Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
’Canes a carnival ride
And that’s the challenge, filing away all the fans’ adoration
CORAL GABLES — For safety Jaquan Johnson, it happened in a mall, seeing people in suddenly fashionable Hurricanes clothes. For receiver Braxton Berrios, it happened walking to class, students greeting him and wishing luck.
For quarterback Malik Rosier, this sudden change from anonymous to awesome happened Monday night at The Big Cheese, a restaurant staple near campus.
Sure, he’d had a professor tell him earlier in the season that all the close wins were causing heart trouble. He’d also been out with a date after the Notre Dame game — “just a friend,” he said — and saw the general euphoria.
But Monday night’s dinner was something new and different as he sat to eat.
“Excuse me …” someone said.
A stranger interrupted for an autograph. And someone else wanted a picture. And then, the ice broken, a few others wanted a piece of him, too. Someone sat and talked for 20 minutes about football. “I couldn’t eat,” Rosier said. Understand, he’s not comMiami’s
plaining. In fact, he’s smiling as he tells what it’s like, this first blush with sports fame and even a slice of its bedfellow, celebrity. For three seasons Rosier was an anonymous back-up on an anonymous team. Now this. “It’s crazy,” he said. It’s not just that everyone loves a winner. It’s how the Hurricanes are the only high-profile winner right now. Look at South Florida’s pro teams. The Dolphins are going nowhere. The Heat look lost. The Panthers remain the Panthers, and the Marlins haven’t been relevant for a decade and are about to sell off their top players.
Meanwhile, you want to know the carnival ride this Hurricane season has taken everyone, including them? Want to see what a run to 10-0 and climb to No. 2 in the national rankings have done to the atmosphere around this team?
You don’t just need the record sales of Turnover Chain t-shirts or the manner Miami officials can’t meet the ticket demand for the ACC title game. You have to understand they’re discussing with these young, impressionable college kids the proper reaction to being praised in public. And how to file it.
It brings to mind the coaches’ dilemma: What’s more difficult to navigate — failure or success? “Rat poison,” Alabama Nick Saban called the constant public backpatting of players.
“Some guys can’t handle you saying ‘good job’ to them,” Miami coach Mark Richt said. “I’ll be honest with you. For whatever reason, they relax. ‘Coach said I did good, so I can relax now.’ Some guys you just can’t do that to.”
Richt isn’t a measure of how this area is reacting to the Hurricanes. He doesn’t go out. Part of this is the blinders most football coaches put on. Part, too, comes with the experience of knowing the reaction if he doesn’t wear blinders.
“I was telling my son Jon, I can’t go to the movies last night, or go bowling with the team [Tuesday],” he said. “There’s stuff we’re allowed to do with the team when all the other students are gone on vacation, by [NCAA] rule, we’re allowed to do some activities for them. I can’t go out and do those things. I can’t go to the Heat game and hang out.
“Just imagine, I’m at the movie one night, I’m bowling the next night and then I’m at the Miami Heat game. They’re like, ‘What are you doing, coach? You getting ready for the game or not?’ I stay home and watch film, is what I do. But it comes with the territory. You have to learn to be very friendly and polite to everybody and all that, but just don’t let it get to your head.”
Richt is 57, has seen success come and go, and understands the slippery concept of fortune in sports. Virginia, he noted, dropped a pick-6 on Saturday while Johnson returned a pick-6 for Miami’s gametying touchdown.
“If Jaquan had dropped his and the other guy catches his, we lose the game,” Richt said.
They won the game. They’re undefeated. And so this once-unloved program is loved again. Rosier knows. That meal at The Big Cheese? The one interrupted by pictures and autographs? He never did finish it.