As has been mentioned in several threads, Chris Doering was a prime victim of the Caste System, which can be illustrated best by comparing him to, ironically enough, "Uncle Cris" Collinsworth, former star wide receiver turned Caste Clown announcer supreme.
Doering and Collinsworth were both tall and lean and even looked a lot alike. Both were high school stars in Florida, but there the similarities end. Collinsworth was highly recruited and signed with Florida and ended up being a high second round draft choice of the Cincinnati Bengals in 1981. With the Bengals he was a starter as a rookie and went on to make several Pro Bowls before injuries cut short his career.
Doering went unrecruited, and ended up walking on at Florida. He slowly worked his way up from the bottom of the depth chart to become a starter, and ended up breaking SEC records for a WR, including touchdowns, against allegedly the best defensive backs in the country. But he wasn't drafted until the sixth round by Jacksonville, and was kicked around the NFL like an old football, catching but six balls in six years before playing out the string as a backup for the Redskins and Steelers.
Collinsworth entered the NFL at the beginning of the hard-core phase of the Caste System and was the last White receiver treated and utilized by the league as a potential star. All the rest who have done well since have had to scratch and claw to get an opportunity, being undrafted or drafted but not utilized well for a number of seasons until finally getting a chance; many more good ones never got any opportunity at all. Doering is a prime example of how the Caste System chews up and spits out talented White receivers.
This article is from SI's "vault," December 25, 1995 issue, found by Sport Historian.
<H1>Eating It Up</H1>
<H2>Nobody has gotten his teeth into being a Florida Gator more than star receiver Chris Doering </H2>
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
It was the last day. Chris Doering didn't realize this yet; why should he? The team bus chugged through Gainesville, Fla., on the same old route; the usual Van Halen pumped from earphones into his head. As they do every year at this time, Doering's teammates sat wide-eyed and quiet, rocking with the rhythm of the drive and this growing, pulse-quickening fever, because Florida would play Florida State in the Swamp, and the whole state was on hold, and the game meant everything. But as the bus turned onto North-South Drive, something strange happened. Doering, next to the window, saw hundreds of people milling on the sidewalks, waiting for the team. The bus had to slow. All those faces pressed in, happy and loud, and Doering knew for the first time: It's over. I'll never do this again.
"I was looking, and tears were coming to my eyes," Doering says. "I was embarrassed. I didn't want my teammates to see. So I just turned and looked out the window."
Maybe he was right. Maybe Doering shouldn't have let his fellow Gators see, because who wouldn't have laughed at such a sight? The best wide receiver on the best passing offense in the nationâ€"the tough, wiry bird who had gained 848 yards for the season and would that day break the SEC career record for touchdown catches with his 30thâ€"crying at the thought of his final home game?
College football has no room for sentiment; it's a multimillion-dollar business, a farm system for the NFL, a setup for a sneaker deal, a scam. By a top player's last home game, messages from sports agents have jammed his answering machine and mailbox. Yet all his teammates know that Doering is different; all know he should weep long and hard and openly because after No. 2 Florida plays No. 1 Nebraska for the national championship in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2, something precious will come to an end.
"A lot of these players could be at Florida State, Miami, Massachusettsâ€"anywhere, just doing their thing," says the guy who sat next to Doering on the bus, quarterback Danny Wuerffel. "But Chris was here so long, with ties to the school and to the city. Not only does he want to win, he wants to be part of this institutionâ€"Florida. That's who he is. That's what he is."
That's how it has always been. Doering didn't just settle on the local team; he grew up in the religion. Florida is a state notorious for its rootless populace, but Chris's father, Paul, studied pharmacy in Gainesville, stayed on to do his graduate work in that field and has been a professor at Florida for 20 years. This is a company town, and Paul is a company man.
When Chris was four, Paul would take him out to the gravel road in front of their house to toss the football; the ball might smash his face and knock him down, but the game never ended. Saturdays, Chris went to Florida games. Sundays, the gates to Florida Field would be unlocked, and Chris and Paul would play catch, and the boy would run under long, perfect spirals. Every summer Chris went to Florida football camp. He went to the same church as former Florida receiver Cris Collinsworth and felt sure he would take Collinsworth's pathâ€"scholarship, stardom. "All I ever thought about," Chris says, "was playing football for the Gators."
