Grandmother sure should be proud
PULLMAN – Dwight Tardy will carry the football this weekend for Washington State at UCLA. But really, he’ll be carrying the ball for someone in the Rose Bowl stands, too.
“My grandma, off the field she makes me who I am. On the field, she’s the reason why I’m here every day,” Tardy said. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here. She’s everything to me. She’s the reason I get up and work hard every day. I don’t want to fail her. She’s put too much time in me for me to fail.”
Evelyn Ingram is probably one of the unlikeliest people to be the driving force behind a Division I-A tailback, but she is just that for Tardy, who seems to be breaking through into a starring role for the Cougars.
Raised in Berlin, Ingram went to college in Stuttgart, Germany, before moving to the United States in 1956. Tardy’s parents divorced when he was 4 years old, and the youth moved in with his grandmother and grandfather, Willie Stell.
Make no mistake, though: Grandma who has been the driving force.
She was the one who supported his BMX biking when Tardy became a world-class rider competing internationally at age 6. She was the one who was telling him which friends would serve him well as the youth grew into a teenager. She was the one driving him 45 minutes to a private high school every day for three years.
“And I probably drove him crazy,” she said. “Every morning I talked. Especially with the kids today, I tried to give him all the advice I could. I’m from Germany. I’m from the old school. I’m old-fashioned.”
Fortunately for WSU, she was also the one who backed the value of an education, telling her grandson to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars being floated by baseball scouts to go after a football scholarship instead.
“For a lot of kids it’s a lot of money, but in this day and age it’s no money,” she said. “Plus, if he gets stuck in the minor leagues he might never get out.”
After arriving at WSU, however, things weren’t immediately rosy for the running back from Southern California. He arrived on campus at the same time as another running back, DeMaundray Woolridge, who immediately became the team’s second-string back while Tardy was relegated to the scout team and a redshirt season.
“The whole of last year, I felt like I was in hell,” Tardy said. “I wanted to play baseball. I didn’t know what I was doing here. … I could be getting paid just to be eating seeds right now.
“I really didn’t want to redshirt. I wanted to play. I felt bad that DeMaundray ended up playing and I didn’t.”
In the spring, worried that playing baseball would eliminate any chance he had of moving up the depth chart, Tardy opted to pass on any chance he had to play two sports and focus on football, the sport he said he loves most.
Still, coming into the fall Tardy found himself behind Woolridge again, and possibly behind another newcomer, junior college transfer Derrell Hutsona. So Tardy decided he needed to find a niche, and in his case that was going to have to be some of the little things that don’t draw much attention on the field.
“I worked on the small game, I guess, getting short yardage when we needed it or my blocking skills,” Tardy said. “I’m not going to lie. Derrell and DeMaundray are faster than me. DeMaundray’s stronger than me – he’s got more weight than I do. It’s like of like survival of the fittest. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to play.
That, along with an attitude that impressed coaches during his redshirt year, positioned him to get some carries early, then significantly more after Woolridge fell victim to injury in the season opener and then failed to regain his form.
“He jumps over piles – he’s fearless,” said head coach Bill Doba, going on to discuss some of the reasons he mentioned Tardy in such a favorable light even last season. “He’s a redshirt. And they’re seniors banging him around. And he’s fighting them. It’s like a game to him. He didn’t back down from anybody.”
Last week, Tardy’s opportunity turned into success, as he ran for 145 yards on 20 carries – 114 of those yards coming in the fourth quarter when the Cougars most needed his rushing skills to grind down the game clock and the Oregon defense.
But don’t think the rushing yards alone are enough to impress the one viewer who matters most, the one who will be watching with a more diligent eye than any other.
“(Grandma) watched the USC game on TV and they showed me, when I got through with a drink of water, she could tell that I said, ‘Thank you’ when I got the water,” Tardy said. “That’s the only thing she was really talking about, my manners.
“Regardless of what I did in this game, or this game, she wants me to be a man off the field and on the field.”
Notes
Coach Doba said cornerback Tyron Brackenridge’s status would be a game-time decision after the cornerback suffered a hamstring injury last week. … Tight end Cody Boyd (high ankle sprain) will not start, Doba said, but he apparently will play after making it through the week of practices.