Sunday, November 1, 2009

Just think, if a few cards had been dealt to other hands, Adrian Peterson, the NFL's best running back, would have been a graduate of Key West High School, instead of Palestine, Texas.

OK, it's a stretch. Blame Chris Valdez, the KWHS assistant principal and assistant baseball coach. He's the one who called me and got me started on some research.

Here's the story: Adrian's father, Nelson, was the son of shrimpers, going back and forth between Texas and Key West. But, Nelson Peterson, now 46, was in Key West long enough to leave his mark at the high school.

John Welsh, the current principal at the high school, remembers teaching him and told me that Peterson played three seasons from 1979 to '81 on the Conchs' varsity basketball team. "Marty Arnold was the head coach and Bill Butler the assistant coach," reported Welsh after checking some yearbooks that indicated that players on those teams included Elliot Bacon, Charlton Barnes, Tyrone Washington (who received a scholarship to Rice University), Keith McCloud, Lewis Chapman, Sterling Sands, Abby Curry and Robert "Speedy" Neal, who later played in the NFL. "I believe, because of his parents' work, he moved back and forth between Key West and Texas," continued Welsh. "I don't find that he graduated from here. He probably went back to Texas after basketball season.

"He was an intelligent, affable, capable young man," said Welsh. "He was a very good athlete and could have played any sport."

In fact, according to a CBS SportsLine.com story, Howard Schnellenberger, the University of Miami football coach at the time, tried to no avail to get the Key West athlete to check out UM. Instead, Nelson, 6-3 and with a vertical leap of 42 inches, had his heart set on playing basketball at Oklahoma, coached at the time by Billy Tubbs.

Back in Texas and after attending junior college near Palestine, Nelson married Phyllis Booker in 1983 and went on to play basketball, not at Oklahoma where he was offered a scholarship, but at Idaho State, where he hoped to make enough money to support a young family. During that time in his life, he was also seeing Bonita Brown of Palestine and, in fact, Nelson fathered two children with each woman, including Adrian with Brown, on March 21, 1985, and another son with Booker within three days of Adrian's birth.

I guess to deal this story so that Adrian would grow up in Key West, Brown would have had to have had some connection here. But, she didn't, as far as I can tell.

Two years later, Nelson divorced Booker. In a Dallas Morning News story three years ago, Nelson said he has 10 children.

Shrimping, his parents' vocation, apparently didn't pay enough. Nelson was a member of a 22-person group that was arrested in 1998 for dealing crack cocaine for most of the '90s, generating roughly $4 million in drug sales, according to another DMN story. For that, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and served eight.

While he was dealing, he was also working at a Wal-Mart warehouse in Palestine and helping coach young Adrian's Pop Warner football teams.

But, while Adrian was becoming a star running back in high school and at Oklahoma, his father was serving time, unable to see him play until late in Adrian's junior year with the Sooners -- his last college season before he was drafted by the Vikings, without a thought, we may assume, of Key West.

Yes, it's fun to think of what might have been, but, as I said at the beginning of this piece, a few cards would have had to have been dealt to other hands to have made it happen.

Sports Editor Ralph Morrow's Armchair Comment appears exclusively each Sunday in The Citizen. He can be reached at 305-292-7777, Ext. 264, at Rmorrow@keysnews.com and by Fax at 305-295-8016.