It’s His Time Of Year
It’s unlikely that anyone welcomes the current change of seasons more than James Darling.
In fall, he can find redemption and satisfaction. He can create it, if necessary - and, to an extent, already has. Two games into his senior season of college football at Washington State and regarded as the natural heir to the Cougars’ string of all-conference middle linebackers - Mark Fields, Anthony McClanahan, Dan Grayson - Darling is finally playing himself into that remarkable company.
“Not just a good football player,” said WSU coach Mike Price, “but a great player.”
But for James Darling, it was difficult to grasp the concept of greatness this past summer.
In the darkness of the Cougar video room, he learned he wasn’t nearly as good a football player as he thought. And in the harsh light of the legal system, he wrestled with the notion that maybe he wasn’t as good as he thought, period.
No wonder he couldn’t trade summer for fall fast enough.
“I just want this to be a season,” Darling said, “where I don’t need any excuses for myself.”
No excuses for his play, and none for his judgment.
We like our college gladiators brave, but well-behaved. Well, most of us do, anyway. In Lincoln and Clemson and Blacksburg, Va. - to name a few radical outposts - social deviance in the name of football glory is not only tolerated but often rewarded.
Indeed, if the coach of the national champions is agreeable to having an accused murderer on his roster, why would we sweat what James Darling might have done to a gumball machine?
Initially, that’s what Darling himself thought, though now he thinks a little differently.
“If you read about some guy off the street doing that, you might laugh about it,” he said. “But when it’s you people are laughing about - and your family - it’s not small and trivial.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about stuff now. I wish I could explain all this. It’s not that I have bad luck and it’s not that people are out to get me. I was just making stupid choices. It’s made me grow up.”
Well, yes. Jail will do that, even if you’re only in a couple of days.
Darling’s summer of uneasy self-discovery actually had roots in two incidents from last October.
He was found to be in possession of a stolen WSU parking permit, a misdemeanor charge that was initially continued for dismissal. Two weeks later, he rolled a teammate’s car returning to Pullman from a hockey game in Spokane and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving, a charge reduced from driving under the influence of alcohol. In addition to the suspension of his driver’s license, a suspended jail sentence and a $600 fine, Darling was also suspended by Price for one game - and made a public apology.
“It’s something I’m still truly sorry for,” he said.
Then came the Great Gumball Caper - “a joke,” Darling said, “that nobody thought was funny.”
Last May in Oroville, Darling and a friend were charged with damaging a gumball machine they had taken from a restaurant and placed on someone’s car as a prank. He pleaded guilty to malicious mischief to avoid the hassle and expense of returning to Okanogan for trial and was given a 30-day suspended sentence and ordered to pay $225 in fines.
Actually, it was just the beginning of the hassle.
By pleading guilty to another misdemeanor, Darling had violated his probation in Whitman County and the parking-pass theft charge was reinstated. But there was another complication. As Darling explained it, he had misunderstood and failed to complete monthly paperwork regarding his reckless driving charge and had six violations pending “each for like 30 days in jail or something. When I went in for violating probation, I had a possible 180 days in jail for that and it was like, ‘How do you plead to that?’ “
In the end, Darling was sentenced to 365 days in jail with 363 suspended.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it was too much for Darling.
“I was in jail with burglars, murderers,” he said. “One guy had got caught in Pullman trying to sell cocaine and heroin, and these guys (were looking at) 10 years in that place - maybe not 10 years in Colfax, but they’d been sentenced. And I couldn’t handle a day. There were people going in and out of this place. I’m like, ‘What am I doing here? I was just screwing around.’
“You grow up when you have someone telling you if they see your face ever again within a year, you’ll have a year in jail. I always pictured myself as a good kid who’d never been in trouble. Now this.”
And now this: turns out his partner in the gumball prank went through the legal process and had all charges against him dropped.
“I was under the impression, if this went to trial, I would have to go up to court the first week of two-a-days,” Darling said. “This is my senior year. I didn’t want that to happen. I thought I could go over there and take care of it that day, pay the fine and be done with it. In a town that small, no way the papers could find out about that, right?”
