KingBarry
1/6/2009, 11:31 AM
AFTER DUAL TRAGEDIES, OKLAHOMA PLAYER TURNS TO HIS MOTHER, NOT FOOTBALL, FIRST
By Amy Shipley, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tues, January 6, 2009
FT LAUDERDALE, FLa. -- He couldn't grab her in time. Dominique Franks's mother slipped through his arms and dropped to the floor of their apartment, her sobs and wails filling his ears, and it was right there that he made a decision far more important than any he has ever made on a football field: He would make this up to her somehow.
He recalled lifting her off the floor, hugging her to his chest, trying to smother her anguish as she absorbed the news from the police officers standing in their living room: His stepfather and her beloved husband, Bo, had been killed in a car accident two days before Christmas.
Franks was a freshman in high school then, just 15 and far slighter and less accomplished than he is now as a 6-foot, 189-pound, starting defensive back for the top-ranked Oklahoma Sooners, who Thursday will play the No. 2 Florida Gators in the BCS championship game at Dolphin Stadium.
For more than three years after his stepfather's death, as he set a school record for interceptions and earned various all-state honors, Franks never forgot the promise he had made. And after another unfathomable heartbreak -- his biological father committed suicide hours before one of his games during his senior season, an event that sent Franks and his mother reeling once again -- he knew just what he would do.
"When those tragedies happened, they just brought us closer," Franks, 21, said. "They made me realize I was going to always have her by my side."
And he wanted the world, at least the small part of it in which he roamed, to know exactly where she stood. So as the senior prom at Tulsa's Union High approached and the girls in his class speculated about whom he would bring, Franks told his mother, Thelma Martin, now 37, to buy a dress and get her hair done. She would be his date.
"No woman in the world is greater than my mother," Franks said by phone before traveling to South Florida last Friday. "The prom is one of your greatest nights in high school. Why not top it off with the greatest woman in the world?"
On the night of the dance, he put on a black tux and walked to his own doorstep with a white corsage and friend's car idling behind him. She wore a black dress and black, open-toed heels. When Franks took hold of Martin's hand as she stepped out of his borrowed car, teachers, administrators and students clapped, cheered and, finally, cried. The men cried. The women cried. Everybody did, Franks recalled.
"That was one of the best nights I ever had, just seeing how happy my mother was," Franks said. "I wouldn't change that night for the world."
Martin said she fought to keep her composure because she wanted to make her son proud. Then she danced into the wee hours, honoring requests from all of Franks's friends.
"It was," she said, "like out of a fairy tale."
Only it had taken a long time, and lots of tears, to reach that happy ending, which has stretched out as time has assuaged the mother's and son's pain and brought more reasons for joy. Franks, a redshirt sophomore who has intercepted four passes this season and returned a fumble and an interception for touchdowns, has played a major role in the Sooners' success. Surrounded by reporters in a hotel ballroom Sunday morning, most wanting to know how the Sooners' defense could possibly slow down the most fleet-footed offense in the country, Franks addressed his questioners with "sir," and "ma'am" and looked unfazed.
"I just stay relaxed because of the things I've been through," Franks said about his demeanor. "That's why I don't get really excited. Emotionally, I don't get too high . . . I can just focus on playing."
A payroll manager for a consulting firm, Martin planned to depart Monday on the 21-hour drive from her home in Norman to Fort Lauderdale with several family members. Franks joked that if she had hesitated about making the trek he would have packed her in his suitcase. Sometime before the kickoff Thursday night, he will scan the stands, and when he locates Martin, as he always does, he will send her his customary signal, kissing his fist and then extending it with his thumb and baby finger extended.
"My mother is my best friend," Franks said. It's "the spirit she kept, the motivation she gave me to keep on going when I was ready to give up. My love grew for my mother just seeing how strong she was."
Martin gave birth to Franks in Tulsa when she was 16, then relied on her parents and Franks's father's parents for assistance as she finished high school and worked toward her degree in criminal justice at Oklahoma. She said she and Franks's father, Joe Bartee, stayed on good terms but could not make a long-term relationship work, and Bartee gradually faded out of his son's life.
