Notre Dame receiver Miles Boykin doing his best imitation of hero Calvin Johnson

Mike Berardino | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Notre Dame receiver Miles Boykin on strong start to 2018 Notre Dame WR Miles Boykin on what it will take to run the table

SOUTH BEND – Miles Boykin has been dominating with his height for as long as anyone can remember. Consider his earliest days on the basketball court, his first love.

“Miles has been playing basketball since he was 4,” says Felicia Boykin, mother of Notre Dame’s leading receiver. “He was 3 when his brother George was 5, and they wouldn’t let Miles play. He was big enough. (League officials) thought they were twins, and I said, ‘Oh, no, he’s only 3.’ “

Boykin was 8 when he started playing travel baseball for the Tinley Park (Ill.) Bulldogs. Once again, he was taller than his peers and used that leverage to his advantage.

“When he was in center field, he had those long legs and he would just go,” recalls Laura Uher, whose husband, Greg, was an assistant coach. “That would help him get all the balls because he was so fast.”

Same thing with a bat in his hands.

“He’d get ahold of that ball, and it would go,” says Uher, who would bake a dozen cookies for any kid who hit a home run.

Boykin, who batted righty and played for the Bulldogs through age 14, led the league annually in chocolate chip consumption.

“Miles was just bigger and faster than everyone out there on the field,” says Scotty Uher, the Bulldogs’ second baseman on those teams. “We said he was like a gazelle out there. He would glide all over the place.”

Still does.

“It’s so weird seeing him now as like an actual professional athlete, basically,” says Uher, a Notre Dame senior majoring in mechanical engineering. “I look back on playing baseball with him, and now I realize that’s what a true college athlete looks like out there.”

Now 6-4 and 228 pounds, Boykin has used his physical gifts to manhandle opposing cornerbacks and reel in four touchdown passes among his 32 receptions for 512 yards. All three totals are team highs for the fourth-ranked Irish, who needed Boykin’s go-ahead score from 35 yards out with 5:43 remaining to escape with a 19-14 win over unranked Pittsburgh on Saturday.

It has been quite a breakout season for a talented weapon who made a quarter of his dozen catches and piled up 40 percent of his 253 receiving yards a year ago in the Citrus Bowl win over LSU.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” Felicia Boykin says. “You just have to wait your time, wait your time and it finally happened. I’m happy for him.”

Did she have to keep her son’s spirits up during the lean times?

“He had to keep my spirits up,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this, Miles!’ He was like, ‘Ma, it’s OK. It’s OK.’ It was me more than him.”

Guiding light

Considering his lifelong stature in relation to his peers, it’s no surprise that Boykin latched onto Calvin Johnson as his personal lodestar once he got serious about football.

Going back to his earliest days at Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, Ill., Boykin studied Johnson’s moves whenever Detroit Lions highlights came on the screen. He chose the No. 81 he still wears in Johnson’s honor.

Boykin, in fact, talked so much about the six-time Pro Bowler known as “Megatron” that his Celtics teammates pinned him with a Transformers-inspired nickname all his own.

“They used to call me ‘Optimus’ in high school, but not anymore,” Boykin says with a laugh. “He was definitely a huge inspiration to me just growing up, watching him be so dominant as a receiver.”

Weary of all the losing after amassing nearly 12,000 receiving yards in his first nine seasons, Johnson stunned the NFL by retiring at age 30 in the spring of 2016. That was Boykin’s freshman year at Notre Dame, but no one else has come along to replace Megatron for him.

“Man, just watching him move,” Boykin says, shaking his head in admiration. “Sometimes we’ll watch film of receivers, and we don’t have many clips of him but sometimes we’ll watch him. It’s just, ‘Wow.’ The way he came off the ball, it was explosive.”

One of the nation’s tallest receiving corps can’t help but nod in amazement as position coach Del Alexander uses his clicker to start and stop the video tutorial.

“He just eats up ground,” Boykin says of Johnson. “He had long strides, just like me. He was just so physical. When the ball was going up, he was coming down with it.”

Johnson, who played at Georgia Tech, has focused on his charitable foundation in retirement as he awaits his certain election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but Boykin’s eyes widen when asked what it would mean if someone could arrange an audience with his top football inspiration.

“I don’t know if they could set that up, but it would definitely be a cool opportunity for me to learn from a veteran like him,” Boykin says.

What would he ask the great Megatron?

“I would just ask him what it’s like,” Boykin says. “What’s the most important thing he worked on in his game? What was his main focus? What were the things he was doing to get better on a day-to-day basis?”

