Just A Good Ol’ Boy
In retirement, Randy Moss is as fascinating as ever.
CHARLESTON, W.V. — “LET’S GO, DADDY-O!”
The country-twanged voice of Randy Moss is dialed up to high volume. He’s tossing horseshoes in the sweltering July heat, and while his form is decent, many of his throws are wildly off-target. Some of the other players, including his partner, Mike Smith, are giving him a good-natured ribbing. Moss gives it right back, flashing that famous cockeyed grin that has long tormented cornerbacks and safeties.
This is the scene at the second annual Randy Moss Country Boy Horseshoe Tournament, held at Coonskin Park in Charleston, West Virginia, about five miles upriver from Moss’s hometown of Rand. This is a low key and laid-back affair, made-to-order for the Fourth of July weekend. A caged volleyball court has been converted into a pitch with about 10 horseshoe pits. Including the players, there are maybe 50 people in attendance. Some curious onlookers walk by every now and then; some of them may not realize that the tall guy in the black WVU cap is the second-best wide receiver in NFL history.
The tournament was organized by its namesake and host, who also put up the $1,000 in prize money. Participants must be “30 or older,” and while it’s doubtful that rule is strictly enforced — no one is exactly checking IDs here — it’s also clear that most of these players easily meet the age requirement. A white piece of posterboard has a pair of winner’s and loser’s brackets drawn in black marker. Moss animatedly takes charge of the whole operation, directing teams to their assigned horseshoe pits, filling in brackets, and shouting out scores as games conclude.
The whole thing feels like an old-fashioned family picnic, just one of many that the park is hosting at the moment. A local bar has a tent set up nearby, selling fish sandwiches and other assorted goodies. Like most of the events Moss attends and hosts, it’s a low-publicity affair, a labor of love. There was no accompanying social-media blitzkrieg or press release. The only locals who have any idea this is happening, other than friends and family, are those who caught yesterday’s small write-up in the Charleston Daily Mail.
Moss continues to talk a little trash, although, unlike on the football field, it is unwarranted based on his play. “What you got, bro?” he cackles. Moss has always insisted that at heart he was just a country boy who got paid to play football, and seeing him in this setting makes the words ring true.
Since leaving his home state after college, Moss has become a beloved figure here. He’s the best athlete the state has ever produced — sorry, Jerry West — and his early life here is so compelling that ESPN has recently announced that their acclaimed “30 for 30” series would be tackling this subject in an upcoming documentary. Sure enough, a largely inconspicuous crew is set up near the edge of the park, and, though no one seems to notice, the cameras are rolling.
The legend of Randy Moss began in Rand, a small hamlet tucked between the Allegheny Mountains and the Kanawha River. Though it’s only a 10-minute drive from the state capital, it’s rural in every other respect. This is the gloomy side of West Virginia that makes the rest of the country cover their eyes: shabby homes and trailers, chain-link fences, crumbling and dusty streets. Moss grew up poor and had a rocky adolescence that brought him face to face with grinding poverty, racial tensions and, eventually, local jails. But he has never run from this place; in fact, he returns regularly and takes a certain sense of pride in his hometown. Once during a nationally televised game when he was with the Patriots, Moss stated his alma mater as “Rand University.”
Moss attended the now-shuttered DuPont High, where he lead the football team to three state championships and won the West Virginia Player of the Year in 1994. Those would have been the defining accomplishments of just about any high school athlete, but Moss’s true legacy at DuPont would be his sublime basketball career, where he won that same award, West Virginia Player of the Year, twice.
Watch the tapes. Moss, sporting a shaved head, lopes around the court doing a pretty fair Kevin Garnett impression. He snatches rebounds high above the fray, he throws down thunderous double-pump slam dunks, he catches behind-the-back passes from flashy point guard Jason Williams, the future NBA star. This famed partnership long ago reached a mythical, “did-that-really-happen?” status. Did they really grow up one mile apart in the hollows of West Virginia? And then go on to make millions in the NFL and NBA? We all remember the Nike commercial, right?
Near the end of his senior year at DuPont, Moss took part in a racially-charged fight. The incident would haunt his future and set off a well-known trajectory of events: criminal charges resulting in jail time; kicked out of high school; denied enrollment at Notre Dame, where he was heavily recruited and signed by Lou Holtz; given a second chance by Bobby Bowden; spent a redshirt year at Florida State, where he so dominated in spring ball that Bowden referred to him as a bigger version of Deion Sanders; violated his probation, resulting in more jail time and a dismissal from FSU; signed to play at Marshall because they were Division I-AA at the time and he wouldn’t have to sit out another season.
