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SPORTS THE LEGACY

Tradition comes first at Highland Park. Which is why these rich kids out-think and out-play faster, tougher teams. Then, once in a generation, a Grant Sumner comes along.
By SKIP BAYLESS |

the Grapevine Mustangs, ranked No. 1 in the state, were already out on the Highlander Stadium turf stretching and flexing when the eerie bagpipe music began. Several Mustangs wore do-rags on shaved heads, and several looked big enough to play for the Dallas Cowboys. There was only one reason the Mustangs would be spending a Friday night in the “rich kids’ ” neighborhood that is Highland Park: to win a football game.

But here came the home team, hustling single file onto the artificial turf it has ruled for generations. Compared to Grapevine, many of the Highland Park Scots looked like trick-or-treaters wearing their big brothers’ helmets and shoulder pads. As a group, they looked more I ike the Mormon Tabernacle Choir than one of the best teams in one of America’s best foot ball-playing states. Yet, like Grapevine, the Scots were also 6-0. The hymn-like bagpipe music, played before every game, seemed to inspire them as if they were going into battle against the king’s forces in Braveheart. Like some crack military unit, they snapped in unison through the same drills, chants and fraternal rituals the Scots have done for years.

Only No. 7 looked a little out of place wearing Highland Park’s blue and gold. Grant Sumner looked like the one man among boys. Though he’s big enough to be a Scot lineman, he’s the latest in the long lineage of star quarterbacks. Highland Park almost always has had a brave-hearted quarterback who beats odds and favored foes. Generations of blue (and gold) blood now flow through Sumner.

His mother Nancy shouldn’t have been surprised recently when a neighbor called to ask if Grant was home, “Sure, I’ll get him,” Nancy said.

“No,” the neighbor said, “I’ve got about 10 kids here who want to come over and get his autograph.”

Around Highland Park this fall, many kids have been seen wearing No. 7 Highland Park jerseys. While they probably idolize Troy Aikman, they want to be Grant Sumner. Some day, one of them will be chosen to carry on The Legacy.

In Highland Park, one of America’s most affluent communities, time stands still while the Scots march on. They still run the same out-of-style option offense like it’s going out of style. Going to a game is like hearing your most memorable golden oldie: On any given fall Friday night in 1996, the team playing at Highlander Stadium could have been the 1946 Scots. Fathers and grandfathers who gave their bodies, minds and souls for Scot Pride watched from the stands with wide-eyed future Scots as the tradition continued. For generations, too-small, too-slow, too-spoiled, too-pale Highland Park teams have beaten evolution and integration by out-coaching, out-thinking, out-conditioning, out-sacrificing, out-hustling and generally out-hearting more talented opposition.

In the age of the Nike commercial, there still isn’t a single would-be “Neon” Deion Sanders on the current Scot squad. How does all-white Highland Park compete with and often beat teams with black stars bound for Division 1A college glory? Above all, the Scots know their predecessors did it They’re driven by tradition-or the fear they won’t uphold it. Their fathers-doctors, lawyers, company chiefs-have taught them they’re supposed to be superior at whatever they do, academically, artistically or athletically. For II of the 12 years The Dallas Morning News has ranked the overall performances of area high school athletic programs. Highland Park has finished first. Sure, rich kids are going to dominate sports like golf and tennis and girls’ soccer, but the sport that dominates the psyche of the entire community is football.

It would be virtually impossible for a Highland Park to win consistently at the Division 1A college football level, where even second-stringers were high school heroes. But in high school, total team effort can overcome two or three blue-chip stars. For nearly all Scot football players, this is their college and pro football.

Lance Mcllhenny was one of the few “lucky” ones who went on to be a college star. Yet former SMU quarterback Mcllhenny, 35, says, “Those days [as a Scot] were the greatest football days of my life. At SMU, you’re thrown in with so many guys from different backgrounds, and football became more of a business. But at Highland Park, football was still football, the way it was meant to be. We’ve never had the pool of talented athletes or the [enroll-ment] numbers a lot of the other successful programs have had.” Grapevine is the state’s largest school in 4A, the second-largest football class; Highland Park’s enrollment ranks only fourth of six division 9-4A teams. “But we’ve had coaches and players who were willing to work unbelievably hard and a community that’s always pulled together and supported the team like crazy. At Highland Park, just because you were a skinny guy with no [bulging] arms didn’t mean you couldn’t fly around and hit people and think you were a badass. Now, that same guy is a senior vice president of Boston Market in Boulder, Colo.”

Mcllhenny, who sells real estate for The Staubach Company, plans for his four-year-old son Brookes to attend Highland Park. History suggests Brookes will start at quarterback as a junior in 2009.

