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 "I'm honored my own kids got to know him," said Gordon Tech coach Bill Jeske. "He taught all of us that bad is never as bad as you think it is."Squires owned one of those stories that crush even the most resilient kids: raised by his grandmother in a tough South Side neighborhood, then shuttled between shelters in three states, always stuck in the turbulent wake of a mother battling demons of her own.
By the time he landed at the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls to begin eighth grade, he had mastered exactly one subject: "How to be out on the streets by myself."
A year later, he went out for football.
"One of the first practices, I knocked a guy over and he got up more excited than I was. He said,
'Dude, you're huge! You can do this!'" Squires recalled.
He is seated at a library table inside Gordon Tech, a Catholic prep school, wearing a white shirt and tie. He unclenches his hands and runs them over the polished surface, as if searching for a memory.
"I liked it right away," Squires said finally. "It was one place you could take out all your frustrations without getting into trouble."
Four years have passed since that day and by major college standards, he's not "huge"
- at least not for a defensive end. He's 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds leaving a buffet, more sculpted and much stronger, but not that much bigger than he was as a freshman.
By the end of his sophomore year, Squires was starting on the varsity and getting letters of interest from Notre Dame, Northwestern, Boston College, UCLA and a half-dozen other big-time programs. Several are still tacked to a bulletin board outside his room at Mercy Home, a long-term residential facility for kids in trouble.
Next came stops at several top recruiting camps, playing alongside and against the best prospects in the nation. That's when he learned how far he still had to go. So Squires returned home and started getting up at 4:15 every morning to catch the 4:45 train, then a bus across town to begin lifting weights by 6. Most nights, he didn't get back until 8:30 p.m.
"When Tory got here, he was big but not athletic," recalled Torono Moore, a program manager at Mercy Home. "I moved him in. He was like a lot of kids that come here, only he had this ... persistence about him.
"He always wanted to be going forward. He was like that commercial, you know, the Energizer Bunny," Moore said with a chuckle. "He'd take a licking and keep on ticking."
That perseverance is how Squires became one of 30 semifinalists for this season's High School Rudy Award, named for former Notre Dame reserve Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger, whose inspirational tale became a best-selling movie.
"The common thread is that they never gave up," said CJ Edmonds, whose Trusted Sports organization administers the award. "They're the kids we can't imagine ever making it onto the field. A few lost limbs, some lost their hearing, others, like Tory, had to do it without the support of parents.
"What we try to measure instead of their stats," he added, "is the size of their hearts."
College football coaches might be sympathetic, but they're hard-boiled when it comes to scholarships. Squires is on the edge of qualifying academically, and he's retaking the ACT exam in a few days. From a football standpoint, though, his size makes him tough to project as a defensive end and nobody disputes his skills are still very raw.
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"He's a diamond in the rough," Jeske said, "I can't tell you how many times I've rewinded tape of him making one play or another ... seeing two blockers hold him, then his arm coming out pulling down a running back like he was taking something down off a shelf.
"I could see him as a tight end, maybe a linebacker, but he's got a frame you could stack weight on and a motor that doesn't stop. His upside is unbelievable."
The handful of schools still pursuing Squires include Illinois, South Carolina, Western Michigan and Ball State. When he was younger, he got through the darkest days by vowing he'd have the power some day to shape them. He lost three friends to violence along the way, but now is close enough to see that promise fulfilled.
"Sure, I'd like to play professionally," he said. "But if it doesn't happen, I could see myself being an accountant, or going into sports management. You tell yourself that over and over when you're a kid there's light at the end of the tunnel. But you don't really know.
"Now," he paused, "I do."
On Senior Day, the coaches, teammates, counselors and teachers who helped Squires arrive at that juncture looked on with a well-earned sense of accomplishment. Standing alongside him, basking in all those cheers was 73-year-old Willa White, the grandmother who taught him never to give up.
"It's her words that are always rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind," he said. "Because she knows better than anyone what I've been through,"
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org
[Associated Press; By JIM LITKE]
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