LEVITTOWN, Pa. -- Not just the body, but the soul was similarly sculpted and shaped over the years.
Up until the first grade, he held people's faces steady so he could read their lips, the congestion in his ears rendering him completely deaf at times. In the fifth grade, he watched one of his sisters die of leukemia. He was the union organizer in his day-care center and Catholic elementary school, the athletic dynamo on a track and football field. Yet he wanted something beyond the hard-scrabble high school a couple of blocks walk from his home: The $4,000-a-year, mostly-white, Conwell-Egan Catholic to where he was the only kid from his neighborhood to bus the 2-mile ride.
In the softer division of a Philadelphia Catholic League given passing notice by major-college football recruiters, he dazzled at tailback and cornerback in a Conwell-Egan program that in 31/2 seasons won 26 games, its sum total of the previous decade and a half. Then, as recently as a year ago today, amid a recruiting disappointment in which Maryland summarily dropped him, he was helping to nurse back to health the big brother and mentor, Charles Tiggett, seriously injured in a motorcycle accident.
To become a freshman sensation at West Virginia University, Steve Slaton has come far.
Fast, too.
Yet that was part of his makeup from the beginning.
"From the time I carried him, he was just always on the move," recalled his mother, Juanita Tiggett-Slaton, motioning to her belly. "The doctor tried to find his heartbeat with the stethoscope, and Steven kept jumping around. The doctor said, 'Wow, you got a track star in there.' He was a handful, oh my God."
Photo courtesy of the Slaton familyWVU's Steve Slaton
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Big East Roundup: Rutgers bowl eligible after win
Team: Connecticut.
Record: 4-3, 1-2 in Big East.
Rank: Unranked.
Last week: Lost to Rugters, 26-24, Oct. 22.
Coach: Randy Edstall is in his seventh season with the Huskies. He is 36-40.
Points for: 32.
Points against: 14.6.
Series: WVU, 1-0; WVU won previous meeting, 31-19, October 13, 2004.
Comment: Connecticut quarterback needs more production out of a running game that has been stalled the past couple of weeks. The Huskies rushed for 97 yards on 33 carries last week against Rutgers.
Injuries have hurt the defense, the once top-ranked unit in the country. It showed last week against Rutgers, which rushed for 238 yards on 42 carries and notched 500 yards of offense.
He didn't like to be held as a baby, perhaps a precursor to someone who doesn't like to be tackled as a tailback -- to wit, his 417 yards and seven total touchdowns in the past three games leading to 18th-ranked West Virginia's home date Wednesday with Connecticut. The same as those first three games as a Mountaineers regular, he wasn't easy to catch as a child, either. In fact, the Slatons stationed family members at opposite sides once they unbuckled the car seat and unfettered the bottled rocket.
"I was giving my parents headaches running around," their baby boy remembered the other day.
"Charles would have to tackle him to catch him," the mother said. "And he was getting faster and faster."
You don't have to tell the past three foes that. He riddled third-ranked Virginia Tech for 90 yards on just 11 carries, including a long-distance pickup of a fumble that saw him swerve back to the Mountaineers' goal line for a spectacular rush of 4 official yards, later followed by a 44-yard romp that secured his hold on the West Virginia position known as superback. He started the next week at Rutgers and rushed for 139 yards on 25 carries on a rainy day when his cousin and reserve Scarlet Knights defensive back Doug Billingsley kept scolding gloomy teammates, "I told you to wrap him up." He astounded in the triple-overtime victory against Louisville when he collected a Big East-record six touchdowns, rushed for 188 yards on 31 carries, and played all 90 offensive snaps -- "without a 'Loaf,' " without taking a play off, marveled coach Rich Rodriguez.
This from a 5-foot-10, 185-pound teenager who was the team's lesser-acclaimed tailback recruit compared to everybody's All-American Jason Gwaltney, the No. 4 in a four-tailback rotation that got him but eight rushes the first four games, the freshman who was given room to run only after fumbles by deposed Mountaineers starters Jason Colson and Pernell Williams.
Befittingly, the steadfast and sturdy northeast Philadelphia kid once dubbed Superman in high school quickly has found a way to become the Mountaineers' superback, quite possibly in every sense.
Slaton's place
The Bristol Township section of Levittown is suburbs and strip malls, taverns and check-cashing stores, Irish-Catholic Philadelphia accents and Spanish spoken here. It's a locale stuck in the middle, one exit from the Philadelphia Park horse track and 9 miles from New Jersey's capital of Trenton and 23 miles from Center City Philadelphia.
A left onto Green Lane, a right onto Bristol Emellie Road, a merge onto New Falls, a left onto Wistar, and you're at the beige-brick Conwell-Egan, a school that opened as all-boys Egan in 1966 and merged with all-girls Conwell in '93. Across the road, a testament to state vs. church, sits the sprawling campus of the 5-year-old, sleek Bucks County Technical High School. Conwell-Egan, by contrast, has trailers for classrooms, security cameras and barbed-wire atop its practice fields fence. Even though some students depart the enormous school parking lot in luxury cars, Slaton didn't arrive on any easy street.