Coach (Frank) Bevers taught us that the most important thing was to leave something better than you found it, and that’s what players at Highland Park have always tried to do,” Mcllhenny says. “1 know there’s the Mojo tradi tion [at Odessa Permian High and there’s the Piano [High School] tradition, but Highland Park’s pretty special.”

It began in the ’40s with a couple of undersized overachievers named Bobby Layne and Doak Walker, whose legends now reside in the NFL Hall of Fame At 5-11 and 170 pounds, Layne didn’t exactly have Troy Aik-man’s 6-4, 225-pound stature, and he definitely didn’t have Aikman’s arm. But Layne’s wobblers always seemed to wind up where only a Scot could catch them. Layne, reared by an uncle in University Park, was a rare mix of “silk-stocking boy.” as the Scots were called by ’40s rivals, and a refuse-to-lose street tough who broke training rules and a few noses. But Layne was no tougher than teammate Walker, whose mere 145 pounds always seemed to vaporize in a tackler’s grasp. Walker, who would win the Heisman Trophy at SMU, wasn’t especially fast, but he was shifty and smart and had enough heart to fuel an entire Scot team fora season.

It’s as if Highland Parkers have somehow invented a way to genetically transfer the intangibles of Layne and Walker down through generations.

Those qualities still bum in current Scot coach Scott Smith who was a fanatically dedicated 5-11, 165-pound Scot QB in the mid-’70s. Smith was followed by Mcllhenny. Rob Moerschell and John Stollenwerck, triple-option quarterbacks who were judged too short, too slow and too rag-armed to succeed at major colleges. But Mcllhenny started four straight years at SMU. Moerschell started at the University of Texas, Stollenwerck at Missouri.

From Layne to Mcllhenny, Scot quarterbacks have been paid the highest compliment: They’re simply winners.

Now comes senior Grant Steven Sumner, who’s everything you’d expect from a Scot quarterback. He’s as tough as the Jeep Cherokee he drives. He dates a pretty, blonde honors student and drill-team lieutenant named Brynn Haney. He attends Young Life meetings on Monday nights, Bible study on Wednesday nights and church every Sunday at Highland Park Methodist. He struggles with physics and recently had to read Beowulf for English. He claims fellow students treat him as if he’s “just another guy” when they pass him in the halls.

But Sumner is breaking the Highland Park quarterback mold- and not just because he listens to Pearl Jam or went as a tatooed Dennis Rodman to a Halloween dance. Sumner, who stands 6-3, began the season at 215 pounds and easily could carry 230 on his Aikman-like frame. He’s among the team’s two or three fastest players, with a 4.6-second 40-yard-dash speed, and he’s definitely the team’s most elusive ball carrier and best all-around athlete. A star pitcher in baseball, Sumner has a major-college arm-and leg. Several colleges want Sumner, who has 50-yard field-goal range, to place-kick and punt for them.

There goes the neighborhood: This year Highland Park finally has had a big, talented athlete at quarterback.

Bui unfortunately for Sumner, the Highland Park mold has in a way broken him. His dilemma: He’s potentially the best pure passer the school has ever had, yet he has been trapped in the tried-and-true running offense that was designed to level the playing field between yet another undertalented Scot team and district rivals such as Grapevine, which has five or six major-college prospects. Says coach Smith, “The sky’s the limit for how good Grant could be. But what I appreciate most is that his success this season has come within the confines of our offense.”

Which is to say. Sumner has sacrificed for the good of the team. Some Friday nights, Highland Park’s Veer option has become Grant’s tomb.

Says Grant’s father Steve, “College recruiters all say they can see he has a very strong arm, but Highland Park throws so little that college coaches just don’t know exactly how he’d be as a drop-back passer. We have great respect for the Highland Park tradition, but it just isn’t fair for all these high school recruiting experts to stereotype Grant as an option quarterback who’ll have to play another position in college. I’ve had coaches from [.rival] McKinney High School kid me that they’d buy me a house if we’d move into their district. With their pro-style passing game, they say they’d make Grant an All-American.”



NEARLY TWO HOURS BEFORE THE GRAPEVINE GAME, STEVE Sumner had been one of the first fans in the stands. Like many parents of players, Sumner wore a button picturing his son attached to his Scot cap. If only he could block for Grant: A jovial 6-foot-3 bear of a man. Steve is also a heavyweight in the legal realm. He has defended such high-profile clients as Cullen Davis, Ricky Kyle and Robert Edelman against murder charges, and he has represented Juan Gonzalez of the Texas open recruiters’ eyes by having a videotape made featuring Grant’s best passes of the last two seasons.

