LITTLE ROCK — He was going to go back to Bremerton, Wash.
Courtney Stone, who never asked for much, had gotten all he wanted out of Earle. He'd graduated from high school and wrapped up his high school football career as an Earle Bulldog, and his only request was for his coach, Maurice Moody, to spring for a letter jacket.
There wasn't anything left for him in the small town on the delta of northeast Arkansas, not after his grandmother, Inez Stone, died after his senior year. He would go back to Bremerton, scrape together some money working at Safeway and, no two ways about it, earn a college degree.
Instead, Stone, 18, died Aug. 14 at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center after collapsing at the end of football practice two days earlier at the Dalton Whetstone Boys and Girls Club in Little Rock. Stone was a 5-11, 250-pound nose tackle for Arkansas Baptist College, a small historically black school in Little Rock that has the state's only junior college football program.
Arkansas Baptist kicks off its third football season at 1 p.m. today at Scott Field in Little Rock against Highland (Kan.) College.Athletic Director Charles Ripley has ordered helmet decals for the team to wear during the season to honor Stone, whose cause of death remains undetermined pending autopsy results and a toxicology report.
In the meantime, three communities are trying to come to grips with an inspirational story that ended in midsentence.
GETTING OUT
Moody has seen and heard plenty of hard-luck stories, having grown up, taught and coached in Earle.
Stone was the rare kid for whom it simply didn't matter.
Moody declined to comment on the activities of Stone's biological parents, except to say their lifestyle directly affected the time and energy they placed into raising their son.
"He had every reason to be disgruntled about his situation," Moody said. "He couldn't go home to his mother and father. He couldn't go home to a home-cooked meal every night."
Moody coached Stone as a seventh-, eighth- and ninthgrader, and coached him again when he returned to Earle for his senior year. He remembers an industrious young man who often deferred to authority figures without complaint. When the Arkansas Baptist staff inquired about Stone, they learned he was a regular at Sunday schoolwhether or not he was accompanied by an adult.
Stone seemed predisposed to avoid trouble.
"He came to school every day," said Donald Williams, who coached and taught Stone in junior high and was an assistant under Moody on the high school staff.
Then came the day when Stone, then a ninth-grader, showed up to Williams' classroom in tears. With his home life still in upheaval, Stone began his 10th-grade year in Bremerton living with his aunt and uncle.
"But he never once got angry," Moody said. "That's just the kind of kid Courtney was."
NEW LIFE
They called themselves "FKK," which was adolescent shorthand for Fat Kids Krew.
Glenn Calnan and his buddies on the Bremerton High School football team were united by their love of the simple pleasures. Leave the usual trappings of teenage thrill-seeking to others. Give Calnan and his friends some money for food and a spot to lay out and play Xbox 360, and you had a group of large and content football players.
"My house seemed to be the gathering grounds," said Calnan's 54-year-old father, Tim. "Just a bunch of kids who would strip down the buffet after football practice."
Tim Calnan had heard about the massive lineman who had moved from the tiny, mostly black rural town in Arkansas to live with his aunt. He was all too happy to have him when he began dropping by with the rest of the football players.
But he knew there was a story behind Courtney Stone. There had to be.
"This kid comes to town, big black kid in this predominantly white and Asian town," Calnan said. "Everyone knew he had a rough upbringing. I mean, why was he here? We knew there was stuff in his background."
Bremerton's football coach, Nate Gillam, was similarly intrigued. Bremerton is far more racially diverse and affluent than Earle, but it has its share of kids bearing the emotional marks of a rough upbringing.
Stone slipped comfortably into life at Bremerton High, driving around town in a beatup sedan that was endearingly tricked-out while making friends both black and white, athlete and nonathlete.
But as it usually is with teenagers, Stone's friends were his chief confidants, not his coaches. Slowly, stories came out, and justas slowly, some of them found their way to Gillam.
"Sad things about the way he had been treated," Gillam said.
At first Stone stayed with his aunt and uncle, then moved in with his uncle Edward when the two divorced. Home life was functional, though it appears he and Edward Stone never fully clicked.
"I think basically he was just living there," said Chris Martindale, a teammate of Stone's. "Just dinner and lunch. I don't think there was much family talk."
Still, Courtney Stone came to consider Bremerton home, even when Inez Stone's illness led him to head back to Earle for his senior year.
The details of his past - or the lack of details - didn't change the perception of Courtney Stone. They only enhanced it. There were no dramatic instances of a town and a school coming together to collectively raise a troubled teen. The teen was clearly doing just fine on his own.
"He looked to the future all the time," said Lloyd Pugh, the 72-year-old track and field coach at Bremerton High who used Stone as a discus thrower.
