The Heisman candidate and ESPN the Magazine cover boy grew up idolizing the kid that can't do what he could because of a rare and unexplained disease.

It's odd. The golden boy is being mentioned with the all-time greats. Shouldn't he, in turn, mention the all-time greats? That's how it's supposed to work. That's good old boy protocol.

But when Ohio State freshman Maurice Clarett is asked what running back he emulated as a young boy, he says straight away, "Deryck Toles, their outside linebacker." By their, he means the Penn State Nittany Lions, who will try to stop Clarett this weekend at the Horseshoe in Columbus.

Toles was a great high school running back -- 1,127 yards as a junior -- but Clarett wanted and needed more than that from an idol. Football is just a vehicle for them, a vehicle out of a place you're not supposed to escape. A jeep for the mountains. Or maybe a helicopter for the jungle. That's what they needed.

Both are out, for now, for better or worse or just for the sake of finding something different, not necessarily better. Better to everyone else, yes. But running away to find the life that everyone else tells you to live isn't what these guys are all about.

For most people, it's probably a tough correlation to make. There is the best freshman running back ever to touch a college football field and there is a backup linebacker limited to 30 plays a game and light work in practice because of a rare enzyme disorder that nobody has explained very well yet.

The first may leave before he's supposed to, may run right into the NFL after his freshman year as the first player ever to do so. The other will graduate with a degree and try to make a go of it in the business world. Yet the understanding will never leave or change and in their own revelations after the fact, they will be equal.

No one else will see that, but it will be the only truth that matters to these two.

It's the only one possible.

-- -- --

In that ESPN article, Maurice Clarett tells of 10 friends he buried. He goes into detail about two men shot in his front yard; one while he was playing football in the street, the other while he was sitting on the porch with his family.

Toles cannot delve into these things or at least chooses not to.

"Yeah, I've seen stuff like that," he says, "a lot of stuff like that. Nothing I would want to put out there."

Which is to say that he could, but that it wouldn't prove anything because you have to live it to understand it.

"There are just people doing the wrong thing," he continues. "There were a lot of people doing stupid things, things that shouldn't be done. Whether it's pushing drugs, going to jail, people getting killed. It was just everyday life for us."

That's the thing. Nothing sticks out from the ordinary.

Toles and Clarett were together at Warren Harding High School in Warren, Ohio for a year. In 1998, Toles was a senior and Clarett a freshman. Both would eventually injure their ankles and see limited playing time that season. Toles looked forward to Penn State, Clarett to future seasons.

Looking forward was always key.

A few months prior to that football season, the two had met for the first time at a track meet.

"A coach brought him up to me," Toles says. "He was saying how he wanted to be the next great tailback and about what he wanted to do in high school and college ... Maurice was always ahead of the game."

Toles moved out of Columbus to Warren to be with his grandmother in eighth grade because his mother was caught up with drugs.

At the beginning of ninth grade, Clarett's mother began driving her son 40 minutes from Youngstown so he could go to Warren Harding. Her son had been living with 11 cousins and two brothers in a three-bedroom house owned by his grandmother when he wasn't serving time in a juvenile detention center.

How does a person make it out of that? Deryck Toles and Maurice Clarett now walk around two of the largest and most historic college campuses in the country. It's as far away as possible.

"Growing up there is hard," Toles says. "You see so many things a normal person wouldn't see. It's kind of hard to fit in here. You can't really find people that relate. You can tell them if they ask but they can't understand, can't really fathom it."

They're surrounded by Abercrombie-clad kids driving new cars their parents bought them. Out of the windows of those cars comes music about drugs and shootings and glory.

Ha, glory.

"It's not cool," Toles says. "None of that stuff is something to be proud of."

For most of the kids that sit in class with Toles and Clarett, college was the only option. For those kids, the biggest problem their friends had in high school was finding a prom date or passing calculus.

Toles is polite and always speaks slowly and thoughtfully. His voice is usually in the same place, not moving around too much. It's tough to take anything from the inflection.

