THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, January 27, 1996 TAG: 9601270120
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 235 lines
Other drivers had pulled off the highway to wait out the storm. Mike Voight pressed on.
He was almost there: Eight miles ahead was Emporia, and a burger joint where he could get out of the weather.
He knew the place, knew all of this narrow, two-lane stretch of U.S. 58 - had driven it for four years, bound for Chapel Hill.
Now he was headed there again. Back to the University of North Carolina, the setting for his life's greatest moments. To a sprawling campus that worshiped him, whose voices had chanted his name by the thousands.
Voight peered through the glass. The wipers couldn't keep up, just sloshed water across the windshield, but he stayed calm. He was almost there. He leaned back in his Buick's crushed-buckskin seat, kept the car aimed just right of the road's center.
And hit a puddle.
The Buick slid across the line, and for an instant the windshield cleared enough for Voight to glimpse what lay ahead: A dump truck with a full load of dirt. A steel I-beam for a bumper. Three tons heavy, and coming on fast.
That moment 18 years ago remains clear to Mike Voight - clearer, perhaps, than his 42 touchdowns in Tar Heel blue, the call from the National Football League, even his first play in his first game as a Houston Oiler.
Its memory will lurk inside him Sunday as he watches the Super Bowl and silently measures his younger self against the players on the field.
Because until that moment, Voight seemed destined to achieve fame and riches in the NFL.
``I'd been banged around, thrown down, beaten and bruised most of my life,'' Voight says, as he nurses a ginger ale in a Chesapeake tavern. ``People always told me, `Mike, you're gonna bust your ass one of these days.' And that's what I did.''
He smiles ruefully. ``My epitaph ought to read: `He was almost there.' ''
Voight is a beefy man today, his hair retreating, his once-fierce jaw line softened by time and weight. He is 41 years old, a businessman. He wears gold-rimmed aviator glasses and favors a wide-brimmed fedora. He carries a briefcase.
His hands and silhouette almost give him away. His palms are meaty, tough, his fingers thick and strong, and despite the extra pounds he retains the unmistakable ``V'' shape of an athlete.
But his soft, melancholy drawl belies the grit for which he won acclaim.
``He was a real rough-and-tumble running back,'' says Rob Carpenter, a retired Oiler. ``You weren't going to tell him he was too hurt to play. He just out-toughed a lot of situations.''
``The first time he carried the ball in practice he got hit, and the guys who hit him really crossed his eyes,'' former UNC coach Bill Dooley says. ``He came back the next day, and he went after them.
``I thought to myself, `That's my kind of player.' ''
Voight had shown tenacity early, back at Chesapeake's Indian River High School, where he'd enthralled fans in a tradition established by three older brothers.
The Voight boys owned the athletic record book. Raleigh had been a high school All-American in football in 1962. Johnny had been another natural. Bobby had smashed Indian River's passing and scoring records.
Then came Mike, whose first love was track, particularly hurdling.
``One of the reasons I played football was the coach guaranteed me a job where I could run away and still be a hero,'' Voight says, chuckling. ``I didn't ever think of myself as a football player. I just ran.''
By the time he graduated, he'd won the state hurdles championship and amassed more than 5,000 offensive yards on the gridiron, playing quarterback, tight end, tailback and cornerback.
Already well-known in Hampton Roads, Voight moved to Chapel Hill. In his sophomore year, after a freshman season played mostly on special teams, he joined future pro James Betterson in the backfield. Each rushed for more than 1,000 yards, the first time two North Carolina players managed the feat the same year.
``He was absolutely reckless,'' recalls UNC athletic spokesman Rick Brewer. ``He ran with abandon.''
``If he didn't have a hole, he'd try to make his own,'' Dooley says. ``He didn't back down from anybody.''
By 1975, his junior year, Voight had emerged as UNC's top offensive weapon. He ran for 1,250 yards and scored 11 touchdowns en route to becoming the Atlantic Coast Conference's top rusher. Despite North Carolina's dismal 3-7-1 record, he was named ACC Player of the Year.
