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"Friggin Joke Monkey"
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Thought this might be of some interest considering the long thread on his pot use ....
Who he is in life makes Talib a success on field
By Tully Corcoran
The Capital-Journal
Published Thursday, November 22, 2007
RICHARDSON, Texas — The phone rings, as it does every Friday afternoon, in Jim Ledford's office. He has ignored several calls to this point, but this one is important.
"Hang on," he says in a familiar Texas drawl. "It's the police department."
Ledford is the football coach at Richardson's L.V. Berkner High School, a school of 2,200 students in suburban Dallas. The Dallas police call him every week to find out if he's heard any buzz around school. Usually, when the shootings happen, the students know they're coming.
"I haven't heard anything," Ledford says, and that's the gist of the conversation.
This seems out of place in Richardson. It is a corporate community on the northeast corner of the Metroplex. It has shiny buildings, clean streets and older women with died-brown hair who wear gold jewelry and drive gold Lexuses 5 mph under the posted speed limit.
It is the former home of Ashley and Jessica Simpson, Morgan Fairchild and author Anne Rice.
Yet it is a place that Ledford was praying Aqib Talib would leave.
"I always felt like when he got away from there, things would be better," Ledford said. "It's not a neighborhood that's full of violence and things like that. With some of his classmates that particular year, there was a lot of rough guys, just a lot of rough and tough type kids. One of his buddies got shot right out here in the parking lot."
In 1992 and 2005, there were fatal shootings after Berkner football games.
Some in the Dallas area say Richardson has a gang influence that causes the violence. Though that could be, it isn't a prototypical gang neighborhood.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income in Richardson is $23,000 higher than that of the rest of Texas, the per capita income is $10,000 better and the percentage living below the poverty line (6.3 percent) is nine points below the state average. Richardson's crime rate is middling compared to the rest of the state.
Violence doesn't pervade, but it lingers. Berkner High is one of four high schools that compose the Richardson Independent School District. In a town of 90,000, that makes for a lot of close-knit rivalries.
"It's been a lot of crazy stuff happening," Talib said. "It's not just dangerous, but it's not a good place either. A lot of people get shot, there's a lot of shooting and there's a lot of drugs and stuff around there."
Just last summer, Talib went back to Richardson for the first time since his high school graduation in 2004. It was for a former classmate's funeral.
With Talib, there was always the fear he could be next — not because he was a bad guy, but because he wasn't afraid of them.
"It wasn't that he was doing anything; it seemed to be he'd be there whenever something was happening," Ledford said. "When he was here, those are the types of things that would always concern us. He would never be involved in some of those things, but some of the friends he picked sometimes would cause him to end up in some of those places.
"He's a fun-loving, happy-going kid, and sometimes you get a fun-loving kid like that and you get him in an atmosphere like that, Aqib would say something, spout off something to somebody and make the wrong person mad."
Talib was one of the two biggest stars at a Class 5A Texas high school, but despite his outgoing personality he was never the most popular player on campus.
"You said just the right thing, Aqib would tell you how the cow'd eat the cabbage," Ledford said. "Everybody knew who Aqib was. Not too many people messed with him."
It's a charge Talib doesn't dispute.
"I did my things in high school," Talib said. "I got in my trouble I was gonna get in, been in my fights and altercations and stuff."
The altercations didn't stop once Talib left Richardson. In March, Talib was riding in a truck driven by former KU wide receiver Mark Simmons when, according to police accounts, Simmons drove the truck over a 23-year-old Lawrence man who was allegedly pointing a gun at them outside a Lawrence nightclub. The man, Aubrey Gilbert, was charged with felony aggravated assault. Neither Talib nor Simmons faced any charges.
Talib also was suspended for the first two games of the 2006 season for undisclosed reasons, and during KU's bowl trip to Fort Worth, Texas, at the end of the 2005 season, he got into a verbal altercation in Fort Worth's downtown bar district.
Other altercations involved family. While at Berkner, Talib once forged a note to cut class.
Then his mother, Okolo Talib, found out.
