Penn State football column: The re-awakening of Jordan Lucas

UNIVERSITY PARK A week before Penn State’s first game of the 2015 season, Jordan Lucas was baptized.

He had said, just three days earlier, sitting across from me in the Lasch Building in a black shirt with red paisley pattern and color-blocked red sleeves, that he would head out to Spring Creek, which runs through State College, to do it.

Lucas said he would be fully submerged in the slow-moving water, “the real deal,” for his baptism, in front of his father, Vincent, his brother, Brandon, and close teammates.

It would flow up over his 6-foot frame, over his neck, the Nittany Lion head tattoo dividing his collarbone, up over his nose and mouth and eyes, and the ink behind his left ear.

“Forgiven,” it reads.

It’s poetic, frankly, and he knows it. The refreshment that comes from a moment of peace spent in a river that flows through the place he’s called home for the last four years, surrounded by the family and teammates that helped him get to that moment, to that quiet place of green trees and sparkling water and white clouds and blue sky.

“I knew it was going to be an important year for me,” he said, of his decision to get baptized. “I knew it had to be now.

“I’m not nervous. I’m ready.”

His ‘why’

One might guess, at the surface, the year’s importance to which Lucas, now a senior, was referring was his move from one of the team’s top corners to safety, announced in the spring by defensive coordinator Bob Shoop.

It’s a shift in which Lucas has had to exercise his versatility, and will continue to do so. Regarded in the season prior as one of the best corners on the team, his shift will also include many micro-moves.

“I think moving (Jordan) into safety put a guy (there) who can match up with slot receivers,” said Shoop at Penn State’s media day in August. “You’ll see him at strong safety, you’ll see him at the star or the nickel, you’ll see him at the dime.”

Lucas was on board with it from the start.

“I feel like at safety, you have to be a leader,” Lucas said in July at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago. “You have to know other people’s responsibilities and I take that challenge. I like that challenge.”

One might also assume that, with the rich history of Penn State players in the NFL and his former teammate Adrian Amos’ preseason success with the Chicago Bears a year removed from that same position shift, Lucas is referring to his future in football.

Or maybe one could guess it was inspired by his younger brother, Brandon, who is autistic. Lucas cares very deeply for him, and the first tattoo he got was of Brandon’s name, followed by the letters “MBK,” meaning “My Brother’s Keeper.”

One might hypothesize about any number of reasons Lucas thought it so important to be baptized when he was, but, just before he revealed to me that he’d decided to do it, as we sat facing each other across a round gray table, his hands moved briefly to adjust a thick gold chain around his neck, with a pendant hanging from the end. I squinted at it. It looked like there was a saint engraved on it.

“Do you mind if I ask about your necklace? Is it faith-related?” I said. It was a blunt, and somewhat discourteous change of topic. We had just been discussing Lucas’ time at Big Ten Media Days, and the enjoyment he took from tracking down every team’s mascot and taking a picture with it.

“Yes, it is,” he said.

Then, he told me about Ida and Gilbert Allen.

They were his grandmother and great-grandfather, with names and personalities straight out of a TV-Land sitcom. Gilbert passed when Lucas was seven years old, and Ida, when he was 18 and in prep school. He misses them enormously.

He remembers them in bits and pieces, in vivid flashes, as humans do when they lose someone they love.

There was the time Gilbert, who was an umpire and who Lucas said was “his best friend,” caught a very young Lucas when he poked his head out of a moving car after dropping a baseball out of it.

“He snatched me back so fast, I don’t know why I remember it but I do,” he laughed. “I see it in my head right now.”

Lucas said he was a skinny kid, but Gilbert called him “Fatso.” It still makes him smile. Lucas loves purple, because Gilbert did — he hated it when Gilbert was alive, loved it when he was gone, in his words.

“When he passed, it was hard,” he said. “I was just a kid. I didn’t understand death at the time.”

He still recalls Ida, who lived in the lower level of his two-family house, trying her hardest to get Lucas to go to church and to become a man of faith mirrored in her own devout eyes.

“I wasn’t big into the church as a kid, because I always thought it was boring,” said Lucas. “I didn’t really understand it, as I look back at it, as I wish I would have.

“(My grandmother) always prayed for me. That’s why this (baptism) is so important to me now.”

He said he used to call Ida before every football game.

His eyes filled, as he talked about her. He looked toward the ceiling. He leaned back, and folded his hands behind his head. On the inside of one bicep, in script, was the tattooed word “truly.” On the other, “blessed.” A tear fell down his right cheek and he brushed at his left eye with his palm to stop a second one from spilling out.

“She couldn’t really come to my games, because she was so old,” he said. “So she would tell me that she was praying, that she hoped I’d do well.

“That’s why I like when people ask me if I have any rituals before games. I just talk to my grandparents.”

He hears them still, he said, voice breaking. They tell him they are proud of him.

We sat, quiet, a moment. His hand drifted back up to his eyes.

“Will they be there with you for your baptism?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “They’ll be so proud.”

He laughed. As a kid, they tried to get him baptized, but he didn’t go through with it.

“They’ll probably think it was long overdue.”

The week after

It was the Tuesday of week one of college football season, and amid the flurry of press conferences and practice and film, teammate and best friend Nyeem Wartman-White said Lucas was “refreshed.” He grinned when he said it. He knew it sounded a little cliché.

“He was really excited,” he said. “I know it was a cool experience for him. I know it just made him feel truly refreshed. Refreshed. That’s the only word I have for it. Cleansed. He feels cleansed.”

Wartman-White was in a football meeting during the baptism, but said he really wished he could’ve been there to support Lucas. The middle linebacker is part of a bible study group a few players have formed. He said he has seen a change in Lucas off the field just moments after addressing his friend’s increase in leadership on it, to a room full of media members. He thinks part of that is due to his faith.

“I could see (Lucas) in the past year, he’d be like, inching in and out (of bible study), and then he started coming with us,” he said.

“I’m proud of him,” he said, smiling a little sheepishly. “Jordan, that’s my best friend right there. I’m proud to see how far he came. I remember freshman year, he was just a skinny (defensive) back, who loves rap, he went by ‘Young Dropp’ with two ‘P’s’, you know, he’s come a long way.

“It’s hard to believe we were so naive just four years ago,” he said. “Just to see him grow up, and mature these past four years, and see how serious he takes things now...It’s nice to see, you know, that’s my best friend right there.”

Lucas said he wants to lead others the way his teammates and the memories of his grandparents have him, but only if they’d like to be led.

In his day-to-day life, he’s all business. Wartman-White said he can see Lucas already approaching the year ahead of them with a high level of seriousness.

“I am getting older, you know, not getting any younger,” he said. “Life is all about decisions. I’m coming to a point where everything I do is going to affect something, either in a positive way or a negative way. There’s no more ‘I can get away with this and I’ll be OK for now.’ There’s no more of that.”

He will need guidance in the “next steps,” he said. Coming ever closer is the rest of his life, and the world outside of Penn State football.

In that world, for some, there’s God, and for some, there’s football, and sometimes there’s both at once, and sometimes there’s neither.

For now, for Lucas, there’s both faith and football at once, and missing two people dearly and painfully, and growing up, and finding peace.

This story was originally published September 4, 2015 at 6:16 PM with the headline "Penn State football column: The re-awakening of Jordan Lucas."