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Lawrence Mattison, a rough-around-the-edges Texas running back who signed with Oregon State this month, sees in the Beavers an opportunity to find a sense of family, something he's largely lacked in recent years.

(Photo by William Luther/San Antonio Express News)

SPRING BRANCH, Texas --

finds it odd that anyone would look up to him.

Not in the literal sense, of course. Strangers often wonder aloud, glancing at the teenager's 6-foot-1, 230-pound hulking presence, "Is that guy in high school?"

But the little boy who approached Mattison last fall after a Smithson Valley football game caught him off guard when he handed up a picture he had drawn in school, shyly saying, "I wanna be like you, No. 21."

"To shake a little kid's hand, to hear him say he wants to be like me, it's crazy, it's humbling," Mattison says. "This kid wants my life?"

Mattison, who signed a letter of intent at Oregon State this month, may be the best running back to ever play at

, a 2,000-student high school on the northern outskirts of San Antonio. But he's also the kid who slept behind a gas station when he had nowhere else to go, the guy who punched two holes in the wall when he lost his cool, the one who got handcuffed and wondered if he had just blown his chance at a better life.

Seventeen-hundred miles away in Corvallis,

and his staff have built a top 25 program where they preach trust, family and relationships. Lots of coaches talk about a family friendly atmosphere but it's a way of life at Oregon State, where coaches' children and wives hang out at practice and eat lunch with the players, where it's not uncommon for Riley to stop a fan outside the Valley Center, put a hand on the person's shoulder and ask, "Hey, how you doing?" then stick around to hear the answer.

When Riley first met Mattison, he was struck by the big, charismatic personality of a kid with a rough background.

"I was amazed by his spirit," Riley says. "But when you first meet him, he just breaks your heart."

Behind a friendly demeanor, Riley could see more than the Rangers' career rushing leader, who has totaled 4,689 yards and 68 touchdowns in three seasons. Mattison has the rare athletic gift that so many want, but he aches for what so many take for granted: To fit in, to belong to someone.

"We need him," Riley says matter-of-factly, pointing out the Beavers don't have a running back of Mattison's stature. But it's the second part of his statement that is probably truer.

"And he needs us."

Connection



started recruiting the 2013 class with the understanding that Oregon State was after something different.

The Beavers' depth chart is littered with small running backs -- short, speedy guys who can hide behind linemen and then appear in the end zone. But wouldn't it be nice to get someone big and strong, the type of runner you see in the Southeastern Conference, a guy who drops tacklers flat on their backs?

Brasfield saw that the first time he watched Mattison in the spring of 2012.

"Lawrence has that natural uncoil, that inertia that when you're out of options and you hand him the ball and there's about to be a collision, boy, look out, because he's going to win it," says Smithson Valley coach Larry Hill. "He's one of the best high school running backs I've seen in Texas, and he's still very raw."

SEC schools that showed initial interest agreed. But when they saw Mattison's grades and heard about his home life, Hill says they backed off, wondering if he'd be able to qualify academically.

Brasfield did the opposite.

"It's tough for me to recruit kids and not get attached," says Brasfield, a San Antonio native entering his third year with OSU. "I love helping people and the more I heard about Lawrence, the more I wanted to give him everything we had. I knew if we got him, we'd have to look out for him and take care of him. But that's what we do here at Oregon State -- we've got a lot of hands on each player, pulling these kids up, helping them be successful."

But Brasfield learned quickly this would be a different type of recruitment.

Mattison, scarred by what he describes as years of abandonment by his mother, Rene, was leery of trusting anyone.

Reality

"I wasn't going in and fighting teenagers," Oregon State signee Lawrence Mattison says of his experiences in a club near San Antonio. "I was fighting grown men in the same situation as me: They needed money because they had to feed themselves, they had to pay the bills. I was scared. ... All my hurt, all my anger, I took it out on those guys."

It's hard to pick the lowest moment of Lawrence Mattison's childhood.

As a sixth grader he was rocked by the death of his father due to heart failure, wondering aloud, "Who is going to teach me how to be a man if he's gone?" He moved around so much that he lost count of the elementaries and junior highs he attended, learning that if you could fight on the playground then kids would stop teasing you about wearing the same clothes all the time or not having much to eat at lunch.

