Just About Every Day Has Been a Test for Hokies’ Thomas : Sugar Bowl: He has had to overcome threat of drugs, poor grades and scouts’ lack of interest.

Pop’s Grocery is a hole in the wall on Martin Luther King Blvd. in Dunbar, east of Fort Myers, Fla. It’s a ‘40s kind of Southern place with a ‘90s twist, a neighborhood store where you can get a pound of bologna and a loaf of Wonder Bread inside and a rock of crack cocaine in the parking lot.

Bradford Lee Blanks was there to do business Aug. 10, but Tyrone Collins wasn’t happy with the terms of the drug deal and the two exchanged words, then gunshots. Collins is in jail, charged with murder.

Blanks, then an expectant father, is dead.

LeRoy Thomas called his son Dwayne in Blacksburg, Va., to tell Dwayne his cousin, with whom he had run as a teenager in Fort Worth and who had watched Dwayne play football at Virginia Tech, would be buried in a few days.

“Come home,” LeRoy Thomas said.

A few days later, LeRoy Thomas told Dwayne, a 22-year-old senior who was wondering how many more tests life had for him, to go back to school.

Dwayne’s mother had delighted in watching him play, then died of cancer when he was 13. He was a father, unexpectedly but enthusiastically, at 20. As a high school senior, he had led Florida in rushing, then learned that the state’s universities considered him a step slow on the field and even slower in the classroom.

As a sophomore at Virginia Tech, his 1,130 yards were the third-highest in school history, then he lost his job as an injured junior to a faster freshman, Ken Oxendine.

Every year was a struggle in the classroom. Excitement was settling under a Miami kickoff, ready to show that the Hurricanes had made a mistake in not recruiting him. Pressure was the final exam in summer school, knowing that failing it would end football, would end college.

Thomas has one more game, against Texas on Sunday in the Sugar Bowl, and in five months he is expected to graduate.

His future, with girlfriend Carmen King and Dwayne Jr., drives Thomas now because he can see one. And he has seen what can happen when there isn’t one.

“I hung out with my cousin a lot and saw the quick money,” said Thomas, Virginia Tech’s third-leading all-time rusher with 2,696 yards.

“I knew it was wrong. I could have done it, but I didn’t want to be out there doing that because it doesn’t last long. That kind of life is guaranteed to get you either six feet deep or in jail, and that’s not something I was looking forward to.”

It’s easier to say now, after August in Ft. Myers and after another lecture from LeRoy.

“I just talked to him, let him know that he had a chance to do something, make something of himself,” LeRoy said. “As long as you are on Earth, people are going to pass. His cousin was doing some things that weren’t good, but it hurt Dwayne a lot when Bradford passed. They enjoyed each other.

“It wasn’t easy to handle, but he just did what he had to do.”

He always has.

He had gone to Bishop Verot High, an African American in a largely white school, recruited by alumni who paid the steep tuition. He rushed for 2,672 yards and 40 touchdowns as a senior.

He dreamed of playing for Miami, but the Hurricanes didn’t want him. Neither did Florida State or Florida.

“They were looking for somebody who could run a 4.4- or 4.3-[second 40-yard dash] and I run a 4.5 or 4.6,” said Thomas, who is actually a step slower than that. “I knew I could play with anybody, but they didn’t think so.”

Unwanted at home, Thomas looked north.

Virginia Tech wanted him, and after a visit, he wanted Virginia Tech.

After a redshirt season, Thomas played sparingly as a freshman, then seemed the kind of back Virginia Tech could build an offense around as a sophomore.

But the classroom was another matter, particularly in the spring, when Thomas spent much of his time at parties.

“I spent my summers catching up,” he said. “That’s pressure. It was football, lifting for football, going to class, doing my work, taking exams, doing homework. It never ended.

“People love to be in the spotlight on the football field, with the cameras on you. But the situation I know people wouldn’t like was to have to sit in that classroom and make that grade or you can’t play. If you mess up on the football field, you’ve got another chance to redeem yourself. If you mess up in the classroom, that’s it. There ain’t no redemption in the classroom. It’s hard.”

In Dwayne’s junior season, he suffered a sprained ankle that cost him three games, and Dwayne Jr. was born. Thomas and King, also a senior at Virginia Tech, live in separate apartments in Blacksburg, but raise him together, as much as they can.

“He is the light of my life,” Thomas said of his 20-month-old son. “I see him and can understand how my dad felt, watching me grow up, crawl, take a step, learn to talk.

“When he came, it was a wake-up call to me. It helped me, made me think of what I needed to do. I had been just trying to get by in class so I could play football, but when I had him, that all changed. I didn’t want to just get by, and when I got hurt in my junior year I realized that football wasn’t always going to be there either. I had to do something for our future.”

He carries a 2.2 grade-point average, but that’s a far cry from where he was. The NFL is lukewarm to him, saying enough of the right things about his ability to spark the interest of an occasional agent, but hardly talking of him in terms of stardom.

He’s a plugger, getting his mind sufficiently together after Bradford Blanks’ death--and Oxendine’s preseason injury--to earn a starting position back and gain 673 yards, the Hokies’ best. There will be pro football tryouts, the hardest way to earn the right to earn a living playing the game.

“I just want a chance,” he said. “People doubt me, but I don’t doubt me. I can compete with anyone, anywhere.”

But then he adds a dose of hard-earned maturity.

“We’ll look at the spring and what it will bring me, tryouts or whatever. But it’s still going to be me and Carmen and Dwayne, no matter what happens. I want to teach him to do the classwork, that football won’t last forever. I want to run a hotel, an apartment building, to own property. I want a future for us.”