Gamecocks' Garcia may have had his breakthrough

The Garcia family surrounded 82-year-old August Garcia and pleaded with him to have the heart operation that would keep him alive. He resisted and said he had had enough, no more.

Then the trump card was played. “You gotta see Stephen play again,” they said.

August Garcia, the grandfather of South Carolina quarterback Stephen Garcia, suddenly became enthused. He wears his South Carolina sweat shirt jersey around the nursing home, and he has the Gamecocks’ schedule tacked on the wall.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

August had the heart operation, and Thursday night a nurse wheeled him out of the Tampa-area nursing home so he could go to his son Augie’s house to watch South Carolina play Southern Mississippi.

It was worth sticking around to see.

His grandson may finally be fulfilling his promise as a college quarterback. Garcia, a 6-2, 230-pound junior, completed 16 of 23 passes for 193 yards in the 41-13 victory against Southern Miss. He also ran over a linebacker on his way to the end zone for a touchdown, which can only help make this his team, at last.

South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier has trumpeted the freshman quarterback Connor Shaw, a graduate of Flowery Branch, but it all seems orchestrated to push Garcia toward being a quarterback the program can trust. On the depth chart under quarterback and who should be first team, the listing includes the word “or” as in “Garcia or Shaw” for first team, but it did not seem likely Spurrier would throw a freshman into the SEC fire so soon. Garcia had to be the guy.

“Having Connor Shaw here pushing him a little bit is helpful,” Spurrier said. “Last year we had absolutely no one to push Stephen. He was our quarterback no matter how he played. I just think now in the back of your mind you've got to make yourself think, if you want to play the game, you have to play the way the coaches ask you to play.

“The other night he was thinking through the play much better than the previous season.”

Garcia is not giving Spurrier any reason to take his job. He ran the offense expertly against Southern Miss and threw the ball on time. When there was pressure, Garcia did not immediately duck and run. He stayed in the pocket and was the quarterback, not the running back.

“We're going to come in and watch film tomorrow,” Garcia told reporters after the game when asked if he had solidified his status as the No. 1 quarterback. “I hope I played pretty well. I think I did.”

Garcia has never appeared to be mainline, the quarterback on straight rails from start to finish. He has hopped the tracks, getting busted for underage drinking outside a dormitory and failure to stop for a police officer.

He seemed innocently oblivious that he was the quarterback for a major college program where everything is scrutinized. He was just being a college kid, and it got him in trouble and gave him a reputation as a nonserious player. Garcia’s hobby is collecting swords and watching ancient war movies, so maybe his personality is to be that swashbuckler.

His uncle Ernie Garcia, a financial adviser in Sarasota, Fla., said his nephew was never a haphazard pirate when it came to football. He wanted to be a student of the game, not a spectacle.

“He always carried a football with him wherever he went,” Ernie Garcia said when asked about Stephen as a young boy. “You could see it in his face that this was going to be his game.”

When Ernie Garcia, who played football at Southwest Louisiana, played catch with the 12-year-old Stephen and the arm strength was on the level of a high school player, he said, “It reminded me of your favorite dog eagerly waiting for you to throw the next Frisbee."

While Stephen Garcia was scuffling at South Carolina for two years and trying to become the quarterback hero, his family in Florida never wavered with support. He has two brothers who attended Harvard, and he has another still in college, plus parents, and uncles and aunts and, of course, his grandfather, who rally behind him.

“When he scores, the family scores, when he is sacked, the family is sacked,” said Ernie Garcia, whose brother Gary is Stephen’s father. “Don’t say we’re ‘pretty close’ as a family. It’s better than that. We’re real close.

“There were some mistakes at the beginning, just like everybody’s made mistakes. It’s how you handle those. That’s the true winner that can get through that. We’re as proud as we can be. I had confidence in his ability the whole time.”

As for Shaw, he completed 4 of 5 passes in his college debut against Southern Miss. He is not the starter, but he did what any good reserve should do, which is to push the No. 1 guy to excel.

“That’s your role, push the starter,” said Lee Shaw, his father and the football coach at Flowery Branch High School. “Your job is to fight to get the starting job, and that helps keep the veteran on track.