Dave Hyde: For Malachi Toney and mom, the good story is just beginning
· Yahoo Sports
Toni Toney knows her family role. It’s to have all the right answers. Maybe your mom had the same job with some of the same questions.
“Mom, why can’t I stay up later?”
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“Mom, can I watch this show?”
“Mom, where should I go to school?”
Toney was no different with her five children, though the questions are different with Malachi, her fourth child and second boy — “the baby boy,” as mom says of the University of Miami star receiver. “That’s what I call him. My baby.”
It’s Mother’s Day, and you can go through the South Florida sports pages to find a mom’s impact on the bigger names from any age or angle. Tennis legend Chris Evert won everything in that sport, but didn’t hesitate when asked about her biggest accomplishment: “Being a mother.”
Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo was taken by his mother, Marilyn Blount, from the rough streets of New Jersey to the backwoods of North Carolina for a better life.
“I’m nowhere without my mother,” Adebayo said.
Coco Gauff’s mom, Candi, over saw her daughter’s homeschooling to help her tennis. Heat legend Dwyane Wade saying his energy came from his mother, Jolinda, a preacher. Jimmy Johnson realized the light went out on his coaching fire when he stood over his mother’s coffin and knew he wanted to spend more time with family.
Here’s the thing about most such sports names we meet: They’re finished products. Adults in careers. Stars, in most cases, if we get to know them. Malachi Toney is 18. He might be as big a name as there is in college football right now. But he’s just a college sophomore.
Yet there he was the other day, leading a clinic for a few hundred youth at the same Washington Park he played on just a few years ago. An 18 year old giving back? Advising a group of hopeful players, “It’s all about the work?”
Someone taught him right — or is teaching him, present tense, because he was just college football’s big freshman name. Toni, who raised him as a single mom, knew Malachi was different from the time Malachi stepped on a football field at age 7. Everyone did.
She didn’t even want him playing football then, because he was so small. But his local youth team needed a quarterback.
“I’ll play it,” Malachi said.
It needed a defensive back, too.
“I’ll play it,” he said.
Mom didn’t try to hold him back. When that park closed and she needed a new one for her two sons, she found Washington Park for them. Malachi wasn’t sure he wanted to play there, but she knew this was a good place. Wasn’t finding good answers her role?
“My philosophy to him was, to be blunt, ‘Go take someone’s spot,’” Toni said. “I said, ‘Outwork him.’ That’s what he did, too.”
That’s what he’s always done. He’s the first to show up early for Hurricanes practices — even after his stellar freshman season for the 6 a.m. practices this spring.
“Watching my mom get up early for work — if she can do it, why can’t I?” Malachi told reporters when asked.
That brought tears from mom, a postal worker who starts each day at 5 a.m. She didn’t know he thought anything of her early hours until that comment. But her navigating his football youth in big and small ways is part of their story.
They have a word for the map she’s drawn up: The Blueprint. “Follow the blueprint,” she’ll tell him.
She had her role in that. It included mom not just being the organizing mother for youth teams but getting involve in the park. She became an official, overseeing the park’s meetings and representing it before the city commission.
The Blueprint included picking the right high school. She learned from the process of Malachi’s older brother, Monroe, who just joined the Hurricanes this winter as a defensive back.
“Monroe wanted to go to the high school of a coach he knew,” Toni said. “I let him play there. Then, the coach left and it wasn’t the same.”
Two years later, when Malachi was ready for high school, mom researched private schools, academics, coaches and football programs. Malachi attended Plantation American Heritage. But that wasn’t the only football conversation they had. He’d been a quarterback all his youth but now decided to play receiver.
“OK, let’s talk about it,” she said.
It came down to size. How tall did he need to be? Who was the tallest NFL quarterback? Malachi, now 5 foot 11, wasn’t the prototype quarterback but fit at receiver. His mother ran track in high school, but Malachi’s speed and athleticism came from his father, Antonio Brown, a receiver and return specialist who played in the Canadian Football League and three years in the NFL (the other Antonio Brown from Miami played for 12 NFL seasons with Pittsburgh, New England and Tampa Bay.)
Next came the decision to leave high school a year early, at 17.
“It just made sense to us,” mom said.
They discussed three ideas about college: Opportunity to play, exposure of his name and development. Miami checked all boxes. She gave him the same advice in sending him to college that she did at Washington Park: "Go take someone’s job."
“I went to every practice that first (training camp),” she said. “Why? Because I needed to see what he’s doing with my own eyes. I don’t need to hear what anyone said. I needed to see because that’s my son and so I’ll go every day.
“I was in my car on my way to the last fall practice, and he texted me. ‘Congratulations, you have earned a starting position as slot receiver at the University of Miami.’ That was my last practice. I cried. I told him, ‘Congratulations, you keep your head down and keep the same work ethic.’ ”
They’ve kept the same mindset, too, in the NIL era. Toney’s agent, Justin Giangrande, helped organize the Washington Park clinic. They also had a turkey giveaway last Thanksgiving at the park.
“It takes a community,” Toni said. “And this park is part of our community.”
He’s 18. Just 18. The best part of that is the good story mom helped script is just starting.
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