SHAQUEM
During the spring of 2015, before my third season at the University of Central Florida, Knights coach George O’Leary decided that Shaquill might be better off without me. While Shaquill was beginning to make a big impact on the football field, I was buried on the depth chart. And O’Leary, for whatever reason, believed I was a distraction for Shaquill.
So when final exams ended that spring, O’Leary decided to separate us for the first time in our lives. O’Leary told Shaquill that he was going to stay in Orlando for summer school and participate in “voluntary” workouts. But O’Leary told me—in no uncertain terms—that I was not welcome to stay at UCF that summer. He told me I had to return home to St. Petersburg.
During my first two years at UCF, I used to tell my mom that college was such a negative place for me. Mom told me she prayed before answering my phone calls because she feared something was wrong every time I called. It was supposed to be the happiest time of my life. I was on a college football team, attending a great university on scholarship, and was given a tremendous opportunity that few people get. I love my school, and I will represent UCF forever. I will never be able to repay the coaches, professors, teammates, and administrators who helped Shaquill and me fulfill our dreams. I will forever be indebted to UCF for giving us a platform to prove we could play in the NFL. For whatever reason, though, O’Leary and a few of his assistant coaches tried to make the experience as joyless for me as possible.
My lowest point came that summer when the UCF coaches had most of the guys stay on campus to work out, while the guys who probably weren’t going to play went home. For the first time in our lives, Shaquill and I weren’t together. Until I stayed in our dorm room during road games, while Shaquill and my teammates traveled around the country to play, we’d probably never been separated for more than a couple of nights. I’m not kidding; that’s how close we were growing up.
Honestly, that summer was the first and only time since I was a kid that I thought about quitting football. I thought about hanging up my cleats, shoulder pads, and helmet for good. I was so miserable. After all I’d been through, after all I’d already overcome, I almost quit.
At the very least, I decided I was going to transfer to another school to play football, leaving my brother behind, or even give up football altogether and focus on track. Those were very dark times for me. I didn’t know where my life and football career were headed.
SHAQUILL
About two weeks after Coach O’Leary told Shaquem to go back to St. Petersburg for the summer, O’Leary found out that he was still on the UCF campus and using the track and weight room to stay in shape. O’Leary told Shaquem that if he didn’t leave, he was going to take away his scholarship, call the university police, and have him arrested for trespassing. So Shaquem went home, leaving me behind in Orlando.
A couple of weeks later, Shaquem returned to the UCF campus to spend the weekend with me. I missed my twin brother and wanted to see him. We’d never been separated for that long in our entire lives. I missed seeing his face and hearing his voice. I also knew Shaquem was confused about everything that was happening, and I wanted to make sure he was doing okay.
That Saturday night, Shaquem and I went out with a small group of our friends. We took some photographs, which made their way onto social media. Somehow, Coach O’Leary saw the photos and figured out Shaquem was back in Orlando. Two days later, on Monday morning, Coach O’Leary summoned me to his office. I will never forget what he said to me. O’Leary said Shaquem didn’t deserve to be there and wasn’t a good enough football player to be part of the UCF team.
As crazy as it might sound, O’Leary wanted to see how I would perform without Shaquem. He felt like my brother was holding me back and was a negative influence. He believed Shaquem was a distraction and wasn’t ready to play college football. He wanted to see if I would play better once he was gone. If that was indeed the case, I believe that O’Leary was going to pull Shaquem’s scholarship after that summer.
Finally, O’Leary told me that if Shaquem came back to the UCF campus again, he would kick both of us off the team. I sat there in O’Leary’s office, staring at my feet and struggling to comprehend what I’d just heard. O’Leary recruited both of us to play football at UCF. He knew we were closer than any players he’d ever coached during his career. Now he was separating us against our wishes, like some sick experiment to see how we would react to being apart.
After finally mustering the courage to respond to Coach O’Leary, I told him, “There is only one person in this room who has faith in my brother, and it obviously isn’t you. If you don’t want both of us at UCF, neither one of us is going to be here. I quit.”
