Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

The beginning.

They called it “Throw it up and get busted” because, really, that's all the game was. The kids in the no-stoplight, one-store town of Sylvarena, Miss., (population: 119) had no football to play with, no money to buy one. So they grabbed an empty two-liter bottle and stuffed some rocks inside. They made do.

Throw it up. Catch it. Get clobbered.

“Chaos,” Donte Moncrief remembers. “Crazy.”

That was Moncrief’s first football – a two-liter bottle filled with stones to weigh it down. Worked well enough. The family couldn’t afford a basketball goal, either, so they nailed a slab of wood to a tree and called it a backboard. They made do.

The town was small, life simple. “Sports or streets,” Donte says. He was the baby of Spencer and Nineta Moncrief’s four children, the rambunctious youngster who spent every waking moment following his two brothers around. He’d get off the school bus and dart to the field, the woods, wherever, without even dropping his backpack off at home. He’d play until dark.

“We’re not talking normal play,” cautions his older sister, Candis Johnson. “We’re talking about us calling him in for dinner while he’s climbing on top of our grandma’s house! Or all the times we had to go to the hospital because he ran into something. The kid was just different. Always.”

By age 10 Donte had decided on his future.

“I’m gonna play in the NFL,” he told a friend.

“By the time you make it there,” his friend shot back, “are they even gonna call it the NFL?”

Houston at Colts, 1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

The decision.

Another decision. Another mind made up. Donte’s wrapping up his junior year at Ole Miss. The NFL draft beckons. So does a diploma. Mom and dad beg him to stay, to finish, to graduate. He won’t hear it.

He has a reason. Dad’s sick. Spencer Moncrief has developed a rare form of arthritis – Raynaud’s disease – which limits circulation of the blood. The doctor told him he had to quit his job at Georgia Pacific, the job he’d supported his family with for 19 years. Money grows tight. Nineta’s paycheck as a regional merchandiser for Winn-Dixie is all they have. She gets up at 3 a.m. some days, trekking across the Bible Belt, returning at night with sleepy eyes to care for her sick husband and four kids.

“We didn’t push (Donte),” Spencer Moncrief remembers. “I really wanted him to stay and get his degree. But when he makes his mind up...”

... he makes his mind up. Donte declares for the draft. Gets the call on draft night from the Indianapolis Colts while gathered with family and friends back in Sylvarena in a double-wide trailer. The connection is spotty. GM Ryan Grigson’s voice keeps breaking up. Biggest call of his life and Donte Moncrief has a bad cell phone signal.

No matter. He’s a Colt. Not yet 21 years old, mom has to sign some of the paperwork for his first NFL contract. The money starts to roll in. Donte buys a truck and gives his parents the rest.

Mom and dad don’t have to work anymore.

The camp.

He played damn near every position on the field: running back in seventh grade, quarterback in eighth, cornerback in ninth, safety in 10th. Not until his junior year in high school did Donte Moncrief line up at wide receiver. He was a natural.

It was never about talent; Moncrief was dripping in athleticism, a football star, MVP of the basketball team, a two-time state champ in the long jump. The problem was no college coach had ever heard of him. Raleigh High School, a tiny outpost an hour southeast of Jackson, wasn’t on the radar, wasn’t even close to the radar. Making matters tougher for Donte, the team ran a wing-T offense. They used just one receiver and ran the heck out of the ball.

So Spencer and Nineta Moncrief’s youngest found his way into an all-star football camp the summer before his junior year. It was his best chance, maybe his only chance. Odell Beckham Jr., now with the New York Giants, was there. De’Anthony Thomas, now with the Kansas City Chiefs, was there.

Donte Moncrief stole the show.

Colts' Trent Cole overcame 'career-threatening' back injury

So striking was Moncrief’s talent that day a Division I coach wondered aloud whether Moncrief would excel at wide receiver or defensive back in college. Then he paused and considered it a moment more. “Or maybe both?”

Donte had done what he came to do. On the ride home, he asked his dad a question.

“These are the best players in the area?”

Dad nodded.

“Well,” Donte replied, “I’m better than all of them.”

Say this much for the kid from the tiny town in rural Mississippi: He never lacked ambition. After his breakout performance at the all-star camp, the calls came. A recruiting tour across the south commenced. Mississippi. Alabama. Florida State. Mississippi State.

“After that camp, everyone knew who he was,” Spencer remembers.

Donte left Ole Miss three years later ranked in the top three in every major receiving category.

The slogan.

The four letters sprawl across his left forearm. GOGA. Nineta Moncrief, the woman who rose at 3 a.m. to hustle off to work to support her family while her husband battled Raynaud’s disease, passed it down to her son when he went off to college.

GOGA. Grind or get ate.

It became more than a motto to her youngest boy; it became his creed, his motive. Grind or get ate. Kill or be killed.

