Tre Mason Grit

[Saniflush]

AUBURN FOOTBALL: Tre Mason’s grit, determination, talent carry him to New York as Heisman finalist

Auburn running back Tre Mason (21) celebrates after his third touchdown, doing the Heisman pose in the Tigers' SEC Championship Game win over Missouri on Saturday.


With each yard her son racked up through sheer force of will — all 304 of them — a smile formed on Tina Mason’s gentle face.

Thousands of excited Auburn fans pulsed around her, seemingly creating a sea of orange and blue. But it was with those in gold and white, the defenders that had spent the better part of four hours chasing her son all over the Georgia Dome field in Saturday’s SEC Championship Game, with whom she commiserated.

As memories flooded back to her, she knew exactly what each Missouri player who failed to bring down Auburn tailback Tre Mason saw from beneath his facemask.

It was the same look she first witnessed 16 years ago.

“I could see it in Tre’s face. If he took the helmet off, I know the face that he would be making,” Tina said laughing. “I was absolutely shocked, because that was just his sheer determination, and I could see it.

“He had that same face when he was little, the same face — his game face.”

It was late. From within the quaint two-story home off Stone Boulevard in East Massapequa, Long Island, Tina heard rustling coming from the kitchen.

Alone while her husband Vincent Mason Jr. was on the road touring with his hip-hop group De La Soul — which started in the late 1980s in Amityville, N.Y.— Tina burst into the kitchen to see just what she expected: her 4-year-old son getting into the cabinets.

“Get to bed!” she yelled at Tre — who was several feet shorter and about 150 pounds lighter than the strapping Heisman hopeful setting records for No. 2 Auburn (12-1) this season.

Caught in the act, Tre flashed his mother a quick smile and took off.

As if recreating a scene from the “Tom and Jerry” cartoon where the cat can never quite catch the mouse, Tre ran his mother around the kitchen — briefly looking back with a glare determination as if to say: “You can’t catch me” — before cutting back through the living room and streaking down the hallway to his bedroom and diving between the covers.

“That’s when I (first) saw that game face. Tre was definitely making it to that room,” his mother said. “And he still has that same look, that same drive. It’s all amazing to me.

“He ran in the room … (and) he’s been running ever since.”

By the time Tina arrived at his door — laughing between deep, gasping breaths of air — Tre popped his mischievous head up from his pillow as if she’d woken him from a deep sleep.

It’s that same drive that has led Auburn’s junior tailback back to New York, where he’ll be this weekend as one of six finalists vying to be the 79th Heisman Trophy winner. Mason was a late bloomer in the Heisman race this season, only emerging as a candidate after a record-breaking 304-yard, four-touchdown performance against then-No. 5 Missouri in Auburn’s epic 59-42 shootout victory in the SEC Championship last Saturday.

It was in his school-record 46 carries that Tre showed the world his tenacity. With an SEC-leading 1,621 rushing yards and 22 touchdowns, Tre’s drive has led No. 2 Auburn to the BCS National Championship Game against top-ranked Florida State on Jan. 6 in Pasadena, Calif.

“I’ve always just been hungry for what I wanted and I always tried to find a way to get what I wanted,” Tre said.

***

Tre Mason refused to let Missouri built any sort of momentum.

He’d witnessed the kind of snowball effect a turnover can have after a pair of first-quarter fumbles allowed LSU to build a 21-0 first half advantage in Auburn’s lone loss to that point.

Not again.

On his first carry after Mizzou defensive back E.J. Gaines scooped and scored on a fumble by quarterback Nick Marshall to go ahead 17-14 less than 2 minutes into the second quarter, Tre ran 13 yards over right end. Then he went up the middle for 16. After a quick breather, he slashed Missouri’s vaunted defensive line for 11 yards before taking it in from 7 yards out two plays later to put Auburn back on top 21-17.

“I told guys, ‘I’m not leaving Atlanta without a ring,’” Tre said after the game. “I told them, ‘I’m not leaving without being a champion.’”

The next time he touched the ball, Mason popped out around the right side and raced 52 yards deep into Missouri territory for the first of four runs to the end zone.

While the Auburn fans around him on either side cheered, Vincent Mason Jr. watched in awe as his son became a star on the biggest stage of his career.

To Vincent, though, he was still the rambunctious little boy who ran him ragged in Post Park during his birthday party 15 years prior.

