He is a sight.

Josh Jarboe, standout receiver from Cedar Grove High School in Ellenwood, stares into a teammate's phone camera, rugged face framed by dyed-red dreads, and rhymes a freestyle rap.

Pouya Dianat/pdianat@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Coming out of Cedar Grove, Josh Jarboe had his pick of colleges. He signed with Oklahoma, but is a Sooner no more.

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The rhymes navigate a standard hip-hop landscape: AK-47s, shots to the head, sex, Atlanta as paradise for gun-toting marauders. It isn't much different from what Jarboe and some friends from predominantly black Cedar Grove have performed and recorded since 10th grade.

Only this time, Jarboe sits in a dorm lounge at the University of Oklahoma, where he chose to play football over two dozen other college powerhouses, including Georgia, Florida and LSU. Summer school students walk behind him without taking much notice. Another teammate makes a goofball cameo.

It lasts 74 seconds.

Next morning, Jarboe flew back to Atlanta to visit family before his first practice in Norman as one of the

country's premier freshman recruits.

The video, meanwhile, passed from the teammate's cellphone to YouTube, where it went viral and set off howls in football-mad Oklahoma.

Jarboe had been arrested in March for carrying a gun on the high school parking lot. The charges were reduced to misdemeanors and the university stood by him.

Yet with his explicit, tossed-off rap out there for the world to see, a lineup of columnists, bloggers and commentators now viewed Jarboe as a poster child for the thug life. Ten days ago, Oklahoma cut him loose.

Jarboe, 18, is still in shock, those who've talked with him say, his promising athletic career derailed by a 21st century collision of culture, technology and teenaged knuckle-headedness.

From Oklahoma to Georgia and beyond, the story has lit conversations about black youth culture, the can't-escape-it influence of the Internet, and how imperfect kids can get caught in the middle.

"Five years ago, this never would've made it out of the dorm," says J. Brent Clark, a lawyer in Norman, former NCAA enforcement officer and author of a book about Sooner football. "Josh Jarboe has been victimized by technology. He wasn't doing anything different than thousands of young people across the country, in terms of making up his own rap lyrics. What Josh did was normal activity for his age group, his ethnicity and his interests.

"Was it poor judgment? Yes," Clark adds. "But what kind of standard are we holding these kids to? I don't know a 50-year-old white male who has any clue about dorm life in 2008 — and I'm a 50-year-old white male.

"But who are the decision makers? Fifty-year-old white men."

Good kid, bad choices

Jarboe, who declined with his family to be interviewed for this story, is described by those who know him as a collection of youthful contradictions: a rare talent and a flamboyant performer; a charismatic leader and a too-easily misled follower; a nice guy with a tough-guy image; a good kid who has made bad decisions.

"He's a very confident kid," says Ray Bonner, Cedar Grove's head football coach. "You look at him and say, 'If my daughter brought him home, would I let her go out? Hell, no.' But then you'd get to talking with him, he'd sit down with your wife, and you'd say, 'Great person.' "

Adds Cedric Beasley, who has known Jarboe since he was 5 and coached him in youth football and track, "A lot of what the world sees is image — they see dreads and tattoos and think he's a thug-type kid. He's made some bad choices, but Josh never harmed anybody. He's one of the best kids you're going to find."

Jarboe lives with his mother and stepfather, and his whole family showed up for his games. His athleticism always seemed beyond his years.

Big (6-feet-3, 195 pounds), fast, elusive and smart, Jarboe emerged as a star during his sophomore year.

Coaches saw him as hyper-competitive. Teammates saw him as a vocal leader, a game breaker who improvised freestyle rap in the locker room to psych them up before games.

"We rap and play like that in the locker room all the time," senior running back William Pratcher says.

Jarboe, a self-taught piano player, performed as a rapper during high school at parties and clubs on the south and west sides, coaches said. He and friends even cut a CD, with at least one song being played on local urban radio during mix-tape segments. Coaches say kids all over DeKalb County have his songs on their iPods.

"Rapping is what he did for fun," says former teammate Xavier Avery, who now plays pro baseball. "But his real agenda was football."

Jarboe's flamboyance surfaced when he picked his college in January during a live network telecast from Orlando of a high school all-star game. With his mother at his side, Jarboe set out on a table the caps from three recruiting finalists, toying with each before pushing it aside. When he lifted what appeared to be the last one — Florida — he pulled out an Oklahoma cap hidden beneath it and scrunched it atop his dreads.

"Looks like they're getting an actor, too," a TV commentator said.

Two months later, an assistant principal spotted Jarboe in a Cedar Grove parking lot before a track meet pulling a gun from the back of a friend's car. When a police officer approached, according to the arrest report, Jarboe tried to hide the weapon beneath the driver's seat, where a stolen .38 pistol was then found.

Expelled from school, Jarboe took online classes to get his degree. Bonner says Jarboe was threatened by a student from another school, and rather than tell coaches or other school officials, took action to protect himself. His lawyer, Maurice G. Kenner, says several facts, including the gun's ownership, were in dispute. With no prior criminal record, Jarboe was sentenced to two years probation and 80 hours community service.

He passed two summer classes at Oklahoma, Kenner says, and completed much of his community service.

Then the video popped up on YouTube.

"He called me, crying like a baby," says Jarrett Harper, an assistant coach at Cedar Grove. "He didn't know what he'd done wrong."

In a T-shirt, shorts and trademark dreads, Jarboe strolled the buggy Cedar Grove practice field last week while his old team worked out in the heat. He talked to coaches, gave tips to players, answered calls on his cellphone.

Coaches say a string of schools have called — from Big Ten and SEC programs to historically black colleges. He's eligible to play this season and could choose a new school this week.

Meanwhile, commentators, fans and the blogosphere chatter on. Some say goodbye and good riddance. Others saw him as a casualty of a culture taken out of context. Even Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops initially seemed to defend Jarboe against the Internet's intrusiveness. "Kick a guy off the team for what he says?" Stoops told The Oklahoman. "Now we're in people's homes, in their private spaces."

A day later, Jarboe was booted. "It was a business decision," says Berry Tramel, a columnist for The Oklahoman. "When you start talking about how rap music and lyrics like this are part of some people's culture, a lot of Oklahomans might believe it, but they're not necessarily going to buy it. It's a public relations nightmare."

Many observers say it was the video coupled with the earlier gun arrest that did Jarboe in — that one seemed to mock the other.

"A lot of times these kids cause things to happen to themselves," says Felix Bell, 63, a retired coach who spent a recent afternoon watching a Cedar Grove practice. "When you get messed up with a weapon, the last thing you want to do is talk about a weapon, even though he didn't know it was going on YouTube."

In a world where technology often trumps privacy, the biggest lesson learned: Be cautious.

Says Bonner, the Cedar Grove coach who understands both Oklahoma's stance and Jarboe's confusion with it: "Bet he won't do a video again — unless he's being paid by Interscope Records."