and zooming off into the sunset.</p><p class="body">So yeah, he thought about quitting.</p><p class="body">Can you blame him?</p><p class="body">He had lost his scholarship. He had lost his opportunity. With the exception of his bedroom, disguised as a green 2002 Pontiac Grand Am, and his Motorola SLVR cell phone, he had lost just about everything.</p><p class="body">He had lost himself.</p><p class="body">You wouldn't have known it watching him play for UC Thursday in its season opener against Southeast Missouri State. You wouldn't have felt his pain as you watched the sophomore receiver catch eight passes for 134 yards in a 59-3 victory for the Bearcats. You wouldn't have thought about the deaths of his grandfather and his godson as he hauled in that 56-yard touchdown pass.</p><p class="body">You would have seen only his potential stardom and his fianceé's tears of joy.</p><p class="body">Gilyard has had a rough stay at UC, but for 60 minutes Thursday, you could see, possibly, the beginning of his rebirth.</p><p class="body">"I cried for him," said Amber Johnson, who was shocked Friday when Gilyard proposed to her. "He was so terribly happy. It really has been a long time coming. He's been through a lot. In one moment to see it come to a head, that had to be such a burden lifted off him. That had to be so glorifying.'</p><p class="body">After all, he'd been stationed light years away from glory the past two years.</p><p class="body">Although the Palm Coast, Fla., native earned playing time on special teams and as a freshman defensive back in 2005, he wasted his hours away from football. A self-described country boy from Florida, he grew enamored with his newfound city life. Attending class became an afterthought.</p><p class="body">"Big buildings and a city lit up," Gilyard said. "We don't have big buildings where I'm from. The city I grew up in, we don't have a shopping center. We've had one stoplight for 90 years. We didn't have the nightlife, where everybody is out so late. Campus life, everybody is up. I wasn't focused. I had my priorities mixed up."</p><p class="body">When former coach Mark Dantonio pulled his scholarship because Gilyard academically was ineligible for the 2006 season, Gilyard began losing himself. He lost his funding, and when he tried signing up for winter-quarter classes, he discovered a bill for nearly $8,000.</p><p class="body">Can't pay for tuition? Too bad, you can't enroll here. Doesn't matter if your grandfather is dying or your 1 ½-year-old godson has drowned or your mom and dad can't afford to help you pay the bills.</p><p class="body">Doesn't matter if this life has become too hard. Go find yourself a job. Deal with your heartache and your stress on your own time.</p><p class="body">So, Gilyard found himself a job or three. He worked as a cook and delivery driver at Pomodori's Pizzeria in University Heights, he worked as a sales rep for a marketing firm, he worked construction for long hours.</p><p class="body">He didn't, however, make ends meet.</p><p class="body">That's why, for a few weeks, he parked behind a CVS pharmacy for the night and tried to sleep with his cell phone - his lifeline - by his side and his possessions stacked all around him. He kept his secret from Johnson. He thought about quitting.</p><p class="body">Said Gilyard: "I called home and talked to my mom, and I told her, 'Mom, I don't know how I'm going to do it. I want to come home. Is football going to be this hard? Maybe it's not made for me.' She was like, 'I can't believe you're sitting here and quitting. Your whole life, you've been a leader. I've never seen you like this. You need to sit down there and pray.'"</p><p class="body">He did. Gilyard said he prayed for better days and better ways, and pretty soon, he went from making $7 an hour to $10 to $12. He stayed with receiver Antwuan Giddens for a few weeks; he stayed with safety Anthony Williams for a while as well.</p><p class="body">"Marty was put in some very difficult circumstances, things we couldn't help him with," Bearcats coach Brian Kelly said. "The other staff took his scholarship, and you couldn't re-award the scholarship until this fall. He had to pay back a huge bill; he had to work all summer. I'm just happy for him that he's been able to overcome some obstacles in his life."</p><p class="body">Gilyard considers himself the rock of his family. His mom hasn't come to see him play, because it's expensive to travel to Cincinnati. His dad, Gilyard says, is a diabetic and has undergone multiple surgeries. In the past year, Gilyard has lost his grandfather and godson - it's hurtful and tragic all wrapped together with a ribbon of grief on top.</p><p class="body">But Gilyard has shown resiliency in the past. When he was in his early teenage years, he was running an errand for his mom and walked into the path of a bullet. Johnson says Gilyard nearly died and spent seven months in the hospital. The gunshot left behind a scar that covers much of his chest.</p><p class="body">Gilyard knows how to survive, so eventually, he paid off his debt - about $10,000 worth. This week, Gilyard hopes to move into his new apartment. The 20-year-old is engaged to Johnson. He's receiving scholarship money once again.