You remember Johnny Rodgers, of course.

Anybody who follows football at all knows that he won a Heisman Trophy in 1972 while competing for Nebraska. Even casual fans have seen, time and again, his twirling, gravity-defying 1971 punt return against Oklahoma -- the biggest play in what may have been the biggest game of the 20th century.

And anybody who reads newspapers or magazines knows that Rodgers' brilliant football career was tarnished often by run-ins with the law. Some charges were serious, and he spent time in jail as a result.

Ask any fan about Rodgers and you'll almost certainly get a reaction like this: "He was a great player, but he was a wild one."

Johnny Rodgers wants you to know that he agrees on both counts. He was a tremendous player, and he was as reckless as they come. But he also wants you to know that, through education, he has become a different man, a responsible citizen who is increasingly dedicated to the education of current and former student-athletes.

He believes you also should know that he benefited in a major way from the NCAA Degree-Completion Program and that he is grateful. He thinks of the grant as a debt repaid, not a gift, because he believes the NCAA and its members have a moral obligation to follow through on their educational commitments, no matter what the cost and effort.

For all of his success on the field, Rodgers set a standard of sorts by being the first Heisman Trophy winner to have already had a major brush with the law. He left school 20 hours short of his degree and experienced another important legal setback soon after his professional career was finished.

For those who indulge in stereotypes, that is all they need to know: He was a great athlete in a big-time program, he abandoned his education, he had trouble with the law and he would invariably end up a failure.

Today, however, Rodgers is the president of a young but prospering business, is active in Omaha civic affairs and is full of hope for the future. He is a man on a mission to tell the world why he struggled academically, what the consequences were and what he did to solve the problem.

He wants to use his experience to help people understand that bad outcomes are not preordained, that even the most desperate cases deserve second and third chances, and that we're all better off for having made the effort to help those in need.

The early years

Johnny Rodgers' mother was only 14 years old when he was born in Omaha in 1951. Although Rodgers didn't meet his father until he was 17, the home had more than one parent. "My grandmother was the person who actually took the most time to raise me because my mother needed somebody to raise her herself at that age," he said.

Education wasn't neglected in the household; it wasn't even considered.

"There really was no emphasis on education at all," he said. "Nobody had an education to emphasize. It wasn't something we thought we were doing without. When I came up, I had three grandmothers -- I had Mother, her mother and her mother and her mother. They were all alive, and none of them had an education."

The first two years of grade school were unremarkable for Rodgers, but the third year was to become one of the most important years of his life.

"I remember my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones," he said. "She was a good one. And she was on me all the time. I really couldn't figure out why she was on me so significantly until I got to junior high school."

As it happened, Mrs. Jones was present at the beginning of Rodgers' athletics career. She struggled against the tide to keep him on a proper educational path, but she struggled alone.

"I was a tumbler," he said. "I did gymnastics. I was doing forward flips and diving over pyramids and I could do the backflips, I could do it all.

"Every day I would come to school and I would spend half of the day, the afternoons, in the gym with the tumbling team, working on gymnastics. Now, I thought that was great until I got to junior high school and realized I had missed half of my grade school from being on the tumbling team from the third grade on.

"We put on exhibitions all over, and I was just the talk of the town. But I had missed half of my basic education up to that point."

The mistake was apparent to no one, other than Mrs. Jones.

"I didn't know and my parents didn't know," he said. "I mean, we just knew I was very popular. And part of my problem was because I was so popular."

The seeds of trouble had been sowed, and they began to sprout by junior high. The educational demands went up, and Rodgers was ill-equipped to meet them. By then, he played every available sport at a high level, but he had no discipline in the rest of his life. When he was 14, he took his uncle's car, went to Detroit and lived on the street for six months.

Rodgers returned to Omaha, but by then, he was full of rough edges and kept dangerous company.

"I used to have to go to school every morning when it was dark. And I used to have to come home every night when it was dark," he said, "Because there were people who were after me the whole time, I'd have to walk in the middle of the street so any way they came, I'd have a 50-50 chance."

He continued to gain fame and flourish athletically, but the deterioration of his social and educational sides accelerated.

