Success more than a dream for NFL star Robert Geathers as a young boy

Robert Geathers Jr. doesn’t remember much about his first game in the National Football League.

“It was a blur,” he said.

It was the 2004 season and he was a defensive lineman-linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, playing in front of more than 65,000 screaming fans against the Baltimore Ravens. He survived more than thrived that late September Sunday in a 14-point loss to the Ravens. He didn’t record his first tackle until a couple games later.

“I wasn’t able to recognize formations and get pre-snap reads until near the end of the season,” Geathers said. “I was too worried about knowing my assignment and figuring out how I was gonna beat my opponent.”

Since that first nervous game, his career has blossomed. He signed a 6-year deal worth up to $33.7 million in 2007. When his team travelled to Georgia to play the Atlanta Falcons in its first preseason matchup on Aug. 8, it began his 10th season.

His is the type of NFL career little boy's dream of, and many high schoolers have braved 90-plus degree weather this month in full football gear for a chance -- no matter how miniscule -- to match him.

But his success is more than the personification of a boy’s dream. It reppresents one of the most vexing questions about an educational system that did not equip his father, Robert Sr., himself an NFL player, with comprehensive literacy skills, and his educational career had a direct affect on his son’s:

Are students such as Robert Sr., who struggle in the classroom but have a unique set of other skills and a propensity to find a way to thrive in most environments, better served by being held back or should they be allowed to matriculate and get out of the formal educational system whatever they can?

A teaching/learning quandry

The goal is to educate them well, which is becoming increasingly important as technology transforms the global workforce and a formal education becomes more vital. But when such students slip through the cracks any way, what should be done about them?

No matter the factors involved in Robert Sr.’s graduation from Choppee High School in 1977 struggling to read the diploma awarded him, if he had been denied a diploma and entrance into college, what has become one of America’s most prolific professional football families might never have materialized.

The question is pertinent today as members of the S.C. General Assembly debate the merits of social promotion, possibly holding back students who are not proficient readers by the third grade and doing away with an exit exam as a requirement for high school graduation.

One in six children who are not proficient readers in the third grade do not graduate from high school on time -- four times the rate of students who are, according to a study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

At the same time, colleges grapple with what they see as a regression of literacy skills by incoming freshmen -- not just athletes -- and cheating and academic scandals that have hit numerous institutions, including stalwarts such as Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The academic requirements put into place since Robert Sr. spent three years at S.C. State, requirements designed to help students like him, likely would have made him ineligible for higher education. Had that happened, he would not have honed his craft for three years under a Hall of Fame football coach.

He would not have been drafted by the Buffalo Bills.

The Georgetown steel mill likely would have been his fate, making him reliant upon an industry that has struggled for the past two decades. His sons would not have grown up in a household with a man who knew how to point them towards the NFL, an industry that skyrocketed in popularity and influence as manufacturing waned.

The school system did not compound Robert Sr.’s problems, said Sally Hare, president of Still Learning Inc.

“We did him a disservice by not teaching him,” Hare said. “But at least we didn’t punish him because we didn’t teach him. We didn’t hold up our end of responsibility, to give kids the tools they need to succeed, and he was able to do that on his own.”

The decision to allow students such as Robert Sr. and others like him to advance was not happenstance.

It was an open secret, one supported by Robert Sr.’s high school coach, Thad Hendley, who also taught English, history and social studies at Choppee.

Schools such as S.C. State “were letting people in that had possibilities,” Hendley said. “They were just thinking that if they were exposed to more, they would become better citizens, to get their children to learn to read and things like that. It was a process I agreed with. And I think it worked.”

In the case of Robert Sr., it worked, and paved the way for his oldest son.

Robert Jr. had little academic trouble and was just as competitive in the classroom at Carvers Bay High School as on the football field.

That’s why a “C” he earned in a 7th grade class may be just as responsible for his NFL success as his family’s football pedigree or the long hours spent in the weight room and on the field running wind sprints.

That day his parents made him a promise.

“If you don’t take the classroom seriously, we will take away football,” they told their eldest son. His father was determined that his son would not slide through the educational system’s cracks.

He gave his son an intense spanking, one his son still vividly, and even fondly, recalled during an April interview about a month before hosting his football camp for young boys along the Grand Strand. The camp is designed to remind area boys of the importance of academic excellence as much as showing them football techniques.

His mother, Debra Geathers, was just as determined and helped her eldest son with nightly homework and monitored his school progress.

“Where Choppee High School fell short, I got it from home,” Robert Jr. said.

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Robert Jr. then enrolled at the University of Georgia.