“Tre, get back here,” Vincent would remember yelling a few days later.

Tre turned and looked back at his father, and there was the same look his wife had seen a year and a half earlier.

“He’s just running, he’s just running,” Vincent recalled with a hearty laugh. “So I go after this boy and he puts this face on and he runs from me, and he’s running me around the freaking park. He’s running me down.”

It had become a game, one the 23-year-old father of three was clearly losing.

Suddenly, Tre cut back toward the picnic tables, still with his dad in tow. Without hesitating or slowing down, Tre reached the large Rubbermaid bucket of water used for apple bobbing earlier and dunked his upper torso in.

Just as Vincent Jr. arrived out of breath, Tre popped his head out of the water with an apple lodged squarely between his teeth.

“Everybody just hit the floor,” Vincent said, unleashing a big belly laugh at the mere thought of the memory.

“I was just the daredevil, the rowdy one, running around, just doing stuff,” Tre said. “All that helped to make me who I am today.”

This Saturday, Tre will be sitting among fellow Heisman finalists Jameis Winston of FSU, A.J. McCarron of Alabama, Jordan Lynch of Northern Illinois, defending Heisman winner Johnny Manziel of Texas A&M and Andre Williams of Boston College inside the Best Buy Theater in Times Square, N.Y., approximately 30 miles from where it all started for him.

“Tre still has that innocence about him,” his mother said, “he really does. He has the innocence about him that he says, ‘You know, this is what I want and I’m going to work for it and I’m going to go hard.’ I don’t know if he has much doubt.”

***

The thick Brooklyn accent still soaks Vincent’s every word.

But it was in his tears as he watched blue and yellow streamers rain down over Tre and his teammates following Auburn’s second SEC championship in the last four years that it really hit him how far the Masons have come.

Growing up in Brooklyn without a father, Vincent worked various jobs around the neighborhood since he was 14 just to care for his mother and younger brother, Anthony, who was only two years his junior.

Spending the first 16 years of his life on welfare, Vincent remembers what it means to struggle, to wonder where your next meal is coming from. It wasn’t until he moved to Amityville on Long Island at the age of 15 that things started to improve.

“I know how bad it can be and I don’t want my children to ever experience that,” said Vincent, a father of four including Marcus (25), Tre (20), Chauncey (16) and Dayo (13). “I don’t even want them to fathom that that’s what life can be like. I want them to know that it exists, but I don’t want them to fathom that it could be (their) life.”

It’s that drive that led him to pursue his passion for music, creating De La Soul with high school classmates Kelvin Mercer and David Jude Jolicoeur while he was still in school. The group released its first song “Plug Tunin” during Vincent’s senior year in 1988 and the debut album “3 Feet High and Rising” the following spring to much critical acclaim, including a Grammy.

“He’s a legend,” Tre said of his father.

But within five years of the group’s debut, Tre was born and it became much harder maintaining the “rap lifestyle” of the early ’90s with a young family.

“The music business, as I like to say, is no different than college football — more fame than fortune,” Vincent laughs. “That’s the music business. You have good years, you have bad years. Here it is I’ve been blessed to make the records I’ve made but some of them sold better than others. From an artistic level, my music is highly regarded, but as far as the business goes, a lot of the records didn’t sell accordingly.”

While not along the same sort of struggle he underwent as a child, Vincent made sure his children always understood what it meant to work for something.

“My dad being who he is also makes me more hungry, because he started from the bottom and he’s come from nothing and worked his way towards the top,” Tre said. “He doesn’t give us everything, like a silver spoon, he makes us work for everything we have to make us as hungry as he was.”

But with a touring schedule that often kept him away from home for long stretches of time, Vincent is still pained by every birthday, holiday or school function he ever missed.

“It’s not any different than a guy in the military or a guy who flies a plane for American Airlines, or the guy who drives a truck for a living,” he said.

“It gets very emotional. I’m angry a lot that I can’t be a part of things because this is what’s necessary.”

It’s in his father’s dedication to his craft that Tre finds his source of inspiration. It’s in that conviction to his own passion that helps Tre grind out every yard he can before pushing his body to get one or two inches more.

“He loves this game. So he’s going (to get) every inch that his spirit is allowing him to go,” Vincent said.

