Turning the corner
PULLMAN – Don Turner can tell you about bad days. Every cornerback can, though he’s been through worse than just having a receiver burn him deep.
What happens to make those bad days better, well, he can tell you about that, too.
At the moment, it’s the Apple Cup – a game that for Turner and his Washington State teammates still holds the promise of redemption in a football season that somehow teetered from good to ugly these past two weekends without passing through bad. But the Cougars get a do-over Saturday against Washington, one that can still put them in a sunny mood some place in December.
If that happens, Don Turner will be ecstatic to be along for the ride – since not that long ago he appeared to have been left behind.
“I had the feeling people had written me off,” said Turner, a senior from Spokane’s University High School who’ll make his last start in Martin Stadium on Saturday. “Even coming into this season, I kind felt that no one thought I was good enough to be out there.”
Good enough at WSU can be Everest if you’re a defensive back. Eighteen Cougars currently play in the National Football League and a third are DBs. Turner has played or practiced with five of them, but he was never asked to leapfrog over Marcus Trufant or Karl Paymah or Jason David.
Mostly, he was supposed to beat out average guys like Alex Teems or Wally Dada – which didn’t seem all that much to expect given Turner’s physical tools and what had been an enticing freshman year back in 2003. But something – injury or indifferent performance – always seemed to hold him back, until finally his position coach, Ken Greene, pulled him aside last spring for The Talk.
“He said they’d had to recruit other DBs because he felt he couldn’t rely on me,” said Turner. “He said he felt something was always going to happen to me, or that I just wasn’t going to be the player he wanted me to be.”
Now that’s a bad day.
“It drove me crazy,” he agreed. “The next day, I woke up at 6 in the morning and went over to these hills near here and just ran until I couldn’t run anymore. There was no way I wasn’t going to start this season. I needed to show people I was the same guy who should have been out there years ago.”
Turner hasn’t transformed himself into a Trufant, by any means. But he’s started nine games – he missed two with a hip injury – and been a surprisingly steady presence, last week’s total team meltdown at Arizona State notwithstanding.
“I talk to him on the phone,” said his older brother, Finis, “and there’s a joy in his voice I didn’t hear for a long time. He’s got a brand-new sunshine and it’s great.”
Turner has had to search hard to find that sunshine before.
He was 13 years old in 1996 when his mother, Ruby, died after a long battle with breast cancer. A beautician and a minister, she had moved the two youngest of her nine sons, Mike and Don, to Spokane from Phoenix a couple of years earlier, following Finis.
“It was really hard,” Turner said. “To watch her die hurt so much. She was losing her hair, losing weight, so weak she couldn’t walk. It tore me apart to watch her go through all that because she was such a strong lady. When she was hurting, she’d do anything so that you wouldn’t know.”
Turner had grown up in Houston and Phoenix without a father (“I haven’t talked to him for so long I can’t remember, and I don’t want anything to do with him,” he said). Having eight older brothers mitigated that somewhat, and when his mother died Mike and Don moved in with Finis and his former wife, Tammy, who became their legal guardians.
“The hard work,” Finis said, “had been done by his mom. She was tough on us – she had to be with nine boys. She was a southern lady and she believed in discipline. I just tried to keep them on the straight line like their mom would have.”
But Turner acknowledged a larger debt.
“When I play, I feel like I’m playing for him,” he said. “He and (Tammy) made a huge sacrifice for me, taking me under his wing. I’m sure I wasn’t a burden, but at the same time it’s hard when a 13-year-old kid gets dropped into your life. There’s a strain. Their time was taken up with me. His paychecks got spent on me. Whatever I can do to give back to him and my other brothers, I want to do – and that’s part of what’s so great about contributing to the team now.”
Not that Don Turner has been anything but a success in their eyes.
“My family and friends – if I have a bad game, they’re still going to think I’m the best corner they’ve ever seen,” he laughed. “In their eyes, I don’t do anything wrong.”
No wonder he’s an expert on making bad days better.