"When I was in high school, my biology teacher, he would give me grades," Rodgers said. "I didn't learn very much biology. The lady teachers never would do anything like that, but different men teachers would. I thought that was great, but it wasn't great. It left a whole lot of gaps."

His first memories of football were of playing in the street -- tackle on the grass and touch on the street, hoping he didn't get caught in between. Josh Gibson, brother of baseball legend Bob Gibson, taught him in a YMCA league, then he moved on to Boys Club ball and Pop Warner. He excelled in junior high and became an outright celebrity at Omaha Tech High School, where he also starred in track and baseball.

But not in the classroom.

"If I had just learned the basics," he said, "if I had not skipped grade school and had gone to junior high with strong basic skills, it would have been altogether different. Or if I had had a mentor or a tutor or a counselor to keep me on track and know the things you've got to know. It never happened. I mean, I spent all my time playing something."

Toward the end of high school, Rodgers' coach, Dick Christie, became concerned about his prodigy and told him he had to improve his grades to have any hope of competing collegiately or professionally. Rodgers, who says the coach had always had his best interests at heart, got his grades up and became eligible for college football.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Rodgers can see how little times have changed.

"We are still in a position where some parents don't know the difference," he said. "We still have a whole generation of parents who didn't make it through themselves to be able to stay on top of the kids. I'll bet there's a tremendous number of parents who have no idea what a 2.3 or a 2.4 (grade-point average) is. If the kid's still in school, he must be doing OK."

As for the kids, not only is education hard to come by, it is stigmatized, just as it was when Rodgers was in school 35 years ago.

"You didn't want to be the smartest guy," recalled Rodgers, recently voted the Nebraska athlete of the century by readers of the Omaha World-Herald. "But I would tell the kids right now, if I had it to do all over again, I'd be a nerd."

Nebraska

Rodgers is quick to say that the Nebraska athletic/education experience of the early '70s bears no resemblance to the experience provided to current student-athletes. He has special praise for Nebraska associate athletics director Dennis LeBlanc and for the academic support provided through Nebraska's Hewit Center.

Nebraska was not Rodgers' first college choice. He wanted to get away from Omaha, and he wanted the best route to professional ball. Southern California was his preference, but Southern Cal coach John McKay did not offer him a scholarship, so he chose Nebraska over 50 or 60 other schools.

As always, there was no question about his athletics ability. Rodgers worked as hard as or harder than anybody on the team and established himself early as a future star.

Off the field, he tried to escape his upbringing, but he often found his upbringing would not let him go. One night, he got a call in which he learned that his great-grandmother had been murdered by her husband.

"He stabbed my (great-)grandmother 75 times and then drowned himself in the bathroom," he said. "They called me home from college to identify the body. Everybody was scared to go in there. I went in and there was blood all over it. Oh, it was horrible, just horrible. I have no idea really why he did it, but it was just a horrible deal."

The entire freshman year was difficult, and it went from bad to worse at the end of the spring semester when Rodgers made a life-defining mistake that shadows him three decades later.

"That was after my freshman year, and it was just being stupid," he said. "We were drinking. It was like the last day of school. All the fraternities were playing tricks and doing the craziest things they could do. They might burn down a hall. They might do anything.

"And, basically, that's all we were really doing was doing a prank. We robbed a gas station as a prank. We didn't have any weapons or anything like that. We could have got ourselves killed if he'd had a gun, for eighty darned dollars."

Rodgers wasn't connected to the crime until almost a year later. Although he didn't volunteer his guilt to the authorities, he didn't try to deny his involvement once charged. He was given a two-year probation.

"It was a hard road after that," he said. "It was the most significant mistake I've made in my entire life."

Rodgers, who was good enough in baseball to have been drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers, focused on football exclusively after coach Bob Devaney told him that he would be the first player that he had ever promoted for the Heisman Trophy. He even picked up his own nickname, Johnny the Jet. But -- again -- while the athletics side grew, the educational side languished.

Asked if he had positive memories of any professors from his early days at Nebraska, Rodgers said, "I can't remember a one of them." He was directed into certain classes, which he did attend, but nobody monitored his progress and he learned little. Rodgers accumulated a grade-point average of about 2.0 in 100 semester hours of unchallenging course work.

