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Sometime this week, as he prepares to play in the national championship game, Mark Ingram will receive a call from his father. One imagines the words that pass between them as almost typical. There will be an expression of paternal pride, wishes for good luck and good health.
More unusual, the circumstances. The younger Ingram, whose Alabama team faces Texas Thursday night in Pasadena, will be taking a collect call before midnight, East Coast time. Apparently, that's when phone privileges cease at the federal correctional facility in Queens, N.Y., where his father is awaiting permanent assignment on a 92-month sentence for money laundering and bank fraud.
Even in a culture made numb by an epidemic of shows that confuse family dysfunction with reality, this scenario seems unprecedented. On the eve of a title game, the newly-crowned Heisman winner is being asked about his convict father. The elder Ingram, once handsomely compensated as a receiver for the Giants, Dolphins, Packers and Eagles, went on the lam Dec. 5, 2008, and was apprehended several weeks later in a motel room just as Alabama was preparing to play in the Sugar Bowl. He told authorities he skipped bail to see his son play on television.
"It shows the type of relationship we have, the type of bond we have as a father and a son," Ingram the younger said at Monday's press availability. "Any son has to appreciate that."
I admire the son's sentiments. Bless him for believing. But I don't. His father is known to have been in trouble since Michigan State, when he did 24 days for breaking into a dorm room and stealing a wallet. Con artists and thieves aren't known to find salvation through paternity.
Then again, Senior isn't the story. It's Junior, a well-spoken running back who now finds himself the central figure in the BCS drama. Players shouldn't be freighted with meaning, college players especially. They're still kids. But Alabama's sophomore running back warrants an exception.
First — and here there can be no doubt — he's the key to the football game. This much is pretty simple. He's the Heisman trophy winner, the first in 'Bama's long and glorious football history. Texas has the nation's best defense against the rush. Strength vs. strength.
But the strength Ingram has shown on the field is still less than he demonstrated in taking the podium on the evening of Dec. 12 at the Downtown Athletic Club. He had told family and friends he "would not be nervous at all" during the ceremony. Then they read his name.
"And my heart was just beating out of my chest," he said.
His voice cracked first. Then came the tears. He thanked his mother, his grandparents and his father. "He's been a great influence on my life," Ingram said that night, "and I love him to death."
Again, it's easier to judge the man than the relationship with his son. Still, in that moment, Mark Ingram Jr. came to embody a special type of perseverance.
This was the closest Heisman vote in years, with Ingram beating Stanford running back Toby Gerhart by just 28 points. But as Tide quarterback Greg McElroy assured the press on Monday: "The right guy won it."
He had done more than win the college game's most coveted trophy. He'd done more than survive the blight of Flint, Mich. ("A lot of struggle, a lot of violence," he said of his hometown.) He had overcome the worst kind of crap people lay off on their kids.
McElroy's own mother and father, a vice president of marketing for the Dallas Cowboys, began to weep as they watched on TV. "Bawling away," the quarterback said. "I'm not much of a crier, but I had to hold it back, too."
Maybe, after he has a kid, he won't be able to. ‘I don't know how I would respond with it being in the public eye," McElroy said. "People scrutinize unfairly."
Fairness has nothing to do with it. Ingram never asked for a part in this reality show.
Now people recognize him, especially in the big cities. Knowing his name and likeness, they think they know him, too. Most of them want his signature; others want details.
"It was difficult at first," he said. "Some questions are harder than others."
His dad's calling from a prison payphone. If he can answer his own questions, the rest are easy.
