Show Stopper

DURHAM, N.C. - Much has been made of the vastly improved conditioning of Duke's players under head coach David Cutcliffe. But Thaddeus Lewis was familiar with conditioning, and not just the physical variety, long before Cutcliffe's arrival or his own pursuit of a degree in sociology.

Lewis grew up in a rough part of Opa-locka north of Miami, Fla. Drug dealers haunted street corners; the lure of a quick buck or a temporary escape from reality were omnipresent. By the time Thaddeus Calvin Lewis Jr. reached puberty, his older brother and early role model had departed for college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His father was long gone, shot to death on a Miami street when his youngest son and namesake was around 18 months old.

Yet Thaddeus Lewis' most pronounced misbehavior as a youth, his major act of defiance, was surreptitiously riding his bicycle farther from home than his mother allowed. That's it. "He didn't give me a hard time at all," Renee Holmes said. "Thaddeus was the kind of kid who didn't want to get in trouble."

From the age of five Lewis "kept busy," as he put it, playing sports and getting an education. Throughout, Holmes challenged her son to consider a reality larger than the games he played.

"My question to him was, 'What would you do if the ball was deflated?'" she recalled. As long as he maintained good grades, he earned the privilege of playing basketball, baseball and football, his favorite. "That was all I knew, so it was pretty hard to get caught up in that fast lifestyle," Lewis said. "My mom pretty much wouldn't let us go out in the streets."

Sports also provided male influences missing at home. Lewis' mother "told me there are some things that a man can teach you that a woman can't teach you," he said. Through Lewis' formative years, Little League and public school coaches instilled toughness, a trait that certainly stands the quarterback in good stead now.

"He's fearless," Cutcliffe said of a senior fast approaching many of the school's most significant career passing records. "If a guy won't keep his eyes downfield, he's not worth a durn. I can sit and watch tape with you and show you a bunch of them that won't do it. He will. He's very, very courageous, tough, fearless."

Well, not entirely fearless.

T-Lew, as he's called by friends, "hated" his mother's standard response to misbehavior, his discomfort intensified by being dispatched to fetch the belt wielded to exact punishment. "She was tough," Lewis, grown to 6-1 and 215 pounds, said of his 5-2 mother. "When I came home late, I got a whupping. If I brought home a bad grade, I got a whupping. I lied to my mom, I got a whupping. So I didn't do it anymore."

Conditioning yielded similar benefits on the football field soon after Lewis, a true freshman from Hialeah Miami Lakes High School, led the Blue Devils to the line of scrimmage against Richmond on Sept. 2, 2006.

"My first play, I called the play, it was a post-dig read," Lewis said of his collegiate debut. "By the time I called the snap I forgot who had the post (long route) and who had the dig (short). In the back of my mind, I had never been hit in a college game and I wondered how hard the defenders hit because they were bigger than me."

Lesson learned: Lewis threw the ball, got hit, and quickly had his fears and curiosity satisfied. "It was not as bad as you thought, not as bad as it looks on TV," he said of being hit.

Since then, the genial Lewis has started all but one game in which he played, blossoming as a signal-caller despite injuries, variable support on the field, two different head coaches and three different offensive coordinators. The 2008 second team All-ACC quarterback made major strides last year, substantially improving his completion percentage (.620) and his ratio of touchdown tosses to turnovers (15-6). Lewis enters this season ranked fourth in Duke history - and will challenge for school supremacy - in career passing attempts (1,061), completions (603), passing yardage (6,735), passing touchdowns (47), and total offense (6,245). He also projects to finish among the ACC's all-time top 10 in most of those categories.

What's more, Lewis' effectiveness figures to mount this season as he masters Cutcliffe's offense, communicates better with teammates, and learns to read, counter and exploit defenses from the moment he exits a huddle.

"He can make all the throws," said Cutcliffe, noted for developing quarterbacks. "If there's one critique of him a year ago, it was inconsistency at times with timing and accuracy, particularly against some of our better opponents. Knowledge should allow him to take that next step...Boy, I love him. He can be a really special player."

Lewis originally chose Duke over South Florida, Texas Christian and Pittsburgh, eager to get away from home and to contribute to an athletic work-in-progress - the resurrection of a once-proud football program. "I want to leave this place better than I found it when I came," he said of Duke, which won as many games in '08 as in the previous four seasons combined. "I feel like it's my duty to do what I have to do this year to help the team be successful."

A comparable sense of responsibility sparked Lewis' interest in starting a group home for boys in his old neighborhood, payback for community generosity he enjoyed as a youngster. His mother finds that impulse, like his physical appearance, eminently familiar. "You have a good heart, like your dad," Renee Holmes told her son, to whom she remains close.

Not that Lewis is ready to hang up his football pads. He will graduate this December, freeing him to prepare next spring for National Football League auditions. Joining the NFL is a dream he's nurtured since he began playing the game, sometimes in the street in front of his house.

A pro career might, incidentally, provide a long-delayed opportunity to settle a personal score. In his third college game senior Aaron Rouse, a 6-4 Virginia Tech safety, delivered a late, savage shot to the Duke quarterback's head that would have made the pre-Richmond horror film in Lewis' mind. The resulting concussion sent Lewis to the sidelines, where he cried tears of anger and frustration as the team doctor and trainer refused to allow a return to action.

"Hopefully I can catch him on the next level," a smiling Lewis said of Rouse, currently a member of the Green Bay Packers.

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