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Really hard to not root for this guy after reading some of this stuff. I knew he had it tough, but man....
cont..MOBILE, Ala. — This is not a shelter. This is not a car. This is not a van.
This has not been washed out, burned down or blown away.
The house D.J. Fluker bought in a quiet West Mobile neighborhood has outer walls built of brick, red and brown with white spots, stacked under a gray-shingle triangular roof. The ceilings are high and the kitchen is spacious, large enough for his 2-year-old son L.J. to run in circles. The rooms, four with three baths, and square footage, 3,000-plus, outnumber the ideas how to fill them.
This is more than somewhere to live.
This is a place not to flee.
The Chargers sought to stabilize their offensive line in April when drafting Fluker, a former Alabama right tackle, with the No. 11 overall pick. Their plan worked both ways, as a first-round guaranteed contract gave the Flukers stability in a life that previously had none, where the panic and toll of Hurricane Katrina is but one chapter to a survival tale.
Fluker, his mother, younger brother and two younger sisters ached with hunger in the bottom barrels of their stomachs. They operated the oven at night, not to bake but to keep warm. They endured the horror of domestic violence and moved place to place, staying together amid conditions that threatened to split them apart.
And that car. That car. For weeks, all five sleeping in that damn car.
"Just visualizing it pisses me off," Fluker, 22, says. “That just drives rage in you. That's what drives me.”
One disaster
Her name was Katrina, and she was a Rottweiler puppy with puppy eyes and a puppy mouth and a puppy tail.
The Flukers found her when they returned to their neighborhood in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, assessing hurricane damage that was absolute. Everything was gone at 2128 Gordon St.; their old building was a cleared slab. But down the street, they found the dog they would call Katrina.
She was under a car, scared and hungry, with her mother but without a home. The family wondered how she survived and took her in, maybe because her situation reminded them of their own.
When escaping Katrina in August of 2005, they twice-crossed the Biloxi-Ocean Springs Bridge in Mississippi that was in no condition to be crossed at all. The family was in between living situations, a new place in Biloxi and old place in New Orleans. Most of their belongings were still in New Orleans. Annise Fluker, D.J.'s mother, hadn't been watching TV and was unaware of the city's condition. She loaded up the kids in the Ford Escort to drive there.
The sons protested. They had seen the news.
"We were on the verge of dying, and we knew it," D.J. Fluker says.
Authorities turned the family away from New Orleans, an area drowning in engineering failure. After crossing the 1.6-mile bridge once, the little Escort had to again.
The sky was a running faucet. The wind screamed as if afraid of the dark. Water from the rising bay smacked against the swaying bridge, which connects Biloxi to US 90, and the damage that was coming ultimately snapped the structure into several pieces, forcing a closure that lasted more than two years.
They crossed the bridge and hurried to Mobile. Completing the trek on a near-empty tank took a $25 WalMart gas gift card, about $2.75 in loose change from inside the car, and fumes.
The Flukers aren't heard mourning the loss of property in New Orleans or the sudden relocation from Biloxi. They didn't have much, and they've always moved. They've been to 64 churches they can count. D.J. Fluker was never taught to read cursive; he missed the lesson somewhere between jumping from elementary school to elementary school. If a counselor inquired about clothing or living arrangements, they moved. If someone from child services approached the family about living conditions, they moved.
But what became of puppy Katrina does unsettle them.
They fed her, they played with her, and they loved her. When a man offered $200, a nice bonus to the Welfare check, to buy the friendly dog, their answer was no. She was theirs. They found her.
The glossy eyes of D.J.'s sisters, Aeriel, 16, and Elizabeth, 13, tell the rest.
Sometime after adopting the dog, she went missing in Biloxi. They searched and searched before finding her for a second time. The miracle dog was howling nearby, hidden from plain sight, lying in a building drainpipe with foam bubbling from her mouth.
"Somebody in the neighborhood poisoned the dog," says Leon Fluker, 21, D.J.'s brother. "That's how it died."
McGill family
No one warned D.J. Fluker.