He was the last of the six kids of Carl Slaton and Juanita Tiggett-Slaton. The father brought four children to the new marriage and the mother one. Together, they sprang Steven Slaton onto the world and, as the burly father said of his blended brood with a chuckle, "After him, we didn't need anymore."
The older siblings doted on their baby brother: Carla, now 38, Carl Jr., 31, and particularly LaShanda, 30, and Charles, 25, who played rough with the boy 11 and 6 years younger. There was that hearing problem, though, and the family never could get firm answers why he read lips, mispronounced bloves for gloves, and so on. When a specialist was summoned to remove his adenoids and insert tubes to drain the fluid from the his ears, Slaton discovered that one young relative actually could speak after all.
Natalie, 20 years older, was the sister who drove him to Sesame Place or the local park. When Carl quit driving a truck after 25 years on garbage detail and then over-the-road hauling, he and his wife -- an engineering planner with Lockheed Martin for 23 years -- started a home heating oil business in the basement of grandmother's house, with a weakening Natalie serving as secretary and baby sitter. She succumbed to the leukemia soon after, and the fifth-grader walked down the street to thank a neighbor lady for attending his sister's funeral. The mother noticed how her baby boy became "more sentimental."
Steve and Charles grew closer still. "Felix and Oscar," she called the neat Charles and his disassemble-everything brother. The baby loved to bake cakes, cook roasts and whip together deviled eggs he would largely eat himself. He also relished going to Charles' football games at Ranconcas Valley High and baseball games at Trenton State (now The College of New Jersey).
"He looks up to him a tremendous amount," Conwell-Egan football coach Kevin Kelly said.
Charles Tiggett became such a presence at Screaming Eagles practices and games that he morphed into a volunteer coach. Mostly, it was a variation of the theme that started in midget football, when Charles would cue up father Carl's videotapes and show Steve and many of the Levittown Tigers what they did wrong.
The little brother, who chose Conwell-Egan instead of nearby Truman High, didn't err much. After only one junior-varsity game -- freshmen were prohibited by rules from practicing with the varsity until school opened -- Kelly came up to head coach John Quinn and gushed about the new kid. Quinn spotted Slaton about a half-dozen carries before he telephoned the parents to seek permission to start their freshman son in the fourth game. Slaton rushed for a school-record 270 yards and scored five touchdowns in his first start, another precursor to his early Mountaineers moments. It was the launch of a record-setting career, his 6,002 yards ranking third in Philadelphia area football history, just ahead of Detroit Lions tailback Kevin Jones.
"Didn't go out and drink any," said Rob Heller, one of his guards. "All about the football team."
When Maryland coaches recruited two local tailbacks and cut Slaton adrift last October after he already gave his verbal commitment, "he was determined to prove them wrong," his father said. His mother called it a vendetta. West Virginia kept talking about playing tailback while Boston College and Wisconsin wanted him as a cornerback. Even when other schools sent the family stories about the ballyhooed Gwaltney heading to Morgantown, Slaton was undeterred. He came to campus July 3 and got an early start with summer conditioning and classes. "I don't think all the hype [about the ailing Gwaltney makes a difference]," he said. "We're just performing now."
Stevie Wonderful
What helped him to learn the spread offense and move into the lineup must faster than star-encrusted predecessors was his "mature outlook," said Bill Kirelawich, the Mountaineers' defensive line coach who recruited him. "You can sit and have a pretty mature conversation with him -- you don't have to deal with Nintendo football."
It's not just the soul that makes the man, but the body on which he spent hours in his school's solitary-confinement-sized weight room and the feet that carried him to the fifth-best indoor long jump and sprint times. Said math teacher and former Conwell-Egan football aide Bill Jackson, "If he's in the PIAA, he wins the state."
Mountaineers linebacker Boo McLee took one look at the unheralded recruit in summer conditioning, and told him: You are going to be a great running back. "I hope he remembers that. His feet are unbelievably fast, man. As a freshman, coming here and doing all this ..."
Slaton was Walter Camp national and Big East Conference player of the week after his 208 combined yards and six scores against Louisville. His photo was in Sports Illustrated. A story about him went up on the Alumni in the News board at his old school. The front announcement board at Conwell-Egan reads: Congratulations Steve Slaton '05.
Who saw success coming so fast? Certainly, Steve Slaton didn't. "No, not really. It's only my first year. I'm just happy to get the ball in my hands." Then, he shrugged.
"Nobody will outwork Steve," said Kelly.
"Some guys go into the weight room, I call them politicians -- all they're doing is talking," added Jackson. "Steve goes in there, he's working. He comes out soaked with sweat, and he didn't wet himself."
"I wasn't too sure; I went to a Division III school, and I had a view of a D-I player pretty much being an NFL player," continued big-brother Charles, who calls Steve during games to offer advice and e-mails every other day. "I knew he was good, I just didn't know if he was big enough or good enough." It was the 44-yard run against Virginia Tech where he saw the body language from his brother that said I can play at this level.
Charles added, "I keep trying to remind him: It's the same show, just a bigger stage. He's ready now."
First Published: October 30, 2005, 4:00 a.m.
