Rick Moffat
CFL.ca
Next time you flush the toilet, think of Alouette Ramon Guzman. The unassuming former Indianapolis Colt swears this is a true story. A flush with greatness if you will. It happened when he was too young to remember. But if you’re from “Ghost Town” in the Bronx you probably know stranger things have happened.
Ghost Town is a twin towers of social misery. Twenty-two stories each of family breakdown, families in crisis or family wreckage. “Leland” Housing Project was a desperate project in single-motherhood or in parenting by necessity from streetwise kids like Ramon.
The second oldest of five kids born to Dominican parents, Ramon was skinny but tall and fast and deserving of the lower bunk in a room shared with his sisters Priscilla and Jennifer as well as little brother Ralph. The other bedroom was for mom and dad. If they were around. The “family business” was hard if not impossible to hide.
“I remember one time playing with the triple-beam scales and my mom asked me what I was doing,” recalls Guzman, now a strapping 6’2, 232-pound tweener of a linebacker who is proof football as an escape from the ghetto is more than cliché; it could be miracle. “I told her ‘I was working’. I’d seen Dad working the scales with cocaine I don’t know how many times.”
“Dad did three years in prison. Mom did a year,” explained Guzman. “They were both away. I had to be there for my brothers and sisters.”
Guzman smiles when I ask him if he ever strayed from the right path.
“When you’re young you think you’re invincible. In Ghost Town no-one was out on the streets but us. I was fast, so I never got caught. I knew right from wrong. But the wrong path, the negative way was right there for us. Football got me away from all of that.”
By age 15 Guzman was running the household. Soon Dewitt Clinton High was being visited by big time colleges like Syracuse to see the running back that lived to hit opposing defenders as hard as they tried to hit him. No surprise his SAT scores were a struggle. University of Buffalo would take him. He didn’t even know Buffalo, let alone NFL or CFL hopes, existed.
Not bad for a reformed toddler felon.
“When mom and dad were dealing out of the apartment I saw them bagging it (cocaine) all the time. When I was little they’d give me a stack of bills to go hide under the mattress. Mom tells me one time she gave me $25,000. But I didn’t go into the bedroom. I went to the bathroom instead.”
Hours later the toilet was blocked. Good luck getting a plumber to visit Ghost Town.
“My dad got somebody to get the ‘snake’ and unblock the toilet themselves. They were shocked to pull out cash! Ripped and water-logged bills I’d flushed.”
The folks straightened up after serving their time, back from beyond the brink after nearly losing her kids to the street and then to foster care. A “wakeup call for them” Guzman says of his parents’ incarceration.
Ironically, living on the edge of temptation and wandering over the line in younger years has helped Ramon swerve out of trouble in his football life.
“I know who’s from the hood, who’s chilled in the hood and who wants to go back to the hood for all the wrong reasons.”
“I saw guys want to go back and deal once football got ’em out. I had a teammate in college … pretty soon he was driving a Lexus and bought a motorcycle. He’d buy these grown ass pizzas for all the guys. I told him ‘don’t draw attention to yourself.'”
Alouettes GM Jim Popp was scouting Quebec-native receiver Eric Deslauriers of Eastern Michigan when he spotted Guzman, then with the Buffalo Bulls (coached his senior year by former US College star and Alouette/Concorde Turner Gill). All these years later, Guzman and Deslauriers are teammates and shared proud moments on the Grey Cup podium in 2009.
“Ramon probably could have gone to another NFL camp last year but he wanted a home,” says the architect of the perennial Grey Cup contenders, Jim Popp. “He’d been with the Colts (’07, followed by a stab at the Cleveland Browns in ’08) and he can rush the passer, play special teams and still cover guys downfield. He can play the Will, he can play in the middle and sometimes he can drop back like a safety into deep coverage.”
These days, Ramon is getting some of his own advice from the homies back in the hood.
“Sometimes they tell me ‘what you doin’ round here. Why you come back? Get out of here.’ They know I don’t belong there. We used to say ‘who you have BEEF with?’ Some guys are there for life and they still have beef with each other. There are still places you just don’t go.”
Is there a moral to the Guzman story? Never too late for a mother to see her boy play in Canada? That could happen this year. Never launder money in a toilet bowl? When you survive Ghost Town to Grey Cup glory there is always hope to find a home.
