That was in September 1993 and Enis — the bruising 225-pound running back for Mississinawa Valley High — was the most talked about prep player in the state.
Back then, Hale was the Bradford head coach. His team entered the game 0-3, while unbeaten Mississinawa was led by Enis, who, the week prior, had rushed for 440 yards and seven touchdowns against Arcanum.
The game — at the Railroaders’ field behind what’s now the old high school — drew a sell-out crowd. Fans ringed the field and some taunted Enis with nasty epithets.
He was the sole focus of the Bradford team, too, as Hale devised a hard-hitting defense where everyone keyed on him every play.
Enis was severely jarred in the second quarter and he sustained a hard shot on the sidelines in the third that left him crumpled on the ground with three cracked ribs. Carried off on a stretcher, he was taken by Bradford’s rescue squad to a Greenville hospital.
Near the end of the game — which Bradford would win 56-13 — an altercation broke out in the end zone that involved fans, one of whom punched an official. Before it ended, an overzealous young town cop tried arresting Mississinawa coach Dan Cox, but couldn’t get his handcuffs around the 300-pound coach’s wrists.
“I realize it’s time for Nutri System,” Cox would later say.
The coach never did lose weight, and Enis never lost a step. Defying the odds, he played the next weekend, finished the season with 2,764 rushing yards — part of a 5,689-yard, 71-touchdown prep career — and was named Ohio’s Mr. Football. He went on to Penn State glory and became the No. 5 overall pick in the NFL draft.
Bradford, meanwhile, lingered year after year in football obscurity.
And that set the stage for Friday night, Aug. 27 — as the Enis-led Railroaders opened their season with visiting Cincinnati College Prep Academy.
“I guess you can say the story has come full circle,” Enis said.
And what a story it is. It includes tremendous highs, embarrassing lows and, maybe now, the most unlikely of resurrections.
Along the way it’s involved a former exotic dancer; a religious figure many consider a con man; one of the most iconic college football coaches in history; one of the NFL’s most storied franchises; a couple of former wives and four children; a new fiancee; a controversial firing by the Miami County Sheriff’s Office; the leakage of some of the salacious details of that incident to the Ohio High School Athletic Association and the Bradford school board; the community debate that followed; a Railroader team rallying behind Enis; and, finally, a candid, sometimes tearful discussion of all this by Enis himself the other day.
“Sometimes the decisions you make in life are good, sometimes they are bad,” he said. “People always want to look at a life as being picture perfect, but sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Hopefully, though, your life will be like a football game and you get another play to make things right.”
‘Best con man’
Raised along the railroad tracks in Union City, Enis used his hardscrabble life to fuel him on the football field. And although academic problems forced him to attend prep school after high school, he found a loyal suitor in Penn State’s Joe Paterno, and he soon paid dividends for the Nittany Lions.
He derailed Ohio State in 1997, rushing for 211 yards on 23 carries and scoring the winning touchdown in the Lions’ 33-27 triumph.
But Enis’ junior season came to an abrupt halt before the Citrus Bowl when he was found to have taken money and a free suit from an agent, an NCAA violation he was slow to come clean on.
Enis once told me how Paterno had called him the best con man he’d ever met. “And,” Enis had said sadly, “I was.”
Forgoing his senior year, he entered the NFL draft and was the first-round pick of the Chicago Bears. An acrimonious contractual holdout proved even more detrimental when he got hooked up with Austin-based minister Greg Ball, who steered him to a new agent with ties to his church.
Enis lost millions in the contract the guy negotiated. At the same time he met a dancer who had undergone a religious conversion. They married and had two children. With his off-the-field life in a swirl, his on-the-field production lost momentum. He soon was at odds with the media, the fans and some teammates, and after three seasons — and 1,497 yards rushing — his career ended with an injury.
He retired at age 24 and returned back home where he said, “I just kind of let life take its course — through the good and the bad.”
There was another failed marriage, a factory job and — after studying law enforcement at Edison Community College — a two-year stint with the Miami County Sheriff’s Office that ended when he was fired, accused of requesting oral sex from a convenience store employee while in uniform.
Enis — who now lives in Bradford and is engaged to be married to a woman there — denied those claims at his arbitration hearing and again the other day. He said he was trying to get the employee — who passed a lie detector test — to be a drug informant.
There were no criminal charges and — backed by the police union — Enis took his dismissal to an arbitration hearing this past January. In that testimony, it came out that one of Enis’ supervisors hadn’t wanted him hired and later led the investigation of various claims against him. The arbitrator discounted all charges but the one for solicitation.
