Auburn’s McCalebb trying to start new life on Plains

The sullen look on Onterio McCalebb’s face tells Bryan Bailey all he needs to know.

There’s no need to talk about it, no need to rehash stories about the centerpiece of the uphill battle McCalebb has faced his entire life. McCalebb’s conversations with his nomadic mother, Staphisa McMillan, remain A and B.

Bailey, McCalebb’s high school track coach and longtime mentor, doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t ask why McCalebb keeps coming back, keeps showing support, keeps promising a better future for his drug-afflicted mother.

He merely provides the transportation for these sporadic encounters.

“Just the look in his eyes tells me everything,” Bailey said. “He hates seeing her the way she is. There are times he shows up and she’s so strung out that she doesn’t even recognize who he is at first.

“It’s just a sad thing for him because he’s doing the best for her and she’s not helping herself.”

McMillan has never seen McCalebb wiggle his undersized body in between a guard and a center, juke a linebacker or outrun a defensive back.

“Yeah,” McCalebb said, “there were a lot of distractions.”

If everything goes as planned, McMillan, along with a few of McCalebb’s cousins, will be at Jordan-Hare Stadium for today’s A-Day game. They’ll be here watching McCalebb make his Auburn debut, wearing No. 23, before an expected 30,000-40,000 fans — at least five times greater than the entire population of McCalebb’s hometown, Fort Meade, Fla.

As far as McCalebb is concerned, though, there’s only one fan that matters.

“It means everything to me,” McCalebb said. “My mom, back when we were little and we didn’t have nothing, my mom stayed in the streets.”

‘Here to here’
Really, McCalebb could be there now, too. No one would have been shocked if it ended up that way.

Before McCalebb enrolled at Fort Meade High School, he, his three brothers and sister — “All of us have different daddies,” McCalebb said — followed their mother from home to home. There were stays at friends’ houses, grandma’s house, any house with an open invitation and a roof able to keep six more people dry and warm.

Only once did the family have a place it could call home — a bare-bones trailer with no electricity.

“We didn’t have nothing,” McCalebb said.

It wasn’t until he was near middle-school age when McCalebb found out who his true father was — right around the time McCalebb was taken away from McMillan and sent to live with his grandma on a permanent basis.

McCalebb was originally told his father was DeWayne McCalebb — the father of his 10th grade brother who carries the same name as the star quarterback at Fort Meade. In actuality, it was Derrick Baker, who lived with McCalebb through the middle-school years before he was sent to jail on a probation violation.

“There’s no denying who his dad is,” Bailey said. “They’re carbon copies of each other.”

But he was gone when McCalebb went from having the care-free life of a child to the worries of an adult all too quickly. So was McMillan, who can usually be found at one of the rougher corners in Fort Meade with the rest of the town’s drug addicts, Bailey said.

Her nights are spent just like they were when the family was together. Sometimes, when McMillan can’t find an open door, she’s forced to sleep in a car.

“For a kid that young to have to go through that, so many of them turn to the streets,” Bailey said. “He fought through it.”

An outstretched wing
McCalebb turned to Bailey, instead.

Bailey first met McCalebb — all 140 pounds “soaking wet” of the freshman — when he returned to his hometown after picking up his teaching degree at Florida State. The small-town feel of Fort Meade, pop. 5,691, called Bailey back.

It wouldn’t take long for him to realize a big-time athlete was lurking in its midst.

McCalebb went to the Florida high school state championships that year in the 100- and 200-meter dash. In his senior season, McCalebb won state titles in both events.

Somewhere in between, Onterio McCalebb took on the nickname Onterio Bailey.

“I guess I kind of took Onterio under my wing,” McCalebb said. “He kind of became my stepson through everything.”

Just like he has in meetings with reporters, McCalebb didn’t come out with the details of what he went through to still be in school and not on the corner slingin.’ It took time, but there are just some things that can’t remain stowed away in the back of a teenager’s head.

McCalebb found relative stability during his four years at Fort Meade. He moved out of his grandma’s and in with a family friend who had three of his own kids in high school. Later, he moved in with a cousin, which provided even more stability because it was just the two of them, Bailey said.

Still, the money was always tight. McCalebb’s pride would try to prevent the inevitable, but sometimes the circumstances were too tough, prompting him to send Bailey text messages from time to time asking for $5.