Steve Savarese is a bit of a hugger.
The Charger stands today at 6-foot-5 and 340 pounds, and that is without much help from high-school growth spurts. Still, in the fall of 2005, when Fluker's size-22 shoes first entered the football office at McGill-Toolen Catholic High in Mobile, in came Savarese for the squeeze.
The freshman flinched and backed away. Between an abusive father, an estimated 20-person jumping in middle school and other violent childhood events, sure, he'd been touched before. But no man had ever hugged him, he would tell the varsity coach later.
Yes, it is fair to say McGill embraced Fluker from the beginning. Quickly, a sociable Fluker found people at the school deserving of his trust and love.
"God sent us an angel that day," Savarese says.
People gravitate toward Fluker. Always have. The scientific community might one day invest millions to study the phenomena.
Friends remember the first time they met him — tough to forget a handshake that covers a wrist. As big as he is, they swear it, the heart is larger. They admittedly grow impatient when in public with him; there isn't an autograph or picture he's refused. While at Alabama, he once missed the team bus from Bryant–Denny Stadium because, after the locker room cleared out and everybody's bags were loaded, he was still signing and posing with that wide smile of his.
If a high-school coach buys him fast food, he thinks of his younger siblings. If a friend treats him to a buffet, he gets to-go box for his family. Simply, Fluker is a provider.
In high school, he made $5 per hour cutting grass every weekend. He power-washed houses. He built cabinets. He built piers. He worked at Ace Hardware. He worked at Swatters, a batting cage facility. While paid to clean out trailers and their surrounding grass area, he lifted a shovel, stalked the rattling, and with a swing, guillotined a snake. Earnings helped support his family.
There is a genuineness in Fluker's interaction with people. Like a tennis serve, that quality returns to him.
Fluker would seek 1-on-1 tutoring or film review. For him, teachers and coaches found the time. Seeing he needed a meal, somewhere to sleep or a ride to school, several McGill families helped out — it was never just one. Around the holidays in 2006, the entire student body donated a present to a family in need. Fluker, thinking the recipients must really be struggling, spared $1 to the cause. Fluker got his dollar back: the family was his, and what a Christmas it was.
John and Julie Beall, parents at McGill, learned of Fluker's story his sophomore year.
"How can we help?" they asked Savarese, and to this day, they haven't stopped. If love unites, the Bealls and Flukers are one.
Before the Flukers moved to Boloxi in 2007, had their trailer burned down by kids toying with matches, and then moved to Foley, Ala. where Fluker played offensive tackle his senior year for the first time, Fluker grew close to Savarese.
Savarese and his wife have a daughter who was off to college, and Fluker occasionally slept in her old room. After Fluker was shown the bed for the first time, he walked downstairs and asked Savarese and his wife before bedtime if there was a toothbrush.
"Sure," Savarese said. "But what's the matter, D.J.?"
Fluker had tears in his eyes. He wasn't sad. He wasn't scared. That he was finally about to do something so simple, something most take for granted, had made him overwhelmed. After getting by for so long on the barest of necessities, it felt strange to look up and admit at age 15.
"I've never slept in a bed by myself before," Fluker said.
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...cont
Sleeping giant
Fluker's cell phone is a hornet left for dead, buzzing and buried in his pocket, unanswered nine times out of 10. By now, friends know what they are in for — ring … ring … ring — when they try, knowing they're unlikely to reach Mr. Missed Call.
On April 27, 2011, John Beall tried.
A tornado warning was declared for Tuscaloosa. Beall wanted his loved ones to know, and three were students at the University of Alabama. He called and reached his son Bo, who said he was OK and somewhere safe. He called and reached Fluker's brother Leon, who said he was OK and somewhere safe. He called Fluker.
Ring ... ring ... ring ... Missed call. Beall tried again. No answer.
Fluker was asleep.
Leave the apartment, D.J.
Between Beall and his wife, Fluker had about a dozen missed calls that afternoon while napping off a spring football practice. After Beall finally reached him, Fluker groggily went back to bed before the phone rang again.