“Either grind or let somebody else get the food off your plate,” Donte says.

Tattoos blanket his body. They tell his story. He got his first as a junior in high school, hiding it from his parents for nearly a year, worried they’d ground him for weeks if they saw it. Seven years later, tattoos cover his arms, his chest, his stomach, his back.

There, the name of his young daughter, “Maylana,” draped by a soaring Superman. “I want to be her hero,” Donte explains.

There, below the letters GOGA, an ode to his youth, a dad handing a football to his son. “My dad teaching me the game of football,” he explains.

There, on his back, a depiction of his hometown with his jersey number – 10 – emblazoned above.

“Never forget where you came from,” he says.

The gift.

Money was tight in the Moncrief home, so mom and dad had to be judicious come Christmas time. That meant one present per kid, per year. When Donte was 12, his uncle built the family a PlayStation. That’s right, built it. They couldn’t afford a new one, so he cobbled together old parts and somehow got it up and running.

“I don’t know how he did it,” Donte remembers.

His favorite present was a bicycle he almost didn't get. One year, all three boys asked for one. Spencer worried whether they’d be able to afford it.

“To be honest, we were struggling,” Spencer says. “For us, in our family, and our financial needs then, that was a big item. I’m pretty sure that they were thinking there was no way we’d be able to get them all a bicycle.”

Donte's bicycle arrived Christmas morning. His eyes lit up. “God made a way,” Spencer says.

On Tuesday night, the Donte Moncrief GameChanger Foundation hosted its first fundraiser. Eleven of Moncrief’s Colts teammates were on hand. Jerseys and autographs and memorabilia were auctioned off. A whopping $80,000 was raised. The money will go to disadvantaged families across Indianapolis, to kids hoping for that Christmas gift they don’t think their parents can afford. It’s not by accident.



“I’ve been in that spot. I know how they feel,” Donte remembers. “I’ve always wanted to give back.”

Dad’s lessons have stuck.

“I always told him that God will bless you not to hoard what you are blessed with,” Spencer says, “but to share what you are blessed with.”

The understudy.

T.Y. Hilton will pick up the phone early on a summer morning and hear that speedy Southern drawl on the other end, the one that screams rural Mississippi.

“What you doing?” Donte Moncrief will ask. “I just got done running.”

The videos flood into Hilton’s cell, too, Moncrief running route after route after route. They usually come with questions.

“What am I doing right?”

“What am I doing wrong?”

“How can I be better?”

Hilton shakes his head. “He’s one of those guys that wants to run seven days a week,” he says. “Sometimes you gotta give your body a break.” The two have grown exceptionally close since Moncrief arrived in Indianapolis in 2014; Hilton teaching Moncrief how to be a pro the way Reggie Wayne taught Hilton.

They bark back and forth on the practice field, they text and FaceTime when they’re home at night poring through film. Along with Phillip Dorsett, they’re the present and the future of the Indianapolis Colts’ receiving corps. Hilton, second in the league right now in receiving yards, has ascended to the level Moncrief aspires to. Hence the texts, the calls, the questions, the work, the chase.

Grind or get ate, remember.

The target.

He was there every day, alert in every meeting, standing on the sideline for every practice. Stay at home? Stay in the treatment room? No. Not happening. Donte Moncrief was injured for the first time in his life; he wasn’t going to let a fractured scapula freeze him from football. He watched. He waited. He prepared.

Then he was back, five weeks later, picking up right where he left off: catching touchdowns. In this, Moncrief’s third season with the Colts, he has stamped himself as the team’s most lethal red-zone threat and perhaps one of the best in all of football. He’s yet to play a full game this season in which he doesn’t grab a touchdown. He’s six-for-six. He’s tied for 10th in the league in touchdown grabs despite missing five games.

Dating back to 2015, Moncrief has caught 11 touchdowns on just 20 red-zone targets. His 12 total are more than any other Colt, including Hilton. ​Moncrief hauled in a TD for the fifth game in a row Monday against the Jets, the longest such streak for a Colts receiver since Wayne did so in 2009. Two more games with a score and he’ll tie Raymond Berry’s club record of seven. That mark was set in 1960.

It’s clear the rapport with Andrew Luck is blossoming, especially where it counts the most. All six of Moncrief’s scores have come inside the 10. He’s a master in tight windows, the 6-2, 220-pound target with the sure-bet hands all quarterbacks crave. The hits usually come after the catch. Moncrief always seems to hold on.

“Down in that red zone, he is a big body/ He runs great routes. He is physical,” Luck says. “I think he has a very good knack for finding the open spot. If it is zone or man, he can win against his matchup.”

Moncrief has done it all season. The closer the Colts get to the goal line, the more he wants the ball.

“I don’t even have to tell him,” Moncrief says of Luck. “He knows.”

Throw it up. Catch it. Get clobbered. Celebrate.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.