A Cautionary Tale

One minute, he is the prodigal son. He sits outside Kenan Stadium with a cast on his foot, awaiting the moment when his return to the North Carolina football team will be a physical reality, not just the second chance given to him by his coach.

The next minute, Bosley Allen is a ghost. The bones and muscles and organs that make up his frame still exist. They still walk the UNC campus finishing a degree over the summer.

But Bosley Allen the football player is no more, having been dismissed from the team May 15 by head coach John Bunting a little more than a month after working his way back into the coach’s good graces and ending a previous suspension.

The ghost of Bosley Allen doesn’t want to talk about what happened. His phone number is disconnected.

The prodigal son had some things to say about it. He didn’t know why these kinds of things happened, the kinds of things that eventually get you kicked off the North Carolina football team. All he knew was that they always did.

He wanted to stop those things before they occurred, but he wanted to be himself.

Even with that internal struggle, how does a man go from strike two to strike three in such a hurry it’s almost impossible to understand how he made it this far in the first place?

To understand that, you have to understand Boz. And even then, there are no guarantees.

Picture Bosley Allen dancing in a nightclub. Another patron, spurred on by machismo and a few pints of liquid courage, approaches from the side.

This football player doesn’t look so tough, he thinks to himself. So he decides to prove it by provoking the player with a bump, shove or outright blow.

In years past, a brawl would no doubt ensue. Boz would start throwing, and his name would end up in the newspaper the next day. Considering the other incidents that have popped up throughout his career, he might even earn an adjective, like “troubled,” before his given name.

In the month between his final suspension and his dismissal, Allen said that if such a situation happened that day, he would find a way to fight the urge to fight back.

“Now, I’d just walk away,” Allen said in April. “And it hurts me inside. You know, I might not have anyone talking to me, but it seems like my conscience would be like, ‘Man, you a punk. Why didn’t you just go ahead and hit him?’ But it feels better not to do it because once you do that, you always worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

And there he was in the flesh – a brand new Bosley Allen. Right?

He still described his personality as “risky.” He made no promises that he would stay out of trouble. After all, he still had to be Boz.

But at the same time, it’s not like he wanted to get in trouble. The personable receiver certainly didn’t want to let down his teammates. He’d already been down that road.

It was Allen’s impulsive nature that kept him out of the beginning of spring practice and cost him a Peach Bowl appearance at the end of last season.

After a broken foot kept him out of the rest of spring practice following his reinstatement to the team, Allen claimed to be more focused than ever on staying out of trouble and on the field.

In 2001, Allen caught 39 passes for 562 yards and four touchdowns as part of a group of dangerous receivers.

This season wouldn’t have been much different as far as personnel, with a couple of new talented faces in the mix. The group of receivers was so eclectic in its skills that Allen likened them to a band of superheroes, each with his own unique superpower.

It was an ironic comparison, even before his Carolina football career was cut short by his own final misdeeds. His previous list of off-the-field troubles could have easily painted him as more of a villain than a hero in the eyes of some.

In October 2000, Allen was suspended by then-coach Carl Torbush for being caught with marijuana.

But that was just a blip on the radar at the time. It wasn’t until after the end of the 2001 regular season that Allen had incidents close enough together chronologically for anyone to take notice that there might be a problem.

The latest occurred in early February when Allen was driving down U.S. 85 and saw flashing blue lights in his rear-view mirror.

Allen, who didn’t have a driver’s license, had only one thought going through his head – he did not want to go to jail. So he turned to teammate and friend Dexter Reid, seated in the passenger seat, and took Reid’s license to hand to the officer.

Allen was charged with giving false information to a police officer, though when it was all said and done, he ended up with a simple speeding citation.

“The papers made it like I straight out lied to (the police), but I was just saving face,” Allen said. “I did use his license, but I never really told them my name was Dexter Reid or nothing like that. It was just a spur-of-the-moment decision. I was in trouble, trying to get out of it.”

It was an irresponsible action by a man who was quick to take responsibility for it.

That’s the thing about Bosley Allen – he is a series of paradoxes. Thirty seconds after he tells you he’s a risk-taker, he tells you that he’s learned his lesson. It’s not so much that you don’t know which statement to believe; it’s that they both appear equally true.

Even now, after Allen finally tested his coach’s faith one too many times.

Bunting told Allen he would have to earn his way back into the good graces of the coaching staff, so that’s what Allen did.

“He dealt with it better than I would’ve,” Reid said. “Once you do something bad, you want to wash your hands of it. He dealt with it.”

Allen had to perform community service and attend meetings, show up on time every day for breakfast at the Kenan Stadium football center and make it to every single one of his classes.

Perhaps the punishment for the traffic offense wouldn’t have been that severe were it not for what happened in Atlanta at the end of December.

Bunting made it clear he had a set of rules for his team as it prepared for the Peach Bowl, and the team had no choice but follow those rules to the letter. Allen couldn’t do it.

Security guards monitoring the players’ rooms saw a female leave Allen’s room after curfew – when the players were not supposed to have visitors of any kind – and reported it to the coaches.

For the second time in his career (the first coming in 1998 when Allen was out with a knee injury), Allen would not be on the field when his UNC teammates played a bowl game.

Once he was back on Bunting’s good side, Allen said he was only concerned with recovering from the broken foot he suffered on his first day back from suspension at spring practice.

After that, it was just a matter of avoiding the impulses that got him into trouble and recognizing that perhaps the first two offseason incidents were a sign that he needed to exercise a little better self-control.

It all seemed so simple, avoiding those moments, those little cracks that apparently even a 6-foot-2, 190-pound man can slip through sometimes.

It was always in those moments of boredom that Allen found himself making the wrong decision, letting his impulses steer him toward the potential for trouble.

That’s why growing up in Bradenton, Fla., he worked hard in school. Allen himself says he wasn’t the smartest kid, he just buckled down in the classroom to get average grades. He needed the homework for the same reason he needed to play three sports – to stay away from the trouble that lurked the streets of his hometown, looking for somebody just like him.

Without the distraction of athletics, Allen was worried he would end up like his older siblings.

“My older brothers, they were both locked up,” Allen said. “My biggest brother, Donnie, he tries to inspire me and tell me not to be where he is. I hate it that he’s in the position he’s in because he’s a good person, he just did some bad things.”

Little did Allen know that soon people would be saying that same thing about him when his Carolina career ended.

“I wish him the best in the future,” Bunting said after dismissing Allen. “I’m disappointed Bosley will not be a part of our program next season, but we have rules that every player must follow.”

Staying busy to dodge trouble had worked for years, and when big trouble did come with this spring’s traffic incident, Allen said he had learned his lesson. But he certainly made no promises.

“Things that would jeopardize my future, I don’t do it, but I’m still risky,” he said. “I like the way I am. I don’t want to change. Maybe one day offspring will calm me down, somebody who I have to focus on. But until then, I’m just gonna be Boz.”

Once again being Boz meant being able to say two contradictory things back-to-back and mean them both sincerely.

But wanting to stay out of trouble, trying to will it to be that way, was just never enough for Bosley Allen. He knew it long before his dismissal from the team, even as he dealt with the fact that the fallout from his actions was creeping up close behind him.

“I’m spontaneous,” Allen said, sitting on that wall outside the stadium, wearing that cast, waiting, reflecting on his spring suspension. “That’s the whole thing – it never came back to bite me. I guess it was catching up to me. Nine lives, I’m on eight.”

Maybe getting to number nine was just a matter of time.