One thing about Darling: He doesn’t believe in the just-spell-my-name-right school of any publicity is good publicity. Seeing his name in newspaper accounts and having his mother interviewed on radio for his transgressions was an extreme embarrassment.
“This gumball thing - I was with friends messing around,” he said. “That’s not to excuse it, but you don’t expect it to be such a big deal. You read the police logs down here, you’d start laughing at some of the stuff that goes on.
“But I have to know better. Do I want to read about me doing this in the paper? Do I want my mom to read about it?”
No one - not a coach or an NFL scout or a judge or a headline writer - can be any harder on James Darling than Darling himself.
In the course of a winding conversation, Darling may paint himself with some severe descriptives: Dumb, naive, immature, even stupid. But only naive sticks. Whatever his mistakes in judgment, Darling is more introspective than dumb, more measured than immature.
The small-town side of James Darling, though, is hard to mask. Something open and trusting. Didn’t even bring an attorney to court.
He is a kid from Kettle Falls who occasionally still pinches himself at the thought of playing Pacific-10 Conference football and getting eyeballed by the NFL talent hounds. He is just 21 - younger than even some sophomores because he never redshirted. His first college game was played in front of 105,000 hostiles at Michigan Stadium, which is big enough to hold every populace in the Northeast A League with plenty of good seats still available.
He has stopped wondering whether he belonged, but has never stopped questioning whether he measured up. The questions came to a head last summer.
His answer: “I was an average Pac-10 player when I had higher expectations for myself.”
He took to watching films of WSU’s 1995 season, which crashed after a 3-2 start to a 3-8 finish. He didn’t like what he saw.
“The Pittsburgh game (the season opener) was my best game,” he said. “Then the Montana game (Game 2) was maybe my second best game. And it kind of got worse and worse, and by the Apple Cup, I was terrible.”
He cited a number of reasons: Nagging injuries, a failure to seek out treatment, a loss of strength and “just not taking care of myself.” But it wasn’t just a body breakdown.
“I wasn’t making up my own defense, but I tried to do too much,” he said.
“When people are moving the ball on you, everyone tries to come up with their own little strategy to stop that. I was taking care of my responsibilities, but I would dive over a pile when I had a gap to hold to make a play, then the running back would spin out of the pile and come right through my gap. Things like that.”
So he cued up tape of other linebackers and went to school.
“I watched Ink Aleaga (Washington’s all-league linebacker) and it reminded me to play low to the ground,” Darling said. “Sometimes I’d run through a hole straight up and have someone chip off me and I’d go flying past the runner.
“I watched Matt Russell of Colorado and Chris Draft of Stanford and Jeremy Asher of Oregon. It’s helpful. (Defensive coordinator Bill) Doba will try to explain something to me and on the field I think, ‘OK, OK,’ but until I see it done by someone else, I’ll wonder if I’m doing it right.”
He would seem to be doing it right this year. He leads the Pac-10 with 40 tackles in just two games - in part because WSU’s defense has been left on the field too long. But if he averages even 13 a game the rest of the way, he’ll break the school’s single-season record.
Darling is driven by a sense of urgency.
“If I don’t play well this year, it’s over for me,” he said. “It’s dartboards and town-team basketball. I wanted to come out and have the best season I could have. I don’t want to be one of those glory days type of persons who look back and say I should have done this or done that.”
Make your own judgments. Darling’s teammates did. Barely a month after he apologized to them for his reckless driving incident and the game he missed, Darling was voted defensive captain for the 1996 season.
He’s not sure why. He’s not particularly vocal on the field and he’s relatively soft-spoken off it. But he remembers former teammate Ron Childs being the same way “and people looked up to him.”
Apparently, they look up to Darling, too. There’s respect, but not reverence - meaning they won’t hesitate to ask him if he has any gum.
The upside of his legal entanglements has been an enhanced relationship with Price “who for my first two years here, I thought was just someone in this power position I was scared to talk to,” Darling recalled. “After the driving thing, I spent about a week in his office about an hour every day, just talking things out.”
It should be all talked out by now. Summer’s history, and it’s James Darling’s final season.
“There’s been a lot of ups and downs,” he said. “I just want to write the perfect ending to it.” , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)