Though Bartee had other children, Franks was Martin's only son, and the two grew closer as time went on. When Martin brought home a boyfriend, Billy "Bo" Martin, a bail bondsman she met at the Oklahoma City Sheriff's Office where she worked as a detention officer, Franks wanted nothing to do with him. Only 11 years old, Franks saw Bo Martin as competition for his mother's attention. But the man who would soon become his stepfather found a way to impress Franks: by treating Thelma Martin like a queen.
"As I was growing up, he got more and more respect" from me, Franks said. "He lived every day for me and my mother. If me and my mother woke up every day, then his day was going to be a great day. If we woke up sick, his day was going to be horrible because he was going to be worrying about us."
When Franks was 15, his stepfather took him to Wal-Mart and bought him a new stereo system as a Christmas present. As snow fell outside, the two spent hours together listening to CDs, even the un-hip country music ones that Bo Martin liked. When Martin finally left their home in Owasso that night to commute to his job in Oklahoma City, he told Franks he loved him.
"All right," Franks recalled saying. "Have a good day at work. I'll see you in the morning."
The next day, the police showed up at the door. There had been an accident on the Turner Turnpike near Bristow. Martin didn't survive.
Before Martin's casket was closed at his funeral, Franks tucked two of his game jerseys inside. Later, he got a tattoo of Martin's face on his right arm with "BO" in cursive letters underneath. But those gestures did not feel complete. The last words he uttered to his stepfather before his death troubled Franks, and trouble him still.
"Just little things eat up at me," Franks said. "He said he loved me . . . and I said, 'All right.' "
Franks, however, tried to hide his own sadness from his mother. He felt an almost crushing sense of duty and responsibility and didn't want to add to her pain. But he relived the moment she fell in the living room night after night, and started to worry about things he never considered before. Thelma Martin noticed the difference. Always close, the pair now did virtually everything together. He called frequently to check up on her.
Both derived comfort from the nightly routine they kept. After Martin got off work and Franks arrived home after practice, he would stand in the kitchen talking to her while she prepared dinner. Later, they would watch television or game films. Occasionally, they would talk about Bo.
"She didn't really have another life besides me, and I didn't really have another life besides her," Franks said. "We just had each other."
There was one new element after Martin's death. Franks's biological father began to take a more significant role in his son's life. In the summer of 2005, when one of Bartee's friends was killed in a motorcycle accident, Franks said, things changed dramatically. Bartee began going to church. He told his son he wanted to become a new man. He told him he would, finally, be there for him. The two started talking daily over the phone about football, grades, college choices. This was different for Franks, and he liked it.
"I finally had my father back," Franks said. "I thought, 'This is what it's supposed to be like.' "
But about a month after Bartee's transformation and a week after Franks's 18th birthday, Franks tried to call his father from the team bus after a game, but reached only voice mail. He tried, and tried again. Finally, he called his father's wife.
"Why are you calling me?" he recalled her saying.
"I was calling you to talk to my father," he said.
"You don't know yet?" she said, then handed the phone to Franks's grandmother.
"Your daddy is dead," she said.
Franks dropped the phone, then rode the rest of the way crying into the hood he had pulled over his head. When the bus arrived at the school parking lot, his mother was there to meet him. She told him his father had shot himself in his car, an act Franks could not fathom.
His teammates, now aware of what happened, gathered around and embraced Franks. They all prayed together in the parking lot.
Franks could not believe he would bury two fathers in three years. Before Bartee's casket was closed, Franks slid his two state championship rings onto his father's fingers. Then, he went straight from the cemetery to a tattoo parlor, where he had Bartee's nickname, "Pup," etched over his heart. After that, he said, he felt lost.
"Then I turned to my friend, the person I turn to the most, and she wouldn't let me turn my back on life," Franks said. "She has my back. I can guarantee I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for my mother."
Martin, who spoke by phone from her home in Norman, said she and her son literally grew up together, bonded by blood, their youth and, finally, heartbreak. She has taken care of him, and he has taken care of her. Given what they endured, she said, she feels relief and joy that he made it through with his values intact.