"I had a counselor and I can't really remember his name, but I'm really upset with him because we had no direction," he said. "And I'm upset with the athletic department (of that day), too, because they were supposed to have been watching him watching me because they were taking the place of my parents."

In the absence of any off-the-field discipline, Rodgers grew ever more reckless.

"I never cared about what was going to be the result of what you were doing. Being daring was just the deal," he said. "I'd drive my car 150 mph if I felt like it. I didn't think about having a blowout until I had a blowout one day. I totaled one of my cars, drove it off a bridge. I've had some times. I'm very, very fortunate still to be in one piece, to be alive."

Not only did he stay in one piece, he set Nebraska records that still stand for receptions in a season (55, 1972), receiving yards in a season (942, 1972), receiving touchdowns in a season (11, 1971) and most 100-yard receiving games (four, 1971 and 1972). He ran for three touchdowns, caught one and threw for another in his swan song, a 40-6 Orange Bowl victory over Notre Dame.

While still in school, he also was charged with marijuana possession (a bogus charge, he says, that was dismissed the following day) and driving with a suspended license, the result of his pedal-to-the-metal motoring habits.

The latter transgression earned Rodgers a 30-day jail sentence, which he served in full not long after returning from New York to claim his Heisman Trophy.

After college

Although Rodgers is not widely known for his pro football accomplishments, that doesn't mean he didn't excel. He just didn't do it in the U.S., and he didn't do it for long.

He played four years for the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League, and he played well, especially for the first two. A Rodgers retrospective in the Montreal Gazette last September carried the following headline: "Former Alouette Rodgers was the CFL's all-time game-breaker."

Rodgers did have an NFL opportunity -- he was drafted by San Diego -- but he said the Chargers chose to bargain at a difficult time for him.

"(The Chargers) came and negotiated with me while I was still doing 30 days in jail," he said. "They figured that because I was in a vulnerable situation, they were just going to be able to offer me a little bit and I'd be happy to get on out of here. Which wasn't far wrong."

But along came Montreal, offering $100,000, and off to Canada he went.

Four years later, he joined the Chargers. By then, Dan Fouts was hitting his stride as a quarterback and Joe Washington was in the backfield. In a preseason game, Rodgers returned a punt 68 yards for a touchdown.

"Me and Joe Washington, we were like unstoppable," he said. "And then I pull a hamstring. I pull one hamstring and then I pull another. So, I'm out the second half of the year."

For the first time, Johnny the Jet was grounded. Next came the crash.

"I finally got around the hamstring," he said, "and then one day in practice, I'm making a curl move and one of my teammates stepped on my foot and popped my kneecap out. I popped a piece out about the size of a half a dollar. I ended up having to get my knee drilled to get it to grow back right. But that was basically the end of it."

He was out of football by 1979, never having scored a regular-season NFL touchdown.

Rodgers reveled in excess as a pro, driving a Rolls-Royce and a owning a closet full of fur coats. But his salvation at the conclusion of his career was that he had been reasonably careful with his money and was blessed with an innate entrepreneurial ability. When he left the NFL, he had about $500,000 in the bank, some of which he applied toward establishing a cable television guide called Tuned in San Diego.

The guide was a big success. In its heyday, Rodgers was selling about 75,000 copies a week through newsstands and subscriptions.

A 1985 book, "Heisman, After the Glory," was candid about Rodgers' problems (admissions of recreational drug use, fathering several children out of wedlock, among other things), but author David Newhouse had nothing but good things to say about Rodgers' magazine. "Rodgers went into the publishing business," Newhouse wrote. "It nearly broke him at first, but he rebounded, and his Tuned In San Diego, a popular TV-entertainment magazine, is highly successful."

About that time, however, Rodgers lost it all.

To this day, he believes he was the victim of a conspiracy hatched by powers-that-be who were chagrined because he would not move aside and let them control the cable guide. In any event, all hell broke lose.

"This guy comes to my house," Rodgers said. "My lady comes and gets me and says there's somebody on top of the house. And he's dressed in plain clothes. So I come out and ask him what in the heck is going on? What are you doing here? You need to come down here and explain to me what you're doing on my roof and who you are or I'm going to come up there and deal with you. I told him I would go and get my gun, I would shoot him."

