ATHLETICS

More Than a Number

Olivo’s passion for Missouri football made him one of the all-time greats

By Joe Walljasper
Tribune sports editor

Note: This Sept. 13, 2003, article has been republished with permission from the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Former Missouri football Coach Larry Smith will never forget the night he met Brock Olivo.

Smith and assistant coach Curtis Jones traveled to Washington, Mo., with the intention of offering Olivo a spot in Smith’s first recruiting class at MU. During the visit, Olivo’s father, David, periodically had to calm his son down. Olivo’s mother, Vicki, put her hand on his leg to keep it from shaking. Jones later admitted that he thought Olivo was having a medical emergency.

“I remember asking him if he wanted to come to the University of Missouri,” Smith recalled. “He came flying off the couch, grabbed my hand and about tore it off. This was the second or third time that night that he’d done it. I was thinking, ‘Is this guy for real?’”

Here’s what is real, documentable fact about Olivo’s football career at Missouri.

He is the school’s all-time rushing leader with 3,026 yards. As a senior, he won the Mosi Tatupu Award as the nation’s best special-teams player. Those are reasons his No. 27 was retired at halftime during Mizzou’s game against Eastern Illinois.

The other reasons can’t be proven, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. The passion for Missouri football that Olivo showed Smith on the night of his in-home visit never waned during his four years on campus. In fact, it spread to teammates and eventually helped a program that had suffered 13 straight losing seasons become a winner again.

“When I was growing up, Missouri was the doormat of the Big Eight,” Olivo said. “That didn’t matter to me. The one thing that made me so mad was to see these great players from Missouri commit to Illinois and Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska. There was nothing that got under my skin more. It just hurt me, just got me right in the heart.

“I just vowed, ‘If ever given the opportunity, I’m going to jump all over it.’”

Olivo came from football stock. His father played quarterback for the University of Miami and the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals. Olivo’s high school career at St. Francis Borgia was storybook stuff – as a senior, he gained 2,500 yards, scored 39 touchdowns and led his team to a Class 3A state title. But he was a white tailback, which made him an endangered species, and there were doubts about his speed.

Many college tailbacks run the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds or less. Olivo joked that his 40 time was “four-ever.”

“We made a decision to move him to defense to play safety,” Smith said. “At that time, we had Joe Freeman and some other good running backs he was behind. One day, I was watching the running backs, and they were struggling during drills, so I grabbed Brock and said, ‘Go down there and play running back.’ So he did. He went down there with Curtis Jones, and he just lit things up.”

Olivo played in every game as a true freshman in 1994 and became a starter midway through the season. It was Smith’s first season as coach, and the team struggled to a 3-8 record as it slowly adjusted from Bob Stull’s finesse game to Smith’s smash-mouth style. Olivo became the face of the program, and stories of his spartan lifestyle and fanatical approach to weight training, conditioning and diet became part of MU football lore.

He found a steep hill behind the MU vet school and soon had many players running up it during voluntary summer workouts. As a freshman, he set the school record in the squat lift at 760 pounds. He eschewed television and junk food. With a diet that consisted mostly of rice, he reduced his body fat to 2 percent at one point.

“We saw what he was doing and his success as a result of doing that, and it was a natural instinct to follow that behavior,” former MU offensive tackle Todd Neimeyer said. “That’s a big reason why we were able to go to two bowl games.”

The enthusiasm carried over to the practice field, where the tedium never seemed tedious to him.

“He was one of the few guys that was genuinely excited to come to practice every day,” said Missouri wide receivers coach Andy Hill, the lone holdover from Smith’s staff. “I remember sticking my head in the huddle one day, and it was a really hot day. He said, ‘Guys, isn’t it great to be out here playing football.’ He kept saying it.”

As a sophomore, Olivo got as close as he ever would to the 1,000-yard barrier, ending with 985 yards for a team that again went 3-8.

In Olivo’s final two years, he and Devin West split time. A running debate raged among fans about whether Olivo should be benched in favor of West. The knock on Olivo was that he didn’t have big-play potential – his longest career rush was 33 yards.

“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t motivated by all of the doubters,” Olivo said. “They’d been there since Day One in high school. They told me I couldn’t play running back in high school because I was too small and too slow. I was always never enough.”

It was as an upperclassman that Olivo made a name for himself on special teams. He talked Smith into letting him play on all the kicking units. He had a knack for weaving through traffic and making open-field tackles. He made nine tackles as a senior, the season he snagged the Tatupu Award. It was that same year – 1997 – that Olivo and his teammates finally experienced the joy of a winning season.

