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Iron Will Rural upbringing left indelible mark on Cougars' preseason All-American linebacker
WSU linebacker Will Derting, from the tiny town of Okanagan, may well be headed for the next level. But football hardly dominates his life and his future plans always include cows and horses.
(Christopher Anderson/The Spokesman-Review) |
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John Blanchette
Staff writer
September 1, 2004 The legend. Will Derting was one of those by the end of his first full college game. But like all living things, the legend must be fed or fertilized. And so this year we have Will Derting and the Horse He Rode in On. See, it isn't enough that he grew up in ranch country so remote it is not serviced by a telephone. That was the very first thing we learned about him, remember — or the first thing after we learned he was going to be a hell of a football player at Washington State University. Intercepts three passes as a rube freshman against Nevada in the Cougars' big-city takeover of Seattle in 2002 and next thing you know he's sheepishly regaling reporters with the tale of having to motor down the road to Aunt Janet and Uncle Ike's place every Thursday evening at 8:30 so the Cougars could reach out and touch him with a recruiting call. Everybody laughed and thought of "Green Acres" — Oliver Wendell Douglas climbing the pole outside his bedroom window to tap into the telephone wire — and they barked for more. So Derting gave them the Okanogan County Fair and his blue ribbon in beef fitting. More, they demanded. He confessed he got lost driving in Pullman — Pullman! — the first time because of those darned one-way streets, paved and everything. We would learn that during his first year in Pullman, his season wiped out by a knee injury, he begged off one Saturday and asked to go home. For branding.Here was the obvious next big thing in Cougar football and damn if it didn't happen to be the definitive Coug — ranch kid, ag major, aw-shucks gent with a wild-hare game. And there it pretty much sat as he went about enhancing those football credentials — All-Pac-10 last year, preseason All-American this fall, prominent on the watch list for the Butkus Award as the nation's best linebacker. All of it baggage Derting is doing his best not to pack around now. "I don't ever buy into it too much," he said. "And I have people around me who, if I was to get too cocky, wouldn't let me stay that way very long." Then there was this: when he returned to campus in June for the not-mandatory-but-always-expected summer workouts, Derting brought something with him. Not an Xbox, an iPod or a PR campaign. Not an advisor or an attorney. Something truly all-American, but on the other hand something very much unlike what most All-Americans would bring. He brought a buckskin quarterhorse. His girlfriend brought her horse, too. They stabled the animals in Moscow and rode them regularly, often up on Moscow Mountain — "just dinking around, getting them broke," Derting said. "This is my fourth summer here and if you stay around here, you get in trouble — or I do. You go to class for an hour and a half and then you go to football for two hours. That's three hours out of the day and then what do you do for the other 21?" Well, you don't take the country out of the boy, that's for certain. • single page | CONTINUED: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 NEXT PAGE »
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