Steve says Arkansas, which needs a quarterback, is hoi after Grant. (Grant’s brother Justin, who is two years older, lasted one year as a walk-on receiver at Arkansas.) Steve and Grant had lunch with Northwestern coach Gary Barnett. who was “extremely impressive,” says the father. “But Northwestern is a long way from home.” SMU. says the Sumner family, is too close to their home on Potomac, just two blocks from campus.

Grant Sumner wants to play for the open recruiters’ eyes by having a videotape made featuring Grant’s best passes of the last two seasons.

Steve says Arkansas, which needs a quarterback, is hoi after Grant. (Grant’s brother Justin, who is two years older, lasted one year as a walk-on receiver at Arkansas.) Steve and Grant had lunch with Northwestern coach Gary Barnett. who was “extremely impressive,” says the father. “But Northwestern is a long way from home.” SMU. says the Sumner family, is too close to their home on Potomac, just two blocks from campus.

Grant Sumner wants to play for the University of Texas. Yet Austin-based recruiting expert Bobby Burton of the National Recruiting Advisor says Grant Sumner is far down the list of quarterbacks coveted by the Longhorn coaches. Burton’s thumbnail of Sumner: “Good athlete. Definite Division 1A prospect. But he probably projects to fullback or linebacker.”

Apprised of Burton’s assessment, Steve Sumner says, “That just hits my hot button.”

His son, who isn’t prone to boasting or embellishing, says he and the top Texas QB prospect, Edmund Stansbury of El Paso Irvin, attended the same football camp at Texas last summer, and that Stansbury “just wasn’t all that impressive. I thought 1 threw the ball at least as well as he did.”

But recruiters would like to see Sumner do it in games against teams like Grapevine.



TEN MINUTES BEFORE KICKOFF, SEASON-TICKET HOLDERS NEAR-ly had tilled the reserve seats on the home side of Highlander Stadium that affords a penthouse view of downtown Dallas. Between good-luck handshakes. Steve Sumner said, “If you look at this game on paper, it’s laughable. Their defensive line outweighs our offensive line 40 or 50 pounds a man. But you watch, we’ll give ’em a fight.”

Did they ever.

At times, though, it seemed like Grant Sumner was playing one-on-11. The Highland Park quarterback was probably the best running back on the field, which included Grapevine back Tellis Redmon, who’ll probably play major-college ball. Yet Sumner paid for each of his 75 yards rushing with cuts and bruises, and his total seemed far less impressive in the next day’s newspapers because of the nine times in 22 carries he was tackled for minus yardage. In his previous three games, Sumner had rushed for an astounding 615 yards, so it was no surprise the state’s No, 1 team built its game plan around making sure Grant Sumner didn’t beat them. While Grapevine allowed Scot fullback Scott Mobley 106 yards, Sumner often was reduced to running over two or three Mustangs to make three or four yards.

This is the price the Highland Park quarterback pays.

But his Dad said, “I had a college coach ask me the other day. What are they trying to do, get Grant killed?1 He has taken an incredible amount of punishment this year. Sometimes he’ll get hit by two or three guys, and Nancy [sitting next to Steve in the stands] will grab my arm so hard I think she’s going to tear it off. You can’t imagine how hard it is. as a parent, to watch that.”

It was nearly as difficult for the Sumners to watch this: With 1:42 remaining in a game Grapevine led by only 17-14, a feisty little Scot defense stopped Grapevine on fourth-and-one and took over at the Highland Park 44. But though Sumner had completed three fairly long passes, one for a 17-yard touchdown, offensive coordinator Price Clifford called four straight running plays, including two quar-terback draws. Four plays: 10 total yards. While the Scots ran, so did the clock. Only with 15 seconds left was Sumner allowed to throw two long passes into three-deep “prevent” Grapevine coverage. Both were broken up by Mustangs. Grapevine survived.

Sumner’s arm definitely can generate velocity rarely seen on the high-school level. He also displayed surprising touch and instinctive trajectory on “’fade” routes up the sideline. But his mechanics suffer under coaches who haven’t taught the passing game. His passing stats against Grapevine-4-of-13 for 100 yards-widened no eyes among University of Texas coaches.

That night, after the traditional postgame dinner for players and their parents, Steve Sumner and several of his frustrated booster-club board members-men who aren’t used to losing-sipped a few extra beers as they wrestled with a near-blasphemous impulse: asking the coaches if they’d consider opening up the offense and letting Grant throw more, especially on first down.