Missouri had a four-pronged rushing attack that featured quarterback Corby Jones, Olivo, West and fullback Ernest Blackwell running behind a no-nonsense offensive line and a devastating blocking fullback in Ron Janes. Ten of the 11 offensive starters were Missourians, and they bulldozed their way to a 7-5 record and Holiday Bowl appearance. The Tigers, who came within a fluke play of upsetting eventual national champion Nebraska, were the feel-good story of college football.

Would a team whose game plan was to overpower opponents ever have gotten over the hump without Olivo raising the bar in the weight room, on Brock’s Hill and on the practice field?

“That’s hard to say, but I always felt like he took the work ethic to a new level on the team,” Hill said. “Overall, he was the guy that was the engine that pulled the train.”

After proving he belonged on the college level, there was another football challenge for Olivo – the NFL.

Olivo went undrafted, of course, and was cut in training camp by the San Francisco 49ers. But he found the right situation in Detroit and made the Lions roster as a special-teams ace and backup running back.

He played four years with the Lions and could have continued, but in the summer of 2002, he walked away. He talked about wanting to pursue a career in music or maybe move to Italy and grow olives or paint fences.

“When I went into the NFL, I had questions. This was a big step, the highest level in the world in this sport,” Olivo said. “I thought, if I can do this, wow, what a great accomplishment. I shut everything else out, put my blinders on like a racehorse and went after it. And I did it.

“After I did it the first year and the second year and the third year and the fourth year, it got to be less and less of a thrill. I was just ready to move on.”

For those who knew him only as a football fanatic, it was a puzzling decision. But in truth, he always was a combination of a free spirit and discipline junkie. He always had many passions – football was just the most obvious. He speaks fluent Italian and plays the guitar and piano.

“Wherever I am at any certain moment in my life, that’s what I’m giving my all to and that’s what I’m focused on,” Olivo said. “Whether it’s music, sports, Italian culture or whatever, I’m pretty much 100 miles an hour.”

He spent a few months in Washington, D.C., where his fiancée, Ianthé Jackson, lives. Then he got an offer to serve as a player/assistant coach of the Ostia Marines of an Italian club league. The competition level was low, and the pay was meager. Olivo didn’t care. He wound up playing for the team. He sang and played guitar in a band that covered American classic rock-’n’-roll groups such as the Eagles and Tom Petty. For seven months, he had a wonderful time before returning to Washington, D.C., over the summer.

So what would motivate a person to give up the riches and glory of the NFL for an Italian club league?

“Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been odd,” Olivo’s former roommate Janes said affectionately. “Just what you’d think he would do, he’d do the opposite.”

Olivo pleads guilty.

“I’m sure there have been a few adjectives thrown around to describe me – crazy, mad, insane,” Olivo said. “But the money was never an issue. If it were, I’d still be out there going through the daily grind” in the NFL. “To play the game over in Italy was never a question. In my opinion, the opportunity to go experience my heritage, my ancestry, my culture, that experience was worth more to me than any dollar amount.”

Now, Olivo is between jobs but doesn’t seem overly concerned about it. He’s getting married in June on the Jersey Shore. Literally, on the Jersey Shore.
“On the beach,” he said. “No shoes allowed. Toes in the sand.”

After Olivo finished his career at Missouri, former Athletic Director Joe Castiglione and Smith declared that Olivo’s No. 27 would be retired as a result of him winning the Tatupu Award. But Castiglione left for Oklahoma in 1998, and Smith was fired as football coach in 2000.

After the issue was raised a few times by the media, MU Athletic Director Mike Alden eventually agreed to honor the promise made by Castiglione and Smith and make Olivo the seventh player to have his jersey retired.

To some observers, Olivo doesn’t belong in such an exclusive group. Players such as Andy Russell, Mel Gray, Henry Marshall, Eric Wright, James Wilder and Phil Bradley haven’t been honored. Most would agree that Olivo’s own teammate, Corby Jones, was a better college player.

But for every skeptic, there is a supporter. Former teammates from as far away as Texas and Arizona planned to attend a dinner in his honor last night. Smith and Castiglione were expected to be there. To them, his intangible qualities made Olivo one of Missouri’s all-time greats.

“Brock Olivo won’t be remembered for stats,” former MU guard Mike Morris said. “He’s remembered for being a leader and changing the people around him. That’s basically the reason they’re retiring his jersey.”

Long after his rushing record is broken, Olivo will still have a legacy at Missouri. He squeezed every drop of potential out of himself and motivated his teammates to do likewise. He jumped at the chance to play football at Missouri when it wasn’t fashionable to do so, and he left the program a winner. The guy who made such a dramatic first impression also made a lasting one.

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Last Update: November 15, 2007