He's just Navorro.
Just a football player. A really good one.
Just a father. A really young one.
Just a role model. Really, the only one.
That's the way it is when you're a resident of District Heights, Md., a suburb 10 miles outside Washington, D.C.
"He means a whole lot to District Heights," Clifton Person, Navorro's friend since the age of 5, said. "I don't know if he really knows what he means."
Navorro means hope in a place where hope comes few and far between.
"It's really just a place where you know you gotta grind," Navorro says. "And if you wanna be something or make something outta yourself, you gotta really get -- no matter how rough the road is -- get towards your dream or your goal."
The goal for Navorro Bowman is the NFL. And he is so close to the NFL. He is so close to a college degree. So close to making it.
And Navorro was so close to being nowhere near any of it.
There was the fight at the HUB-Robeson Center on Oct. 7, 2007, which led to a guilty plea of disorderly conduct. It kept Bowman from traveling with the Nittany Lions to San Antonio for the Alamo Bowl and jeopardized his status with the team before being reinstated in the summer.
But football became the least of his concerns.
His father, Hillard, died June 16, 2008, of a blood clot that developed three weeks after he underwent surgery for an injury sustained playing basketball.
"We talked like we always talk," Person said of the bad times. "That's my best friend."
Bowman moved forward. He starred as a reserve in Penn State's first three games, recording 24 total tackles and earning a starting spot against Temple on Sept. 20, 2008.
Eleven tackles, five tackles for loss, three sacks, a forced fumble and an interception later, Bowman had arrived. He was named Big Ten Co-Defensive Player of the Week, and he was just getting started. He accumulated 106 tackles on the season to lead the team, he was selected first-team All-Big Ten and he was ready for Penn State's New Year's Day showdown with Southern California in the Rose Bowl.
But then came the 3 a.m. wake-up call.
The morning before the big game, defensive line coach Larry Johnson Sr. told Bowman that Nick Lynch, his coach at Suitland High School, had been killed in a two-car accident near his Brandywine, Md., home.
Bowman didn't sleep the rest of the night, not after losing his "second father" the same year he lost his birth father. And he didn't sleep a day later, making a Penn State bowl-record five tackles for loss in a 38-24 defeat against USC.
But then there was the marijuana issue.
On April 22, Bowman admitted to a judge that he had smoked marijuana not long after Lynch died, a violation of the probation he was already on for the HUB fight.
There was the kid with the NFL future blowing it all away, message boards said. There was the kid with the free education taking everything for granted.
"Nobody has gone through more off the field than Navorro Bowman," defensive end Jerome Hayes said. "And that's not all his fault."
Bowman's probation was extended a year. He sat out the Blue-White game. He met with Joe Paterno.
He'd be back for 2009.
He'd switch his jersey number from 18 to 11 like former Penn State great LaVar Arrington asked him to. He'd make all the preseason award watch lists. He'd be the fear of every running back in the Big Ten.
But then there was the groin injury.
Not even two full series into the 2009 season, Bowman had to check himself out of Penn State's opener against Akron after hurting his groin in a fall practice. He missed the next two games.
"Coming up to the game, I was a little hesitant on how I was gonna do because I knew I had an injury, so I was just trying to really get out there and not push myself too hard in the beginning," he said. "But the first real contact I got, it told me it wasn't ready. So I waited, did the things I had to do to get me back out there. I'm back on the field and excited to be playing."
He's excited because he has 62 tackles, 10 for loss. He has a sack and an interception. He has two fumble recoveries, one of which led to a 91-yard touchdown run.
"You always can get better, but my play, I just let it come and go," the redshirt junior said. "I wake up and try to do the things that I need to do to make me play my best. But everything that happened, I'm blessed for. And hopefully I can continue doing it every week."
Now he's Navorro. He's the all-everything linebacker Penn State thought it was getting. On June 3, he became the father of Navorro Bowman Jr. He's shaping into the figurehead his hometown could use.
"I would love to be an icon, someone to look up to, someone who a kid wakes up and says, 'I want to be like Navorro Bowman.' Who wouldn't want that?" he says. "But it's a hard road to hold up, and you have to be a guy with a strong mind and a strong will to stay on straight when you're up or when you're down."
He knows that too well. At his probation hearing in April, he told the judge he lost about 10 friends back home to drugs or violence since he'd arrived at Penn State.
"Not everyone can be an athlete, and I don't look at anyone different who's not. I respect it and give everyone an equal shot, an equal hand," he said. "My town is a town where it takes a strong-minded person to get out of, and I'm one of those and blessed to be one."
He's blessed to have friends like Person, who he met at a basketball camp 16 years ago, when Person was the new kid in town.
"We like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, that's what we always say," Person said. "I play off of him, he plays off of me. We got great chemistry in everything that we do, not just basketball, just friendship and life. Period."
He's blessed to have great teammates, like the men he lines up beside every day at Linebacker U.
"All of us have dealt with some adversity at some point," captain Sean Lee said. "He's a guy with great character. He's responded from all the adversity because of it."
He's blessed to have Navorro Jr., who is up for home games and whose pictures Navorro will look at every now and then on his cell phone and "wish for more times."
"Knowing the next morning he has to leave, that's when it gets to me, it hits me," he said. "So I'm just trying to do what I have to do here, and then I can spend every day with him."
He's blessed to be on the brink of graduation and the NFL, a decision he'll make once the season ends.
"It's a tough thing now, with the recession going on and things like that," he said. "You have to take into thought: You have a family now. So I have to take care of [Navorro Jr.], I have to be a good father. That's a choice I have to make in a few months."
Most of all, he's blessed to have gone through everything he did, because he wouldn't be where he is -- and so close to where he will be -- if things didn't play out the way they did.
"Happiness. That's the first thing that comes to my mind," Person said when thinking of his best friend. "I'm proud of him, and I tell him all the time. I call him before every game, I call him after every game. And I know he can't answer the phone during the game, but still, when he does good I send him a text message to let him know that I'm watching, that we watching, that we with him 100 percent for everything he's gonna need."
"Coach Lynch and his father are not here physically, but they watching him from a better place now," he added. "And I know they very proud of him."