He wanted to play the most competitive football in the nation’s most competitive major college conference.

A quarter of a century earlier, his father chose what is now S.C. State University over the likes of Clemson University because S.C. State was all-black and felt more comfortable to a man who had grown up in the segregated South.

Robert Jr. entered the NFL after it had become a multibillion dollar juggernaut, with an average player salary of more than $1 million, compared to the roughly $90,000 average when his father entered the league.

His father was coming of age when the Georgetown steel mill, and other manufacturers, were growing and represented relatively high-paying jobs with good benefits - with salaries the equal of the NFL’s at the time - with little requirement for formal or higher education.

There’s no way to know for sure, but had his father been prevented from attending S.C. State because of his academic shortcomings, Robert Jr. would not have had an in-house NFL mentor and might instead have been caught up in the region’s economic fortunes.

Instead, he entered UGA as the steel mill was in the midst of a burgeoning 21st century labor fight that was a key marker in a downward spiral for the mill and other area plants.

Three years later, he was drafted into the exploding NFL. On a mild winter day in an open stadium in Cincinnati during the middle of his rookie season, he began to be noticed throughout the league.

He lined up against the Dallas Cowboys offensive line, used his speed to force his 300-plus pound opponent to commit one direction and was able to reach back and tackle quarterback Vinny Testerverde for his first NFL sack.

“I was super jacked, felt like I was invincible,” he said.

He finished the day with that sack, two pass breakups, quarterback pressures and a tackle, the kind of game day stat line that turn players into pro-bowlers. It convinced his coaches to award him his first defensive player of the game award.

He had arrived.

His football earnings allowed him to buy an Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt franchise and convinced him to be smart about handling his finances.

“Many people don’t realize that the money I make in a handful of years I have to try to make last a lifetime,” he said.

Football’s climb counters manufacturing’s descent

It’s not the kind of money he would have earned at the Georgetown steel mill, which has roughly one-seventh the workforce today that it had in the immediate years before Robert Jr. was born.

During Robert Jr.’s sophomore year at Choppee, there was a Christmas-time work stoppage at the steel mill. A sister plant in Kansas City was having similar labor disputes and downsizing.

The $5 to $6 per hour workers had been making in profit-sharing began to disappear. The mill filed for bankruptcy in 2001. At that point, its workforce was down to about 630 people from a high of roughly 1,400. Late in 2003, the mill faced another bankruptcy and was shut down.

Georgetown officials wondered about the potentially devastating impact of the mill’s closure. They pulled together a $1.1 million contingency fund in case the mill had gone silent for good.

Economists estimated that roughly 660 non-plant related jobs were supported by the steel mill. A new company, ISG, bought the mill out of bankruptcy and by June of 2004, steel was being made in Georgetown once again – but this time with 380 people.

Meanwhile, Robert Jr. was the 117th player taken in the NFL draft April of that year, becoming the first of a second-generation of Geathers to make it into the highest level of football.

The slow bleed of jobs over many decades lessened the shock the mill’s problems would have had on Georgetown, but its troubles still pushed the county’s unemployment rate to one of the highest levels in the state and into the double digits for years. The mill is operating today with a little more than 200 workers. It avoided another labor stoppage in the summer of 2012 when the steelworker’s union decided to continue working as a new labor agreement was being finalized.

What was happening at Georgetown steel was happening elsewhere. The manufacturing industry was contracting – at least 31 steel companies filed for bankruptcy protection between 1999 and 2002 – while the NFL was expanding and becoming a $9-billion behemoth.

The loss of Georgetown steel jobs was part of what felt like a tsunami in the area in the early 2000s. Announcements of layoffs and plant closures and bankruptcies seemed as frequent as the waves hitting the Pawleys Island beachfront.

In 2002, more than 2,000 manufacturing job losses had mounted in Georgetown, more than 22,000 in the state and more than a million nationwide. Companies such as Canal Industries Inc., AVX Corp. Conbraco Industries Inc., Honeywell and others in neighboring Horry County were making workforce and other changes.

The unemployment rate hit 16 percent; not many people remembered it ever being higher.

Given the Geathers family’s ability to start and run small businesses, from farming to plumbing and car sales, they might have avoided the woes of the declining manufacturing industry any way.

But Robert Sr.’s acceptance into S.C. State, despite his literacy problems, paved the way for three sons who expect to play in the NFL this fall.

And it made it easier for Robert Jr. to do what he did this past offseason: Sign a 3-year, $9.5 million contract to continue playing with the Bengals.

This story was originally published August 12, 2013 at 4:57 PM with the headline "Success more than a dream for NFL star Robert Geathers as a young boy."