Bailey didn’t think twice about it.

“Every kid deserves to take a girlfriend out once and a while to a restaurant, go to prom, homecoming,” Bailey said. “I’d rather go in debt and have to file bankruptcy than to see you sling one drug or steal anything.”

The relationship provided more than just handouts.

When Scout.com and Rivals.com started calling on McCalebb after his 10th grade season, Bailey was there to offer the fatherly advice he simply couldn’t find elsewhere. He warned McCalebb of the hangers-on that would soon emerge, just trying to reserve a seat on his future gravy train.

Sure enough, McCalebb would have to constantly fend off people pretending to be some sort of cousin or long-lost relative, Bailey said.

“I’ve seen it too many times,” Bailey said. “What’s sad is people that have nothing going for them want to live off someone else. I said ‘Don’t let someone connect themselves to you and live off of what you’ve got.’”

From Day 1, Bailey said he told McCalebb not to worry about him whenever he made it big.

“I did what I did because I love him,” Bailey said. “I’ll always be there no matter what and I wanted him to do the best things for him.”

By the book
The best thing to happen to McCalebb, Bailey said, was not getting into Auburn right away.

His ability to elude tacklers and flat-out burn his pursuers helped McCalebb run for nearly 3,500 yards and score 54 touchdowns during his final two seasons at Fort Meade. It helped bring on the scholarship offers from the Auburns, Clemsons and Floridas of the college football world. And it helped make a way out from what once was a pre-destined life on the streets seem feasible.

But it wasn’t enough, Bailey said. McCalebb needed to experience a stable lifestyle before he was sent away six hours from home to a big school — a place that can unravel even the most pampered of teenagers.

Enter Chatham Hargrave Military Academy.

McCalebb begrudgingly signed on for a year at the prep school in “middle-of-nowhere” Virginia. The distance from home, from his mother, even from the streets of Fort Meade scared McCalebb.

That soon would change.

“It was a shock. Times got hard,” McCalebb said. “You can’t have a cell phone, no microwave, no refrigerator, no outside clothes, no car.

“It helped me become a man.”

Bailey saw the difference as soon as McCalebb walked off the plane in his first trip back to Fort Meade.

Gone was the kid “you’d hear before you see.” Instead, McCalebb, dressed in army boots, a Hargrave shirt and shorts, walked up to a waiting Bailey in silence before outstretching his hand.

That handshake quickly morphed into a hug. McCalebb was a man now.

‘He’s fast’
When McCalebb first took a handoff in high school, Bailey watched him ignore his blocks up the middle and dart straight for the sideline.

That worked just fine in 1A high school ball, especially for a player as dangerously fast as McCalebb. But it wouldn’t cut it in college, let alone Hargrave, so McCalebb toughened up and prepared for a daily pounding.

“He’s turned from a sideline sprinter into a running back,” Bailey said.

Though he’s bulked up significantly since that first day of track practice five years ago, McCalebb is still undersized. He’s listed at 5-foot-10, 165 pounds, but that could be a shade on the generous side.

Speed is how he’s separated himself so far in a spring where his name seems to come up every day in reference to big plays in practice.

“I’m just running off talent,” McCalebb said.

“We’re asking him to do a lot and play at a lot of different spots for us, and he’s doing a really good job,” running backs coach Curtis Luper said. “He’s going to get better, he’s going to get so much better.”

McCalebb has just as much chance as anyone in topping a wide-open depth chart that’s come courtesy of a new coaching staff. Even if he can’t beat out Ben Tate, a more prototypical tailback, McCalebb will be on the field if he can prove to offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn that he is too dangerous to be on the sidelines.

“When I’m going up against the defense, people who are bigger than me, it doesn’t fear me,” McCalebb said. “I gotta go out there and do something that’s my dream to do — to get my momma off the streets.

“If you’ve got the heart, you can do anything.”

That goal has had McCalebb thinking about the future even before the start of his Auburn career. If his potential pans out and professional options become a realistic possibility, McCalebb said he’d jump at the first opportunity.

All for the good of a woman who has likely run out of them.

“That woman put those kids through hell,” Bailey said, “But they’d drop everything in the world for her.”

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