So the story ends here, yes? Doering, a senior, is not particularly fast, yet his knack for getting open has made him the prime passing target in coach Steve Spurrier's "Fun 'n' Gun" offenseâ€"the hometown boy who has helped bring his beloved Gators to the brink of their first national title. "He doesn't take a break," Spurrier says. "He just plays full speed. And he's so sure-handed that it's very easy for me to call plays where he's the main guy." That Doering has this eerie resemblance to Collinsworth only makes his success seem preordained. "Yeah," Doering says casually, because he must've said it a thousand times this year. "Dream come true."
Except for one thing. When Doering was coming out of Gainesville's P.K. Yonge High School, nobodyâ€"least of all the Gator coaching staffâ€"wanted him. Despite being one of Florida's few all-state selections in football, basketball and baseball, despite his great leaping ability and the fact that he led the nation's top football state in touchdown catches his senior year, Doering got no invitations for official visits, few phone calls from anxious coaches, no scholarship offers from anyone. That hurt plenty. But what killed him was this: Doering's high school is run by the University of Florida, yet by January of his senior year it was clear that the Gators had no intention of offering him a free ride. In an essay for his high school English class that spring, Doering wrote, I tried to lie to myself and keep believing it would still happen. I should have known after none of the Gator coaches ever came to one of my games. I simply dismissed this fact by saying that they probably had seen enough of me at football camp last summer. I should have known after the letters and phone calls from them stopped coming....
According to P.K. Yonge offensive coordinator Dave Mitchell, he had taken some film of Doering to one of Florida's graduate assistants. While they were watching footage of the pencil-thin Doeringâ€"6'4", 170 poundsâ€"another Gator assistant, Kyle Lingerfelt, burst into the room, began cursing and rasped out these infamous last words: "Chris Doering is no good. He'll never play Division I football. Stop wasting our time."
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
Spurrier says he knew nothing of Doering's recruitment until he heard about Lingerfelt's rudeness. "That was embarrassing," Spurrier says. Lingerfelt, he is quick to add, "wasn't with us the next year."
P.K. Yonge head coach John Clifford considers that revisionist history. "They saw him," Clifford says. "Chris was at every Gator camp from the time he was 12 years old; he was the [top] camper of the session from 12 until he was 18. But their priorities were to recruit speed, and their evaluation was, 'He doesn't have it, and he's not going to get it.' "
Signing day came and went. Paul Doering heard one sportscaster mention that Chris hadn't yet announced which school he would attend, and Paul's heart dropped like a stone. Announced? Chris had nothing to announce; Division I-AA schools were telling him to walk on. Paul didn't doubt Chris could play at the top college level. So he began working the fax machine, sending letters to any school that had ever dropped Chris a postcard, following up with a 15-minute videotape of Chris's high school triumphs. Only Florida State replied, with an offer to walk on; one weekend Paul and Chris visited Tallahassee with Clifford. "I was bitter," Paul says. "I wanted him to go to Florida State and come back and whip Florida, show what they missed out on. Crazy thoughts went through my mind: What are we going to do with all this Gator paraphernalia? All these sweatshirts and T-shirts? We have to throw all that stuff out. I'm going to have to wear garnet and gold."
Chris mulled the Seminole proposal. But Florida made its own walk-on offer, and after attending the Florida-Florida State baseball game in Gainesville, Chris had seen enough. "I saw the Florida State fans doing their chop thing, and I thought, That's obnoxious," he says. "That's something I grew up hating. I don't want to be part of that."
Still ringing in his ears, though, was his last conversation with Jim Goodman, then Florida's recruiting coordinator. When he first heard Goodman's voice on the phone, Doering was sure his Gator ship had finally come in. Goodman told him he was a great playerâ€"and then said that Florida had no scholarship for him. "I took it personally," Doering says. "They didn't want me. I'd given all this time and support over the years, and they just pushed me away." As he would put it in his school essay: My heart froze. I could not believe what I was hearing: This has to be a joke. But it wasn't. For the rest of the conversation, I tried to play that what he told me had no effect. When I got off the phone, I went hack to my room and cried. I fell I had been cheated. Looking back on it now, it wouldn't have hurt quite as much if I would have prepared for the worst, or even opened my eyes. But if we all knew what was going to happen next in our lives, living wouldn't be half as exciting.