Voight's reputation as a wild man, as a self-dubbed ``Space Cowboy,'' at times raised Dooley's hackles.
``He was a little different,'' the coach says. ``He was one of those guys who wanted to wear long hair. One day we were talking about it and he said, `Well, Jesus Christ had long hair.'
``I said, `See that swimming pool right there? You walk across it, and you can wear long hair.'
``But he was a very likable guy. And when he strapped that chinstrap on, he was all business.''
North Carolina turned it around in Voight's senior year, going 9-3. Savvy fans, recognizing that the Tar Heels' attack relied almost entirely on one player, splashed Voight's name and No. 44 on buttons, banners and T-shirts.
``Everybody knew,'' Brewer says, ``that he was going to get the ball on the big plays.''
``We had the ball 54 snaps in one game, and I carried it 47,'' Voight says. ``We didn't throw the ball much.''
He racked up more than 100 yards in six of his 10 appearances that year. In the final game, a seesaw battle with Duke, Voight rushed for 261 yards, scored four touchdowns and, in the closing seconds, swept into the end zone on a two-point conversion to give UNC the win.
He had become the best-ever rusher at UNC and the fifth-leading rusher in NCAA history, topping the likes of Charlie ``Choo Choo'' Justice, O.J. Simpson and Red Grange. Again, he was named ACC Player of the Year. No UNC player since has won the honor twice.
But Voight left Chapel Hill frustrated. He happened to share his senior year with standouts Tony Dorsett of the University of Pittsburgh and Ricky Bell of Southern California, who nabbed first-team All-American honors. Voight had to be content with the second team.
And he injured his ankle while practicing for North Carolina's Peach Bowl game against Kentucky. Toothless without him, the Tar Heels were whipped 21-0.
``Bowl games really give you a chance to show your wares,'' Voight says. ``Like I said: Almost there.''
Still, the following spring he was snatched by the Cincinnati Bengals in the third round of the NFL draft. Then, another setback: The Bengals, their running corps overstocked, waived him three days before the 1977 season opener.
Until then, Voight was renowned almost as much for his cockiness as his playing style. At UNC, he'd brazenly told Tar Heels great Don McCauley that he planned to break all of his records. He'd once raced a Porsche on foot. He lived large.
A somewhat humbled Voight was picked up by Houston.
``When Mike came in, he had a hard time right off the bat, because you don't just step into an offensive system like that,'' says Carpenter, also a newcomer to that team. ``It took me all of training camp to get comfortable with it. We ran a lot of audibles.''
Lacking time to learn the playbook, Voight landed a spot on the Oilers' special teams. His chief assignment: blocking for Billy ``White Shoes'' Johnson, an explosive runner on kick returns and the league's first end-zone dancer.
``If they kicked away from Billy they kicked to me, and when they kicked to Billy, he had a 214-pound blocking back in front of him,'' Voight says. ``I never thought I would feel good about somebody else getting the cheers. But when I was laying on the ground, and I'd just thrown a good block, and Billy was in the end zone doing his `rubber legs' thing, I felt pretty good.''
``He just kind of went blind into things,'' Carpenter recalls. ``He'd just go for the ball. It didn't matter if there were trains and planes coming from the right and the left, he had tunnel vision for the ball.''
The Houston coaching staff, led by slow-talking O.A. ``Bum'' Phillips, was impressed.
``Once a young man has had a lot of college success and he gets to the pros, and he's put on special teams for whatever reason, sometimes he'll feel like he's above and beyond that,'' says Andy Bourgeois, Voight's special teams coach. ``Mike felt like whatever he had to do to contribute, he was ready to do. He was a real pleasure to be around.''
Voight played all 14 games, making eight returns for a combined 156 yards and, in one game, breaking loose for 34. He recovered a fumble. In the season's 10th game he was moved to the backfield, and carried the ball five times for 15 yards. He carried again the following week, and again in the finale, a squeaker that knocked Cincinnati out of the playoffs.