Just like that, I quit the UCF football team. I kicked O’Leary’s office door on my way out. When O’Leary was recruiting us out of Lakewood High School, he told us everything we wanted to hear. He was the only college football coach who told me I couldn’t come without Shaquem. Being able to stay together was why we chose UCF. When we got there, it was completely the opposite. It was so dishonest. I understand that college football is a big business, and coaches will say anything recruits want to hear, but O’Leary reneging on his promise to us felt so wrong.
Coach O’Leary called me back to his office a few hours after I quit the team. He apologized for what he had said about Shaquem. He asked me to come back to the team and invited my brother back for the coming season too. He knew I was not going to pick UCF over my brother. He knew we were inseparable, and that’s the part he forgot, apparently.
SHAQUEM
I spent that summer back in St. Petersburg working with Dad and our older brother Andre. Dad owned a tow truck, so I woke up at seven o’clock in the morning to go to work with him, towing cars around the city. I got off around six o’clock in the evening. I went to my old high school to work out, and then I went to work with Andre cleaning offices at a car dealership—he and his wife, Ronke, owned a cleaning business—until around midnight.
I followed that schedule every day, Monday through Saturday, for the entire summer. And it sucked. It was so boring and depressing. Every time I went to work, I wondered if I was falling behind my UCF teammates even more. While I was towing cars and emptying trash cans, they were lifting weights and participating in 7-on-7 passing drills. Would I be back on the scout team that coming season? Would I even be on the UCF team at all?
I remember towing this guy’s car one morning that summer. When we dropped the car at a repair shop, the customer pulled a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. I thought he was about to hand me a tip. Instead, he ripped the five-dollar bill in half. He handed me half and put the other half in his pocket. I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh or curse the man. I just gave him this puzzled look. The man smiled and said, “Keep on working, son, because nothing comes easy.”
I will never forget what that man said, because it was exactly what I needed to hear at that very moment. It was the same message my dad preached to me during those grueling workouts in our backyard. Nothing comes easy. It was the kick in the pants I needed.
Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided that I was going to work extra hard that summer to make sure the UCF coaches knew I was ready to be on the field. I wasn’t going to give them a reason to put me back on the sideline. I thought about everybody who was like me—the other kids with limb differences—who had to fight every day to be treated like equals. How could I possibly let them down? What kind of an example would I be setting for them?
Unfortunately, not much changed after I returned to UCF. During one of our preseason workouts in August 2015, one of the strength coaches told me, “You’ll never wind up being anything. You’ll be nothing.” Shaquill almost jumped on the coach right there in the weight room. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why the coaches were trying to tear me down. It was as if they wanted to break my spirit so I would quit the team. Who does that to a twenty-year-old kid, especially one who has faced obstacles his entire life? It seemed so wrong.
When UCF opened the 2015 season against Florida International University on Thursday, September 3, I found myself back where I had been the previous two seasons: mostly sitting on a bench on the sideline. I was playing on special teams but was still buried on the third-team defense, despite how hard I had worked during preseason camp.
After winning at least a share of back-to-back American Athletic Conference championships in our first two seasons at UCF, we lost our season opener against the Golden Panthers 15–14 at Spectrum Stadium in Orlando. We had a chance to win the game in the closing seconds, but FIU’s Imarjaye Albury blocked a 47-yard field goal to spoil our opener.
Unfortunately, it was an omen of things to come. We lost 31–7 at Stanford the next week—worse, we lost our starting quarterback, Justin Holman, to a broken finger on his throwing hand.
The next week, we fell to Furman 16–15 at home. That’s when I realized it was going to be a very long season. The Paladins were members of the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), which is a level below the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). UCF had more scholarship players and was supposed to have better players. In other words, Furman was not supposed to beat us. We turned the ball over four times, however, and couldn’t generate much of anything on offense. It was Furman’s first win over an FBS opponent in sixteen years, having dropped its previous fifteen such games. It was also the first time UCF had lost to an FCS opponent since moving up to the FBS in 1996.
After dropping our first three games, we reached a crossroads in our season. We could rally and try to piece things back together, or we could quit and just go through the motions the rest of the way. Sad to say, most of the UCF players chose the latter, and I was one of them. After three games, we ranked dead last in the FBS in total offense. We blew a nine-point lead at South Carolina to lose our fourth consecutive game, 31–14. Then we had five turnovers in a 45–31 loss at Tulane and four more in a 40–13 defeat to Connecticut. I made my first college tackle and recovered a fumble on a botched punt against Tulane.