Once it’s time for Boykin to prepare for the NFL draft, his mother already has an idea how to make that happen.

“Hopefully we could get (Johnson) to train with Miles,” she says. “It might cost us a pretty penny, but I mean, if that’s what he wants to do. Miles really likes him. He already has a shirt and a jersey. If he’s doing private training lessons, why not?”

Throw it and he'll go get it

That same can-do spirit caused Felicia Boykin, a labor-and-delivery nurse at Franciscan Health in Olympia Fields, Ill., to show up at the team hotel last Friday night with a cake and a plan to celebrate her son’s 22nd birthday.

“I had a little surprise birthday party for him,” she says. “He was like, ‘I knew you were going to do this.’ I said, ‘You didn’t know anything.’ “

Putting something like that together on the eve of a game in major college football carries a high degree of difficulty, but Boykin’s mother wasn’t deterred.

“You know they’re sequestered in a hotel,” she says. “So, I had called a couple of his friends and I said, ‘Hey, listen, this is what I’m thinking.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’ll take care of it.’ Nobody gave up the secret.”

Friday nights are family time for Notre Dame football, so turnout wasn’t outrageous in the extra room the hotel provided for Boykin’s surprise party. And Boykin’s buddies on the undefeated Irish showed remarkable restraint once the candles had been extinguished.

“None of them wanted to eat cake,” Felicia Boykin says. “They were like, ‘No, no, we can’t eat cake.’ Some people said, ‘Bring it tomorrow.’ So, I had the cake sitting in my car before the game. They said they would eat it after the game.”

Limited to two catches for 37 yards through the first 3 ½ quarters, Boykin came alive at winning time. Still trailing the Panthers by two points, quarterback Ian Book found his favorite target on two straight plays: a 12-yard out and a 35-yard seam route.

“Miles works so hard,” Book says. “Our chemistry is starting to come along. He’s one of the playmakers that I try to get the ball to.”

With Boykin’s Venus flytrap hands and condor-like wingspan, he makes for an inviting target.

“When it’s a critical down, he’ll make the plays for us,” Book says. “He’s really rangy, so I just have to put it up there and give him a chance. Throw it, and Miles will go get it.”

Still a chocolate chip fan

All in all, Saturday wasn’t a bad way for a young man to celebrate his birthday. Boykin even got his own personal cake after the game while the rest of his pals settled for the yellow cake with butter cream icing.

“That’s not his favorite,” Felicia Boykin says. “His favorite is a chocolate chip cookie cake. That’s just for him.”

She smiles and shrugs.

“Sometimes I just try and do things,” she says.

A lifelong fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, mainly because of Magic Johnson, she has been trying to convert Miles to her way of thinking for years. When his favorite basketball player, LeBron James, jumped to the Lakers over the summer, she figured she finally had won that battle as well.

“I said, ‘Oh, we have something in common now; we’re Laker fans,’ “ she says. “Miles was like, ‘No, I’m a LeBron fan.’ He still doesn’t like the Lakers. He just says he’s a LeBron fan. He still thinks I’m living in the old age with the Lakers. He’s like, ‘You just need to stop, Ma.’ “

Back and forth they go, the towering senior receiver with the bright future and his hilarious, brutally frank mother.

“He has a very good sense of humor,” Felicia Boykin says. “I don’t know how to say it. He can just make you laugh. He’s quick with the lines.”

Older brother George already has his private pilot’s license and is getting his master’s degree in aviation management, prompting Felicia to joke that she’ll be the flight attendant while they fly around the country to watch Miles play football.

“I tell Miles he gets his sense of humor from me,” she says. “He’s like, ‘No, I don’t, Ma.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, you do.’ “

Spotting Scotty Uher again after the pregame Player Walk, she can’t resist ribbing him as well.

“This is the guy Miles used to get in trouble with,” she says. “This guy right here. I forgot about that.”

Uher nods sheepishly.

“They used to call us the ringleaders,” he says. “We were always joking around, just trying to have a good time on the bench. Our coaches reined it in a little bit.”

When it was winning time, however, Boykin always seemed to come through. His old baseball teammates still talk about the tape-measure homer he hit at age 10 or 11 in Jacksonville, Ill., to key a miracle comeback from an eight-run hole with two outs in the bottom of the seventh.

That gave the Bulldogs a tournament win over a neighboring rival. And, of course, it meant Laura Uher had more chocolate chip cookies to bake once she got back home.

“I tell everyone Miles is one of the nicest guys I know on the Notre Dame football team,” Scotty Uher says. “It’s just great to see him in this situation, and he’s very humble about it. He’s still a good kid at heart.”