It was that drive that propelled Tre to balance himself on top of Auburn junior center Reese Dismukes after getting stopped short at the 1-yard line and reach the ball over the goal line for the winning 5-yard touchdown in the 45-41 upset of then-No. 7 Texas A&M on Oct. 19 in College Station.

“Every time I see moves like that I’m like, ‘Yeah, go hard or go home,’” his father said with a large belly laugh. “Yeah, go hard or go home! And he goes very, very hard. He’s a hard worker.”

Because, as Tre told his father before the SEC Championship game: “We Mases, we ain’t soft.”

***

Tre Mason never wanted for much, especially after his father moved their growing family to South Florida in the early 2000s to provide a more stable environment — “because I don’t think they would have been able to survive New York like I was able to survive New York,” Vincent said.

It was there Tre developed his love for football.

Never a fan of the sport growing up, Vincent finally witnessed his son’s natural ability with a football in his hands while watching a preadolescent Tre score at will at North Broward Prep.

After the game, a North Broward coach approached Vincent and his wife with some advice: “Try to keep your son in football. He seems to love the sport and if he continues to love it, he could probably do extraordinary things. Because what he’s doing out there, nobody can really coach that.”

Afterward, Vincent looked at his son and asked: “What did you see out there?”

“Daddy, I just see a hole and I go through it,” he remembers Tre saying at the time. “That’s all I see, I can just see it.”

“I was like, ‘Man, that’s a gift,’” Vincent said. “I was in awe then.”

For Park Vista High School head football coach Brian Dodds, his first experience with Tre was a little more subdued.

During an offseason program in January 2008 an assistant coach called him over to watch this hotshot freshman do Plyo box jump drills.

“Coach, you have to see Superman over there,” the assistant said.

While all the other players did the drill properly, jumping on and off of the box, Tre did it his own way, leaping flat-footed over the 20-inch box and back again.

After introducing himself to the gangly freshman, Dodds walked back to his assistant and said: “Oh my God, this kid’s an amazing athlete.”

That spring, Dodds got a taste for Tre’s playmaking ability when he returned a punt for a touchdown the very first time he touched the football during the team’s annual kickoff classic.

“I turned to my coaches and said, ‘We’re giving him the ball,’” Dodds recalled.

Tre finished his prep career with nearly 4,500 rushing yards and 64 touchdowns in three years at Park Vista, where his younger brother Chauncey is now a star sophomore receiver.

“In high school, when he touched the ball, he was electric,” Dodds said. “Especially when he got in the open field, he was almost impossible to tackle.”

But at 5-foot-9 and 175 pounds as a senior in 2011, Tre had to look outside the Sunshine State for opportunities, choosing the defending BCS national champion Tigers — fresh off the program’s first national title since 1957 — over Ole Miss and Penn State when neither of the big Florida schools (Florida, Florida State and Miami) showed much interest.

“Not one Florida school even came to check (on him),” his father said.

Of course, even as a member of Auburn’s sixth-ranked recruiting class in 2011, the four-star athlete that was considered a more change-of-pace runner than a lead back and was overshadowed by five-star sophomore tailback Michael Dyer and speedy junior Onterio McCalebb.

And while he had to wait his turn, it was coming in with a chip on his shoulder that helped Tre put on muscle and morph into the 5-10, 210-pound hard-nosed runner he is today.

“He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s a tough guy,” first-year Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn said this week. Malzahn was the Tigers’ offensive coordinator Tre’s first season on campus and then spent last year as head coach at Arkansas State.

“I can’t say that enough how tough — physically and mentally tough — he is,” Malzahn said. “He doesn’t back down from anybody or any moment.”

***

Somewhere between carry 30 and 46 on Saturday, Malzahn walked over to his star tailback in the middle of the biggest game of his career.

“You OK? How are you holding up?” he asked Mason.

Searching his face — his eyes — for any sign of exhaustion, any sign of weakness, Malzahn saw nothing but unflinching resolve.

Mason stared back into the first-year Auburn head coach’s eyes and didn’t hesitate with his response: “Coach, keep giving it to me. We’re going to win the SEC championship.”

He wasn’t lying.

On fourth-and-goal from the ½-yard line, Mason got the ball on a dive up the middle — right into the heart of the fierce Missouri front seven. Pushing himself forward, Mason appeared to get stopped short for a second before landing on the white chalk of the goal line.

“I don’t know if he made it,” CBS analyst Gary Danielson said.

