Of all the instinctive, unpredictable moves Devin Hester has become known for making, Tamara James knows her favorite. Hester made it June 6, 2005, in Miami, and the impact caused James to buckle at the knees like someone covering one of Hester’s punt returns. Together they had gone to Game 7 of the Miami Heat-Detroit Pistons NBA playoff series at Miami Arena, a hot ticket but the place to be for the University of Miami’s hottest couple.
Hester, the Bears’ electric rookie punt returner, was entering his final season as a Hurricane football player, and James, a member of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, eventually would leave Coral Gables as the school’s career scoring leader.
The uncertainty of their upcoming pro sports careers weighed heavily on Hester’s mind that summer. So at halftime of the Heat game, with James expecting nothing more than a trip to the concession stand, Hester tried removing that doubt by proposing she take a different kind of journey with him.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a ring and asked the girl he met as a freshman to marry him. Once the shock wore off, James said yes.
Hester’s “Anytime” nickname at Miami apparently didn’t just fit on the football field.
“Surprised doesn’t begin to describe how I felt,” James said. “But that’s Devin.”
That’s Devin, a 5-foot-11-inch, 196-pound bundle of possibility whose spontaneity is appreciated by Bears fans as much as by his fiance. Even their wedding date might have to be a spur-of-the-moment thing with their dual athletic careers complicating matters. James leaves Tuesday for Spain to begin playing in a professional league this fall.
Like the Packers’ coverage teams, she will find Hester easy to miss.
“It might be tough on him, but we’ve talked about how it’s a job now and not like a scholarship, and I know he’ll be fine because once he sets his mind to do something, he does it,” James said. “That’s the way he’s always been.”
Getting life in order
He didn’t leave the house for two weeks, spending most of the time crying in his bedroom. Hester, an All-American at Suncoast High School in Riviera Beach, Fla., found out in 2002 that his SAT scores were too low for him to enroll at Miami, and the news hit him harder than any linebacker.
“It was very tough because I had been through so much already,” Hester recalled. “So many people said I wasn’t going to graduate from high school and not go to college that I started to believe maybe college wasn’t for me.”
His mother, Juanita Brown, disagreed and used all of her evangelical skills to coax her youngest son out of the emotional doldrums. Brown, a postal worker who also has preached for the Jesus Is The Answer ministry in Asia and Africa, asked Hester if he really believed following the negative influences that had started to creep into his life fit the model he always imagined.
“I just told him his dream was still alive and this, too, shall pass,” Brown said.
Hester decided to follow his mother’s personal road map out of adversity, one he brought with him to Chicago.
A serious car accident nearly paralyzed Brown and left her bedridden for weeks when Hester was 10 years old. Two years later his father, Lenorris Hester Sr., a high school track standout who divorced Hester’s mother when Hester was a toddler, died of cancer at 33.
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“I was lucky that I had a stepfather, Derrick Brown, who treated us like one of his own,” Hester said. “But I’m not going to lie. Losing my dad was rough.”
Sports had helped pull Hester out of his depression, and that was where he turned when his life seemed in such disarray after high school. He finally stopped moping around temptations at home and started visiting his brother Lenorris, older by 11 months, at Florida International University, where he played wide receiver.
Since the day they began playing one-on-one in the yard with their stepdad as quarterback, the Hester brothers always vowed to help one another reach their shared goal of football stardom. Now it was Lenorris’ turn.
“Devin didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life at that point, and maybe watching me got his mind back on that,” he said.
Lenorris Hester’s football career ended after that 2002 season because of a serious pelvic injury, but his younger brother’s resumed the following season at Miami because he had regained his focus and passed the SAT.
“He was ready to show the world what he could do,” Lenorris said.
Confident from start
He was ready to tell the world too. Hester predicted during Miami’s media day in his freshman year of ’03 that he would return a kickoff for a touchdown in his first college game. He missed by one week, racing 97 yards against Florida the second week and pulling his helmet off to celebrate so ostentatiously he drew a penalty.
That same type of braggadocio helped Hester make an impression on Deion Sanders, now his mentor, the first time he met “Prime Time.” On a recruiting visit to Florida State, Hester asked Sanders if he could wear his retired No. 2 Seminoles jersey.
“He said, `You have to do more than what you did in high school,'” Hester recalled.
The point became moot when Hester chose Miami, but Sanders remembered their exchange. A few years later, after Hester returned a punt 78 yards against Louisville in a nationally televised game, Sanders asked then-Baltimore Ravens teammate Ed Reed, a Miami alum, to put the two in touch.
They hit it off and remain close. When Hester returned to the Bears’ locker room last Sunday after his 84-yard punt return for a touchdown, Sanders had left him a text message: “I’m proud of you.”
“He’s kind of like an older brother,” Hester said. “He’s not only there for me on the field but off the field as well.”
Hester credits Sanders’ influence with helping him keep things in perspective as celebrity swirls around him.
Like Sanders, Hester delicately balances flamboyance with a strong faith that fuels his self-confidence. The player known as a trash-talker in the Miami tradition wears a tattoo on his back quoting Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon that is formed against me shall be able to prosper.”
It was Sanders who counseled Hester to follow his heart last winter, when he was debating whether to return to Miami for a final season, thereby fulfilling a promise to his late father by graduating. Hester opted to enter the NFL draft. The biggest reason: to provide for his family, whose house was heavily damaged by Hurricane Frances two years ago. As the Bears’ second-round pick, he received a $1.25 million bonus.
“I’m going to graduate because I said I would,” Hester said. “I just thought it was time.”
Offense in future?
Hester was on his way to the defensive meeting room the other day when quarterback Rex Grossman intercepted him.
“He said, `You’re going to the wrong meeting,'” Hester said, smiling.
He took it as a compliment. Like the Bears’ offensive coaches, Grossman would welcome a player with Hester’s 4.27 speed running pass routes each game.
A threat like that certainly would stretch the field against a good defense such as the Lions on Sunday, and Hester would not be shocked to be thrown into action sooner rather than later this season. Not that he is pushing to play in all three phases of the game as he did in college.
“I won’t say it’s going to happen, but two, three years from now I could see being a receiver, sure,” Hester said.
For now he is having fun returning punts, having become the first Bears rookie since Perry Jeter in 1956 to bring one back for a touchdown in his NFL debut. Nicknamed the “Windy City Flyer” by Bears radio announcer Jeff Joniak, Hester compares the thrill of breaking into the open field to riding a roller coaster.
Buckle up, Bears fans. And enjoy the ride.
“I would say returning punts is 20 percent coaching and 80 percent natural instinct,” Hester said. “You can’t just put anybody out there. You feel when somebody is up on you so you don’t have to look. It’s just something God blesses you with–and I have it.”
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