It was Chance Warmack, an Alabama teammate whom the Titans drafted No. 10 overall in the 2013 NFL Draft, one spot before the Chargers took Fluker.
Fluker answered.
Warmack invited him to come over and hang out. He accepted, getting out of bed and getting dressed while dark afternoon clouds sailed over his apartment. He headed downstairs, ran to his truck and got inside. Rain pelted the windshield. He drove to a gas station and filled his tank, the visibility so poor he could barely make out the streets en route to Warmack's dorm building.
He arrived, and there was strangeness inside. Residents were crowded together, sitting on the floor near the entrance. They asked Fluker to join them. He declined. They insisted Fluker join them. Agitated, he declined. He met with Warmack upstairs. People were behaving oddly, they agreed. Warmack played some of his beats. They took turns rapping when a third voice came.
A tornado notice advised residents to take shelter immediately. Fluker, Warmack and some other teammates went downstairs, opened a door and looked outside.
They saw it all.
The devil's finger poked through the dark clouds of Tuscaloosa and lowered to the ground. The multiple-vortex fog raised hell, whistling while it worked, leveling a Krispy Kreme, a gas station, a bank, a shopping mall, neighborhoods — everything. The tornado was a giant gray thumb scraping against an ant farm, and it was directed straight for the apartment Fluker left less than an hour earlier.
When the rampage ended, Fluker and a friend drove to a nearby town and bought dozens of burgers for people at the dorm building. They saw dead bodies on the side of the road, people hanging from trees, buildings smashed together.
The devastation was nuclear, Fluker thought.
The next day, Beall drove from Mobile and took a cell-phone photo of Fluker. He is standing atop his flattened second-story apartment room. A different shot shows a Ford Mustang that had flown into Fluker's bathroom, the place he would have hidden had he stayed home.
Fluker saw that and knew.
"If (Chance) never called me, I wouldn't be here right now," Fluker says. "That one phone call saved my life."
The vault
On the football field, Fluker is a kid again.
He is a kid bothered his parents aren't in the stands at McGill when other parents are; the kid being told in New Orleans he is just a muscle-man who will never earn a degree; the kid lying awake at night, furious, wondering why they have to sleep in this damn car when there is so much room inside that house.
Before games, Fluker hops up and down and, to pump them up, yells at teammates, "Get your mind right!" For him, that means entering a vault of childhood memories, choosing one or two events, reliving the emotion of that moment, and then, the vault door swinging shut him, strapping his helmet to hit somebody and make it right.
Fluker often tells people the football field is the only place you can hit a person and not go to jail. They laugh. He does, too, but always adds, "I'm serious."
The vault contains many memories — too many — from which to choose, but the one most often selected, the one recalled most vividly, is a small, green Chrysler car.
Its roof was the only one the Flukers had for weeks during D.J.'s sophomore year at McGill. It belonged to his mother's sister, who lived in a large house her husband said was too small for her in-laws. Night after night after night, they could sleep in the Chrysler. They could not sleep in the house, but they could sleep in the car.
Fluker asked his mom, "Why? Why can't we sleep inside?"
That was the answer. The uncle said no.
Life is hard. Regardless of class, race, gender or era, life is hard. But it didn't have to be that hard, Fluker says. More family members should have been there. That is what families are supposed to do. He remembers the emotion, inside that car, the sense of rejection.
Fluker couldn't sleep, too irate about being cramped together, stuffed inside a car like unwanted groceries. He loves his mom. He loves Leon. He loves Aeriel. He loves Elizabeth. None of them in that car should feel so displaced again.
Months later, at school, Fluker was told to write a goal on the back of a white T-shirt. He grabbed a black Sharpee marker and, knowing what it would mean to his family, didn't think twice. He pressed down on the dri-fit fabric. He felt the pressure of the words.
"I will be a first-round draft pick."
Theirs
It was a conversation where neither side had heard enough, said enough or seen enough to press "End." He in Atlanta and they in Mobile, Fluker held a black iPhone in front of his face last month as the video streamed for 22 minutes on the other side.
