It’s Oct. 29, 2004, and Morgan Park is facing Moline in the first round of the IHSA 7A football playoffs. On the sidelines, the coaching staff draws a play for Chris James, a wide receiver with the kind of hands football coaches dream about. The plan is for a deep pass to James, who should be well into first-down territory by the time he catches the ball.

The quarterback fires, but the pass looks long. Desperate to make contact, James stretches one hand high in front of him, grabs the pigskin, and in one motion tucks the ball and trucks it into the end zone.

“I think that was the moment when I realized I could do it,” James says of the play he considers the highlight of his career. “I could play in college.”

James’ run helped the Mustangs to a 40-7 victory, but starting Sept. 2 the 6-foot, 177-pound James plans to be repeating his legendary move all over Zuppke Field. James is a four-star high school wide receiver who last week signed a letter of intent to play at Memorial Stadium for the next four falls.

Playing Division I sports is an accomplishment for any high school athlete, but for James – whose tumultuous childhood featured time in the Chicago Housing Projects before he moved in with the grandmother who demanded he play sports – it means something more. College will be another big step away from a past he refuses to let define or limit him.

“Some guys with a background like that use it as an excuse,” Illinois football coach Ron Zook said. “Chris, he’s used it to motivate himself to be the best he can be as a student, as a person and as a football player.”

Playmaker

James landed one of the first scholarships of Illinois’ 2006 recruiting class, getting an offer last February, and was one of the first to fax in his National Letter of Intent on Feb. 1. Ranked by ESPN.com as the No. 127 recruit in the country and picked the No. 4 player in Illinois by Rivals.com, James has the speed, athleticism and good hands Zook looks for in a wide receiver.

“He’s a big play guy,” Zook says. “He’s going to make some things happen.”

Other than feeling pressure to join Morgan Park teammate Demetrius Jones at Notre Dame, things have been fairly easy for James since he committed to the Illini prior to his senior year. He finished the season with 51 receptions for 977 yards and 19 touchdowns, and even filled in for Jones at quarterback during the 2005 Prep Bowl, where he rushed for 115 yards and one touchdown in addition to throwing for 50 yards and another six points.

Considered the 26th-best receiver in the country, James was named to the Chicago Tribune’s and Champaign News-Gazette’s All-State teams. The Chicago Sun-Times named him to its Top 100 All-Area list, and he was picked as a member of the Chicago Public League All-Illini Prairie State Conference. As a junior, James made 30 receptions for 550 yards and seven touchdowns.

“I’ve always, always been a sports fanatic,” James says of the hobby he has turned into a tool. “As a young kid, even when I was bad, I was a sports fanatic. I’d be getting into trouble, and I’d run home to watch a game.”

Troubled childhood

Trouble for James meant panhandling and dancing around gang activity. For several years he lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago toughest neighborhoods, with his parents and twin sisters.

James’ father, Charles, worked two jobs as a tow-truck driver and a mechanic, supporting both his children’s needs and their mother’s addiction. James says his mother, Kyle Greer, struggled with substance abuse throughout his childhood.

“My dad worked nights,” James said. “He would work late and come home with money, to support my mama’s problem. She would take his money.”

Charles James had four children from a previous relationship, but he worked to take care of Chris and his baby sisters. He taught his youngest son the rules of football and basketball, finding time to watch games with his kids while working to feed the family.

“My dad was the most amazing . my dad was my mother and my father,” Chris James says. “My dad was a phenomenal man to do what he did. He was the only thing I had.”

After four years in the Robert Taylor homes, James’ family moved to a two-flat in a neighborhood he says was worse than the one they came from. With money feeding Greer’s drug habit rather than paying the family’s bills, the heat and water were turned off. James remembers skating across the cold kitchen floor in the winter, while dishwater froze around plates and pans in the sink. He said his dad decided to pull up the living room carpet because the exposed wood floors were in better condition than their covering.

