Just plain Big.(Leonard Davis, offensive tackle for University of Texas football team)

From his dimension (6-5 7/8, 370), to his family (21 brothers and sisters), to his potential in the NFL, everything about Texas offensive tackle Leonard Davis is

There is a house, a simple white farmhouse, high on the hill in central Texas ... and immediately outside the front door, not 20 feet from the edge of the porch, are endless rows of headstones, each of them flowing downward and to the east like a thousand granite teardrops.

Here is where Prezell Thompson is laid to rest. Mae Ola Cox. Celester Carter. Delma Moning. PFC George Harper-U.S. Army WWII. And the hundreds and hundreds of others buried under the tombstones fashioned from the pink stone unearthed from the Texas Hill Country and then finally taken to this hidden town called Wortham.

As the the last of his parents' 22 children, long before he was predicted to be one of the first 10 picks in the NFL draft, Leonard Davis would stand on the front porch and stare at all the ghosts in his yard. It was as if they were stretching from the place where his family has lived for over a half-century, stretching all the way to Tehuacana Creek, past the railroad tracks, past Porter Chapel, Central Presbyterian, First Baptist and First Methodist and the restaurant known as Nan-Nan's Place.

Davis' parents were widow and widower when they married-and his father, L.A., brought 11 kids to the marriage, his mother, Sammie Lee, brought 10. They had one child together: Leonard Davis.

His father, a mighty preacher at the clapboard Primitive Baptist Church, had been rocked to his core when he peered into the crib one day. The infant had somehow pushed himself up, craned his neck and fixed his father with an unrelenting gaze. It was something the man of God would never forget. The preacher had learned long ago to coax life from the land, to survive as a farmer in the middle of unforgiving Texas--and to never ignore the signs. There was something about his last son. "I think the boy had a special message," the preacher told the boy's mother.

And the mother saw it, too. She told people that the boy was unnaturally quiet. He was quiet in a way that ran completely counter to the way the boy was physically maturing. At the age of 3, he clambered into the seat of the family tractor and was allowed to drive it across the 160 acres of corn. He was a 300-pound waterboy in the seventh grade. By the time he became a teenager, he was well over 6 feet and 50 pounds shy of 400. In awe of the big child from the gigantic Davis family, people began to simply call him "Big."