"She come up here and she told me she was gonna punch him when he came around the corner," Ledford said. "I had to catch her."
Try as she might, Okolo admits that by the time Aqib hit high school, he had developed stubbornness that defied everybody. Everybody, that is, except Yaqub, his older brother.
"The only person that ever messed with Aqib while I was here was his brother," Ledford said. "Aqib went and spouted off something to Yaqub one day, next thing I know Aqib comes back and his eye's dotted and he's cut up, and we're all making fun of him then. That mouth overloaded that rear end."
Aqib and Yaqub, the youngest Talibs, grew up close.
"My parents, they worked a lot and stuff, so my big brother was always kinda the one at the house, telling me what to do," Aqib said. "He kept me out of a lot of trouble and kept my head on straight."
Talib's combination of athletic ability, cockiness and confidence made him a preseason All-American. But long before he appeared in Playboy, Okolo knew she had a son who was both special and amazingly difficult to handle.
Okolo had her first child, Saran, when she was 15. Then came Kai, then Yaqub, then Aqib, which in Arabic means "the last one."
"I knew I didn't want anymore kids," she said. "I had two boys, two girls. What else can you want?"
Okolo and Aqib's father, Theodore Henry, were married at that time. After the divorce, their commitment to Islam faded some, though they still consider themselves Muslim and the kids still use some Arabic to address their parents. Okolo isn't "Mom," she's "Umi." Theodore isn't "Dad," he's "Abu."
Okolo didn't move her two boys to Richardson until Aqib was in eighth grade, so he spent most of his childhood in Ohio and New Jersey, where Okolo first noticed she had an athlete.
"They had seen this mattress someone had thrown out, and they started doing somersaults, you know, just going back two, three, four times, jumping on this mattress and flipping and these kind of things," she said. "I'm like, 'Boy, you're gonna hurt yourself.' But he was very, very good at it, so we let him continue to do this, him and his brother competing against each other.
"That's when I first knew he was gonna be something. I didn't know what, but he was gonna be something."
Years later, Ledford also could tell, just by watching Aqib mess around.
"If you ever saw him in the gym, he's unbelievable in the gym. He can take off just inside the free-throw line and jam it," Ledford said. "He had that kind of ability, 360 dunks. We've all seen him do that, he just had massive hip explosion. He had the record for our vertical. Athletically, he was unbelievable."
At 6-foot-2, Talib's body and leaping ability make him an ideal wide receiver, which is what he would have been at almost any other high school. But Ledford runs the triple option, which means he isn't going to waste his best athletes at receiver, where they'll get one or two plays per game.
As a junior, Talib made the varsity at cornerback. He had a junior season so good that nobody threw his direction as a senior, which was when Talib became, athletically, what he is now, a 6-2, 200-pounder with 4.4 speed and a 38-inch vertical. Ledford made Talib run track his junior year, when he was the anchor leg of the 400-meter relay.
"Aqib was not a blazing runner until the spring semester of his junior year," Ledford said. "I'll never forget it, he goes down the back stretch on the four-by-one, and when he got the stick he was in about fifth place. He sucked everybody up, and then we knew he was developing athletically. His body was just beginning to catch up. He was just unbelievable from that point forward."
He was so good as a cornerback that the game got boring.
"He got so frustrated at just covering the other team's best receiver and nobody challenging him," Ledford said. "I'm not kiddin' ya, he wore me out until I put him some at receiver. We started using him a little at receiver, just to pacify him a little bit. And every time we needed a big play, we'd just throw him in at receiver, and I don't remember him dropping one, ever."
Because he was a part-time receiver and got so little action on defense, few college recruiters noticed him. Dave Doeren, a former KU assistant who is now at Wisconsin, was one of them. He was in Ledford's office all the time. He showed up at practices, really recruited. Kansas was the first school that offered Talib a scholarship, and because of that, he committed.
Doeren and KU thought they had found a sleeper, but they also were assuming a risk.
