Kadeem Custis (78) attracts a crowd of friends when he's not bringing violence to the football.
South Philly Review photo
Back in the day, as the kids like to say, Russell Conwell was even more of an icon on the national level than Bill Cosby is now.
In Conwell's case, "The day" was about two centuries ago, before today's 21st Century and before the 20th Century noted for a couple of big World Wars.
It was the latter part of the 19th Century, only a decade or so after Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and Conwell was a noted lecturer who packed them in across the country on a regular basis, long before TV and radio. One of his most famous talks was about a man who searched the world for wealth, only to come home and find "Acres of Diamonds" in his backyard.
Conwell also founded one of the largest and most respected universities in the country, a school that currently is the 6th largest educator of professionals in the nation and its 38th largest university.
He called it Temple University, after the Baptist Temple on campus that still stands.
Temple football coach Al Golden knows all about Russell Conwell. The night before he was named head coach in December of 2005, he stayed at the Conwell Inn and read up all about Conwell. He even mentioned the founder in his initial press conference.
Since then, Golden has remained true to the Conwellian philosophy when it comes to recruiting prospective student-athletes for the university.
To be sure, Golden travels pretty much all over the country for talent but pretty much settles on the great bulk of it within a couple of hours drive time to the school.
So it was on Thursday that Golden found a couple of diamonds in his backyard, plucking a couple of gems who could probably leave their front porches and be on the practice field in, oh, about 20 minutes.
Oh yeah.
They could have went anywhere.
They chose Temple.
One of the guys is a three-star lineman, Kadeem Custis, of Neumann-Goretti, a 6-5, 275-pound tackle who had standing offers from West Virginia, Pitt, Connecticut, Maryland and North Carolina State. He even made an official visit to West Virginia last week, one week after making an official visit to Temple. When he checked and rechecked his list, West Virginia kept coming up on the short end compared to spending the next four years in the city he loves so much.
You could say Custis' Last Stand will be as an Owl, but we won't. We're calling it Custis' next-to-last stand because we really feel he will get coached up to where he will have an opportunity to play on Sundays if he works hard.
Another guy is Glen Mills' tailback Bernard Pierce, a 6-foot, 205-pound speedster who only ran for an eye-opening 1,534 yards and 26 touchdowns this season.
With those two, Golden hit the Mother Lode of Acres of Diamonds in a single day.
He's not done, though.
Another player from Valley Forge, cornerback Kwame Johnson, committed this week.
They join three players from New Jersey who also committed in recent days, defensive end Aaron Hush (Piscataway), linebacker Marcus Green (Fanwood) and linebacker/fullback Blaze Caponegro of Wall Township.
Maybe Hudson Catholic's Jason Hendricks commits today, tomorrow or the next.
If we forgot anyone, we apologize. We'll get to profile everybody in the next month or so.
Meanwhile, for selfish purposes, we'd like to see a high-achieving quarterback with the ability of an Andrew Shoop (Danville) or Jeffrey Legree (Fork Union, Va., via Brooklyn) joining this group in the coming days. Temple has two very good quarterbacks now in Vaughn Charlton and Chester Stewart, along with St. Joseph's Prep Mark Giubilato but we'd like to see five in the mix and a great one emerge by September.
Hopefully, both Legree and Shoop will be up for the Temple Challenge, as Cosby likes to call it.
If he were alive today, Conwell might have used his own "back-in-the-day" verbage to say the same thing and we think whatever he came up with would have been jaw-dropping.
Sort of like the commitment list Al Golden currently is putting together.
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