“He did not,” longtime CBS play-by-play man Verne Lundquist followed before quickly correcting course, “And now they signal.”

“It’s close … yes he did,” Danielson said.

Seven minutes of game time later, the longtime CBS announcers were singing a much different tune.

“Mason, of course. Mason, of course,” Lundquist screams, the decibel level in his voice rising as the running back sheds Missouri defender after defender on his victory-clinching, 13-yard touchdown run to go ahead 59-42 with 4:22 remaining in the game.

After crossing the goal line, Mason ran to Auburn’s sideline and into a bear hug from the program’s most revered figure — the incomparable Bo Jackson.

“You’re probably one of the best players to ever put on an Auburn helmet,” Mason recalled Jackson telling him.

It was Jackson’s pregame pearls of wisdom that seemed to keep Mason charged the entire contest.

“Play at a different level,” Mason recalled Jackson telling him before the game. “You know, if you’re going to be great, you’ve got to play great.”

It was that advice, and his sheer force of will, that helped carry Mason and the Tigers to the pinnacle of the conference a year after going winless in SEC play.

From her spot in the stands, Tina Mason harkened back to what Tre told her in the midst of Auburn’s worst season in 60 years.

“He’s like, ‘Mom, you know what, I’m not worried. I believe in who I chose to be and what I chose to do and what my team can do,’” Tina said her son told her last season. “And he was like, ‘We’re going to be OK, we’re going to be fine.’”

So whether or not Tre Mason brings home Auburn’s fourth Heisman Trophy this weekend, his impact on the Auburn isn’t measured in hardware or stats but in the will to win, something he helped reinfuse into a team that needed to be reminded it could.

And while Auburn’s incredible rise from the SEC basement to BCS National Championship contender may have caught many around the nation by surprise, the Masons always believed it was possible.

They saw it all along in their son’s eyes.

“This is his genius,” his mother said, “this is what I believe he’s meant to do.”

[WiregrassTiger]

Loved this. And love that kid. Not only because he's so good at football, he's humble and polite. He just does his job and goes back to do it again. He's a lot of fun to watch.

[dallaswareagle]

 

He's a player I would like to meet one day.

[CCTAU]

I've spent years trying to get my son to have that same resolve. I'm not sure it can be taught or developed easily. Some are just born with it and do not waste it. Tre is one of those. And he is fun to watch.

I sure hope he comes back.   

[WiregrassTiger]

I've spent years trying to get my son to have that same resolve. I'm not sure it can be taught or developed easily. Some are just born with it and do not waste it. Tre is one of those. And he is fun to watch.

I sure hope he comes back.

Well, in defense of your son, you are his dad. That's a lot to overcome.

[Snaggletiger]

Well, in defense of your son, you are his dad. That's a lot to overcome.

This^^right here above me^^no, look up^^there^^see that?^^Yeah, that just happened.

[Saniflush]

Well, in defense of your son, you are his dad. That's a lot to overcome.

 

[dallaswareagle]

“I don’t know if he made it,” CBS analyst Gary Danielson said.

“He did not,” longtime CBS play-by-play man Verne Lundquist followed before quickly correcting course, “And now they signal.”

“It’s close … yes he did,” Danielson said.

Seven minutes of game time later, the longtime CBS announcers were singing a much different tune.

[The Prowler]

Yup, he gone.

[Tiger Wench]

Tre finished his prep career with nearly 4,500 rushing yards and 64 touchdowns in three years at Park Vista, where his younger brother Chauncey is now a star sophomore receiver.

Prowler, please tell me this kid is on our list somewhere...

[CCTAU]

You guys SUCK!

[Saniflush]

Prowler, please tell me this kid is on our list somewhere...

[Snaggletiger]

We've had a long dry spell of big time D1 talent down here. One guy to keep an eye on from these here Wiregrasses next year is Jamarius Henderson.  5'10" 207 Running back. Had 2,294 yards and 34 TD's for Dale County H.S. Can't recall if they are 3A or 4A.  He took a visit to Alabama during the season and not sure if he's been the Planez yet or not.  He should start getting some big time attention next year.  130 total tackles on D as well.

[Pell City Tiger]

Little known (fabricated) fact about this photo; the honky linebacker in the background stumbling around looking for a soft place to fall down is Jake's 1st cousin, Jack Holland.

No word as to whether he's receiving interest from Auburn.