Said Steve, “When we do throw, it’s so predictable. I realize that the option offense has been great for Highland Park for many years, yet a lot of times. Highland Park gets into the playoffs and hits a ceiling.” It has been a long time since the Scots were state champs in 1957 and co-champs in ’44. “To break into the top echelon, you have to be able to throw.”



WHEN NOW-LEGENDARY COACH FRANK BEVERS WAS H1RKD in 1974 to revitalize Highland Park football. “They wanted someone who knew how to move the ball, possibly with inferior talent,” Bevers says. Bevers brought with him from Mineral Wells the Houston Veer, built around a quarterback who can ( I ) give or fake to the fullback, (2) pitch or fake to a trailing backor(3)cutupfield and run himself. The idea is for the quarterback to execute so quickly and flawlessly that two-on-one mismatches are created on the perimeter.

Of perennial college powers, only Nebraska still runs the option. But this season. Army, Navy and Air Force have used option offenses to beat teams with superior talent. On the high-school level, superior teams have a tough time preparing for Highland Park’s triple option because it’s too complicated to simulate in practice. It’s difficult enough to prepare for the Scots’ pre-snap shifting, which can be more confusing than the first day of algebra.

Equally perplexing for rival coaches is trying to convince their charges of the intensity with which the “slow little” Scots will hit them. For Scots, playing football is something like joining the Marines while living at home. Frank Bevers believed in long, rough practices, and in the beginning he worried about having to deal with too many spoiled brats. He need not have, Bevers says: “Hey, we’re all soft at one time. Then we go through the discipline of learning to control the mind. These kids are just like any other. They want to be disciplined. And you’ve got to realize their daddies are success-oriented people, which is how they got to be doctors and lawyers. I didn’t have to teach ’em to work hard. They see Daddy do that every day.”



THOUGH IT WAS ONLY 1 P.M. THE DAY AFTER THE MOST CRUSH-ing loss of Grant Sumner’s life, he already had been to a team film session, practice and lunch and had gone to take some pictures for his sixth-period photo-journalism class. Yes, though a color picture of Sumner lept off the front page of that Saturday’s Dallas Morning News sports section, the quarterback had been out snapping his own shots for the Highland Park yearbook. So what if his hands were cut and swollen and he had a little trouble getting the film in and out of his camera?

Ah, youth: Grant Sumner appeared to have gotten over Friday night much quicker than some of the Highland Park fathers. He still had the swagger and serenity of a natural athlete who knows he’s good. With wavy brown hair parted near the middle, he’s more outdoorsy handsome than poster-boy pretty. He’s most comfortable in T-shirts, shorts and sandals. His idea of a great vacation is backpacking in Canada.

“He’s always been very quiet,” Nancy Sumner said after returning from a meeting of team captains’ mothers. “But believe me, he’s very intense.”

That came across full force as Grant sat in the living room, toe tapping impatiently, and answered more questions from a prying reporter. He gave the feeling he still lives in a kid’s world off-limits to adults. But he definitely has adult goals.

“It has always been a dream to play pro football,” Grant said. “It’s somewhat of a goal. I don’t rely on it because I know you can get injured on any play. That’s why academics are very important.”

If football doesn’t work out, he said, he’d like to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a trial lawyer. “I think that would be a cool life,” he said.

But pro football would be cooler. “Troy Aikman has always been an idol or a hero of mine because I’ve always liked the way he plays football. I don’t know much about him outside football, but I’ve always liked how poised and intense he is and how he handles himself in interviews.”

Grant Sumner doesn’t know that Aikman was a late-blooming passer who went to his dream school-Oklahoma-got trapped in Barry Switzer’s triple-option offense, and had to transfer to UCLA to get a passing chance. Will Sumner sign with Texas after a “promise” he’ll get a shot at quarterback? Will he find himself losing interest in football after being moved to fullback or linebacker? Grant’s brother Justin quit after a year at Arkansas because, as he told his father, “I hate football.” It just wasn’t the same as playing for Highland Park.

Since Bobby Layne and Doak Walker, only one ex-Scot has gone on to start in the NFL-offensive tackle David Richards.

Next fall will be very different for the Sumner family. On Friday nights, Steve and Nancy will travel to Grant’s college games. No more of what Steve calls “the purity” of high school football. No more of what Nancy describes as “your heart beating until it feels like it’s coming out of your chest”-unless, of course. Grant becomes a college star.

Who knows? Maybe Grant Sumner will beat the odds and become another Aikman. And maybe, if his parents are really blessed, he’ll give them a grandson who one day will be chosen to carry on the legacy: to play quarterback for Highland Park.

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