"He was very concerned about him," Ledford said. "Aqib was a little wild while he was here. But he knew all that and coach (Mark) Mangino knew it. He's very high strung, and you have to set boundaries for him. Coach Mangino talked about that before he ever went to Kansas. I'm really proud of the fact that when he went there, coach Mangino put boundaries on him and made him stay inside those boundaries and helped him mature into a fine young man. I don't think he'd have got that anywhere else."
From Okolo to Mangino, Talib's superiors have always had to negotiate the bull-headedness that makes him the guy nobody messes with in the halls, and the guy nobody messes with in the seams.
"A lot of the things that make him good right now is the things that'll drive you crazy whenever you're a coach," Ledford said. "That stubbornness is the feeling that, 'I can do this' and 'He's not gonna run over me' and 'He's not gonna run around me' and 'He's not gonna beat me deep.' That stubbornness makes him pretty good on the football field. There's not many kids that have that, and the key was getting it channeled in the right direction and keeping it there."
Talib now has multiple channels for his stubbornness. Just before the season, Talib's girlfriend, Cortney Jacobs, gave birth to Talib's first child, Kiara.
Okolo and Theodore weren't thrilled to hear the news.
"We really didn't want that, but he's got his own way he's gonna do things," Okolo said. "He wanted it and he accepts it, so we couldn't do nothing but like it, too. What can you say?"
Okolo, who now lives in New Jersey, spent the entire month of September in Lawrence, thinking she would need to be a helping hand.
Wrong.
"Watching him surprised the heck out of me," she said. "He's just on it, all the time. He's there. I mean, I didn't have to do no more than what I wanted to do. He's like, 'I got this, I got this.' It really did shock me to see he was ready. I love it now. I love it."
Ledford says he loves Aqib. He watches every KU game that's on TV. Last time Aqib was in Richardson, the two spent an evening together. They trade the occasional text message. Three years ago, Aqib left for Lawrence, and Ledford was worried.
Not any more.
"You're trying to mold a life there. You're trying to give direction," he said. "To me, that's what a teacher is, a person that provides direction and teaches responsibility. The university, that's what they've done for this kid. Now, he's gonna make a lot of money one day."
Who he is in life makes Talib a success on field
By Tully Corcoran
The Capital-Journal
Published Thursday, November 22, 2007
RICHARDSON, Texas — The phone rings, as it does every Friday afternoon, in Jim Ledford's office. He has ignored several calls to this point, but this one is important.
"Hang on," he says in a familiar Texas drawl. "It's the police department."
Ledford is the football coach at Richardson's L.V. Berkner High School, a school of 2,200 students in suburban Dallas. The Dallas police call him every week to find out if he's heard any buzz around school. Usually, when the shootings happen, the students know they're coming.
"I haven't heard anything," Ledford says, and that's the gist of the conversation.
This seems out of place in Richardson. It is a corporate community on the northeast corner of the Metroplex. It has shiny buildings, clean streets and older women with died-brown hair who wear gold jewelry and drive gold Lexuses 5 mph under the posted speed limit.
It is the former home of Ashley and Jessica Simpson, Morgan Fairchild and author Anne Rice.
Yet it is a place that Ledford was praying Aqib Talib would leave.
"I always felt like when he got away from there, things would be better," Ledford said. "It's not a neighborhood that's full of violence and things like that. With some of his classmates that particular year, there was a lot of rough guys, just a lot of rough and tough type kids. One of his buddies got shot right out here in the parking lot."
In 1992 and 2005, there were fatal shootings after Berkner football games.
Some in the Dallas area say Richardson has a gang influence that causes the violence. Though that could be, it isn't a prototypical gang neighborhood.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income in Richardson is $23,000 higher than that of the rest of Texas, the per capita income is $10,000 better and the percentage living below the poverty line (6.3 percent) is nine points below the state average. Richardson's crime rate is middling compared to the rest of the state.
Violence doesn't pervade, but it lingers. Berkner High is one of four high schools that compose the Richardson Independent School District. In a town of 90,000, that makes for a lot of close-knit rivalries.
