`NO HALF MEASURES'
Lynn had winding journey from small Texas town to become Trojans' defensive guru
LOS ANGELES >> They would wage wars on the hoop in the driveway, a father who never believed in taking it easy and a son who never could accept his own failure.
Life is hard. Cruel. Unflinching. Anthony Lynn wanted his 10-year-old son D'Anton to know this, and understand that nothing came easy. Anthony was the pastor, and their driveway from Colorado to Texas to Florida was his sermon, preaching lessons with every swat of D'Anton's shots and every game won 21-0.
D'Anton's mother, Cynda, pleaded with Anthony, a former NFL running back in the twilight of his athletic prime, to lower the goal. To let him score, just once. No. If you want to score, Anthony would tell D'Anton, you need to learn how. Do something different. Go around me.
Cynda thought it would break her son's confidence. Instead, D'Anton would drag his father back out when Anthony got home, weary from long hours spent across various NFL coaching gigs. Back to the driveway. Back to another butt-whooping for D'Anton, a young Sisyphus pushing the rock.
Losing has never broken D'Anton Lynn, the man now tabbed as USC's next defensive general. It just angered him off. For eight years straight, he'd run 21 against his dad, and the competitiveness got intense. Unsettling. One fellow parent, Anthony said, barred a young D'Anton from his house because he played too rough.
His father's legacy has loomed large since that driveway, across a football journey walking paths already tread by Anthony. In
D'Anton's sophomore year of high school, Anthony moved his family back to Celina, Texas upon taking a job with the Cowboys — the tiny town with one stoplight where the father was a living legend. Best player in Celina High history. And Anthony thought it would all be too much for his son, a ballplayer himself, nowhere to run to escape a long shadow.
But by the time his senior year at Celina rolled around, D'Anton beat Anthony in the driveway for the first time.
“There was no mercy,” Anthony remembered.
And D'Anton never lost to his father again. Two decades later, sister Danielle said, her brother hasn't changed. That gene is masked, maybe, by a private demeanor, an analytical approach that made him into a Broyles Award finalist at UCLA and a rising name in the coaching business. But after a mutual