Willis McGahee doesn't need to speak to tell the tale of his remarkable season. The story begins here, right here on his arms. That pinkish welt around his right elbow, the one that kind of looks like the state of Missouri? The Florida Gators did that while McGahee was breaking a tackle. He's not quite sure which tackle. Then again, when you run for 204 yards, you tend to lose track of all the tackles you break.

Over on his left, there's a quarter-size lump that looks like an acorn sprouting from his forearm. He can thank Florida State for that. And the Seminoles can thank McGahee for breaking their backs with a 68-yard run off a screen pass that set up the game-winning TD.

FSU's also responsible for those cute little hacks raised up an inch north of the acorn. Oh, but it gets better. A little higher up, a four-inch gash snakes its way across his biceps, and McGahee has to roll up his T-shirt sleeve to show it in its full glory. That beauty mark is courtesy of the Temple Owls. It happened, McGahee thinks, some time after his first two touchdown runs and before his last two scores that day. "Must mean I'm doin' something right, if they're coming at me like this," McGahee says.

Yeah, McGahee is doing something right this season. He's gone from a shy third-team tailback, who teammates say didn't utter two words in his first two years at Miami, to a Heisman Trophy favorite. He'll probably break UM's single-season rushing record, then be the first running back taken in April's NFL draft.

McGahee loves his wounds, every gruesome one of them. He sports them like a soldier wears his medals. Each one tells a story of some game-breaking score or hit-the-rewind-button run. But it's the scars you don't see, the wounds that don't show up on skin, that tell you why Willis McGahee came to Miami, and why he almost ran away.

***

It's okay to cry. That's what they told him. So he stood there in his little suit, surrounded by relatives, in the only house he had ever called home, and he just bawled. He didn't really know why. Maybe because that's what his mama was doing. This was Willis at age 9, the day of his brother Kiki's funeral. Kiki was 17 when colon cancer took his life. Three days earlier, lying in bed, eyes half closed, Kiki called his baby brother into his room just to tell Willis he loved him. And that was it.

Jannie Jones' three sons had always been close. Kiki and Willis got even tighter after her oldest, Eugene, a powerhouse nose tackle, left home to play at Lambuth College in Tennessee. Kiki and Willis would sit in front of the TV all day long, playing video games, giggling, trying to outdo each other. Jannie would be out, driving her bus for Dade County, and wouldn't get home until it was Willis' bedtime, but she never worried, not with Kiki around. It took the disease only 10 months to ravage Kiki's body.

Losing your brother, your best friend, is devastating enough. But it's even worse when you don't know how to make your mama happy again. How do you cope with that? If you're a 9-year-old mama's boy, like Willis, you hang onto her like a necklace. You flash your dimples and hope that if you look happy, maybe she'll feel better. You sprint home from school, blowing off your pals playing football in the street, so you can ride your mama's bus all the way from one end of the county to the other, right until 10 p.m., when her shift ends. Then you crawl into her bed, wrap yourself under the covers and sleep right next to her just to make sure she's safe. And for the next thousand nights, her bed becomes your bed.

Willis slept in his mama's bed until he was 13 years old. At about that time, his uncle Keith, a career military man, retired from the Army and moved back to Miami. Keith Jones worried about his nephew; he worried that everybody spoiled Willis and that he never had a father figure there to teach him about the world and how people can be. Keith looked at him and saw a boy who appeared so peaceful and so pleasant, and worried that somebody would play him. "Why do you smile all the time?" he asked Willis. "People can take that the wrong way. Everybody's not gonna be your friend, and they can take your kindness for a weakness."

Willis just listened, then smiled back. He couldn't help it. Besides, after seeing him tote the football, everybody did want to be his friend. Willis never got the chance to play in youth leagues because he was too heavy. The coaches in the 16-and-under league even tried to talk his mom into letting him play in their league, but Jannie didn't think it was such a good idea -- Willis was only 12. That didn't stop Willis from becoming a legend around the Gladeview neighborhood of Miami, where teenagers played in a vacant lot they called the Dustbowl. That's where Willis, the polite mama's boy who was always smiling, started freight-training full-grown men.

By the time Willis was a senior at Miami Central High, every college in the country was after him. Not even a torn ACL that limited him to five games his senior year could cool the chase. He was leaning toward Ohio State, even though the cold bothered him, provided he could bring his mama with him to Columbus. But Willis would have had a better chance of bringing the South Florida weather with him than getting his mama to move. Jannie wasn't leaving Miami, so neither was Willis.

The plan was for McGahee to redshirt in 2000, then take over as the Canes tailback in 2001. At least that's what he figured. So did most of the teammates who saw him -- and were run over by him -- when he was a freshman on the scout team. He's just like Edgerrin, they claimed, only faster. Much faster. Miami's strength coach, Andreu Swasey, said McGahee was capable of running a 4.1 40; said the 6'1", 224-pounder was the most explosive player in UM history.

But all Clinton Portis saw was a weakness.