All his life, whenever a ball had come Doering's way, he had heard this voice in his head: Make the catch, Chris. Now it was 1992, his redshirt freshman year at Florida, and he was doing scrub duty in a nasty 31-14 loss to Tennessee in Knoxville. Gator quarterback Antwan Chiles lofted a ball Doering's way, and Doering heard the voice and made the catch, his first for Florida.
The year before, the Gator coaches had challenged Doering to prove their initial assessment of him wrong, and he had taken the bait. But he hated being considered just another tackling dummy, buried below nine other receivers on the depth chart. So he caught the tough balls in drills. Quarterbacks began looking for him. Small victories followed. The first was his mere presence that day in Knoxville; he'd made the traveling squad. The second was that catch, the only one he would make all year. His mom, Cheryl, and dad celebrated at home. His sister Tracy called a radio talk show and giggled, "Hey, who was that number 28!"
"I was just watching the tape of that play the other dayâ€"a 13-yard pass from Chiles in the pouring rain," Paul Doering says, laughing. "We were so excited that you'd think he won the game." Then again, Paul says, "we used to get thrilled when we'd see Chris next to coach Spurrier on TVâ€"'There he is! There he is!' "
Chris and Paul sit at the kitchen table now, awash in football's good clutter: news clippings pouring to the floor, manila envelopes from agents, stacks of videotapes. The phone rings; CBS wants to do an interview. "What's tough for me is coming to the realization that my career with the Gators is almost over," Chris says. "It's hard. You've got to create a new dream, or something."
In Gainesville the old dream still resonates beyond Florida Field. This is partly because Doering's scrub-to-star ascent makes him the most lovable character on an offense that scores with bloodless efficiency. "There's not a teacher in the community who doesn't use him as the model for what a hero should be," says Gainesville mayor Jim Painter. "To be a walk-on and set all these records?"
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
Then there is Doering's style: Cantering about the field, a self-described "skinny white guy," he is nobody's idea of a modern wide receiver. But his passion is unmistakable. "The enthusiasm he hasâ€"at times he'll start throwing pillows against the wall, throwing empty Gatorade cans around because he gets so psyched," Wuerffel says. "It means so much to himâ€"the competition and just being at Florida. It elevates his game."
In the fall of '93 everything changed for Doering. The Friday before the first game of the season, Spurrier walked into the team's meeting room and announced that Doering would be getting his scholarship. His teammates clapped and whooped for him; Doering ran upstairs and signed before the coaches could change their minds. Two weeks later in his first start, against Kentucky in Lexington. Doering proved himself worthy by pulling down six passes for 95 yards and scoring the winning touchdown with three seconds left.
The next week, in the bus before the Tennessee game in Gainesville, Doering felt it all come together for the first time: the scholarship, the touchdown, the fulfillment of his childhood mission. He stared out the window at all the people cheering, and his heart clenched. He didn't dare let his teammates see his face then, either.
On Nov. 27, two days after the win over Florida State, Doering was walking alone in the tunnel under the stadium when he turned and caught a glimpse of the field. He walked out into the sun and the empty, echoing stadium.
"I couldn't believe it," he says now. "Your whole life you look forward to playing here, and you play here so many times, and all of sudden it's gone."
December is the best month in Gainesville. Exams are coming to a close. College recruiters stop by P.K. Yonge to check out talent, and better yet, the showdown with Nebraska looms. Coach Clifford was chatting with a recruiter from Furman recently, talking about Florida and Chris Doering. "The funny thing is," Clifford told the recruiter, "when Chris finally got his scholarship, I gave him the file of rejection letters I'd saved for him." The Furman man shook his head in what-a-world sympathy, and Clifford laughed at him. "I had one in there from Furman," he said.
Doering is on a roll now; he has been named second team All-America, and his huge senior season (70 receptions and 17 touchdowns) has, he hears, raised his stock in the NFL. He knows that this never would have happened had he not worked so hard, had Florida not rejected him in the first place. But it's strange: He doesn't quite know what to do with himself, and there aren't many people who have known his quandary. What do you do once you've gotten everything you ever wanted?
