BUDDYMARTIN: Why The Chris Doerings Of The World Are On An Endangered Species List.

Chris Doering may have been Florida's ultimate walk-on. (SEC Photo)

“It was a completely sacrilegious thought, going anywhere but Florida,” he said. “My father and I were at a Florida-Florida State baseball game my senior year. I saw the Florida State people doing the obnoxious Tomahawk Chop. And I turned to my dad and said, ‘I can’t be a part of this.’”—Chris Doering

When I was a boy, they referred to it as “The Old College Try” – sis, boom bah! It was the purest form of amateurism, a euphemism for hustle and extra effort by the amateurs who played for the love of the game, their school, their fellow students and maybe a chance to get noticed by the cool chicks.

Today, “The Old College Try” has transitioned into a capitalistic frenzy, “going for the gold” -- and not the Olympic kind. There is form of pay for play. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But where is amateurism anymore? Look no further than the non-scholarship walk-ons. Well, what’s left of them.

The entire embodiment of the college football spirit once resided in no purer form than among young men and women who played the game for nothing but the love of it. Without being paid one red cent. For the walk-ons, it was about the joy of competition, the test of wills, the hope one day of becoming a scholarship athlete. Sometimes that would take years. Sometimes it never happened.

I know, because I was one. I had dreams of one day playing quarterback for the Florida Gators, but I never could screw up the courage – or the talent -- to try out. So I walked on as a baseball pitcher back when they had freshman teams and lasted long enough to earn a freshman numeral, or letter. The following year on the varsity, I sat the bench for six games until I counted myself as 15th best pitcher on a staff of 15. I decided my time would be better spent in class where I was about to flunk physical sciences.

The life of a walk-on was difficult. That’s why I have such high regard for those volunteer football players sometimes used as cannon fodder just to keep their dream alive. I don’t have the numbers, but my guess is the failure rate for walks-ons, if they are the uninvited ones, would be more than 50 percent.

The non-scholarship players were once the forgotten commodity of college football, but the Name-Image-Likeness cash flow has altered the landscape. Effectively the whole grant-in-aid model has been transformed as some athletes now get paid by outside streams of income.

At BYU, the entire walk-on program for football has reportedly been privately financed, said by Forbes magazine to be a potential $4M liability. I say bravo for the Cougar program – NIL money well spent.

In this world of obsession over 4- and 5-stars, it’s delightful to see the overlooked, underdog players making difference on occasion.

Spurrier, Tennessee's Josh Heupel, Doering at the special night. (Loren Meadows photo)

Perhaps Florida’s most successful walk-on was Doering, who would be quick to remind you of guys named Kerwin Bell and Louis Oliver as well. Nobody’s dream was bigger than Doering’s, however.

“I grew up here in Gainesville, the son of two Florida grads, my father having taught in the College of Pharmacy throughout my childhood,” Doering recalled. “We went to every Gator sporting event there was – not just football, but basketball, baseball, gymnastics… It meant a lot to me. I had it in my head my entire childhood that I was going to get a scholarship, play football for the Gators and go on to play in the NFL.”

Doering’s dreams of being a heroic football player on a championship Gator team would hold fast, but even though he was an elite, all-state athlete at Gainesville’s P.K. Yonge with excellent academics, he began to be greatly discouraged by the lack of interest from Florida. So discouraged that he began considering a preferred walk-on offer from a hated UF rival. But he just couldn’t stomach the idea.

“It was a completely sacrilegious thought, going anywhere but Florida,” he said. “My father and I were at a Florida-Florida State baseball game my senior year. I saw the Florida State people doing the obnoxious Tomahawk Chop. And I turned to my dad and said, ‘I can’t be a part of this.’”

Keep in mind that he hadn’t yet received any offers. Later he discovered the reason there was no invite from Florida was that his video had been nixed by some low-level grad assistant before Spurrier ever saw it.

As the HBC recalled, “the grad assistant sort of looked at it a little bit and said, ‘this guy needs to go play someplace else.’ I found out about it and said, ‘of course you can walk on here. C’mon on!"

Spurrier, SC's Sean Beamer and Doering at Spurrier's Gridiron Grille (Loren Meadows photo)

Doering will never forget the day he picked up the newspaper to read the roster and, upon scanning over the player thumbnails, finally found a small blurb about himself at the bottom that read: “Lanky walk-on.” He would never forget that moniker.

Ahead were some tough days for the 6-4, 175-pound wide receiver, an easy target for some of the hard-hitting members of the stout 1991 Gator defense. But that deep burning desire to play for his favorite team kept his drive alive.

After a redshirt season, when he had played very little, Chris emerged as a favorite target of Danny Wuerffel. Along came the 1993 game at Kentucky in what would be one of the Gators’ most iconic victories and the famous call of Mick Hubert: “Doering got a touchdown! Doering got a touchdown.” With three seconds left, Wuerffel hit him on a 28-yard scoring strike for a 24-20 win. Florida won another SEC title that year, the first of a four-year streak.

It almost never happened. Oddly, Chris never had any doubt it would, right down the dream of winning a championship. And he went on to play for eight NFL teams because he couldn’t find the word “quit” in his vocabulary, until he did – but still regrets not accepting an invite from the Texans to try for another year.

Instead, he went back to Gainesville, founded Chris Doering Mortgage, then got hired by the SEC Network to work with Dori Nowkhah and Gene Chizik. And he can’t talk about any of his success without kudos for his old coach. He credits just about all of his success on and off the field to Spurrier.

Doering sees it as a blessing that he almost missed the walk-on chance and nobody else offered him, “otherwise I might have taken it and missed out on being a Gator.”

It turned out that the timing was just right, with Spurrier unleashing his string of SEC championships and future Heisman Winner Danny Wuerffel finding his stroke as he began a remarkable four-year stretch from 1993-1996.

“And all he did was catch more touchdown passes than anybody in the SEC,” Spurrier chuckled, “a record that stood for 25 years until the guy from Alabama, DeVonta Smith, broke it two years ago.”

With 17 more scoring catches his senior year, Doering racked up an SEC record 31 career TDs on completions thrown mostly by Wuerffel. Doering laughed as he remembered Spurrier being asked if he was surprised by all of his touchdown receptions.

“And coach Spurrier said, ‘Of course not! I was the one calling those plays!’”

Chris Doering, AKA "Lanky Walk-On"

During the evening at Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille where Chris Doering Mortgage proudly sponsored the presentation of the Football Writers of America Steve Spurrier First-Year Award, Doering was able to show a little gratitude for his coach and his school.

“Not many coaches would give a walk-on a chance over a guy you signed,” Doering said. “It makes you look stupid. But Coach didn’t care. He always said he wanted a guy to play the way he was coached. And I think I did that.”

As it turned out, the Lanky Walk-On didn’t have to wait all that long to earn his scholarship. Today, the real walk-on is on the endangered species list. We’ll probably never see another Chris Doering.