When news of Stone's death reached Bremerton on Aug. 14, the members of FKK were again piled into Tim Calnan's living room. A freshly bought copy of "Madden 10" was on the Xbox 360, and the talk was of Courtney and his love of afternoon video game sessions.
Then their phones went off with text messages. One by one, they looked at their phones. Then, one by one, they looked for privacy. A few found empty rooms. Martindale walked out to the front yard alone.
"We broke down," Martindale said.
Two days later, a memorial service for Stone was held at Bremerton High School. Funeral services for Stone were held Aug. 22 at the Whole Truth Gospel Church in Earle with members of the Arkansas Baptist College football team and choir in attendance.
PREMATURE END
Richard Wilson didn't so much know Stone as know of him.
That's the sort of thing that happens when you coach at an open-admissions junior college that is the only one of its kind in the state. Players without the grades or the money to play at four-year schools come in waves, and the Arkansas Baptist stafftends to bring them in first and get to know them later.
Stone was no different. As much as Bremerton seemed like home, Washington offered no nearby junior-college programs, certainly none that came on the cheap like Arkansas Baptist. Plus, the Buffaloes had a few players from Earle on the roster, so Stone wouldn't be among strangers.
Those who knew Stone in Bremerton have no doubt he would have eventually found his way to a college campus. But as little as Stone let on about his past, his actions spoke of someone in a hurry to put as much distance between himself and his background as possible.
"I don't think he was trying to prove something to other people," Gillam said. "More to himself."
Wilson didn't see him go down. It had been more than 10 minutes since practice ended on the field outside the Dalton Whetstone Boys and Girls Club, and both offensive and defensive players were meeting with their respective coordinators after a conditioning drill run in shorts and helmets.
Players gathered around Wilson in the shade of a nearby tree after the position meetings. Wilson asked players who still needed to fill out various pieces of paperwork to stand up, and one by one he asked those players about their status.
Wilson had gone through about 18 players when a player approached him and said "Coach, something's wrong with Courtney." By then, the water had been cleared from the field and the athletic trainer that is on hand for every practice had left.
Stone died two days later at St. Vincent's. Wilson said Stone had a form on file indicating he had passed a routine physical exam, as all Arkansas Baptist players are required to do before participating in drills.
Given that Stone was a newcomer on a team that had just started football practice, the players found themselves in the strange position of saying hello and goodbye to a teammate at the same time.
Wilson figures that to be a blessing, although it afforded him no peace.
Wilson was a wide receivers coach at Minnesota in 2002 when he befriended Brandon Hall, a homesick and frustrated offensive lineman from Detroit. It was Wilson who helped convince Hall to stay put after he wanted to quit and head homeafter his first season, and it was Wilson who saw the 19-yearold's attitude change the following fall when he was moved from offense to defense.
Hall saw his first collegiate action in the Golden Gophers' season opener, making a tackle in a 42-0 victory over Southwest Texas State. Hours later, Hall was shot and killed in a dispute between a group of his teammates and three men in a Minneapolis bar.
In the days after Hall's death, it was Wilson's boss, Coach Glen Mason, who shouldered the responsibility of talking about Hall's death while grieving in private.
"I just thought, Lord, that takes so much resolve," Wilson said. "That's somebody else's child. They're under you."
Wilson's sense of responsibility to young men, long a source of personal pride, now weighs on him. He lives in the dorms, just as he did the past two seasons. He's the one who comforts the homesick, drives players to Wal-Mart so they can buy toiletries and is generally the on-call surrogate dad.
Wilson never knew playing such an important role could trigger so much pain.
"It hurts so much more because we are becoming some of those father figures," Wilson said. "I never had a job where I have lived with and mentored the kids. It makes you closer to them."
The hurt, still fresh, cuts a wide swath. Now an assistant coach at West Memphis, Moody plans to spend the rest of his career telling his players about Courtney Stone, the big, amiablekid who grew up hard but never asked for anything.
"I miss him so much, man," Moody said. "I'd point at him and say, 'If he can do it, you can do it.' "
Williams said plans are in the works to retire Stone's jersey in Earle, despite the fact he played only one season of varsity ball. One of the last things Williams said to Stone before he left for Arkansas Baptist was "please make us proud here."
Far off in Bremerton, they are coping as best they can. Stone had so effortlessly made him a part of the community that some students were shocked to learn he was a transfer who had lived in town only 18 months.
He'll be remembered for far longer.
"I hate to sound glass-is-halfempty," Gillam said, "but you don't find guys like that anymore."
Sports, Pages 21, 28 on 08/29/2009