"It's just awesome," she said, "to have seen him grow into such a great young man."
By Amy Shipley, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tues, January 6, 2009
FT LAUDERDALE, FLa. -- He couldn't grab her in time. Dominique Franks's mother slipped through his arms and dropped to the floor of their apartment, her sobs and wails filling his ears, and it was right there that he made a decision far more important than any he has ever made on a football field: He would make this up to her somehow.
He recalled lifting her off the floor, hugging her to his chest, trying to smother her anguish as she absorbed the news from the police officers standing in their living room: His stepfather and her beloved husband, Bo, had been killed in a car accident two days before Christmas.
Franks was a freshman in high school then, just 15 and far slighter and less accomplished than he is now as a 6-foot, 189-pound, starting defensive back for the top-ranked Oklahoma Sooners, who Thursday will play the No. 2 Florida Gators in the BCS championship game at Dolphin Stadium.
For more than three years after his stepfather's death, as he set a school record for interceptions and earned various all-state honors, Franks never forgot the promise he had made. And after another unfathomable heartbreak -- his biological father committed suicide hours before one of his games during his senior season, an event that sent Franks and his mother reeling once again -- he knew just what he would do.
"When those tragedies happened, they just brought us closer," Franks, 21, said. "They made me realize I was going to always have her by my side."
And he wanted the world, at least the small part of it in which he roamed, to know exactly where she stood. So as the senior prom at Tulsa's Union High approached and the girls in his class speculated about whom he would bring, Franks told his mother, Thelma Martin, now 37, to buy a dress and get her hair done. She would be his date.
"No woman in the world is greater than my mother," Franks said by phone before traveling to South Florida last Friday. "The prom is one of your greatest nights in high school. Why not top it off with the greatest woman in the world?"
On the night of the dance, he put on a black tux and walked to his own doorstep with a white corsage and friend's car idling behind him. She wore a black dress and black, open-toed heels. When Franks took hold of Martin's hand as she stepped out of his borrowed car, teachers, administrators and students clapped, cheered and, finally, cried. The men cried. The women cried. Everybody did, Franks recalled.
"That was one of the best nights I ever had, just seeing how happy my mother was," Franks said. "I wouldn't change that night for the world."
Martin said she fought to keep her composure because she wanted to make her son proud. Then she danced into the wee hours, honoring requests from all of Franks's friends.
"It was," she said, "like out of a fairy tale."
Only it had taken a long time, and lots of tears, to reach that happy ending, which has stretched out as time has assuaged the mother's and son's pain and brought more reasons for joy. Franks, a redshirt sophomore who has intercepted four passes this season and returned a fumble and an interception for touchdowns, has played a major role in the Sooners' success. Surrounded by reporters in a hotel ballroom Sunday morning, most wanting to know how the Sooners' defense could possibly slow down the most fleet-footed offense in the country, Franks addressed his questioners with "sir," and "ma'am" and looked unfazed.
"I just stay relaxed because of the things I've been through," Franks said about his demeanor. "That's why I don't get really excited. Emotionally, I don't get too high . . . I can just focus on playing."
A payroll manager for a consulting firm, Martin planned to depart Monday on the 21-hour drive from her home in Norman to Fort Lauderdale with several family members. Franks joked that if she had hesitated about making the trek he would have packed her in his suitcase. Sometime before the kickoff Thursday night, he will scan the stands, and when he locates Martin, as he always does, he will send her his customary signal, kissing his fist and then extending it with his thumb and baby finger extended.
"My mother is my best friend," Franks said. It's "the spirit she kept, the motivation she gave me to keep on going when I was ready to give up. My love grew for my mother just seeing how strong she was."
Martin gave birth to Franks in Tulsa when she was 16, then relied on her parents and Franks's father's parents for assistance as she finished high school and worked toward her degree in criminal justice at Oklahoma. She said she and Franks's father, Joe Bartee, stayed on good terms but could not make a long-term relationship work, and Bartee gradually faded out of his son's life.
