BOCA RATON, Fla. – The bus didn’t look like it was coming.

Deon Yelder felt like this was his best shot, his only shot at a college scholarship. A Division I coach was waiting for him on a Friday morning at his Louisville high school. All he had to do was make it to the meeting.

But the bus ran late. By the time it arrived, he realized he would miss the transfer to the next bus. He wouldn’t get to school until almost 1. By then the coach would be long gone.

He wouldn’t get any offers.

“I just messed this up,” Yelder thought to himself, in a moment of fear. “No way I can fix it.”

View photos From walk-on, to Senior Bowl standout, Deon Yelder hopes to hear his name called in April during the NFL draft. (AP) More

The story of Deon Yelder must include his bus rides. He grew up in a working-class part of Louisville and his middle school was a 20-minute drive, but both of his parents worked long hours – his mom at AT&T and his dad in construction – and they didn’t always have the chance to drive him. The school bus didn’t make that trip from the neighborhood where he lived. So Deon would wake up early and board the TARC (Transit Authority of River City). He would sit in the back so he could see any trouble that may arise on the bus. He would leave one earbud dangling so he could hear what anyone might be saying. He would listen to Drake or Eminem and look out the window on the cold, dark mornings. He would grab his transfer and board his connecting bus. The trip would take more than an hour, there and back.

Deon was 12.

His football life may have started sooner if it wasn’t for this commute. He started playing at age 8, but when he got to middle school, the sport became a long-distance relationship.

“I loved football,” he says. “I didn’t have a lot of ways to get to practice.”

Yelder doesn’t complain about this, or anything else for that matter. He simply explains it. His parents worked; his school was far; he wasn’t about to put a sport over family or school. Period.

So he gave it up. He played some basketball. He tried to keep his grades up and the video games off. He dreamed of working as a car technician. He rode the bus.

Yelder went to high school a little bit closer to home, so his bus rides got shorter. He kept playing basketball, took a couple of shop classes, and then when he became a junior, he figured he could go out for football again.

Turned out he wasn’t bad at it.

By the time he was a senior, he was a starting wide receiver who also played safety and returned kicks. Jeff Brohm, then an offensive coordinator under Bobby Petrino at Western Kentucky and now head coach at Purdue, took an interest and visited him at the high school. They set up another meeting and that’s when the TARC let him down. Yelder texted the coach to let him know what was happening, but he thought he had lost his only shot. No other schools were interested in giving him a full scholarship.

He still thinks that missed connection cost him his scholarship. “I think so,” he says, “but you never know. You never know unless it happened … but it didn’t happen.”

Still, Brohm kept the faith.

“If you get guys that come from that background, they really know what hard work is, and what it’s going to take,” the Purdue head coach says. “I felt like he had it in him. When things didn’t go his way, he worked through it. I felt like if we could get him to stick it out, he had the talent to grow into an athletic tight end.”

Western Kentucky eventually offered him a preferred walk-on spot and he took it.

He would walk on for four years.

*****

It’s a bright Wednesday afternoon in March and Deon Yelder is in a South Florida neighborhood dotted with auto shops. One is called Smokey’s, another is called Last Chance. Power tools and hydraulic lifts whirr and jolt everywhere. There are beaters and classic cars and totaled wrecks. This is the kind of area where Yelder imagined himself as a grownup. He loves cars, loves everything about them, even though he has never owned one.

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