After losing every game we played, everyone was extremely frustrated, including O’Leary. From the day we stepped on the UCF campus, he wasn’t a fan of our dreads. We were proud of our hair. Shaquill and I started growing dreads when we were about twelve years old. It might sound silly, but I grew dreads because I wanted my hair to hang out of the back of my helmet. Some of our favorite players in the NFL, such as Jamaal Charles, Richard Sherman, Larry Fitzgerald, and Marshawn Lynch, had long dreads, and I wanted them too.
During preseason camp that season, O’Leary told us that our hair was too long. O’Leary said he didn’t want it hanging down to our jerseys. Shaquill and I folded the dreads in half and tied them off with rubber bands when we wore our helmets.
A couple of days after the Connecticut game on October 10, 2015, O’Leary saw us in the football facility with our helmets off. He stopped and said, “I told you to cut your hair. Cut your hair or you’re off the team.”
That night, Shaquill’s girlfriend, J’Nea Bellamy, cut our dreads off outside our dorm room. Our mother watched via FaceTime on her cell phone. Mom cried the entire time. Shaquill cried, and I cried too. It was so demeaning. I didn’t think our hairstyle had anything to do with football; it was our personal preference and part of our identity. There were other guys on the UCF team with long hair, and O’Leary didn’t make them cut theirs. It seemed to be a rule for only Shaquill and me, which seemed unfair.
Once my dreads were gone, I felt like I had been drained of my strength and power. I didn’t have any swag. I felt kind of like Samson after he met Delilah.
On October 25, 2015, about two weeks after O’Leary demanded we cut our hair, he announced his retirement. The announcement came one day after the Knights lost to Houston 59–10 at Spectrum Stadium, which dropped our record to 0–8. UCF quarterbacks coach Danny Barrett, who had been head coach of the Canadian Football League’s Saskatchewan Roughriders from 2000 to 2006, was named interim coach.
When I found out about O’Leary’s retirement that Sunday, I turned up music on the speaker in my locker and celebrated. Some of my teammates said I was being rude, but I didn’t care. They hadn’t gone through what I’d endured for three years. I didn’t wish ill will toward O’Leary, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t happy he was gone. As long as he was coaching at UCF, I wasn’t going to be given an opportunity to prove what I could do.
Our results didn’t get any better after O’Leary retired. We lost the next game at Cincinnati with a score of 52–7, and were then defeated by Tulsa 45–30 to fall to 0–10. I thought I might finally get a chance to play on defense when starting safety Drico Johnson was ejected in the first half of the Tulsa game for a targeting penalty. Instead of putting me in the game, the coaches moved Shaquill from cornerback to safety. Having to watch my twin brother play my position was like throwing salt in my wounds.
Sadly, by the final month of the season, I didn’t care about results anymore. I was at a point where I told myself it wasn’t my fault because I wasn’t even playing. It seemed like the season would never end. It was so long. I felt bad for Shaquill and my teammates who invested so much into that season. My brother went into each game thinking, This might be the one we finally win, but it never happened.
Finally, in the season finale against South Florida on the day after Thanksgiving, UCF cornerbacks coach Travis Fisher put me in the game on defense. I don’t think he even told Coach Barrett he was doing it. Coach Fisher grabbed my shoulder pads and pushed me onto the field. We were losing badly when I played safety for USF’s final two offensive possessions. It felt so good to be playing defense again. I got a good lick on Bulls receiver Rodney Adams, one of my high school teammates and closest friends. I had three tackles and one pass breakup in our 44–3 loss.
Two years after beating Baylor in the Fiesta Bowl and finishing in the top ten of the final Associated Press poll, which at that point was the highlight of UCF’s football history, we finished the 2015 season with a 0–12 record. We were the only winless team in the FBS that season. Somehow, we lost every single game we played.
Even worse, UCF football was becoming the butt of jokes. A bar in Orlando called The Basement started giving away free beer until we won a game. The bar owners ended up giving away more than fifteen thousand beers as UCF fans drowned their sorrows. I heard it nearly put the bar out of business. I just couldn’t believe how far we’d fallen.
Only five days after UCF football hit rock bottom, however, the university’s administration made a decision that would change the perception of the program—and my life—forever.