"It's been a lot of crazy stuff happening," Talib said. "It's not just dangerous, but it's not a good place either. A lot of people get shot, there's a lot of shooting and there's a lot of drugs and stuff around there."
Just last summer, Talib went back to Richardson for the first time since his high school graduation in 2004. It was for a former classmate's funeral.
With Talib, there was always the fear he could be next — not because he was a bad guy, but because he wasn't afraid of them.
"It wasn't that he was doing anything; it seemed to be he'd be there whenever something was happening," Ledford said. "When he was here, those are the types of things that would always concern us. He would never be involved in some of those things, but some of the friends he picked sometimes would cause him to end up in some of those places.
"He's a fun-loving, happy-going kid, and sometimes you get a fun-loving kid like that and you get him in an atmosphere like that, Aqib would say something, spout off something to somebody and make the wrong person mad."
Talib was one of the two biggest stars at a Class 5A Texas high school, but despite his outgoing personality he was never the most popular player on campus.
"You said just the right thing, Aqib would tell you how the cow'd eat the cabbage," Ledford said. "Everybody knew who Aqib was. Not too many people messed with him."
It's a charge Talib doesn't dispute.
"I did my things in high school," Talib said. "I got in my trouble I was gonna get in, been in my fights and altercations and stuff."
The altercations didn't stop once Talib left Richardson. In March, Talib was riding in a truck driven by former KU wide receiver Mark Simmons when, according to police accounts, Simmons drove the truck over a 23-year-old Lawrence man who was allegedly pointing a gun at them outside a Lawrence nightclub. The man, Aubrey Gilbert, was charged with felony aggravated assault. Neither Talib nor Simmons faced any charges.
Talib also was suspended for the first two games of the 2006 season for undisclosed reasons, and during KU's bowl trip to Fort Worth, Texas, at the end of the 2005 season, he got into a verbal altercation in Fort Worth's downtown bar district.
Other altercations involved family. While at Berkner, Talib once forged a note to cut class.
Then his mother, Okolo Talib, found out.
"She come up here and she told me she was gonna punch him when he came around the corner," Ledford said. "I had to catch her."
Try as she might, Okolo admits that by the time Aqib hit high school, he had developed stubbornness that defied everybody. Everybody, that is, except Yaqub, his older brother.
"The only person that ever messed with Aqib while I was here was his brother," Ledford said. "Aqib went and spouted off something to Yaqub one day, next thing I know Aqib comes back and his eye's dotted and he's cut up, and we're all making fun of him then. That mouth overloaded that rear end."
Aqib and Yaqub, the youngest Talibs, grew up close.
"My parents, they worked a lot and stuff, so my big brother was always kinda the one at the house, telling me what to do," Aqib said. "He kept me out of a lot of trouble and kept my head on straight."
Talib's combination of athletic ability, cockiness and confidence made him a preseason All-American. But long before he appeared in Playboy, Okolo knew she had a son who was both special and amazingly difficult to handle.
Okolo had her first child, Saran, when she was 15. Then came Kai, then Yaqub, then Aqib, which in Arabic means "the last one."
"I knew I didn't want anymore kids," she said. "I had two boys, two girls. What else can you want?"
Okolo and Aqib's father, Theodore Henry, were married at that time. After the divorce, their commitment to Islam faded some, though they still consider themselves Muslim and the kids still use some Arabic to address their parents. Okolo isn't "Mom," she's "Umi." Theodore isn't "Dad," he's "Abu."
Okolo didn't move her two boys to Richardson until Aqib was in eighth grade, so he spent most of his childhood in Ohio and New Jersey, where Okolo first noticed she had an athlete.
"They had seen this mattress someone had thrown out, and they started doing somersaults, you know, just going back two, three, four times, jumping on this mattress and flipping and these kind of things," she said. "I'm like, 'Boy, you're gonna hurt yourself.' But he was very, very good at it, so we let him continue to do this, him and his brother competing against each other.
"That's when I first knew he was gonna be something. I didn't know what, but he was gonna be something."
Years later, Ledford also could tell, just by watching Aqib mess around.