"My whole life was structured around playing football at Florida, and I accomplished that, and I'm happy," Doering says. "But now that it's over, it leaves me feeling kind of empty. Obviously, I want to play pro football, but not like I wanted to play for the Gators. A lot of kids say they want to grow up to play in the NFL and make a lot of money. But if I could, I would stay around here and play Florida football forever."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1007602/1/index.htmEdited by: Don Wassall
Doering and Collinsworth were both tall and lean and even looked a lot alike. Both were high school stars in Florida, but there the similarities end. Collinsworth was highly recruited and signed with Florida and ended up being a high second round draft choice of the Cincinnati Bengals in 1981. With the Bengals he was a starter as a rookie and went on to make several Pro Bowls before injuries cut short his career.
Doering went unrecruited, and ended up walking on at Florida. He slowly worked his way up from the bottom of the depth chart to become a starter, and ended up breaking SEC records for a WR, including touchdowns, against allegedly the best defensive backs in the country. But he wasn't drafted until the sixth round by Jacksonville, and was kicked around the NFL like an old football, catching but six balls in six years before playing out the string as a backup for the Redskins and Steelers.
Collinsworth entered the NFL at the beginning of the hard-core phase of the Caste System and was the last White receiver treated and utilized by the league as a potential star. All the rest who have done well since have had to scratch and claw to get an opportunity, being undrafted or drafted but not utilized well for a number of seasons until finally getting a chance; many more good ones never got any opportunity at all. Doering is a prime example of how the Caste System chews up and spits out talented White receivers.
This article is from SI's "vault," December 25, 1995 issue, found by Sport Historian.
<H1>Eating It Up</H1>
<H2>Nobody has gotten his teeth into being a Florida Gator more than star receiver Chris Doering </H2>
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
It was the last day. Chris Doering didn't realize this yet; why should he? The team bus chugged through Gainesville, Fla., on the same old route; the usual Van Halen pumped from earphones into his head. As they do every year at this time, Doering's teammates sat wide-eyed and quiet, rocking with the rhythm of the drive and this growing, pulse-quickening fever, because Florida would play Florida State in the Swamp, and the whole state was on hold, and the game meant everything. But as the bus turned onto North-South Drive, something strange happened. Doering, next to the window, saw hundreds of people milling on the sidewalks, waiting for the team. The bus had to slow. All those faces pressed in, happy and loud, and Doering knew for the first time: It's over. I'll never do this again.
"I was looking, and tears were coming to my eyes," Doering says. "I was embarrassed. I didn't want my teammates to see. So I just turned and looked out the window."
Maybe he was right. Maybe Doering shouldn't have let his fellow Gators see, because who wouldn't have laughed at such a sight? The best wide receiver on the best passing offense in the nationâ€"the tough, wiry bird who had gained 848 yards for the season and would that day break the SEC career record for touchdown catches with his 30thâ€"crying at the thought of his final home game?
College football has no room for sentiment; it's a multimillion-dollar business, a farm system for the NFL, a setup for a sneaker deal, a scam. By a top player's last home game, messages from sports agents have jammed his answering machine and mailbox. Yet all his teammates know that Doering is different; all know he should weep long and hard and openly because after No. 2 Florida plays No. 1 Nebraska for the national championship in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2, something precious will come to an end.
"A lot of these players could be at Florida State, Miami, Massachusettsâ€"anywhere, just doing their thing," says the guy who sat next to Doering on the bus, quarterback Danny Wuerffel. "But Chris was here so long, with ties to the school and to the city. Not only does he want to win, he wants to be part of this institutionâ€"Florida. That's who he is. That's what he is."
That's how it has always been. Doering didn't just settle on the local team; he grew up in the religion. Florida is a state notorious for its rootless populace, but Chris's father, Paul, studied pharmacy in Gainesville, stayed on to do his graduate work in that field and has been a professor at Florida for 20 years. This is a company town, and Paul is a company man.
When Chris was four, Paul would take him out to the gravel road in front of their house to toss the football; the ball might smash his face and knock him down, but the game never ended. Saturdays, Chris went to Florida games. Sundays, the gates to Florida Field would be unlocked, and Chris and Paul would play catch, and the boy would run under long, perfect spirals. Every summer Chris went to Florida football camp. He went to the same church as former Florida receiver Cris Collinsworth and felt sure he would take Collinsworth's pathâ€"scholarship, stardom. "All I ever thought about," Chris says, "was playing football for the Gators."
