A framed haiku that Southern California tailback Petros Papadakis wrote in grade school sits above the living room in his San Pedro, Calif. home.

It's about mountains and ice melting, or so says his father, John. All he knows is, the imagery is vivid. And it was the first thing that revealed to John, who lettered at USC in 1970-71 and became the only Greek ever to be named to Notre Dame's all-opponent squad twice, exactly what kind of a child he was raising.

From there, everything that was normal about his son deteriorated. Not in a bad way, however.

"He's crazy," John said.

Petros agrees. "I'm out of my mind," he said.

What else can you say about a man whose main goal this season is to walk off the field and not be carried off it?

He shaved the budding afro he was sporting earlier this season in preparation for preseason camp. He said he normally does it before camp, so it wasn't superstitious or anything of the sort. Still, he hardly denies looking to the stars sometimes for good fortune.

"Superstitious?" he quipped. "No. Obsessive-compulsive. It's ridiculous."

Some might say the same thing about the fact that he's third on the Trojans' depth chart, behind sophomore Sultan McCullough and junior Malaefou MacKenzie. Papadakis, a senior who runs a 4.4 40-yard dash, has enough strength behind his strides to classify himself as a power back.

"We do have a competitive situation at running back," USC coach Paul Hackett said. "They have really been in a battle to see who gets the playing time. It is our hope that over the first part of the season that one of the three men emerges as our tailback. We want to get as much action as we can out of all three."

Sometimes, though, it seems Petros would rather run his mouth than run with the football. But when he does, everyone listens.

"He has a linguistic ability he uses artistically," John said, trying his best to sound like his verbose son. "Petros is very outgoing. He trusts his instincts with people. I'm probably a bit more conservative.

"He has a gift for leadership because of the magnetism of his personality and genuine love of people."

Around the time he wrote that Haiku, he started reading. And he didn't stop. Great philosophers, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, whatever he could get his hands on.

"I started reading, man, when I was really young," he said, his voice barely trailing off one word before he starts the next. "I was inside a lot. Real bad asthma. Underdeveloped lungs. Couldn't walk straight. All screwed up."

He had even more time to read last year, when a foot injury sidelined him for the entire season. The injury, although in a different location on his body, was eerily similar to the ones his brother Taso suffered while playing with the Trojans in the mid-1990s.

"My brother -- two reconstructed ACLs, reconstructed wrist," Petros said. "Now my foot has been reconstructed, so I know a little bit about that."

The rehabilitation gave Petros an excuse to perfect his on-air image. Because of his vivacity, he's the most sought after Trojan player for personality interviews. In fact, John said, movie producers have been calling about his son.

"But," Petros' father said, "he's not allowed to do that" because he is still in college. When his son's not playing football, he's needed to help run Papadakis Taverna, a local San Pedro Greek restaurant run by the family. John opened it when he was 22, and it's thrived ever since.

"If you get Petros as a waiter, you'll spend half the night laughing and the other half eating," John said. "When you're not eating, you're laughing. He listens. He sizes you up, then lets you have it."

"Get the rack of lamb," Petros said. "You can't go wrong there."

Rod Perry, a Penn State wide receiver who once attended USC, knows Petros quite well. In fact, Perry said, the two were close friends. Even 3,000 miles away, he added, Petros' charisma doesn't escape the Nittany Lions' junior.

"Petros is a very eccentric person, that's the best way to describe him," Perry said. "He's very deep. He has a lot of knowledge on things that are rooted deep inside. He's a very good person, and a very deep person."