Though Bartee had other children, Franks was Martin's only son, and the two grew closer as time went on. When Martin brought home a boyfriend, Billy "Bo" Martin, a bail bondsman she met at the Oklahoma City Sheriff's Office where she worked as a detention officer, Franks wanted nothing to do with him. Only 11 years old, Franks saw Bo Martin as competition for his mother's attention. But the man who would soon become his stepfather found a way to impress Franks: by treating Thelma Martin like a queen.
"As I was growing up, he got more and more respect" from me, Franks said. "He lived every day for me and my mother. If me and my mother woke up every day, then his day was going to be a great day. If we woke up sick, his day was going to be horrible because he was going to be worrying about us."
When Franks was 15, his stepfather took him to Wal-Mart and bought him a new stereo system as a Christmas present. As snow fell outside, the two spent hours together listening to CDs, even the un-hip country music ones that Bo Martin liked. When Martin finally left their home in Owasso that night to commute to his job in Oklahoma City, he told Franks he loved him.
"All right," Franks recalled saying. "Have a good day at work. I'll see you in the morning."
The next day, the police showed up at the door. There had been an accident on the Turner Turnpike near Bristow. Martin didn't survive.
Before Martin's casket was closed at his funeral, Franks tucked two of his game jerseys inside. Later, he got a tattoo of Martin's face on his right arm with "BO" in cursive letters underneath. But those gestures did not feel complete. The last words he uttered to his stepfather before his death troubled Franks, and trouble him still.
"Just little things eat up at me," Franks said. "He said he loved me . . . and I said, 'All right.' "
Franks, however, tried to hide his own sadness from his mother. He felt an almost crushing sense of duty and responsibility and didn't want to add to her pain. But he relived the moment she fell in the living room night after night, and started to worry about things he never considered before. Thelma Martin noticed the difference. Always close, the pair now did virtually everything together. He called frequently to check up on her.
Both derived comfort from the nightly routine they kept. After Martin got off work and Franks arrived home after practice, he would stand in the kitchen talking to her while she prepared dinner. Later, they would watch television or game films. Occasionally, they would talk about Bo.
"She didn't really have another life besides me, and I didn't really have another life besides her," Franks said. "We just had each other."
There was one new element after Martin's death. Franks's biological father began to take a more significant role in his son's life. In the summer of 2005, when one of Bartee's friends was killed in a motorcycle accident, Franks said, things changed dramatically. Bartee began going to church. He told his son he wanted to become a new man. He told him he would, finally, be there for him. The two started talking daily over the phone about football, grades, college choices. This was different for Franks, and he liked it.
"I finally had my father back," Franks said. "I thought, 'This is what it's supposed to be like.' "
But about a month after Bartee's transformation and a week after Franks's 18th birthday, Franks tried to call his father from the team bus after a game, but reached only voice mail. He tried, and tried again. Finally, he called his father's wife.
"Why are you calling me?" he recalled her saying.
"I was calling you to talk to my father," he said.
"You don't know yet?" she said, then handed the phone to Franks's grandmother.
"Your daddy is dead," she said.
Franks dropped the phone, then rode the rest of the way crying into the hood he had pulled over his head. When the bus arrived at the school parking lot, his mother was there to meet him. She told him his father had shot himself in his car, an act Franks could not fathom.
His teammates, now aware of what happened, gathered around and embraced Franks. They all prayed together in the parking lot.
Franks could not believe he would bury two fathers in three years. Before Bartee's casket was closed, Franks slid his two state championship rings onto his father's fingers. Then, he went straight from the cemetery to a tattoo parlor, where he had Bartee's nickname, "Pup," etched over his heart. After that, he said, he felt lost.
"Then I turned to my friend, the person I turn to the most, and she wouldn't let me turn my back on life," Franks said. "She has my back. I can guarantee I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for my mother."
Martin, who spoke by phone from her home in Norman, said she and her son literally grew up together, bonded by blood, their youth and, finally, heartbreak. She has taken care of him, and he has taken care of her. Given what they endured, she said, she feels relief and joy that he made it through with his values intact.
"It's just awesome," she said, "to have seen him grow into such a great young man."