On a crisp spring afternoon, a day only the tempestuous Corvallis winter can yield, Oregon State running back Ken Simonton sits in the school cafeteria grading papers. As white bodies pour onto patches of green in search of precious UVs, Simonton -- one of only 163 blacks out of 13,776 undergrads -- meticulously marks up essays for the entry-level sociology class in which he serves as a teacher's assistant. At 12:55, he collects his papers, throws on his knapsack and heads out into the sun, carefully looking both ways to avoid getting ambushed in the fierce water-gun war being waged by a large group of Beaver athletes.

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	ESPN Classic will profile Ken Simonton on Friday, Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Instead of falling prey to a super squirter, Simonton is bombarded with something else as he reaches the main quad. The College of Agricultural Science and the College of Forestry are holding a fair. Small tractors surround several stalls. The OSU logging team offers the opportunity to bucksaw your own slice of tree. There's even, for reasons unknown, a mechanical bull. A man asks Simonton if he'd care to take a try. The star smiles, shakes his head and walks on. "Only in Oregon," he says.

The fact that he calls Oregon home is merely the first of many ironies in the life of Simonton. He's a black man in a state where only 2% of the population is African-American. He's a football player at a school where athletes often feel marginalized, with many housed on the other side of the train tracks that run through campus. He's the author of an impending independent study comparing college players to migrant farm workers -- at a university (formerly Oregon Agricultural College) that boasts one of the biggest aggie programs in the country. He is an All-America on the field and an outspoken critic of the NCAA off it.

Simonton considers himself an outsider. And yet the 5'8", 190-pound senior is also the unapologetic face of Dennis Erickson's Miami West revival, the leading man in the Beavers' transformation from Pac-10 doormat to national title contender. He has rushed for more than 4,000 career yards, becoming OSU's first legit Heisman hopeful since Terry Baker snagged the stiff-armer back in 1962. In his own words, Simonton is both hero and villain, all too aware of the role that power, race and politics play in every social dynamic, even a Heisman Trophy campaign. In fact, as his image is pushed before the public and used to finance a growing athletic program, he has turned himself into the anti-candidate for the game's biggest award -- the Ralph Nader of the Heisman race.

Judged solely on his athletic achievements, Simonton's story is remarkable enough. Neither big nor particularly fast, the 22-year-old back tends to disappear behind his mammoth linemen; by the time you see him, he's running over somebody in the secondary. "We have no means of measuring how I do what I do," he says. "You'll never see it on a test, in a 40 time or on the weight bench. It's just the fight in the dog."

He grew up poor in the East Bay town of Pittsburg, Calif., the second-youngest son of an oil refinery supervisor. Ken Simonton II, himself an outstanding athlete, spent time in the minor leagues, as did his oldest son, Benji, now a Class-A hitting instructor with the Giants. Ken III loved baseball too, and even played his second year at OSU. But it was football -- and the foresight of one coach -- that made his education possible.

Hampered by poor grades, Simonton wasn't heavily recruited. In fact, if it weren't for the persistence of Mike Riley, there's a chance the Pittsburg High star might never have played major college football. For a good portion of Simonton's senior year, the phone was out at his parents' home. So Riley, then the offensive coordinator at Southern Cal, grabbed a phone book and called Ken's grandmother, Rosie Simonton, at 7 a.m. on the first day of recruiting season, asking her to relay the message: USC was interested.

From the moment they met, Simonton could sense something different about the coach. "He was just Mike Riley," Ken remembers. "He didn't have to sell anything. There was no frontin' about him. He was just good people." Simonton says he would have gone anywhere to play for Riley, even Alaska. As it turned out, Corvallis was far enough.

Riley and his recruit came to the Northwest together in 1997 when Riley took the head coaching job at Oregon State. After redshirting with a shoulder injury, Simonton racked up his first of three straight 1,000-yard seasons the following year. It was the start of something big for the Beavers, who won five games for the first time in 27 years, more than enough for Erickson to build on after Riley left for the San Diego Chargers. Adopting Erickson's "speed kills" philosophy, OSU went 7-5 in '99, including its first bowl bid in 35 years. Last season brought even more milestones -- good and bad. Behind Simonton, the efficient Jonathan Smith at quarterback and a swarming D, State went 11-1, whupping Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. During that game, Erickson's players seemed to celebrate after every tackle. "He just kind of took the gloves off," Simonton says. "Coach E lets you do whatever it takes to get the work done."

The Beavers' bash-and-trash style has plenty of critics, but Ken refuses to apologize. "Every story needs a hero and a villain," he says. "The way I see it, we're the same guy. You may not hear my name mentioned when you talk about Miami West, but I'm one of the ringleaders. If you don't understand our celebration, come spend a summer running in these mountains. You'd understand it then."

The complications of black reconstruction -- that's the focus of today's Ethnic Studies class, and the discussion ranges from racial profiling to the reinforced stereotypes of '70s blaxploitation films. Not surprisingly, Simonton is full of opinions. Toward the end of the period, he reads an Eldridge Cleaver quote from the class text: "Can you change the system if you've made the constraints of that system?" Like most of the subject material he deals with, the quote hits close to home. Simonton would like to change the system he's part of, a system in which he has become a walking paradox. His athletic talent has made possible his education, which in turn has led him to publicly challenge the exploitative nature of college football.

