For Better Or Worse 
By Roy Cummings | The Tampa Tribune

TAMPA - There were times when Earnest Graham and his girlfriend, Alicia, would hop in the car and just drive until they couldn't stand to drive any more.

That's what you do when the money is all gone and home has become a $49-a-night room at Howard Johnson's. You escape from the place you know you have to come back to and when you're far enough away from it that you finally feel good again, you stop and you hold each other and you talk.

You talk about the weather or family or the future, anything but the mess you're in because talking about it isn't going to change it. Talking isn't going to bring back the money you lost or the man who stole it from you, the man you trusted with every penny you had in the world, the one you called friend.

"He was acting kind of like my manager," Graham remembered as he prepared for today's game against Tennessee and his first start as an NFL running back. "I was young, right out of college. One day, the money just disappeared. Then he disappeared. It was everything I had. I couldn't pay the rent."

Truth be known, Graham could have paid the rent. He was working some odd jobs while he nursed the shoulder injury that earned him his release from the Bucs in the summer of 2003. Alicia was working in the bursar's office at the University of Tampa.

Together, they were making enough to cover the rent on the small apartment they were sharing, but paying the rent meant going hungry and that wasn't going to happen. So home became that Howard Johnson's on Fowler Avenue or the Extended Stay on Hillsborough Avenue, anywhere Earnest and Alicia could find an affordable rate.

"We'd stay a few nights in one place, then maybe a night or two in another - wherever we could find a good deal," Alicia said. "Sometimes we'd just pick a place to sort of change things up a bit.

"That's why we took those drives. Sometimes we just had to get away from that hotel. We'd ride out to the causeway or somewhere and just sit and talk and try to clear our heads."

Surely you can picture them, sitting on the beach, arm in arm, the sun setting across the gulf. They look like young lovers, don't they?

"We loved hard back then," Alicia said.

Now look closer. There's more to the picture. It's right there in front of them, tangled up in their legs.

That's Aiyana. She's a little more than a year old. She has no idea what her mother and father are going through or why they're all at the beach tonight. It's better that way, of course. Earnest and Alicia aren't sure they could have explained it even if they had to.

"We probably could have been all right on our own," Alicia said, "but we had our daughter and she needed to be in day care and she needed Pampers and she needed to be fed, so we had to look at Plan B."

Plan A was every young boy's dream. For a while, Graham was living it. Despite being ignored in the draft following his senior season at Florida, he had signed with the Bucs as a free agent in April 2003. For the better part of the following summer, it looked as if he would make the team.

But then Graham hurt his shoulder in an exhibition game against the Dolphins on Aug. 8. He hung around for a few more weeks, hoping he'd get better fast, but he was cut on Aug. 22 after reaching an injury settlement that paid him a few thousand dollars.

That's when the trouble started. Graham entrusted the money he received in that injury settlement to his friend, the one who was supposed to be acting as his money manager. To this day, Graham still has no idea where that guy or the money wound up.

"Sometimes, when you trust people, you get disappointed," Graham said.

Alicia didn't disappoint him. Not for a second. Graham half expected her to pack up her things, grab their daughter, head back to Gainesville and leave the mess to him. Not Alicia. She was in for the long haul, in for better or worse. And she'd seen worse.

She grew up with a single mother, so she knew tough times. She knew what it was like to wake up and not know whether breakfast would be on the table that morning or where dinner was going to come from that night. She had faced adversity before. This was just another battle.

So off she went to work in the morning, then all over Tampa at night, bouncing from hotel to hotel, her daughter in tow. For more than two months, they did that. Then another friend of Earnest's - a real friend, a former college roommate - offered them the back room of the place he was sharing with three of his buddies.

Alicia's still not sure which was better, those hotel rooms or that place with the four guys living in the rooms up front. She put up with it, though. To say she did it with a smile on her face would be pushing it. But she refused to make a bad situation worse.

"She was right there the whole time," Earnest said. "And she never gave me that look or anything or made me feel bad about what happened, which is really something. I mean, a situation like that, you need to get it together. A situation like that, that's just not normal, man."

It took Earnest, Alicia and Aiyana four months to get back to normal. In the end, it was the Bucs who helped get them there. Earnest's shoulder healthy again, the Bucs signed Graham to their practice squad on Dec. 3.

They cut him again on Dec. 9, but the $4,000 he got for that week on the practice squad and the money he got after signing with them for good a month later allowed them to move out of his buddy's back room and stay out of the hotels.

Four years later, Alicia is still around. She's not Graham's girlfriend anymore. She's now his wife and the mother of his two children, Earnest Myles coming along a couple of years ago. She doesn't necessarily look back fondly on those long drives to anywhere and the nights spent in hotels, but she appreciates what it's done for her, Earnest and their family.

"I think what happened to us had to happen to us," she says. "Our eyes were opened to a lot of things by that experience. I mean, we learned a lot about each other back then. It was tough, but everything Earnest did he did with his family in mind. He's a very faith-driven man, a very patient man."

The Bucs certainly can attest to that. For four years, the former star running back for the Gators patiently has played a much lesser role than he had hoped for. He's played on special teams and played understudy to Cadillac Williams and Michael Pittman, but he's never complained about his role. After what he went through at the start of his career, he's just happy to be playing football.

"Sure, you want to be at the top of your position," Graham said. "But I understand the business and I've progressed and improved as a player so I've been fine with it.

"I mean, I never thought I should be the guy playing in front of Cadillac or anything like that. So I just played my role. If I didn't play my role, I wouldn't even be here."

Graham's role changes today. He'll start the game and carry the load the injured Williams and Pittman usually carry. Today, the cheers will be for him. Alicia will be among those cheering.

"I can barely contain myself," she said.

Earnest is a little more calm than Alicia. But only a little. Those nights in the hotels, those drives he took with Alicia, they were investments in a dream, the best part of which is finally coming true.

"This is different," said Graham, who has carried the ball plenty and carried it well during exhibition games. "The sense of urgency is different.
"I mean, you actually know you're going to be getting the majority of the carries. It's finally happening for me. I'm finally starting. It's finally my time."