Aiken: Demetris Summers sad USC saga

Commentary by Ron Aiken.

With the verification of what most insiders already knew – Demetris Summers stopped going to school almost immediately after he was booted from the team for failing his second drug test and will not be able to transfer to a Division-I program without sitting out a year – the University of South Carolina and Summers officially are done forever.

Some say good riddance to bad rubbish; since he first began attracting attention as a freshman in high school, there have been those eager to portray Summers as a bad seed, a case study for how athletic prowess trumps academic merit and, to a larger extent, how our society coddles and mollifies troublesome athletes rather than dealing them the tough love they need.

I've never been one of those people, but that's because I know Summers better than most. As the beat writer covering Lexington since his sophomore year, I interviewed Summers and saw him play more than any other media member in the state. His talent was beyond enormous; it was effortless. In my journalism career I've seen only two players so far above the competition at the high school level that they make the game their own personal playground – Summers and Raymond Felton.

But unlike Felton, who was a polished professional when dealing with the media as a high school sophomore, Summers never was comfortable speaking to the media or, for that matter, anyone else not inside his circle of friends and family. While many took that as arrogance, it was due to quite another reason – fear.

To understand Summers, one has to go back to the kid who was first discovered by Lexington coaches while he was in the eighth grade – for the second time. It is my opinion that he had an undiagnosed learning disability, one his high school coach, Jimmy Satterfield, tried his best to get diagnosed though by the time he was able to it Summers was a senior.

I know something about learning disabilities, as before my journalism career I used to work for the Greater Columbia Literacy Council specializing in dyslexia. Summers had all the classic hallmarks of the condition, including one that most negatively affects those suffering from it: a social withdrawal from the frustrating world of academic achievement. When Summers spoke, he looked at his shoes, your shoes, anything on the ground other than make eye contact.

Of the thousands of people I've interviewed, no one was more difficult to get a complete sentence from than Summers. Teenagers by themselves are hard enough to interview; add the fact that Summers, because of his traumatic experiences with authority figures, came off as painfully shy and unwilling to give more than a couple-word answers and it's no wonder so many in the media have been eager to heap labels upon him such as 'lazy' and 'troubled.'

I always got the impression that football was never fun for Summers. He was not the most popular teammate on his high school team for the same reasons he experienced a similar backlash at USC – teammates bristle when someone who they perceive as not working as hard as they are both on the field and off get second chance after second chance. On the sidelines at Lexington he often stood by himself, especially after a mistake on the field. Even when Summers would have the kind of outing most backs would dream of, at best he'd seem relieved. Wins and losses didn't seem to affect his emotional well-being as much as it does for most players, and his interest in the recruiting battles waged for his services was nil – he'd leave media guide after media guide unopened in Satterfield's office.

He simply just didn't care because those weren't the things that made him happy. That those are precisely the things which most people would give their eye-tooth for made it so difficult for people to understand how someone could throw so much away. I think in Summers' case, he never wanted it in the first place. Ask him about his goals, and there was never a plan in place to get to the NFL and succeed. I remember thinking the last time I spoke to him for a big centerpiece story that in his mind, Summers would have been happy never playing football again after high school.

Now he has that chance, though it comes at the price of an epitaph on his college career that no one who cared for him wanted: Demetris Summers, dropout. Personally, I'd be very surprised if Summers transfers anywhere. The academic load in front of him should he want to do so is one I don't believe he has the desire nor ability to get through on his own, which is where he would find himself. That doesn't mean Summers can't be happy doing a million other things; I'm hoping he will.

Fans and media members will say he was the single greatest waste of talent ever to walk on two legs, and they have a valid point. The magnitude of the skill level he possessed on a football field was of an order not seen but once or twice in a generation. And yet, the irony is that he never once let that talent change the person he was before he was discovered by football coaches. Say what you will about Summers and the people who bent over backwards to pull him through academic hoops for their own athletic ends. I say he'll always be the best I ever saw on the high school level, and despite his recent problems off the field I'm hoping he finds the happiness in life he couldn't on the football field.

To view other columns written by Aiken, click here.

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