Last December, Simonton declared his wish to become the first player in recent history to win the Heisman based solely on his on-field performance. He said he wanted no "Simonton for President" campaign, flush with billboards and posters -- just a simple highlight video for Heisman voters. Ken's comments irked many in the OSU community, hardly a first for Simonton. Athletic director Mitch Barnhart, a veteran of two Heisman candidacies while a senior associate AD at Tennessee, wondered how Simonton could possibly win without taking an active role. The exchange led to an ongoing dialogue between the two, however, and Barnhart soon learned that the player's idea of personal involvement went a lot deeper than the AD had anticipated.

Simonton says now he was only trying to take back some control: "I really wanted a big say on how I'm portrayed. I don't mind doing it. I think it's good for the game, for the program, for the school. But I still want to be a part of how I'm imaged."

As of July, the imaging of Simonton included a 42'x28' wall painting in downtown Portland, with his blessing. Oregon State plans on spending about $100,000 on their campaign (not much when you consider the $250,000 that Civil War rival Oregon shelled out for a New York City billboard hyping Joey Harrington). Barnhart has also pledged to phone all 922 voters on Simonton's behalf. "I think we both came to a place where we could work together," the AD says. "He still is not completely convinced that college athletics is a pure system. Unfortunately, the system has been around much longer than he or I have been."

It is the system, of course, that Simonton continues to rail against, risking his chance at the Heisman as OSU tries to compete with the traditional Pac-10 powers. Just last September the school broke ground on a $9 million indoor practice facility that is already near completion. Gill Coliseum, the 52-year-old facility that houses many of the athletic offices, is also undergoing a $1 million face-lift. Meanwhile, the Beavers have sold out all their home games at Reser Stadium, a first for the program. Lost in all this progress, however, is an unchanging reality: Oregon State has just one full-time academic service counselor for nearly 100 football players. And like his teammates, Simonton must figure out how to live on the $640 monthly stipend he gets in exchange for his play.

"We don't want to admit it's a business," he says. "When I speak, people don't want to hear me as an employee -- they want to hear me as some amateur enjoying his childhood dream." Yes, he is thankful for the opportunity. But having to pay for everything from books to groceries to credit-card bills out of his $640, while the school rakes in millions, is hard to stomach. Especially when Corvallis has the highest cost of living in the state, making it a challenge to live off campus, as Simonton does with his mother, Beverly, and 13-year-old sister, Rosie. (Dad is in Pittsburg, where the second-youngest of the five kids, 16-year-old Steve, is finishing high school.) "I don't know if the right thing is to pay student-athletes," Ken says, "but I definitely think we need to get more on our scholarship check."

Simonton suggests that a players' union may be the only way to fix the system. He notes that their off-season earnings are capped at $2,000, and that insurance coverage is poor. When Florida State's Devaughn Darling died during a spring workout this year, his family received just a $10,000 insurance payout. "Right now we don't have a voice," says Simonton, one of 353 student-athletes asked to attend the NCAA Foundation Leadership Conference last year (though a schedule conflict prevented him from attending.) "You just got people like me screaming from the rooftops. And what good does that do? If we have a union where we have some sort of collective voice, we'll be able to make the experience more enjoyable."

In a way, Simonton would have you believe his life at Oregon State is like that of any other athlete. Fun in small-town Corvallis goes something like this: "Play ball, go to school, try not to get arrested." But while he downplays his diverse interests -- "I'm not the only young black man who has ever read Shakespeare" (or listened to opera or taken ballet) -- he is clearly as proud of his academic pursuits (3.0 GPA) as he is of his gridiron records. For the kid who rarely felt challenged in high school, the hardest part about college was getting here.

"He's one of the most exciting students I've had," says Natalie Dollar, associate professor of speech communication. "Unlike most students, whose natural tendency is to attack, evaluate and pick apart what they are reading, he would take the opposite approach, which was to first understand what the writer is trying to say before he moved to a phase of real critical analysis." Adds Lani Roberts, senior instructor of applied ethics: "He had immediate credibility in athletics. He has earned intellectual credibility."

Simonton owes his maturity (teammates call him "Grandpa") as much to his upbringing as to his studies. His real education began back home, where older brother Javaris would pick him up at middle school and then deal drugs with little Ken in tow -- all the while telling him not to follow his example. The message hit home when Javaris ended up in jail as a juvenile. But it was Ken's own run-in with the law that began to put football in perspective.

In June 1998, Simonton tried to break up a fight between a friend and the friend's girl in Pittsburg. By the time the woman reported the incident in July, Simonton was back in Oregon. Six months later, while driving to school after the holidays, he was pulled over by police in California's Mendecino County for having an expired license tag, then informed there was a warrant out for his arrest on three felony charges. Unable to post bail, he was forced to spend three days in jail before returning to Corvallis. He would eventually plead no contest to misdemeanor assault and serve time in a California work program. "It was a good lesson that you can be touched no matter who you are or what you do," he says.

As his final college season approaches, the final irony for Simonton may well be that for all of his gains in the classroom, he is still defined by how well he runs the football. He has evolved into the very sort of person a liberal-arts education attempts to nurture: a responsible citizen willing to look at the hard things in life and able to think for himself. He is the epitome of what a student-athlete can be. And yet he's realistic enough to know that the business of college football always comes first. "There will be a time and a place for everything," he says. "Now is just not the time and the place to change the world."

This article appears in the August 20 issue of ESPN The Magazine.