Mormons from BYU and Cal alike say their experiences were worth the time away from football
By Jay Heater
When Brigham Young University quarterback John Beck was introduced to pressure, it had nothing to do with defensive ends. While serving a two-year Mormon mission in Lisbon, Portugal in 2001, Beck encountered a married man in his mid-20s whose wife was close to giving birth. As Mormon missionaries do, Beck was teaching about the Church of Latter Day Saints. The man decided to be baptized, a decision that enraged his wife's parents. "I was amazed by the whole situation," said Beck, whose Cougars face Cal in the Las Vegas Bowl on Thursday. "His wife's parents told him that they would no longer accept him as part of their family. But he told me, 'This is what I want to do.' He had so much faith that he still got baptized. It was good for me to see someone make that kind of sacrifice. In the end, his in-laws didn't disown him." Beck is one of 62 BYU players to have served missions. "I would expect that they would have a lot of people like me out there," said Cal defensive end Nu'u Tafisi, a 24-year-old junior who spent his two-year mission in Samoa. "They would have a lot of guys who are mature and who are on the same page. No one out there is acting like a little child."
Cal coach Jeff Tedford agrees. "It is definitely a given that with BYU you are going to be facing very responsible, very hard-working guys," Tedford said. "You know they are going to have great leaders. You know that their players go away for a couple of years and they develop a respect for the game while they are gone.
"Part of college coaching is not only academics and athletics. You have to deal with social issues. You have 18- and 19-year-olds who are growing and learning socially. There's probably a difference there with young kids and guys who have served a mission." Tafisi isn't the only Cal player to have served a Mormon mission. Senior center Marvin Philip served in South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Minnesota. "For me, I believe it was an advantage," Philip said of the mission he took following his freshman year at Cal in 2000. "You hear that football is 90 percent mental, and it seemed like I understood the game better when I came back." Even so, Philip had some catching up to do when he returned. He weighed 300 pounds following his freshman season, but returned to Cal at 245. "It was tough when I first got back," he said. "I got tossed around. I had to earn my stripes." Beck said that anyone serving a two-year mission does pay a price in terms of conditioning. "In the beginning of my mission, you could use dumbbells," Beck said. "But a year into my mission, they changed the rule and you couldn't have any weights. I had these heavy rubber bands that I used along with doing sit-ups and pushups. I would wake up about an hour early, about 5:30 a.m., to do my running. "It's definitely a major adjustment. I left on my mission in November of 2000 and I got back in November of 2002. I started classes again the next January. After we would work out that January and February, I would go back to the locker room and put on my pads and helmet and just sit around. My teammates would laugh, but I was so excited to be back. It really was going to be three years between games for me." BYU junior tight end Jonny Harline said it took him an entire season to get back into football shape. "I didn't have the same speed," he said. "I wasn't able to do the things I could do before. Man, physically, it killed me. But at the same time, I could handle the frustration." Harline said that while he was more mature, reading scriptures and teaching religion made him lose some of the edge necessary to be competitive on the football field.
"I didn't have that same killer instinct that you need," he said. "That was the hardest thing for me to get back." Sent to New York City and Samford, Conn., Harline spent a lot of his mission working in soup kitchens and elderly rehabilitation centers. "I learned patience," he said. Cougars wide receiver Zac Collie spent his two-year mission in Joao Pessoa, Brazil. Even though he was sent to teach, he often felt more like the student. "My first day arriving, we flew into Sao Paulo (Brazil)," he said. "We took the bus to the mission training center, and along the banks of the freeway, you saw all these cardboard houses. I had never seen something like that. It was a humbling experience about how people live in this world.
"Then were the times when we would go into a poor area where the houses were made out of clay and I would sit down on the ground ... no carpet, just cement ... and teach right there. I learned life lessons in perseverance, patience and overcoming difficulties."
Collie's younger brother, Austin, was the 2004 Mountain West Conference Freshman of the Year as a wide receiver. However, Austin Collie took the next two seasons off to serve a Mormon mission in Buenos Aires. Will the missions make them better players? "It was extremely hard physically for me," Zac Collie said. "A week and a half after I got back, I had a stress fracture in my hip that put me out a year. Then the next season, I had hamstring problems. It was one thing after another. "But in terms of picking up schemes faster, in terms of maturity, the mission was beneficial." Beck said the lessons he learned from those missions are hard to beat. "We all wanted to have a successful mission, and we all want to be successful now," he said. "You learn hard work, and you learn that you have to pay a price. You learn that you have to sacrifice time and effort to reach a goal. It's an important lesson."
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