Back From the Wilds : Monestime, Humphrey Flee Montana, Find a Home at Moorpark

Home, home on the range . . . Well, not exactly. Mack Humphrey and Marc Monestime, a couple of suburbanites who headed for the hills for a chance to play big-time college football, never felt at home on the range lands of Montana.

Where the deer and the antelope play . . .

They never conducted any field studies of the animals, but they had a hunch that the deer and antelope of Montana didn’t find much time to play, not with everyone in the state constantly trying to shoot them.

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word . . . At first, that might have been true. Monestime and Humphrey said that they loved the first few weeks of their lives in Missoula, which is hard west from the towns of Nimrod and Bearmouth and just a few miles south of the always-popular St. Ignatius National Bison Range. But after a while, often was heard a discouraging word.

And the skies are not cloudy all day . . . Then how, the football players would like to know, would you explain those endless storms that swept across Idaho and roared into Montana, lashing Monestime and Humphrey with biting snow and rain? It is generally accepted that a foot of snow doesn’t fall out of skies that are not cloudy all day.

“We’ll always remember Montana,” Humphrey said. “But this is where Mark and I belong.”

They were, after all, at Thousand Oaks High, where Humphrey was a hard-hitting linebacker and his teammate and buddy Monestime set a Ventura County record for career rushing yardage. When they graduated after leading the Lancers to the 1987 Coastal Conference championship, however, they had few offers to play college football. Nearby Moorpark College showed interest, but the pair had loftier goals. Mike Trevathan, a former Thousand Oaks wide receiver, was about to begin his junior season at Montana. He had made the adjustment easily and, pleased with Trevathan, Montana came calling for Monestime and Humphrey.

“We were both pretty excited,” Monestime said. “We didn’t know much about Montana, but it was Division I-AA football, and that’s all we had to hear.”

Montana offered Monestime a scholarship. Humphrey made the team as a walk-on and was then given a scholarship. Suddenly, the world was rosy. Snowy and cold, but still rosy.

However, the two played sparingly in 1988, their first season. Humphrey was seeing little action after being switched from linebacker to strong safety. Then, the coaches decided to switch to a run-and-shoot offense, which pretty much took Monestime out of the picture too.

“I just didn’t fit in anymore,” Monestime said. “The offense had one fullback and about six receivers, and the fullback just blocked. I thought I could adjust, but I could see right away that I was being left out.”

The two met one night and decided it was time to leave. They had been at the university for only one semester, but that was enough. Winter was setting in and without football to concentrate on, the idea of spending the foulest months of the year in the Wild, Wild West suddenly didn’t appeal to Monestime and Humphrey.

So they came home. And immediately called Moorpark Coach Jim Bittner and asked if there might still be a couple of places on the roster. They enrolled at Moorpark for the spring semester, were an instant hit in spring drills and earned positions on the roster.

Monestime and Humphrey are now key players on a Moorpark team that is 6-1. Monestime is the Raiders’ second-leading rusher with 432 yards in 69 carries. Humphrey plays safety on a defense that has allowed only 55 points.

“They told me that they were basically homesick in Montana,” Bittner said. “We recruited them out of high school, but Montana talked scholarship with them and we couldn’t match that, so they went. But I’m glad they’re back. They’re both excellent players.”

Both players said they would never forget their brief visit to Montana. Just thinking about it, Humphrey said, makes his shoulder ache. “A teammate brought us all up to his parents’ ranch about an hour out of Missoula,” he said, “and during the day he asked us if we wanted to shoot some guns at targets. I had shot a .22 before, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. He hands me the gun and doesn’t say anything. I aim and pull the trigger, and the next thing I know I’m flying backward. It almost blew my shoulder off and knocked me back about 10 feet. It was a 7-millimeter rifle, not a .22.

“I look around and the whole team, all the Montana guys who grew up shooting these big guns, are laughing like wild men.”

Monestime, who laughed along with the others, was next. He had watched Humphrey hold the gun’s stock much too lightly against his shoulder, resulting in the wood-on-shoulder impact from the gun’s recoil that nearly knocked his friend into South Dakota.

Monestime wasn’t about to make the same silly mistake.

“So I hold the gun real tight, like I’m strangling it,” he said. “I’ve got it jammed up against my shoulder as tight as I can. And then I put my eye right up against the rifle scope, and BANG! “

Monestime’s next memory is of having one very painful eye. The scope slammed against his eye socket, cutting him and later causing it to swell.

And, he recalls, the incident must have caused great alarm among his teammates, who by now had stopped laughing at Humphrey and were rolling on the dusty ground, clutching their sides in an obvious sympathetic response to Monestime’s misfortune.

“I thought they had laughed loud when Mack shot the gun,” Monestime said. “That was nothing.”

Already initiated into the Montana gun club, the next offer they had was to join some teammates on a hunt.

“That’s all these guys talked about,” said Humphrey, who once listed “raising animals and training them” among his interests.

“Deer, antelope, elk, anything really. Anything that moved, these guys hunted it. Sometimes, during the hunting season, that’s all you’d hear. All day long it’s ‘elk this and elk that.’

“But when they told us that sometimes they’d have to track an elk for seven hours over a mountain, that’s when Marc and I told them no thanks. When they went hunting, we just stayed home and watched “Geraldo” on TV.

“Montana was nice while it lasted, but I think both of us are glad to be home.”