HOUSTON — Like so many of our earthly companions, they preceded humans on the planet, by roughly 54.8 million years in their exalted case. They turn up in statues all over the world in city squares and in front of hallowed buildings. Through war and peace, human beings long have reported deep rapports with them in that eternal search to understand their mystery.
Yet here comes a phenomenon that feels fresh: horses as essential to the development of a 6-foot-3, 292-pound, American original with a luminous mind, voluminous tackles-for-loss statistics (42½ in a 26-game college career) and a dizzying perch on NFL mock-draft lists. Ed Oliver Jr., a University of Houston defensive tackle and one of the tiptop players in all of college football, might have grown up in the nation’s fourth-largest city, but he also grew up around horses his father acquired, four of them ultimately.
He once got kicked by one.
He more than once feared getting thrown by one.
And in a crackling Heisman Trophy campaign just when it seemed all the crackling Heisman Trophy campaigns had dried up, he appears atop one on his bobblehead, this former kid always in motion. He has become a 20-year-old adult football player always in such compelling football motion that former Rice coach David Bailiff called him “as close to the Tasmanian devil on the football field that I’ve ever seen” — long after Oliver mastered an entirely different kind of motion.
They say you really, really should have seen him during high school days, riding horseback at times on weekends around the northern edges of the metropolis, a giant five-star football recruit in the areas of Houston that retain a certain woodsiness and allowed him some open fields.
“No kidding,” said his brother Marcus, who also played for Houston, “Ed used to get a lot of praise about him and riding his horse. You’d just see Ed fly by, and people would say, ‘Wow, that kid can really ride a horse.’ Ed’s not just good at football. He’s also good at horses.”
Marcus, older by two years, used to tease Ed: “You can ride horses better than you can play football.”
Pause.
“I can’t say that anymore.”
Ask Ed Oliver what humans can learn from horses, and the answer bounds out quickly: “I think patience. What I learned was patience because I had ADHD and it took time. With me when I was with the horses, it took time. It actually helped me unwind. And I don’t know. It’s just something that’s bigger than you, taking care of, the responsibility, work ethic. You learn a lot from messing with horses.”
Value lay in “getting them to respond,” he said. “To train them, whatever. Toughness.” Value lay further in one of the utmost elements of life: the conquering of fear.
“I can tell you, I got over a lot of fear with horses, too,” he said. “A couple times I thought I was going to die, and I realized: ‘Hey, you’ve just got to go through it. You’ll be all right.’ Real life, I thought sometimes, ‘Man, this horse could kill me.’ I’m overcoming fear just getting back up on the horse and riding it. Something about fear. You learn a lot from horses. I don’t know. They made me tough, if you ask me. At a young age.”
Ed’s father, Ed Oliver Sr., had grown up in Louisiana as what Ed Jr. calls “a country dude from a small town,” with famously rugged hands that knew their way around a horse. Marcus got thrown once around eighth grade, he recalls, which slackened his interest, but these mighty beings stirred Ed’s interest all along. In a story retold umpteen times by now, the lads once helped their father build a barn not so far from home. “His first love was truly horses,” Marcus Oliver said of his brother.
Through high school, as he became swarmed with swooning mail from college football coaches and the kinds of acts that make all of America swoon — such as that 101-yard fumble return in high school available on video — the horse took on another meaning.
“That was kind of like his getaway from everything,” Marcus said. “Middle school and high school. It was crazy when you would see him. He had time on the weekend. He would go and just let it all out while riding horses, and then he’d be really ready for the next week. . . . That was Ed’s way of calming himself down because he loved horses and still does.”
Only once in all that time did one give him a boot. It landed on the back of his hamstring, he said. He was “about 11.”
“My daddy thought it was funny,” he said.
“Was it?”
“No, it wasn’t funny,” said the giant with the giant personality. “My daddy thought it was funny. He said it was because I wasn’t spending enough time with them, which is probably true, but he thought it was funny. He just said, ‘You ain’t spending enough time with them. Uh huh. That’s what you deserve.’ Or, ‘That’s what you get,’ or something like that. I can remember he kicked me right in the back of the leg. It really wasn’t a hard kick, but he tapped me.”
Was it painful?”
“I felt betrayed,” he said.
Continuing: “But I think I hadn’t been to the barn for, like, a couple of weeks. So when I was back at the barn walking up behind him, he just gave me a little love tap, like, ‘Yeah, where you been at?’ I feel where my daddy was coming from. I would have kicked me, too. I didn’t spend any time with them.”
All the same, he seemed to spend zero time doing nothing. “The funny thing is, when he was little, if he was bored, he would just go outside and cut the grass,” Marcus said. “I was like, ‘Are you trying to make me look bad, or you just want to cut the grass?’ ”
Often, he would say to Ed Jr., “You don’t chill at all.”
“I’m still trying to figure out to this day, ‘Dude, what goes through your mind?’ ”
It’s an authentic and fertile mind, enthralling to listen to, one willing to buck nationally accepted custom and go to a Group of Five school as a five-star player. It’s also one that didn’t grab hold of the football bug until after it got the horse bug. Marcus Oliver recollects Ed Jr. as one who deserves credit for going from “on the fence” about football during middle school to, for example, a voracious consumer of game film.
Now this bustling soul has this final of his three Houston seasons utterly relishing the double-teams he faces, and he has just watched highlights of the impossible energy of Khalil Mack’s first-half domination Sunday in Green Bay, and he’s saying, “I want that to be me one day . . . that guy that you’re hearing about a couple of times a game . . . a game-changer type.”
All the while, it fits that back in Westfield High, where he played in suburban Houston, out front there’s a statue of a mustang, while his brother fields a question about how Ed Oliver Jr. looks while riding a horse.
“Art,” Marcus said.
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