James says Greer’s addiction intensified and she became involved with local gangs, and as James got to know the kids in the neighborhood he started to follow them into trouble. While he admits to being no saint as a kid – “Growing up in the Robert Taylor Homes,” he says, “you’re going to be a bad child because there’s nothing to do but be bad” – he said he was at his worst at the start of junior high.

It didn’t help that James and his sisters rarely had enough to eat, driving the 12-year-old to do whatever he could for a little cash.

“You know those kids you see standing around the gas station asking to pump people’s gas, asking to carry people’s groceries?” he said. “I had to do that just to eat.”

Tough love

Charles James decided something had to change. He sent his children to live with Gwendolyn Parker, the grandmother who could provide the kind of tough love the children needed.

Parker issued her rebellious grandson an ultimatum: play sports or leave. Parker hoped athletics would provide an outlet for James’ endless energy and keep him off the streets, so she signed him up for every organized league in the area.

“Where I come from, in the neighborhood I was raised in,” James says, “the only way out is sports.”

By eighth grade, James had made a complete turnaround. He had a new group of friends, was doing better in school and was deeply involved in sports. He played in a grammar school football league, while also participating in baseball and basketball programs.

“I’m a real aggressive, hands-on person,” James said. “Baseball wasn’t my sport.”

Football, however, was. James played cornerback and wide receiver, and was getting ready to use his athleticism and good hands on the high school team.

“When I moved in with my granny,” James says, “Everything just changed.”

‘Wake-up call’

As his life was finally stabilizing, James took the hardest hit of all. His father was working on a car when the jack slipped and the car fell on him. Charles James was crushed and killed.

Although he’d sent his children to live with their grandmother, Charles James had remained close to his kids. He wanted the best for them, James says, and he knew Parker could take care of them better than he or Greer.

Losing his dad was a horrible jolt for the eighth grader, who says now that his father “was everything to me.”

Rather than slip back into the life of gangs and drugs Charles had worked so hard to keep his son away from, James decided it was “time to do right.”

“It was a wake-up call that you can’t play around with life,” James says. “I’d already been down that road of being violent, being a bad child, and I didn’t want to do it again.”

James’ mother was still rarely around, so Parker took on the role of full-time parent to him and the then eight-year-old twins. She has raised all three for the past six years.

“My granny, she is just a phenomenal woman,” James says.

She’s had some help, especially from her grandson, Joseph Parker, Greer’s brother Kelly Greer and James’ cousins Derek Jones and Ricky Brown – men James calls “my four fathers.” Joseph Parker regularly stops by to check James’ homework, and all four men make sure he stays on the right track.

“They look out for me,” James says. “They do the things that I don’t get because I don’t have a father.”

Football family

In the fall of 2001, James threw himself into high school football. His coach put him at cornerback, but when James held on to interception after interception, he quickly switched sides of the ball.

“I’m athletic and I think on the field,” James says of his strengths. “Some people just have raw athletic ability, but if you have raw athletic ability and you can think, it makes you a better player.”

College coaches soon saw that distinction, and the recruiting blitz began. James says he got nearly two dozen scholarship offers from schools including Oregon, Northern Illinois and Tennessee. In the Big Ten, Ohio State, Michigan State and Minnesota all courted him. But as soon as he visited Champaign, James says, he was ready to sign with Illinois.

“It was the most comfortable of all the schools I had visited,” James says. “It felt like a high school, and that’s hard to say about a big college.

“At most colleges you can’t talk to everyone. When I went down there, it felt like the coaches could really talk to everybody. It felt like a family.”

James didn’t want to spend the fall dealing with the pressures of the recruiting game and was one of the first in the class of 2006 to verbally commit to Illinois. His National Letter of Intent was in Zook’s hands by 8 a.m. on Signing Day.

He says he’s excited to get to Champaign, and has already been down several times, attending basketball games and getting to know his future teammates. After drawing so much media attention in high school, James is thinking about majoring in communications and hopes to eventually go into broadcast journalism.

While James is used to being the star, Zook says his future is only going to get brighter.

“He’s an electric guy,” Zook says. “He’s such a friendly guy, people are just drawn to him. He’s a guy the fans will love.”