</p><p class="body">Johnson says that, before her eyes, he's transformed from a hotheaded boy into a responsible man.</p><p class="body">"I just grew up," Gilyard said. "I had to face responsibility as a man. With my grandfather leaving, all those things hit hard. I had to become mentally strong and emotionally strong for everybody."</p><p class="body">Which brings us to a Thursday night blowout that featured the unveiling of Kelly's new offense. It's also brought us to the reintroduction of Gilyard.</p><p class="body">That night, as he started dressing in his uniform, Gilyard could think back to his last two years. All the work. All the debt. All the immaturity.</p><p class="body">The loss of his loved ones and his possessions. Of his scholarship, and the loss of himself.</p><p class="body">He thought about how blessed he'd been, despite all the woes. He thought about what this new opportunity meant.</p><p class="body">Then, he saw the C-Paw on his helmet and his last name on the back of his jersey and realized that everything he'd been through had been worth it.</p><p class="body">Because after losing everything that mattered, Gilyard, once again, had found what he'd lost. He had found himself.</p><p class="body">And he started to cry.</p> </p>
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070903/SPT0101/709030352/1062/SPT</p> </p><div class="header">Coming back to the ball</div> <div class="decker">Working four jobs, living in his car and spurning a troubled past, Marty Gilyard worked his way back to Bearcats</div> <div class="byline">BY BILL KOCH / BKOCH@ENQUIRER.COM </div> As soon as he saw his name on the back of his University of Cincinnati football jersey in the locker room Thursday night, tears began to cloud Marty Gilyard's eyes.</p> To his teammates, having their name on the back of their jerseys might not have meant much. To Gilyard it meant everything.</p> "I didn't have my last name on my jersey last year," Gilyard said Sunday. "I didn't even have a jersey. I was in a wind breaker on the sideline. Once I saw that C-paw on my helmet and my name on the back of my jersey, that's when I got a little emotional and I cried."</p> Gilyard, who was redshirted last year, would catch eight passes for 134 yards, including a 56-yard touchdown reception, against Southeast Missouri State in his first game as a wide receiver after having played defense in 2005 for then-UC coach Mark Dantonio.</p> It was a nice way to begin his new career as a wide receiver, but in many ways it wasn't a beginning at all. Rather it was the culmination of a long, arduous journey that saw him lose his scholarship, forcing him to work four jobs to pay his tuition.</p> Things got so bad that Gilyard even spent several weeks living in his car in June, for a time parked behind the CVS store near campus, hoping when he went to sleep at night that he would wake up in the morning undisturbed so that he could begin another grueling work day.</p> He did all that so that he could play football again, but also so that he could salvage his life before it was too late. One thing he knew for sure: He couldn't go back to his drug-infested hometown of Bunnell, Fla. There was nothing for him there but trouble, and he had already seen his share of that.</p> He was going to stay in Cincinnati. He was going to work as many jobs as he physically could and he was going to play football again.</p> Gilyard was smart enough to understand that he had to get out of Florida after he finished playing at Flagler Palm Coast High School, where he had rushed for more than 2,500 yards and was a first-team Class 5A all-state selection.</p> He chose UC because he thought it was a safe distance from his hometown.</p> "When I go home, everybody's doing the same things they were years ago," Gilyard said. "They're on the same corners, selling the same drugs. I had to get away. I didn't want to be close enough to where I could drive home or to where somebody could come and see me. I wanted to be far enough away so that I wasn't dependent on anybody back home."</p> By the time he had reached his early teens, Gilyard said he was already on the street selling drugs. One day, as he went about his financially lucrative business, he was shot in the chest by a passing car attempting to shoot at someone in another car.</p> "I was addicted to that fast money," Gilyard said. "Four hundred dollars was a lot of money. Then $400 turned to eight and eight turned to 16. I was good at making money."</p> When he arrived at UC, Gilyard was switched from running back to defense. He didn't like it but he acquitted himself well on special teams, breaking off a 60-yard kickoff return against Miami.</p> He didn't acquit himself nearly as well in the classroom. Instead of taking advantage of his new environment, he allowed himself to become spoiled by it.</p> Forget those early-morning classes on Wednesday and Friday. Gilyard was out partying on Tuesday and Thursday nights.