He watched his mother, Aeriel and Elizabeth walk through the front door for the first time and see the house D.J. Fluker bought. It was for them.
Hands covered mouths. Tears flowed down cheeks. Eyes looked up and around. The girls laughed and screamed into the two-way video screen: "Thank you, D.J.! Thank you!"
The girls saw Fluker's reaction to theirs. So often he smiles, but they've never seen him this happy. He was an All-American at Alabama. He graduated from school in 3 1/2 years. He was a first-round draft pick. And now, finally, he did it.
Leon saw the house days later. He slept peacefully that night and awoke the next morning.
"I didn't get out of my bed because I thought I was in heaven," he says.
The Flukers used a video call for the unveiling because D.J. was in Atlanta, working out before Chargers training camp. A few days prior to the day he was required to report to San Diego, Fluker drove from Atlanta to Mobile and met his family at the house for the first time.
All five sat comfortably between two large couches.
Next spring, Leon is set to graduate from Alabama on scholarship with a degree in sports management. Aeriel and Elizabeth are both honor roll students and recently won leadership and algebra awards at school, respectively. D.J. is in the NFL, setting new goals that involve Super Bowls and the highest personal accolades. Annise achieved what meant most to her, keeping her children together and in school.
They reminisced. They teased. They laughed.
The Flukers, for the first time, were home.Comment
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Reading that makes me glad we picked him.Comment
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Cut him before I cry damn it!!!Go Rivers!Comment
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Holy crap. What a story. Can't believe I didn't like that pick at first. Seems like so long ago.Dean Spanos Should Get Ass Cancer Of The Ass!
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Must've sent that link to 30 people so far. Great read!Dean Spanos Should Get Ass Cancer Of The Ass!
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Gehlken isn't a great sports writer, but he has a flair for these longer, detailed human interest stories. Good stuff. I'd assume that Fluker and Mathews have connected, based on their similar upraisings.Comment
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Didn't Acee write an article like this about Mathews in his first camp (even had the homeless angle)? I also recall people speaking glowingly of Meachem after an article on here last year about this time. I recall nice articles about Cason his rookie year in cap as well, same can be said of Stuckey. I could probably go into more but I can't search the UT website (not a subscriber) nor can I go back to the old board. To be honest, Fluker will be liked on here as long as he produces. If he doesn't produce then he will get no love on this board.Comment
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I don't recall any of those guys having their home taken out by Katrina (not to mention that tornado). I know Matthews was living out of his car too, but it didn't seem like it was for very long (granted any amount of time for a kid is awful). Then they added the domestic violence, which was new at least to me. It probably has a lot to do with Fluker's personality as well. You would think a dude that goes through so much wouldn't be such a cheerful fellow. He also apparently has a ridiculous work ethic (clearly noticeable by how he sculpted his body this offseason). Matthews on the other hand fails conditioning tests and is called lazy.Originally posted by Den60 View Post
I agree that his on field performance will make or break him, but it's easy to pull for a guy like him. Shit dude can probably have his own blind side movie, although obviously they need to change the title
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Just pointing out (from memory) that people on here have said something to the effect that "this is a guy I can root for" in cases of those I mention. Two are pretty much hated on here, one didn't get a lot of love, and the 4th is often cited as being a poor pick (by you in fact).Originally posted by Beerman View PostI don't recall any of those guys having their home taken out by Katrina (not to mention that tornado). I know Matthews was living out of his car too, but it didn't seem like it was for very long (granted any amount of time for a kid is awful). Then they added the domestic violence, which was new at least to me. It probably has a lot to do with Fluker's personality as well. You would think a dude that goes through so much wouldn't be such a cheerful fellow. He also apparently has a ridiculous work ethic (clearly noticeable by how he sculpted his body this offseason). Matthews on the other hand fails conditioning tests and is called lazy.
I agree that his on field performance will make or break him, but it's easy to pull for a guy like him. Shit dude can probably have his own blind side movie, although obviously they need to change the titleComment
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