He arrived at Smithson Valley midway through his freshman year, a black kid in an affluent white community who wore long dreads, gold grills on his teeth and cursed more than any adult around. He found friendship with Diego Hodges, the first kid to reach out, the one Mattison would call when he had nowhere to sleep. More than once, Hodges arrived at 1 or 2 in the morning outside a gas station to pick up a crying Mattison, who would get in Hodges' car, shake his head and say softly, "Things are bad at home."

Hill, Smithson Valley's coach for the past 20 years, could sense something was wrong. Mattison would disappear for a day or two, but never divulged details when Hill pressed. Instead, he promised to do better at the game that gave him a small measure of stability and success in a life that otherwise lacked either.

Mattison doesn't want to hear how his story sounds like that of

, the newly minted Super Bowl champion whose life was chronicled in the movie

Stories like that package up in a nice Hollywood bow, and some people think they can watch and understand what it must be like.

"In the movie, the bad stuff is 20 minutes," Mattison says. "My life, this is what I lived every day."

At 16, Mattison arrived at a warehouse on the outskirts of San Antonio, desperate for money. He knew about an underground fight club inside, knew that if you won you could walk away with up to $300, cash that he could give his mom to help pay for rent and food.

"I wasn't going in and fighting teenagers, I was fighting grown men in the same situation as me: they needed money because they had to feed themselves, they had to pay the bills," Lawrence says. "I was scared. I've always been a scrapper, but how do I do this? The first time, I took a swig of whiskey. Drinking is the only thing that would make me mad enough to do it, and when I started, no one could stop me. All my hurt, all my anger, I took it out on those guys."

Once, Hodges went with Mattison, horrified yet unsurprised at what he saw.

"Of course he was going to win, look at how big he is," Hodges says. "It's not right that a kid gets that desperate. He used to get so mad when he fought. It took him a long time to settle down."

Slowly, parents in Spring Branch started to catch on to the fact that Mattison's home life was a struggle. Rene, 49, says she was "a great parent," active and attentive to her son's needs. But Lawrence and 10 members of the community interviewed by The Oregonian paint a different picture. School administrators say Rene was often absent, missing meetings with teachers. Parents of other players say she didn't show up to games or team functions. Rene acknowledges she didn't attend one game in Lawrence's senior year, and wasn't there when he signed his letter of intent on Feb. 6. Lawrence says his mom struggled with alcohol; she admits she "had problems with bingeing" and says she went to treatment for it last fall.

He's not a charity case. He doesn't want a new mom. And while he's forgiven Rene, he says, he can't forget her mistakes. He just hopes for things to be better.

"If you asked me what I want in life, I just want security," Lawrence says. "Some people want to take trips, buy expensive things. I want to make sure I have a meal, that there's a roof over my head. There was a time I had to sleep down by a dumpster because my mom had kicked me out, and I had nobody there for me."

According to records from the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, everything blew up on May 6, 2012.

After a few weeks in California, Rene arrived home at their two-bedroom apartment, surprised to find Lawrence and his girlfriend, Brianna Johnson, hanging out. Lawrence and Rene started arguing and Lawrence, who says he had been at the fight club and drinking earlier that night, lost it. He put his fist through a wall twice, screaming about how Rene had left when it counted most.

Rene called the police, who arrived and handcuffed Lawrence. But Rene didn't want to press charges, and officers asked Lawrence if there was anyone he could call.

For what felt like the first time in his life, he answered yes.

Rescue

Chris Brasfield, the Beavers running backs coach, knew he faced a special challenge in recruiting Lawrence Mattison - cultivating trust in a young man who was leery of trusting anyone. As other programs backed off upon learning more about the teen, Brasfield did the opposite.

Cathy West is the mother of three boys, all former Smithson Valley players, the type of mom who shows up with food for everyone and organizes team sleepovers.

Cathy and her husband, Wade, were some of the first to notice Mattison's struggles. They saw that he often didn't have a meal before games and that his cleats were held together with duct tape. Quietly, the Wests started to buy Mattison clothes and football supplies, loading him up with groceries to take home.

