For lack of a better place to put this one..
webbage Cleveland's rock: Sturdy Peyton Hillis gives Browns and their fans reason to believe team can turn corner
Thursday, November 18, 2010 03:04 AM
By Todd Jones
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
BEREA, Ohio - To understand the resurrection of hope among the Cleveland Browns, you must first forget the pigskin ball and venture into the land of wild pigs.
Go into the team's locker room, then go deep into the woods that fill the hunting memories of the sturdy fellow who moments earlier shed his camouflage pants for football equipment.
"It's crazy," Peyton Hillis says with a Southern twang.
His eyes burn as he explains to the microphone- and notebook-toting city folk media who are asking how someone hunts a wild boar.
"You get a team of boys together, a bunch of dogs, you get (the boar) up against a tree and shoot him or cut him," Hillis says.
The Browns running back, an Arkansas native, stares as if he's explaining addition to a third-grader.
"It's simple," he says.
Really? You scurry to the Internet, call up ehow.com and read boar hunting tips:
"Aim for the boar ' s shoulder, which should put the bullet into a vital organ for a fast death. If you accidentally shoot the pig in another part of the body, you must chase and kill it as soon as possible. If the boar is wounded, it may charge at you. When the boar is down, approach it slowly with your knife or gun in easy reach. When you are sure it is dead, whistle for someone in your hunting party to bring the rest of your supplies." Oh, and those wild boars can weigh as much as 400 pounds.
"I heard one in Arkansas that was killed that weighed over 1,000 pounds," Hillis says.
If that sounds like a legend too good to be true, well, so does the story of Peyton Hillis.
The block of granite who says "no sir" and "yes sir" was buried behind two other future NFL backs at Arkansas, wasn't drafted until the seventh round, fell out of favor with the Denver Broncos after two years and was finally dumped on the Browns in a trade for quarterback Brady Quinn.
Now, Hillis could run for mayor of Cleveland.
That's if he'd still be allowed to wear jeans, cowboy boots, drive a pickup truck - and hunt wild boars, of course.
Down-home country boys
The Browns aren't exactly Super Bowl material. They're 3-6 and starting a rookie quarterback in Colt McCoy.
Yet that QB, another Southern boy with good manners, has teamed with Hillis to make Cleveland fans briefly pause from their religion of rehashing past pain and, instead, ponder a promising future.
"We're pretty much the same person," Hillis says.
McCoy was a hotshot at Texas, but his roots explain why he's displayed a calm, confident leadership style since going 2-2, including an overtime loss to the New York Jets, as a starter the past four games.
The rookie played his high school ball in Tuscola, Texas, a one-stoplight town with 700 residents that doesn't have a police department and didn't have a sewer system until four years ago.
McCoy grew up in a four-bedroom ranch house on 10 acres, with a donkey, goats and a goldfish pond. He used to bail hay, feed chickens, fix fences and pick cotton on his grandfather's 1,000-acre ranch.
So it's no surprise that McCoy has become close friends with the humble Hillis, a punishing runner at 6 feet 1 and 240 pounds who thrives on the in-game mayhem but takes comfort away from the field in the quiet of the outdoors.
"Peyton would just as soon be in a deer stand or a duck blind or on some lake fishing," said Tim Horton, his running backs coach at Arkansas.
Browns coach Eric Mangini sees similarities in the young duo's personalities and dirty-fingernail work ethics. So, too, do teammates.
"They're very level-headed, down-home country boys," offensive tackle Joe Thomas says. "They're not real flashy. And both really like football."
Cleveland is especially swept up in Hillis fever because of the way he plays - a wrecking-ball swivel of passion and pad-poppin'.
"He fires up the offensive line, the sideline gets fired up, the fans get fired up. It all starts with him," McCoy said after the Browns upset New England 34-14 on Nov. 7.
Hillis rambled for 184 rushing yards and two touchdowns that day, and suddenly this industrial city adopted the country-music lover from Conway, Ark., a town of 40,000 about 30 miles from Little Rock.
"I feel like I can relate to the fans here on a personal level," Hillis says. "They're hard-working people who love football. They don't ask for much. They just want to see their team play."
In Hillis, northeast Ohio sees a guy so in love with football that back in high school he tied a rope around his waist and pulled a pickup truck as part of his workout regime.
"Now I ask you, how are you going to tackle somebody who can pull a truck?" asks Kenny Smith, who coached Hillis at Conway High School.
Or bring down somebody who can stick a knife into a snortin' wild hog?
Rollin', rollin', rollin
There isn't much fancy about Hillis other than his cowboy boots, some of them made of ostrich, lizard, python and rattlesnake.
His football outfit is also simple.
"He wears these little, itty-bitty thigh pads that are about as thick as toilet paper," says Dean Weber, trainer for the Arkansas football team for nearly 40 years.
Who needs pads when you enjoy the hitting? Not someone comfortable in cowboy chaps.
"Peyton's invited me to go on a cattle drive," Horton says. "I've never been asked to go on a cattle drive before. I don't know if I could ride a horse that long, but he's fired up about it."
Hillis is enlisting Browns players and coaches to join him on the two-week cattle drive this spring. They'll start in Wyoming and travel to Canada.
"Sounds fun; I'll have to ask him about it," Thomas says.
Thomas has found kindred spirits in McCoy and Hillis. The three-time Pro Bowl tackle is an avid hunter and has even gone "noodling," a type of fishing where you catch catfish with your hands.
And he's hunted boar, too.
"They're about the nastiest thing you're going find outside a grizzly," Thomas says. "It's pretty intense."
Kind of like the running style of the man he blocks for.
Charging linebackers don't make your heart pound the way hunting a 400-pound wild pig does.
"I'm a scared person when I do it," Hillis says. "It's exciting and fun. It's an adrenaline rush."
Now the man who loves going into the woods hopes to finally lead the Browns out of the woods.
tjones@dispatch.com
