They weren't going to take the leg, the left one Nelson Peterson used to push off of to make all those sweet jumpers. The one Billy Tubbs bought into enough to offer Peterson an Oklahoma basketball scholarship.
The one that might have run him up and down an NBA court one day.
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| Adrian Peterson needs 334 more rushing yards to be Oklahoma's all-time leader. (AP) |
"The doctors wanted to amputate it," Nelson Peterson said. "I fought it. I said, 'You're going to have to kill me.'"
If the infected leg didn't kill him first.
It's magically obvious that Nelson's son Adrian shares the same DNA. The two have the same build, same demeanor. Same powerful legs. The ones that are about to make Adrian the leading rusher in Oklahoma history, maybe get him to New York for the Heisman ceremony for the second time in his career.
The ones that Nelson Peterson are going to see run the football Saturday for the first time since Adrian was in elementary school.
Definitely the ones that will make Adrian a load of cash in the NFL.
Definitely?
That's where Adrian's dad went wrong all those years ago, deciding the world owed him that living. It didn't take him all of those eight years in federal prison to figure it out. But it's the first time the 43-year-old father of one of the best players in the country has been able to tell us himself.
"I was caught up in entitlement," he said.
A sense of entitlement that grew after being denied an easy living carved out on the hardwood. By all accounts the young Nelson was an exquisite athlete. Howard Schnellenberger once invited him up from Key West to check out the University of Miami. No thanks. Nelson and his 42-inch vertical were going to be one of Billy's runnin', gunnin' Sooners.
Marriage and fatherhood intervened in the early 1980s. Not necessarily in that order. Tubbs released him from his scholarship.
"You try to do the right thing," Peterson said. "Once you get a man's daughter pregnant you've got to do something."
Things settled down. The basketball jones never ebbed. Picking up his basketball career later, Peterson once hit eight 3-pointers in a game for Idaho State. He is still the school's seventh-leading scorer.
Then the accident changed everything. His brother was holding a .22 caliber rife -- some reports say it was being cleaned. It discharged accidentally. A round ricocheted.
"Bounced around and tore up everything," Nelson said. "My legs were my strongest point."
That's when Nelson Peterson's determination shifted. It wasn't about getting to the rack, to the NBA. It was about saving that leg.
"Everybody was saying the staph infection was going to spread up to your heart," he said.
It took 2½ to three years of Peterson going to hospitals all over Texas -- Dallas, Houston, Tyler, San Antonio. Finally in Galveston he found a research hospital that was looking for, well, volunteers.
Just sign these consent forms, they said. Not that Peterson had a choice. Who cares if the treatment was experimental or the drugs hadn't been approved by the FDA? He was determined to keep that leg.
"I went there for more than a year, sometimes twice a week," he said. "They did surgery to put in antiobiotic beads. They put me in a hyperbaric chamber, 100 percent oxygen, which made the healing process shorter."
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That was in the late 1980s. Nelson can't remember his doctors' names or even the hospital. He walks with a limp, but the leg stayed. A damaged reminder of what could have been, but better than the alternative.
Adrian was born in 1985. His father couldn't have been more doting, which was good for everyone. Nelson reportedly had a pair of sons with two different women. Adrian and a brother, Derrick, were born within three days of each other.
Nelson says he fathered 10 children. Nine survive. Nine-year-old Brian was hit by a drunken driver in 1993 and died days later.
Nelson was the first person to put a football in Adrian's hands. Signed him up for youth league. Emphasized holding the pig in that outside hand to keep it away from defenders.
Nelson also eventually became a gentleman criminal. Low key. That sense of entitlement led him to join a large crack cocaine trafficking ring in East Texas.
All the while Nelson was an upstanding member of the community. Respected, even. It didn't seem quite right that a Wal-Mart warehouse worker would drive a bit-too-expensive car, but he was great guy so who cared?
Years later while chatting with a prison official, Nelson asked him about his house.
"He had a $250,000-$300,000 house," he said. "I told him I lived in one of those neighborhoods. You never know who lives next to you.
"If you ever saw me on the streets you would have never known I was involved in drugs. I was respectful, had a good job, well groomed. A guy society could relate to."
Smart enough in the end to know you don't go to court with the feds on a drug trafficking beef. When they closed in, the law had Nelson Peterson cold. He pleaded out, giving up three houses, three cars and $200,000 in cash, according to documents obtained by the Dallas Morning News.
He pleaded guilty to money laundering. They gave him 10 years.
It was 1998 when Nelson went in the joint. Adrian was 12. Talk to each separately and they each have the same memory of one of their last times together. It was a youth football tournament in Orlando, Fla.
"I still remember like it was yesterday," Nelson said.
So why did he do it? Because life had owed him, and he wasn't going to let a bad-luck bad leg keep him away from the big money. The 42-inch vert went away, but the sense of entitlement didn't.
"Sometimes you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than playing in the NBA," Nelson said. "I could have worked my way in. After I injured my leg I wasn't able to pursue my basketball career."
So Nelson chucked it all. His life, his future. His family, it seemed.
"Even while he was locked up and wasn't there physically, we always kept that connection with each other through letters, talking and visiting him," Adrian said. "Mentally, we had that bond that you can't break."
That was the strange thing. Nelson didn't become embittered while at the facility in Texarkana, Texas. As early as 2001, he was classified as a non-violent offender given "community custody." That meant Nelson could drive, by himself, in the area. He learned a trade and traveled to staff members' homes to service their air conditioning.
"The type of facility I was locked up in, if Martha Stewart was a man she'd be in that type of facility," he said.
Adrian would visit. Nelson could pick up a phone and gently scold his son about doing his schoolwork. Saturdays in prison were reserved for sports. Nelson was pretty much in charge of the TVs in Wing 5.
"It was mandatory that Oklahoma was going on one TV," he said.
Two lives separated by time and miles somehow stayed connected. Then this summer Adrian said his dad was close to being released. Reporters weren't the only ones fantasizing about the story lines.
"It will be special just him being in the stands for the first time and me being able to look up there," Adrian said. "Hopefully after I score a touchdown I can look to him and let him know, 'That was for you.'"
Last Thursday, Nelson Peterson was released from an Oklahoma City halfway house, still unable to cross state lines for 30 days. Being there for the Red River Shootout with Texas in Dallas was impossible. So it will be have to be Saturday when the Sooners play host to Iowa State.
There will be the requisite minicams, photo ops, retold sappy stories. Tears, even.
Will they know about that DNA being spread to another generation? Will they know that 2-year-old Ade'ja is beginning to show the same trait as her father and grandfather?
"She reminds so much of him," Nelson says of Adrian's daughter. "Just the little things I can do with her. I can grab her ankles and she'll pull herself up like Adrian did."
Strong legs. They run in this family. Not just on Saturdays.