Miami County sheriff’s officials did not return repeated calls for a comment. In recent months, the 25-page arbitration report has been sent anonymously to the Bradford school board and the Ohio High School Athletic Association.
“We’ve seen it,” said Tim Stried of the OHSAA. “But right now it’s a school issue, not a state issue.”
Controversial hire
Bradford has had 10 head football coaches in the past 20 years and, since going 5-5 in 1993, has had just one winning season. Each of the past three years, the Railroaders have gone 1-9.
Drawn to town by his fiancee, Michelle Bates, Enis began volunteering with the Bradford sports teams a year ago. He coached junior high basketball and track and helped with the running backs on the varsity football team.
When head coach and athletics director Gary Miller left for another job in April, Enis and three others applied for the position.
“We had a committee of eight people from different aspects of the school and after the interviews we presented the board with two names,” Bradford Superintendent Jeff Patrick said.
Enis was not one of them, but the board said it wanted his name added to the list.
“At that point, I felt like the committee members had been slapped in the face and I removed myself from the process,” Patrick said.
Later, the high school principal would resign, in part because of the matter.
But Enis — who said he was up-front about his troubles, including those with the sheriff’s department — did have staunch backers.
Returning players on the team went door to door in his support, got 360 signatures in one night and presented them to the board.
“Coach Enis is an inspiration to all of us,” explained senior linebacker Ryan Dunlevy. “We look up to him.”
Bobby Floyd — president of the Bradford Community Club and now on Enis’ staff — was on the eight-member search committee:
“In my eyes, only one candidate should have had the job and that was Curtis. Last year as an unpaid volunteer, he was the only coach who showed up at every study table for the players and went to the teachers to get the kids’ grades.”
Enis was selected as the coach with a 4-1 vote by the board. Maria Brewer — whose husband used to be the head coach and now is an Enis assistant — cast one of the affirmative votes.
She said the board had seen the arbitration report: “All I’ll say is that he was the best candidate for the job. The kids respect him. You can see a difference in the fans this year and we support him 100 percent.”
Patrick also now lends his backing: “Curtis had nothing to do with the board’s actions. I don’t hold anything against him. I didn’t support him in the beginning, but now that he has the job I do. The most important thing is the kids, and he’s doing a pretty good job with them. They respect him and respond to him.”
‘Small-town guy’
Sounding like a precision marching unit — their cleats clicking off the concrete outside the dressing room — Bradford’s 30 varsity football players came tromping in tight formation toward the field before Friday night’s game.
Dressed completely in black and wearing dark shades, Enis was front and center, his arms interlocked with his two captains, Dunlevy and Ronnie Hoelscher.
“One heartbeat, one play, one family,” Enis would explain. “We’re a family.”
Among the 300 or so fans at the game was Roger Jeffers, who had been Enis’ coach and tutor at Mississinawa and later his long-distance mentor during his early days at Penn State.
“I haven’t talked to Curtis in maybe 10 years,” said Jeffers, now the head of the New Albany/Floyd County (Indiana) parks and recreation department. “When he got in trouble at Penn State, I think he got embarrassed and kind of went into hiding.
“But Curtis is a good kid. Along the way he just made some bad choices and surrounded himself with some bad people. But from everything I’ve heard now he’s really into this.”
When Jeffers surprised Enis outside the dressing room, the Railroaders coach soon was tearful, and the mix of old memories and new reinforced one thing.
“I’m a small-town guy,” Enis said. “And I love Friday nights under the lights.”
That was obvious when his players came out strong against the undermanned Cincinnati team, playing just its second year of football.
When Railroaders freshman quarterback Brandon Wysong connected with James Canan on a 57-yard touchdown pass — which put Bradford up 21-0 in the first quarter — the usually stoic Enis let out a whoop and went running along the sidelines with his index finger upraised.
Later, when a Railroaders lineman committed a personal foul, Enis pulled him to sideline and, face-to-face mask, read him the riot act.
As the final seconds ticked off in what would be a 42-0 Bradford win, the cheerleaders led a little-used chant:
“Less than a minute,
“Who’s gonna win it?
“Roaders are ... Roaders are.”
When the game had ended and the players had finally left the field and Enis was alone, he talked about what had just transpired: “Like I told them before the game, these kids have given me a new life in a lot of things.”
And then, as he walked off toward the darkened fringes of the field — tears in his eyes and the scoreboard still bright with victory — you wondered if he finally had worked his way off that stretcher toward lasting resurrection.
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