Moss’s ensuing two-year career with the Thundering Herd was a talent explosion that never settled. The numbers, even set against today’s pass-happy schemes, are still mind-boggling. In 26 games, he caught 174 passes for 3,356 yards and 54 touchdowns. He scored at least one touchdown in every single game he played in college. Some of his single-game splits are beyond belief: eight catches for 288 yards and three touchdowns against Delaware; 13 for 205 and five scores against Ball State; 8-216-3 against Kent State. At the end of Moss’s freshman season, Marshall faced Montana for the I-AA Championship. Against a defense specifically geared to stop him, he hauled in nine passes for 220 yards and four touchdowns in a 49-20 rout.
Marshall rejoined the MAC in 1997, the same year Moss crossed orbits with future NFL QB Chad Pennington. Playing against a full Division I-A schedule that was well aware of his ability to carve up a defense, Moss ratcheted up his game to another level. He scored at least two touchdowns in every game until late October. He nearly doubled the MAC record for receiving touchdowns in a season, won the Biletnikoff Award and finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting.
But it wasn’t the stats so much as the plays: those first eye-popping glimpses of what would happen to bigger, faster NFL defenses in the coming years. Moss sliced past defenders like he was running downhill, snared balls out of the air like he was jumping on a trampoline. His scoring plays regularly covered more than half the field. Against Western Carolina, he ran a short hook pattern, caught a pass near midfield, made one simple cut to the near hash mark, and zoomed past three hapless defenders for a touchdown. Against Army, Moss took a crossing screen pass, slipped past two would-be tacklers, juked another guy, hurdled another, stiff-armed the safety, and outran the rest for an impossible 90-yard score.
The deep balls he caught with such regularity were mesmerizing because they seemed so effortless. The ball would go up, and there’s Randy, two or three or five steps behind everybody, cradling a 50-yard toss in stride like he was playing catch in the backyard. On Marshall’s first offensive play in the Ford Motor City Bowl against Ole Miss, Pennington casually dropped back and launched a deep spiral. Moss, of course, was unfathomably wide open and caught it for an 80-yard score.
There are many compilation videos of Moss’s Marshall highlights on YouTube, and one in particular is titled “Unthinkable Dominance.” That’s probably the most appropriate way to sum up his otherworldly college career.
“YOU BUZZIN’, COUSIN!”
Team Moss goes down early. They are bounced in the first round and relegated to the loser’s bracket. Last year, Moss paired with Charleston mayor Danny Jones and lost by the lopsided score of 21-3. Smith, his new partner and a fellow Rand native, is supposedly a more skilled player, but he can’t carry the team himself.
Moss is not bothered by the loss. He saunters around the horseshoe pits wearing a large pair of hiking boots, making idle chatter with some of the players and shouting out an endless spew of instructions. He is brash but playful, with no hint of the diva reputation that hounded him relentlessly during his playing days.
Moss has not fallen victim to the retirement jolt that so many controversial stars are unprepared for. His post-NFL life is bucolic: he has four kids with his longtime girlfriend and a prime TV gig as an analyst on Fox Sports One’s Football Daily show. While most former players morph into cliché-spouting Windsor knots in the studio, Moss has surprised many with his eye for detail and keen football intelligence. In June, he was hired as an assistant high school coach in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his son currently plays.
Lean and fit at 37 years old, he looks like he could still get behind some NFL safeties. It’s easy to imagine him slipping on a pair of cleats, heading over to the nearby turf football field, and dropping a few jaws by turning on those jets that propelled him to one of the most fascinating NFL careers in recent memory.
Randy Moss in his prime was like no other. The unmatched combination of size and speed was only the beginning. There was a rhythmic perfection in his impossibly long strides; he not only ran faster than everyone else but also better, his body perfectly in synch and prepared at any moment to uncork his 39-inch vertical leap or his huge wingspan. He tilted the field in a manner unseen before or since; only Moss could dismantle double-coverage like it wasn’t even a fair fight.