Said Clarett: "I looked up to him because of the type of person he was, his character and the way he carried himself. He's a gentleman."

Both are well-spoken. Both have large, easy smiles that are the beginning of the charisma.

-- -- --

Clarett rushed for 785 yards and eight touchdowns his senior year of high school -- in the playoffs. He graduated a few weeks later so he could be at Ohio State in the spring. It was the only school he considered.

"I don't really like to fly," he says, "so I didn't want to take too many visits."

Toles wanted him to come to Penn State.

"He tried to get me," Clarett says.

Toles knows as well as anyone that everyone has their place. For a Warren, Ohio football star, that place, of course, is Ohio State. The good old boy network leads you there, where you belong.

Toles thought about it. Then he came to Penn State and saw all he needed to see. He signed after his junior season.

"I think I just wanted to get out of Ohio," Toles says. "See something new."

That's a recurring theme for Clarett, too.

"I just try to take everything as a new experience and just learn from it," he says. "That's how it was when I was in high school and now that I'm here and if I go to the NFL."

-- -- --

The enzyme disorder works basically like this: Toles' muscles eat themselves for energy.

People will often ask him to explain the feeling.

He is again filled with the fact that explaining something like this is useless because you just can't understand it until you're there.

But he tries anyway.

"At first, it's like a tingly feeling," he says, a story-teller setting the tranquil early scene, ready to take his listener up the slope of rising action.

"Then, it's like my muscles are ripping apart." He tears right to the reality of it. Might as well not sugar-coat it. "Once I contract my muscle and try to relax, it contracts 10 more times. Everything starts exploding. Then, it burns."

How many times does he feel this a week? Is it every game? Every practice? It varies.

Toles didn't know about the disease until the end of his redshirt freshman season, when he couldn't take the fatigue and pain anymore. So little is known about the disease that all he can do now is work within his limits. Tough for a guy who's spent a life going past the limits he was supposed to have.

"I'm proud of Maurice," Toles says. "He's doing his thing, now. He made it out. I knew he had a good head on his shoulders, but that doesn't always do it."

Toles has seen the best of athletes fail a test and slip away. Teammates haven't scored what they should on the ACTs, and after that, there's nothing but dealing drugs. There is, after all, more than one way to be successful. College isn't the only way.

"I mean, it isn't fair," Toles says. "That's not anything big to say. But who decides what's fair or not? I've got family doing these things. They're backed into a corner."

At any other school, Deryck Toles might not be playing football anymore. There's no use for a linebacker who plays less than half the game. It's tough to believe another school would keep him on scholarship.

But maybe any other player wouldn't choose to go through what Toles is going through now. Not the physical pain. That part is minor. It's tougher when the game is on the line, the running back is ready to plunge ahead and your muscles won't let you do anything about it.

Maybe any other player would accept fate, lament what could have been and move on.

-- -- --

Clarett isn't sure about the NFL draft. He put it out there in a national magazine and now it's all the rage, but that's all he needed. He just wanted to let people know what he was thinking.

How could he not? This isn't the "poor kids should take the money" bit. No, it's a kid looking ahead. If you're good enough to do it, then do it.

"I haven't broken anything out yet," Clarett says of his short but stellar career with the Buckeyes. "This year is basically a year of learning. Next year, hopefully I'll be better."

He knows his name is on television. He knows people across the country are writing about him. He knows that his words reach millions.

But at the end of the day, it's no different.

"I go home to be with the people I'm comfortable with," he says. "My brothers, my cousins, the people I grew up with.

-- -- --

Toles said he planned to call Clarett sometime this week.

The two of them will have plenty of fans in attendance on Saturday: family, friends, old coaches and former teammates.

They'll talk during the game, a little. Neither is much of a yapper.

"We'll dilly-dally around, maybe talk some trash," Toles says.

And it will all calm down after the game. The game got them out of the corner they were backed into, but it's not a corner in itself. Too many people look at it that way.

They'll smile at each other.

There won't be much to talk about.

Anything worth saying is already understood anyway.