So the story ends here, yes? Doering, a senior, is not particularly fast, yet his knack for getting open has made him the prime passing target in coach Steve Spurrier's "Fun 'n' Gun" offenseâ€"the hometown boy who has helped bring his beloved Gators to the brink of their first national title. "He doesn't take a break," Spurrier says. "He just plays full speed. And he's so sure-handed that it's very easy for me to call plays where he's the main guy." That Doering has this eerie resemblance to Collinsworth only makes his success seem preordained. "Yeah," Doering says casually, because he must've said it a thousand times this year. "Dream come true."
Except for one thing. When Doering was coming out of Gainesville's P.K. Yonge High School, nobodyâ€"least of all the Gator coaching staffâ€"wanted him. Despite being one of Florida's few all-state selections in football, basketball and baseball, despite his great leaping ability and the fact that he led the nation's top football state in touchdown catches his senior year, Doering got no invitations for official visits, few phone calls from anxious coaches, no scholarship offers from anyone. That hurt plenty. But what killed him was this: Doering's high school is run by the University of Florida, yet by January of his senior year it was clear that the Gators had no intention of offering him a free ride. In an essay for his high school English class that spring, Doering wrote, I tried to lie to myself and keep believing it would still happen. I should have known after none of the Gator coaches ever came to one of my games. I simply dismissed this fact by saying that they probably had seen enough of me at football camp last summer. I should have known after the letters and phone calls from them stopped coming....
According to P.K. Yonge offensive coordinator Dave Mitchell, he had taken some film of Doering to one of Florida's graduate assistants. While they were watching footage of the pencil-thin Doeringâ€"6'4", 170 poundsâ€"another Gator assistant, Kyle Lingerfelt, burst into the room, began cursing and rasped out these infamous last words: "Chris Doering is no good. He'll never play Division I football. Stop wasting our time."
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
Spurrier says he knew nothing of Doering's recruitment until he heard about Lingerfelt's rudeness. "That was embarrassing," Spurrier says. Lingerfelt, he is quick to add, "wasn't with us the next year."
P.K. Yonge head coach John Clifford considers that revisionist history. "They saw him," Clifford says. "Chris was at every Gator camp from the time he was 12 years old; he was the [top] camper of the session from 12 until he was 18. But their priorities were to recruit speed, and their evaluation was, 'He doesn't have it, and he's not going to get it.' "
Signing day came and went. Paul Doering heard one sportscaster mention that Chris hadn't yet announced which school he would attend, and Paul's heart dropped like a stone. Announced? Chris had nothing to announce; Division I-AA schools were telling him to walk on. Paul didn't doubt Chris could play at the top college level. So he began working the fax machine, sending letters to any school that had ever dropped Chris a postcard, following up with a 15-minute videotape of Chris's high school triumphs. Only Florida State replied, with an offer to walk on; one weekend Paul and Chris visited Tallahassee with Clifford. "I was bitter," Paul says. "I wanted him to go to Florida State and come back and whip Florida, show what they missed out on. Crazy thoughts went through my mind: What are we going to do with all this Gator paraphernalia? All these sweatshirts and T-shirts? We have to throw all that stuff out. I'm going to have to wear garnet and gold."
Chris mulled the Seminole proposal. But Florida made its own walk-on offer, and after attending the Florida-Florida State baseball game in Gainesville, Chris had seen enough. "I saw the Florida State fans doing their chop thing, and I thought, That's obnoxious," he says. "That's something I grew up hating. I don't want to be part of that."
Still ringing in his ears, though, was his last conversation with Jim Goodman, then Florida's recruiting coordinator. When he first heard Goodman's voice on the phone, Doering was sure his Gator ship had finally come in. Goodman told him he was a great playerâ€"and then said that Florida had no scholarship for him. "I took it personally," Doering says. "They didn't want me. I'd given all this time and support over the years, and they just pushed me away." As he would put it in his school essay: My heart froze. I could not believe what I was hearing: This has to be a joke. But it wasn't. For the rest of the conversation, I tried to play that what he told me had no effect. When I got off the phone, I went hack to my room and cried. I fell I had been cheated. Looking back on it now, it wouldn't have hurt quite as much if I would have prepared for the worst, or even opened my eyes. But if we all knew what was going to happen next in our lives, living wouldn't be half as exciting.
All his life, whenever a ball had come Doering's way, he had heard this voice in his head: Make the catch, Chris. Now it was 1992, his redshirt freshman year at Florida, and he was doing scrub duty in a nasty 31-14 loss to Tennessee in Knoxville. Gator quarterback Antwan Chiles lofted a ball Doering's way, and Doering heard the voice and made the catch, his first for Florida.