</p> "I came from a real small city," Gilyard said. "We only had one light in the city. I wasn't used to having the night life, with everybody up all late. I never saw big buildings like that, never in my life. You got girls, girls and more girls. It was a real hard transition for me.</p> "Everybody told me it was going to be hard, but I was naïve. I didn't really pay attention to anybody, especially my head coach in high school. He told me that when you play college football, it's a full-time job. I was like, yeah, yeah, football is football."</p> Eventually, the partying and the missed classes caught up with him. During spring quarter of his freshman year, Gilyard was told by Dantonio that because of his poor academic performance he was taking away his scholarship. The plan was to give it back to Gilyard during fall quarter if he took care of business in the classroom.</p> Gilyard did his part, but because of an NCAA rule that was passed in 2006, UC could not award him a scholarship in the middle of the quarter. That left Gilyard with nearly $9,000 in tuition and lodging bills that he had to find a way to pay before he could get back into school and reclaim his scholarship.</p> Before he left in December for Michigan State, Dantonio asked UC assistant coach Tim Hinton, who had recruited Gilyard and was staying on Brian Kelly's new staff, to do everything he could to help him.</p> But Hinton was limited in what he could do.</p> "That's one of the crazy things about the NCAA," Hinton said. "There's a lot of issues with this kid and you're sitting there with your hands tied. There's nothing you can do. You can't give him money. You can't set him up with housing. You can't store his stuff in our house."</p> Kelly first became familiar with Gilyard's situation after his staff saw him on tape.</p> "He was the most potentially gifted athlete we had in the program," Kelly said. "That gets my attention, so I met with Marty to figure out what the story was. He's got an existing bill of $6,100 that he's got to pay back, including his rent money. That's another $2,500 and he can't come back to school until he pays his bills.</p> "I can't require the kid to be here because he can't go back on scholarship until this fall. He works a job, comes to all the workouts, works out a deal with (trainer Paul) Longo that he comes in at 5:30 or quarter to six in the morning and works out."</p> UC appealed to the NCAA to permit Gilyard to get his scholarship back. The NCAA said no, not until he paid his bills.</p> Gilyard couldn't turn to his family for help. His mother, Trish Crudep, was in financial straits. His father, who split up with his mother when he was little, is an insulin-dependent diabetic and couldn't help either.</p> So Gilyard went to work - as a cook and delivery person at a restaurant, as a sales rep pushing kitchen cutlery. He worked construction and for a moving company, for a brief time working all four jobs at the same time.</p> He drew encouragement from his fiancé, Amber Johnson, and her mother, Deborah, neither of whom knew that he was living in his car.</p> "I could have stayed in a hotel but I didn't want to," Gilyard said. "I wanted to figure out how far I could go down low before I realized there was only one person that could help me and that was God. I had to find him and get my faith back because I was down. I was really down. I was like football's gone now, school's gone now.</p> "I was a hometown hero. Everybody back home knows me personally. When all this goes down, my mom's back home covering for me, saying, everything's OK with Marty. She still don't know to this day that I had to sleep in the car. When my fianceé found out, she broke down and cried."</p> At one point, it was too much to bear.</p> "I'd call and tell my mom this is too much," Gilyard said. "I want to come home and be done with everything. I don't think it was meant for me to go to school. She was like, no. Have faith in the Lord and everything will fall into place. I did a lot of praying, waking up in the morning praying. I'd pray before I would eat, before I would go to bed. I even prayed in my sleep."</p> Gilyard's not out of the woods yet. He took out a loan for a few thousand dollars to help pay his school bills. The rest came out of his own pocket.</p> He'll have to pay back the loan after he graduates, but the important thing is that he's back in school and playing football on scholarship with three years of eligibility remaining. Suddenly, a career that once seemed to have ended is promising once again.</p> When Gilyard showed up for summer camp in early August, Hinton said, it was one of the happiest day of his 26-year coaching career.</p> "If he had gone back to Florida, he would have never come back," Hinton said. "He wouldn't be back here today and have a chance to get an education. In the long run that's what this is about. College football is a business, but number one and foremost is to get a kid a college education.</p> "There's a great kid inside of him. With a college degree and an educated mind, he may change a whole life cycle down there. He has seen sides of the world that I hope I never have to. But he's got a good perspective and he's a competitor. And he loves this game."</p> </p>