When Cunningham or Culpepper or Brady uncorked one of those so-high-it-leaves-your-TV-screen bombs, there was a great moment of anticipation in knowing that the ball would eventually, like a heat-seeking missile, land softly in the arms of Moss, running three steps behind the defense but appearing as if he were on a Sunday afternoon jog. The true genius of Moss was the ease in which he performed his magic: the feet always came down inbounds; the hands always snatched the ball at precisely the right moment; the body was always gracefully able to make nearly any adjustment.
One of his favorite tactics was putting his hand in the air as he was about to shift into seventh gear. This is something kids do in the schoolyard when they realize an inferior defender is lined up opposite; Moss did this to grown men paid to cover him, against defenses designed specifically to stop him. One of the more impressive plays of his career came on a ball that he didn’t even catch: In the waning seconds of Super Bowl XLII, with the Patriots desperately trying to get into field goal range, Moss got a step behind the Giants’ prevent defense and nearly pulled in a pass from Tom Brady that traveled at least 70 yards in the air. On replays, it appeared that Moss had to slow down slightly at the last second, and the pass was broken up. Only in Randy Moss’s world can a 70-yard pass be underthrown.
Once again, a close examination of Moss’s numbers can make your head spin. His rookie record of 17 TDs in 1998 hasn’t been touched. He scored 23 in ’07 to break Jerry Rice’s long-standing single-season mark. He’s the only receiver to begin his career with six straight 1,000-yard seasons, and he had 1,000-yard seasons with six different quarterbacks, a record he shares with his former mentor, Cris Carter.
Carter famously took Moss under his wing during those superlative early years in Minnesota, and, for a while, it seemed like No. 84 could set a new standard for greatness at his position. But Moss remained an enigmatic and mercurial player, which led to an up-and-down career. He never shied from his faults and even admitted that he sometimes didn’t play hard — a cardinal sin against the NFL’s fall-in-line mentality — or mesh well with certain teammates. For this, he is often portrayed as a front-runner.
But Moss was also given the Wilt Chamberlain treatment, where the superstar shoulders the blame for the failures of a team. Yes, Moss had two poor seasons in Oakland, but the Raiders — then, as now — were a floundering, directionless organization who could barely find a decent quarterback to throw to him. Yes, he was run out of Minnesota twice, but he also got tangled in the middle of two soap operas: Mike Tice vs. Daunte Culpepper, and, much later, Brad Childress vs. Brett Favre.
Moss never shied away from speaking his mind, and this was the root of many problems throughout his career. During his disastrous and embarrassing 2010 season, his bizarre postgame press conferences led to both the Patriots and Vikings each dumping him after four games. Still, he took responsibility for his flaws and almost always tended to learn from his mistakes. When he surprisingly came out of retirement to sign with the 49ers in 2012, he freely admitted that “he had to adjust some things in his life.”
He also made no secret his desire to be part of a stable and winning environment. He thrived greatly under established and respected coaches like Dennis Green, Bill Belichick, and Jim Harbaugh. Despite the perception of his as a selfish and aloof player, many have referred to him as a great teammate and leader. He never did seem to care much for the individual stats or records. In an interview with Chris Myers during his Oakland years, Moss was asked to name his greatest individual accomplishment in the NFL. He spoke candidly, as he almost always does with the media: “To be honest with you, I really don’t have one … because from a team standpoint, I’ve done nothing, and that’s what I [really] want to do. I want to win a championship; I want to play in a Super Bowl; I want to have success.”
Moss eventually played in two Super Bowls, but failed to get that ring. For all his individual accomplishments, his legacy as the second-best wide receiver to ever play may be secured by this: He was the centerpiece of the 1998 Vikings and the 2007 Patriots, arguably the two greatest offenses in NFL history.
The tournament rolls on into the afternoon. Like any summertime gathering or family outing, there is no end time. People will leave whenever they feel like it. Moss will be here for awhile, filling in brackets and hanging out with his hometown friends. Speaking to the Charleston Gazette, Moss describes the essence of the event: “If nothing else, it’s the comradery, guys just getting to know other people. It’s just having a good time, that’s what this is all about.”
The story of Moss’s life and career represent the full scope of the human condition, but not many people outside of West Virginia are eager to acknowledge this. They’d rather label him a thug or an underachiever, or say he just should have worked harder. Moss, as always, probably doesn’t care what they think, and he’s better off for it. He’ll be back in Kanawha County soon enough, tossing horseshoes or fishing or hanging out with his longtime buddies from home.
Just a county boy, doing what country people do.
