North Carolina State University Athletics
Man of the House
4/14/2005 12:00:00 AM | Football
April 14, 2005
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH - Oliver Hoyte wants to be a leader, but he's not sure he knows how.
The senior linebacker, one of the most experienced returning players from NC State's top-ranked defense last year, is an introvert, not prone giving rah-rah speeches or spouting off about his teeth-jarring tackles.
But the Wolfpack defense needs new leaders after losing a trio of three-year starters in Pat Thomas, Andre Maddox and Lamont Reid.
Hoyte wants to be up to that challenge, but when so many parts of your soul have died, it's hard to share what's left with anyone else.
He's trying, though, because he wants a future in football. If not the NFL, then in coaching, where he can share with the kids the lesson he learned on the toughest streets in Tampa: sports are a way out. Hoyte was raised by his mother and five sisters in College Hill Homes, a 55-year old public housing project so poor and so riddled with crime that in 2000 the city got a $32.5 million federal grant to tear the whole place down and start over.
It was a tough neighborhood, with tough guys who frequently found trouble. Hoyte was one of them. But he didn't have to resort to some of the same antics as other kids in his neighborhood, who would steal and commit other petty crimes to raise the money they needed to participate in youth football leagues.
Hoyte had a benefactor in his father, Oliver Hoyte Sr., a machine operator at a local chemical plant who would drop off money when his youngest son needed to pay participation fees.
"Most of my friends didn't have anybody to pay that for them, and they would steal the money," he said. "A lot of them got in trouble and a lot of them went to jail. I always had that part taken care of."
But the elder Hoyte didn't live with his family, and that caused a strained relationship between father and son. Oliver Jr. accepted his father's checks, but he wanted more of his time, to learn a little more about the man who emigrated to Florida from Barbados and fathered eight children.
In December, 2000, just about the time Hoyte and his father began having a real relationship - they would go fishing, or spend an afternoon talking - the elder Hoyte died of cancer. It began a long string of personal tragedies that convinced Oliver Jr. that he would never get out of Tampa.
Not long after his father passed, both Hoyte's maternal grandparents died, also of cancer. Two aunts on his mother's side died, of cancer. Then Kevin Hayes, a Chamberlain High School teammate of Hoyte and Wolfpack wide receiver Brian Clark, died after being struck by a stray bullet outside a nightclub in a bad part of town. "I thought I was next," Hoyte said. "Everybody around me died, and I thought it would happen to me.
"I never really had any hope of going to college. I never thought there would be money for that. The thought never really crossed my mind."
Hoyte had a mother and five sisters to take care of. He was always the man of the house, and everyone came to him when times were bad.
"I had to do a lot of that," Hoyte said. "There was always something happening with my family that needed to be taken care of, even after I got up here for school. My mom and my sisters leaned on me a lot."
So he has been a leader, in his family and on his Chamberlain High School team that advanced to the Florida 5-A semifinals for the first time in school history during his and Clark's senior year.
Can he step into that role now? Wolfpack coach Chuck Amato thinks so.
"Oliver could be the man," Amato said. "It's not his personality. He is an introvert. He really has shown the way he plays that he is a leader. Sometimes you don't have to talk a whole lot when you do that."
Hoyte, who started nine of 11 games last year and had 93 tackles, has spent all of spring practice playing out of position, learning to play the weakside linebacker after three years at middle linebacker. It was a move made to give the Wolfpack some more depth in the thin linebacking corps, since junior Stephen Tulloch has been out all spring with a shoulder injury. But it is also a temporary move.
He'll be back in the middle in the fall, standing in front of the huddle and calling defensive sets. He'll get everybody lined up in their positions and make sure they know where they are supposed to go. It's the closest thing the defense has to a quarterback.
"I know I have a lot of responsibilities and I want to be someone who can lead," Hoyte said.
But can he? No question about it, says someone who has known Hoyte since the first grade.
"He knows about adversity," Clark said. "He knows about the world being against you and having to fight through it. He knows where his strength comes from. That's what he does on the field. Times when the defense might be down, looks like they can't win, he can pull them together. He can say, `I've done been through too much. We can get through this.' "
Oliver Hoyte wants to be a leader. Maybe he doesn't realize that he already is.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