The year before, the Gator coaches had challenged Doering to prove their initial assessment of him wrong, and he had taken the bait. But he hated being considered just another tackling dummy, buried below nine other receivers on the depth chart. So he caught the tough balls in drills. Quarterbacks began looking for him. Small victories followed. The first was his mere presence that day in Knoxville; he'd made the traveling squad. The second was that catch, the only one he would make all year. His mom, Cheryl, and dad celebrated at home. His sister Tracy called a radio talk show and giggled, "Hey, who was that number 28!"
"I was just watching the tape of that play the other dayâ€"a 13-yard pass from Chiles in the pouring rain," Paul Doering says, laughing. "We were so excited that you'd think he won the game." Then again, Paul says, "we used to get thrilled when we'd see Chris next to coach Spurrier on TVâ€"'There he is! There he is!' "
Chris and Paul sit at the kitchen table now, awash in football's good clutter: news clippings pouring to the floor, manila envelopes from agents, stacks of videotapes. The phone rings; CBS wants to do an interview. "What's tough for me is coming to the realization that my career with the Gators is almost over," Chris says. "It's hard. You've got to create a new dream, or something."
In Gainesville the old dream still resonates beyond Florida Field. This is partly because Doering's scrub-to-star ascent makes him the most lovable character on an offense that scores with bloodless efficiency. "There's not a teacher in the community who doesn't use him as the model for what a hero should be," says Gainesville mayor Jim Painter. "To be a walk-on and set all these records?"
<DIV ="siv_artPara">
Then there is Doering's style: Cantering about the field, a self-described "skinny white guy," he is nobody's idea of a modern wide receiver. But his passion is unmistakable. "The enthusiasm he hasâ€"at times he'll start throwing pillows against the wall, throwing empty Gatorade cans around because he gets so psyched," Wuerffel says. "It means so much to himâ€"the competition and just being at Florida. It elevates his game."
In the fall of '93 everything changed for Doering. The Friday before the first game of the season, Spurrier walked into the team's meeting room and announced that Doering would be getting his scholarship. His teammates clapped and whooped for him; Doering ran upstairs and signed before the coaches could change their minds. Two weeks later in his first start, against Kentucky in Lexington. Doering proved himself worthy by pulling down six passes for 95 yards and scoring the winning touchdown with three seconds left.
The next week, in the bus before the Tennessee game in Gainesville, Doering felt it all come together for the first time: the scholarship, the touchdown, the fulfillment of his childhood mission. He stared out the window at all the people cheering, and his heart clenched. He didn't dare let his teammates see his face then, either.
On Nov. 27, two days after the win over Florida State, Doering was walking alone in the tunnel under the stadium when he turned and caught a glimpse of the field. He walked out into the sun and the empty, echoing stadium.
"I couldn't believe it," he says now. "Your whole life you look forward to playing here, and you play here so many times, and all of sudden it's gone."
December is the best month in Gainesville. Exams are coming to a close. College recruiters stop by P.K. Yonge to check out talent, and better yet, the showdown with Nebraska looms. Coach Clifford was chatting with a recruiter from Furman recently, talking about Florida and Chris Doering. "The funny thing is," Clifford told the recruiter, "when Chris finally got his scholarship, I gave him the file of rejection letters I'd saved for him." The Furman man shook his head in what-a-world sympathy, and Clifford laughed at him. "I had one in there from Furman," he said.
Doering is on a roll now; he has been named second team All-America, and his huge senior season (70 receptions and 17 touchdowns) has, he hears, raised his stock in the NFL. He knows that this never would have happened had he not worked so hard, had Florida not rejected him in the first place. But it's strange: He doesn't quite know what to do with himself, and there aren't many people who have known his quandary. What do you do once you've gotten everything you ever wanted?
"My whole life was structured around playing football at Florida, and I accomplished that, and I'm happy," Doering says. "But now that it's over, it leaves me feeling kind of empty. Obviously, I want to play pro football, but not like I wanted to play for the Gators. A lot of kids say they want to grow up to play in the NFL and make a lot of money. But if I could, I would stay around here and play Florida football forever."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1007602/1/index.htmEdited by: Don Wassall