Rodgers said it turned out the man had been sent by the cable company to cut off service to the television of his grandmother, who was living with him.

The repairman came back -- this time, Rodgers said, dressed as a repairman, driving a cable-company truck -- with police in tow. Rodgers was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, among other things.

The incident was serious by itself, but with the armed robbery charge, the previous jail time and assorted other issues in his past, Rodgers was now in serious trouble. He said he had difficulty in acquiring adequate legal counsel, and he finally made a considered decision to defend himself.

The trial may have had more in common with "My Cousin Vinny" than "Inherit the Wind," but Rodgers said he felt strongly about his innocence and was not willing to plead guilty simply to get probation. Rodgers in fact was convicted, but the verdict eventually was overturned by an appeals court.

He spent time in jail because of a contempt citation, and he was wiped out financially by the episode. But out of it all, almost ironically, he discovered his untapped academic side.

Education, at last

In his effort to defend himself against the assault charges, Rodgers turned to books as he never had before.

"You could not come to my house and find any time, whether it was a waking hour or any hour, where I wasn't really studying," he said. "I mean, I studied 24/7. I was sleeping at the desk. I woke up and I started back."

After the cable incident was over, he began to think about returning to school, but other priorities always seemed to get in the way. Eventually, though, he moved back to Omaha, and in 1993, he returned to Lincoln to re-enroll at Nebraska.

At first, he did not know about the NCAA's Degree-Completion Program or other resources that were available to help financially. The man who had driven a Rolls-Royce 15 years earlier now took out a loan to return to school.

As a practical matter, Rodgers believes he didn't have to have the degree. "The formal education is important, but the university of hard knocks is important, too," he said, and by then he had a Ph.D. from the university of hard knocks. He also had experience in starting a business and had undertaken other endeavors, including a fling in real estate.

So, completing the degree wasn't essential for him to make a living. It was, however, absolutely necessary for his self-image and for establishing credibility with young athletes.

"I was telling kids they could do what they want and they could be what they want, but they could never, ever, under any circumstances, quit on anything, large or small, because it could become a habit," he said. "But from the time I was a senior, I knew that I had quit school. Well, either I had to take that out of my speeches or I had to do something about it."

Soon, Rodgers heard about the degree-completion program and acquired a grant from the NCAA.

"I felt like college sports owed me the whole thing," he said. "I came back knowing that they owed me and knowing that they owed me a quality education.

"The only reason I didn't get one the first time was because I didn't ask for one. Now that I'm asking for one, I deserved to have it. I knew the work I had to do on my part, but I wanted to make sure I held them accountable for their part."

He mapped out an ambitious plan for a dual major in advertising and broadcasting. He didn't worry about failing because he knew failure would be too humiliating. "I had a tremendous amount of publicity when I went back, and I knew I would have a tremendous amount of publicity when I dropped out," he said.

Rodgers hired tutors and then fired them when he felt they weren't giving him an edge. This time, he was no different than any other students, and no grades would be given to him.

Unlike before, he found an individual who positively influenced his education -- Will Norton, dean of the college of journalism. And this time, Rodgers interacted with his fellow students, who had no trouble accepting him.

"They looked upon me favorably," he said. "I was older, but I still was there with them. They would ask me, 'What are you going to be when you graduate?' And I would tell them, '50.' "

He beat that, comfortably. On August 19, 1997, at the age of 46, Rodgers claimed a bachelor of journalism in advertising and broadcasting, having posted a 3.700 grade-point average after his return to college.

The vision

Today, the man who once was issued three speeding tickets in a single block drives around in a Cornhusker red sport utility vehicle. He hasn't had a speeding ticket in two years.

In the 1985 book "Heisman, After the Glory," the Rodgers chapter concluded with him dining on champagne chicken at a San Diego marina, declaring that he had left hell and found heaven on the West Coast.

These days, he is back in Omaha, where he leads his company, Jetwear, from a small office on the near north side of town. With the help of a man named Chris Pappas, Jetwear -- a bedding collection that uses logos and images from various top college sports programs -- has gained a page in the next J.C. Penney catalog.