"If you ever saw him in the gym, he's unbelievable in the gym. He can take off just inside the free-throw line and jam it," Ledford said. "He had that kind of ability, 360 dunks. We've all seen him do that, he just had massive hip explosion. He had the record for our vertical. Athletically, he was unbelievable."
At 6-foot-2, Talib's body and leaping ability make him an ideal wide receiver, which is what he would have been at almost any other high school. But Ledford runs the triple option, which means he isn't going to waste his best athletes at receiver, where they'll get one or two plays per game.
As a junior, Talib made the varsity at cornerback. He had a junior season so good that nobody threw his direction as a senior, which was when Talib became, athletically, what he is now, a 6-2, 200-pounder with 4.4 speed and a 38-inch vertical. Ledford made Talib run track his junior year, when he was the anchor leg of the 400-meter relay.
"Aqib was not a blazing runner until the spring semester of his junior year," Ledford said. "I'll never forget it, he goes down the back stretch on the four-by-one, and when he got the stick he was in about fifth place. He sucked everybody up, and then we knew he was developing athletically. His body was just beginning to catch up. He was just unbelievable from that point forward."
He was so good as a cornerback that the game got boring.
"He got so frustrated at just covering the other team's best receiver and nobody challenging him," Ledford said. "I'm not kiddin' ya, he wore me out until I put him some at receiver. We started using him a little at receiver, just to pacify him a little bit. And every time we needed a big play, we'd just throw him in at receiver, and I don't remember him dropping one, ever."
Because he was a part-time receiver and got so little action on defense, few college recruiters noticed him. Dave Doeren, a former KU assistant who is now at Wisconsin, was one of them. He was in Ledford's office all the time. He showed up at practices, really recruited. Kansas was the first school that offered Talib a scholarship, and because of that, he committed.
Doeren and KU thought they had found a sleeper, but they also were assuming a risk.
"He was very concerned about him," Ledford said. "Aqib was a little wild while he was here. But he knew all that and coach (Mark) Mangino knew it. He's very high strung, and you have to set boundaries for him. Coach Mangino talked about that before he ever went to Kansas. I'm really proud of the fact that when he went there, coach Mangino put boundaries on him and made him stay inside those boundaries and helped him mature into a fine young man. I don't think he'd have got that anywhere else."
From Okolo to Mangino, Talib's superiors have always had to negotiate the bull-headedness that makes him the guy nobody messes with in the halls, and the guy nobody messes with in the seams.
"A lot of the things that make him good right now is the things that'll drive you crazy whenever you're a coach," Ledford said. "That stubbornness is the feeling that, 'I can do this' and 'He's not gonna run over me' and 'He's not gonna run around me' and 'He's not gonna beat me deep.' That stubbornness makes him pretty good on the football field. There's not many kids that have that, and the key was getting it channeled in the right direction and keeping it there."
Talib now has multiple channels for his stubbornness. Just before the season, Talib's girlfriend, Cortney Jacobs, gave birth to Talib's first child, Kiara.
Okolo and Theodore weren't thrilled to hear the news.
"We really didn't want that, but he's got his own way he's gonna do things," Okolo said. "He wanted it and he accepts it, so we couldn't do nothing but like it, too. What can you say?"
Okolo, who now lives in New Jersey, spent the entire month of September in Lawrence, thinking she would need to be a helping hand.
Wrong.
"Watching him surprised the heck out of me," she said. "He's just on it, all the time. He's there. I mean, I didn't have to do no more than what I wanted to do. He's like, 'I got this, I got this.' It really did shock me to see he was ready. I love it now. I love it."
Ledford says he loves Aqib. He watches every KU game that's on TV. Last time Aqib was in Richardson, the two spent an evening together. They trade the occasional text message. Three years ago, Aqib left for Lawrence, and Ledford was worried.
Not any more.
"You're trying to mold a life there. You're trying to give direction," he said. "To me, that's what a teacher is, a person that provides direction and teaches responsibility. The university, that's what they've done for this kid. Now, he's gonna make a lot of money one day."
