Blessing and Cursing

Blake Gideon

Longhorns' safety Gideon a real back breaker

The back was already bad, with aches here and pains there. Every once in a while it would flare up.

There was Blake Gideon, bad back and all, just a freshman in high school.

"He probably injured it before he even got to high school," Steve Gideon said of his son, now the starting safety for the top-ranked Texas Longhorns. "I always thought there was something wrong."

Then there really was something wrong.

There were a few big hits during a non-district football game his sophomore season at Leander. There was a crack. Lots of pain.

Blake knew his back was bad, and getting worse, but he sucked it up and kept to himself.

A bad back meant no football, and that was unacceptable.

"What's amazing is we didn't find out he had broken his back until three or four weeks later," said Steve Gideon, Leander's head coach.

"He didn't tell anybody. But all of a sudden, instead of winning every sprint at practice and being the best at every drill, he was finishing last at everything, and I mean dead last at every practice. Finally, one day I asked him what was wrong. He said, 'Dad, my back is killing me.' "

You want to know Blake Gideon? Know he played four varsity football games with his back broken in four places as a sophomore in high school.

There's a reason the Longhorn coaches can't stop talking about Gideon as he gets ready to face Chase Daniel and the explosive Missouri offense.

It's more than his 26 tackles, which tie him for second on the team, and his four pass breakups.

It's the fearless attitude the 6-foot-1-inch, 190-pounder displays, like when he tackled Oklahoma's 6-6, 250-pound tight end Jermaine Gresham.

It's the leadership he displays on the field, despite being paired with fellow freshman safety Earl Thomas.

It's his ability to not get caught up in the big moment and staycalm and collected.

"He's my surprise of the year," Texas coach Mack Brown said.

He's also a player defensive coordinator Will Muschamp is turning to more.

"He's a guy who walks out in that environment unfazed," Muschamp said of the Texas-Oklahoma game. "First ball game, unfazed. You walk on the field with Blake and say, 'If they get into three-by-one and run the Yogi hawk, we need to be here.' Well, he understands that, and not many kids understand that at this point, or ever."

Gideon is serious, passionate and fiery when it comes to football, like Muschamp.

"Blake, he's more quiet and serious," Thomas said. "I'm more goofy. I like to play around. He takes everything real serious. I'll just push him, but he doesn't like to play around like that. So I'll just leave him alone. He'll be the angry guy."

Gideon smiles when called the angry guy. After all, this is the kid who likes to go country dancing with his family and knows how to two-step, waltz and polka.

This is the Gideon who, as a cute 6-year-old kid, went to his "scary neighbor's" front door and told him he would fix the window he had broken if he could have his baseball back.

"I don't think I'm an angry guy," Gideon said smiling, "but those guys definitely keep me loose."

Gideon's football smarts and his toughness can be traced back to his father and the back injury.

As a sophomore at Leander, Gideon was ready for the big time, the spotlight of Friday nights and any role he was thrust into.

So his father sat him down.

"I told him that he was under a different microscope than everybody else because his father was the coach," Steve recalled. "I told him, 'You've got to be twice as good as everybody else at any position in order for you to start.' He understood. He always understands. He's a great listener."

The words he heard that year were that he might never play football again.

"There were a lot of tears when we found out how bad the injury was," Steve Gideon said. "I remember when I sat him down and said, 'Maybe God has a different plan for you than football.' "

But Gideon had a different plan.

The back injury prevented him from doing much at all for nearly nine months. There was no pick-up basketball, no running around with friends, no weightlifting.

"That was the hardest part of the injury, watching all my friends work and compete and try to get better, and there I was sitting on the sideline," Gideon said. "I just wanted them to know how bad I wanted to be out there, to help them win. I'm just so passionate about football, and to be on the sideline was really hard."

But positives came out of the injury.

Unable to do typical workouts, Gideon started working other muscles, like his abdomen. He was able to do crunches from the high bar, where he brought his knees to his stomach and then extended his legs. He would tread water for 45 minutes at a time.

"He really strengthened muscles that normally don't get used as much," Steve Gideon said. "And that helped his recovery."

Fully recovered, Gideon received calls from Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Texas during his junior year at Leander, where he starred as a safety and sometimes-quarterback.

The Longhorns wanted him despite the fact he was up front about his back injury.

"The amount of respect we have for coach Brown and his program, we weren't going to put him in a situation where he wasn't fully informed,"Gideon said.

In the car, minutes after getting the scholarship offer from Brown, Gideon and his father embraced. They cried.

"They were tears of joy, of happiness," Steve Gideon said.

Now Blake's gone from a two-star recruit that some Texas fans complained about to a starter, a leader of the secondary and perhaps the biggest pickup in the Longhorns' 2008 recruiting class.

He's even helping the coaches.

Before games, Gideon finds Brown and Muschamp.

"I hope you're not nervous," he says.

It's a tradition Gideon started with his father years ago. Brown jokes that he's trying to hide from the freshman.

"I know he's trying to get to me subliminally," Muschamp said.
So far, Gideon's getting to everybody. Both on the field and off.