Rodgers recently was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. He laughs easily and often, and from all appearances, his life is more stable and meaningful than it has ever been.

He is enthusiastic about his late-in-life educational experience and strongly believes that others would benefit from following his lead. The NCAA, he says, is the catalyst that must make it happen.

"If we don't face up and just do the honorable thing and make sure that all the guys have their degrees paid for, then there's some injustice here," he said. "It would scare me to no end knowing that God is just and that this is something that will come back to haunt us."

Rodgers strongly believes the NCAA should find ways to recruit those athletes who did not receive their degrees the first time around -- both for the sake of the athletes and the NCAA. He tells NCAA audiences that the Association has little choice if it is to claim moral authority and mend its battered image among high-profile student-athletes, especially those who are black.

The 1999 Division I graduation-rate report showed that 60 percent of the black males who enrolled in the 1992-93 academic year did not receive their diploma within six years. Rodgers tells anybody who will listen that a large part of the NCAA's image problem comes from how that group feels about the Association.

When he was an athlete, Rodgers was strident in the belief that athletes generating revenue should be paid. Now, based on his experience, he believes that a genuine education is acceptable compensation. At the moment, however, he believes too many elite athletes are getting the worst of all worlds: no money and no quality education.

"The NCAA is thought of as the big hoodlum in the gang because they're controlling the purse strings," he said. "The (NCAA) guys are making fairly good livings on the backs of the athletes, and the athletes don't get paid any money. And now, we've got a whole other group out there that doesn't have any degrees, either.

"Now, if you can get them the degrees, the quality degrees everybody should have, then the NCAA is shown to be a benefit for all the athletes. Then we're on the right track."

In Rodgers' vision, not only would the returning athletes work toward their degrees, they would mentor current student-athletes, many of whom need guidance from those who have shared difficult experiences.

"They would come through there and make a difference in the whole program," he said. "And (eventually) we could do less and less of the degree-completion program because we would have more degrees completed (on time) than we do at this point.

"But if we just leave them out there, then it's going to come back to haunt us all."

Through all of the astronomic heights and cavernous depths, Rodgers is still positive about his time as a college athlete. His motivation now, he says, is to make the experience better for everybody involved.

"It was a very good experience," he said. "I really wish I could have been fortunate enough to have had an educational, academic side. It really would have made all the difference in my entire life, but God has put me in this position for a reason.

"I know there are some things that could have been better, some things I brought on myself and things that have been inflicted upon me. It's just been part of growing up and growing into the light."

That, he hopes, is the Johnny Rodgers everybody will remember.

The Degree-Completion Program

The NCAA Degree-Completion Program was established in 1988 to assist student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility for institutional financial aid.

Applicants must have completed eligibility for athletically related aid at a Division I member institution before they may apply. They also must be within 30 semester hours of their degree requirements.

Those receiving grants may be funded for a maximum of five semesters on a part-time basis or two semesters (minimum 12 hours per term) on a full-time basis.

Full-time students receive grants equal to a full athletics grant at the institution; part-time students receive tuition and an allowance for books.

The program is administered by the NCAA Degree-Completion Consultants.

Applications are accepted in the spring for the following fall and spring, and in the fall for the next spring and summer. Application deadlines are: fall -- first week in October; spring -- first week in May.

Applications are available at each Division I institution's department of athletics. Completed applications should be sent to Karen S. Cooper at the NCAA national office.

Degree-Completion Awards Facts

Number of awards given to date: 1,290.

Total amount of awards: 1988-98, $5,998,317 (average: $5,211.39). 1999-present, $920,962 (average $6,625).

Marital status of awardees: married, 13 percent; single, 73 percent; divorced/separated, 1 percent; unknown, 13 percent.

Gender of awardees: male, 59 percent; female 29 percent; unaccounted, 13 percent.

Race of awardees: white, 43 percent; Black, 21 percent; Hispanic, 2 percent; American Indian, Native Alaskan, Pacific Islander, 3 percent; unknown, 31 percent.

Institution given most awards: San Jose State University.

Sports most awarded: men -- football; women -- basketball.

Degree-completion rate for awardees: 1988-99, 93 percent.