Cathy was in bed when her phone rang at 1:30 a.m., a police officer on the other end explaining that if someone didn't come pick up Lawrence Mattison right away, he was going to jail.

Cathy jumped in her car and got to the Mattisons' apartment, worried when she saw Lawrence "so distraught."

"You know when a little kid has been crying so hard that he's so worked up he can't really talk?" she recalls. "That's what it was like. But the thing that broke my heart is that he gets in the car, and as we're driving away, he says that his mom told him he was a mistake. And he says to me, 'What am I supposed to do?'"

Cathy pauses, trying to collect herself.

"How do you answer that? What do you say to a kid in that situation?"

There were no magic words. So instead of talking, Cathy threw open her home to Lawrence, letting him stay almost six weeks. Lawrence swore off fighting and drinking after that night and stayed with the Wests until July, when he moved in with another family.

Loved and respected in the community for their work with Young Life, James and Robin Perrin are accustomed to teenagers around their dinner table. Though they have no children of their own, the Perrins have a warm, inviting house with plenty of extra space. When they heard Lawrence needed a place to go, they volunteered.

"I remember we had a big dinner at the Wests', me and James, Wade and Cathy and Lawrence. We talked about it, and he said to me that he'd never really had anybody he could count on," Robin says, tearing up. "That was it, it was a done deal."

A former small college basketball player, James talked Mattison through much of the recruiting process, and had a first-hand look at how Brasfield built a relationship.

"You have to understand, this kid has been burned a lot in his life," James says. "He's learned to not trust people. He doesn't want anybody to think he's different. For a long time, he told a lot of stories and lies, because he wanted everyone to think things were OK at home. There were times, as we found out more, that we wondered, 'How bad must it have been for him?'

"But I have to hand it to Brasfield, because every time Lawrence got off the phone with him, he couldn't stop talking about Oregon State."

Trust

Mike Riley and his staff have built a top 25 program where they preach trust, family and relationships. Lots of coaches talk about a family friendly atmosphere but it's a way of life at Oregon State.

If fall camp started tomorrow, Mattison would not be eligible. He's on track to graduate, but he's yet to hit a qualifying test score on the SAT or ACT.

Through it all, Oregon State hasn't -- and won't -- walk away.

"I told Chris, 'We are all in on this guy, we'll wait as long as we have to,'" Riley says. "We're the right place for him, because we can give this guy a family."

Now 18, Mattison gets by on the help of his late father's social security checks. He's eager to have structure in his life, but knows that after years of living largely on his own, rules will be an adjustment. Still, after visiting Corvallis for the first time in January, Mattison can't wait to get back.

"When I got there, it felt like home," he says, his smile widening. "I haven't really felt that before, you know. Man, I miss Corvallis already."

Perhaps more than anything, Mattison wants to get to Oregon State not because he'll finally have security, but because he knows Brasfield is waiting for him.

"I can't let anybody take my dad's spot but Coach Brasfield, that's my dude, that's the man who cares about me," Mattison says. "We clicked right away. We didn't talk about football until we were two months in. He was like Coach Hill -- he asked me how I was, what was happening in my life, then he listened to the answer. Brasfield took me under his wing. He's been in my ear the whole time, telling me, 'You're a warrior, you're a fighter, you don't need some junior college, you can be a qualifier, you can succeed.'

"Suddenly, things are changing. I'm getting blessed left and right. When I get to Oregon State, I know it'll be different.

"I know it'll be a family."

Live chat: Discuss this story Monday

Talk with Oregon State beat reporter Lindsay Schnell about Lawrence Mattison and Beavers football at

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Riley and Brasfield agree. They say that when you meet someone with nothing to fall back on, that person will fight like hell to succeed. Mattison isn't coming to Corvallis to fail. If he can get here, he'll finally have a place to belong.

"He's got work to do academically," Riley says. "It's not a finished story. But we believe we are the right place for him because we can take care of him. That's the beauty of a small environment. He's not going to get lost here. We're getting a very hungry person who just needs some love.

"And I'll tell you what -- this kid, he's worth the wait."

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