Portis, who many say was the biggest trash-talker in Hurricane history, sounded like Chris Tucker, dressed like a pack of Starbursts and never worried about pissing people off. Portis wasn't as big or fast as McGahee, but that didn't stop him from telling McGahee how much better a back he was every chance he got. McGahee tried to tune Portis out, but he couldn't, not when he was hearing stuff like, "You'll never be better than me. Never. That fumble in practice. I dunno man. You can't be puttin' the ball on the ground here."

Willis proved Portis a prophet in fall camp. McGahee wasn't reading blocks right. He wasn't attacking the hole. He was running scared, a 4.2 guy playing a 4.6. "It's like Willis didn't want to be on the field," says center Brett Romberg. Portis, meanwhile, ran like Marshall Faulk. It was obvious who won the job. Running backs coach Don Soldinger came up with a term for McGahee -- coachproof. "You'd talk to him and it would just roll right off his back," says Soldinger, a.k.a. Coach Sol. "He didn't want to be corrected."

Midway through last season, McGahee sprained his left knee returning a kickoff and missed two games. That was just enough time for freshman Frank Gore to push McGahee down to third team. Willis was all set to quit Miami and transfer to Auburn. His mama wouldn't let him, though. She didn't raise any quitters. "Just wait your turn," she pleaded. "Your day will come."

As Jannie recalls, "He just kept telling me, 'Mama, don't worry. I'll handle it.' But I did worry. I hadn't seen him that sad since the time when he was a little boy and his brother passed."

As Miami closed in on the national title, Coach Sol finally realized McGahee had let Portis get into his head. It bothered the coach, but he wasn't about to make Portis tone down his act. After all, that edge helped make Portis play like a superstar, and at some point, football is a game of survival of the fittest. Especially at this level, where soft is the dirtiest of all four-letter words.

McGahee was losing that survival game. Then right before Christmas, as Miami prepared for the national title game, Coach Sol told McGahee that Najeh Davenport, UM's fullback, had broken a foot. Guess who he wanted to learn the position?

McGahee grudgingly accepted. After paving the way for Portis to gain 104 yards against Nebraska while gaining just seven himself, McGahee stood in the middle of the Rose Bowl celebration and made a silent vow. Next year, I'll be the one. With all that prime Pasadena sod smeared on his jersey, McGahee had every right to join Larry Coker and Ken Dorsey if he wanted to, puckering up to smooch that crystal football just like Portis did. But no, that could wait for 2003.

McGahee knew Portis would likely jump to the NFL. But Frank Gore was coming back too. Coach Sol was sweet on Gore, who was blessed with a dynamic burst and preternatural vision -- those "lamps" that Coach loved so much. But so what? Says Jannie, "We just kept telling Willis, 'Hey, you're the best running back on that team. Don't you forget that.'"

McGahee's family wouldn't allow him to forget. His brother Eugene, who owns a gym in Miami, had a plan: In addition to the crack-of-dawn training sessions at UM, Willis would work out at night with him. Twice a week his big brother would make Willis push, then pull, a Ford 4x4 pickup over the length of a city block. "I'd tell him, 'y'all are working me too hard,'" Willis says, "and all I'd hear back was, 'Shut up and lift them weights.'"

Turns out fate was pushing as hard as his family was. Portis did leave for the NFL, and during spring ball, Gore tore an ACL. Not confident that McGahee was ready to be a feature back, Miami coaches moved his best friend, WR Jason Geathers, to tailback over the summer. Geathers quickly overshadowed his buddy by running for 199 yards in UM's opening romp over Florida A&M. But in Miami's real 2002 debut at Florida, it was McGahee who upstaged everyone by gashing the Gators for 204 yards. "He could've run for 300 yards if we needed him to," says Coach Sol. Afterward, when someone asked McGahee if this was his way of jumping into the Heisman race, he just smiled. He thought for a minute. "Wait, I'm new to this all," he said. "Yeah, I wouldn't mind being a Heisman candidate. I just don't understand how it works. What do I have to do?"

Fast-forward two months, and McGahee has nearly run his way to New York, where he could pick up that stiff-arm statuette and hand it to his mama. He visits her every day, and each time he sees her, he realizes that she was right, that his time has come. And even with a fresh set of bruises and welts to refute any question that he's soft, he still feels a bit embarrassed that he let Portis get in his head the way he did. "If he were at Miami now, nah, it wouldn't matter," McGahee says. "It'd be a whole different story. I just had to come to my senses."

Portis says he's happy for McGahee. Yeah, he knew McGahee was fragile, but he swears he was trying to help his teammate, to get him to step up to a challenge, not shy away from one. "Hopefully, some day he'll realize that," Portis says.

***

A half-hour after the Florida State game, McGahee is the last one out of the showers. With a towel wrapped around his waist, he weaves between a pack of TV crews and a huge laundry hamper, coming within 10 feet of his locker before getting roadblocked. There is Geathers, his understudy, his buddy, holding court in front of a half-dozen reporters, talking about scoring the game-winning touchdown. It was a play set up by McGahee's crazy scamper on a screen pass. McGahee glances over the pack and sees the look on Geathers' face. And, still bleeding from his latest wounds, he just smiles.

This article will appear in the November 25 issue of ESPN The Magazine.