``He was pretty hyped about that,'' Carpenter says. ``He didn't care much for Cincinnati.''
He blocked a punt in that game, too, and during the season turned other plays that didn't make the books: In one, he halted a kick return by Denver's gazelle-like Rick Upchurch by getting a finger stuck in Upchurch's helmet. ``It broke my finger,'' Voight says, ``but I got a few attaboys for that one.''
The Oilers' media kit crowed that he had ``excelled in all phases of special-team assignments.'' Voight headed back to Chapel Hill for the four courses he needed to graduate, confident that his future with Houston was assured. On the way he stopped in Hampton Roads to attend the Norfolk Sports Club's annual jamboree dinner.
The next day - Jan. 25, 1978 - he turned onto U.S. 58.
The first thing Voight noticed after the wreck was that his leg bone was jabbing his stomach. His left femur had torn from his hip and lay across his lap. The bone's knobby head was splintered. A spray of powdered glass was imbedded in his face and eyes.
``I knew I'd been injured,'' he says quietly. ``When I got into the hospital the doctor said I wasn't going to have the same gait. That I might run, but that was being optimistic.
``People said I was lucky to have so much car in front of me.'' He pauses. ``When you're a runner and you lose your legs, you don't feel very lucky.''
Brian Smith, a Tar Heels fullback and Voight's college roommate, saw him not long after.
``It was an emotional thing, knowing Mike the way I did and the way he'd used his legs,'' he says, ``because he had no use of his legs.''
After months of traction his rehabilitation began, and for the first time in his life Voight's setbacks outnumbered his victories.
``All my career I'd had three or four guys at a time trying to knock me down, and having a hard time,'' he says. ``And here I was having a hard time staying on my feet by myself.
``That's when reality hits you. I remember waking up one morning with the phone ringing, and thinking I could cross the room to answer it, and falling face-first into the chest-of-drawers. That's reality, right there.''
He returned to UNC, where a spill erased some of his progress. He slid into depression. In 1979 he attended Oilers minicamp, where he learned his left leg had 60 percent of its former strength. The team, riding high on a new back named Earl Campbell, scratched him from the active roster. His UNC records began to fall. His depression deepened.
``I thought everything I had planned my life for was taken away,'' he says. ``It's a difficult thing.''
For years after the accident, the region's newspapers carried annual stories updating readers on Voight's recovery. Each reported that he hoped to return to the NFL. Eventually, the stories stopped.
Voight worked as a volunteer coach at Indian River for a few years, took care of his ailing parents, worked on the leg. He joined Chesapeake's recreation staff, designed a weight-training program for youngsters. He married.
He and his wife started a fuel-oil company. The marriage, he says, has run into trouble, and the company with it. These days Voight lives in his mother's house. ``I'm in a transitional period,'' he says.
But there have been rewards. For eight years he has officiated at high school football games. He is back on the field.
``You shoot for perfection, you settle for excellence,'' Voight says. ``That's what I did. I tried to get back to being in the best 1 percent of athletes, which is what they say you need to be to get into the pros.
``Well, now I'm keeping up with high school athletes every week. And the doctors told me I wouldn't be able to.'' He shrugs, cradles his ginger ale.
There are those who will always wonder: Would Houston have used him as a running back? Would he have won some of the glory that went to Earl Campbell?
``You never know,'' Andy Bourgeois, his old Oilers coach, says. ``Earl could have gotten hurt, and Mike was a hard-nosed kind of running back. He might have done great. You never know.''
Voight does his best not to dwell on the possibilities.
``The past is fading. It's been almost 20 years,'' he says. ``And things are on the upswing. My spirits are up. I can walk.
``But it does seems like I got to the dance, and didn't get to dance much.''
``Like I said.'' He reaches for his hat, slips it on.
``Almost there.''
He picks up his briefcase and strides to the door.
Without a limp. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Huy Nguyen
Mike Voight
Photo COURTESY OF MIKE VOIGHT
By the time he was done playing at North Carolina, Mike Voight
ranked fifth on the NCAA's career rushing charts.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB