Colleges

Path cut short

The life of USF freshman Keeley Dorsey ends just as he was getting it on the right track.

By GREG AUMAN
Published January 19, 2007

Keeley Dorsey's tattoo, as seen on Facebook.com: "Tomorrow may never come. Enjoy life today. Yesterday is gone."
	[Facebook photo]

ADVERTISEMENT Keeley Dorsey collapsed and died at the USF athletic facility.

TAMPA

Mike Dorsey got the phone call Wednesday, telling him of the death of his 19-year-old nephew, and the tragedy he mourned was that Keeley Dorsey's life had just started to turn around.

The USF freshman football player, who collapsed during a weight-room workout and died shortly after, had worked so passionately for the past few years on getting himself off a path that might lead to dying young.

"He was really determined to make something of himself, and not just in football," said Dorsey, 38, who lives in Keeley's native New Jersey. "He was just here in August, and you saw that such a maturity had come about him and changed him."

In South Florida, another uncle, Elton Dorsey, lamented that he never saw Keeley play college football, that his life, like his football career, was just beginning.

"That's the shame of this," said the law enforcement officer in Hialeah. "He had grown up to be quite a man. He'd been through so much, but he persevered through all of it."

For most of Keeley childhood, his mother's two brothers were the only father figures in his life. His biological father, Harold Keeley, gave him nothing more than his first name, they said.

"He denied him," said Mike, who lives nearby and called him Wednesday to tell him the son he'd barely known had died.

Keeley, who had no known medical conditions, was the middle of three boys Tammie Dorsey raised on her own, first in New Jersey and later in the Florida Panhandle, often working two jobs to keep them clothed and fed.

By middle school, Keeley was running with the wrong crowds, getting into enough trouble that his mother's only option was to move regularly, from town to town and school to school.

"The kids he grew up with, they all got into the same wrong things," Mike Dorsey said. "Not having a father, it has a negative effect on a boy. He never got locked up, but if he'd kept down that road, you didn't like where he was headed."

At 12, he was arrested as a juvenile in Okaloosa County on suspicion of felony larceny; Elton Dorsey said Keeley and other boys broke into a school to play basketball in the gym.

His life changed midway through high school when his family settled in Tallahassee, his mother met Claude Terrell, the man he considered a stepfather, and he found the football program at Lincoln High.

"He never played Pop Warner ball, didn't take sports until high school," Elton Dorsey said. "When he got into that, found something he really liked, it turned him around. He thrived at it."

That Dorsey earned a scholarship to USF was a bit of luck. Defensive coordinator Wally Burnham had stopped at Lincoln, which his sons attended when he coached at Florida State. He was recruiting another player, but a coach told him the best recruit wasn't playing football - Dorsey couldn't as a fifth-year senior - and he popped in a 2004 tape.

Burnham wasn't sold until he met Dorsey, saw the determination he had in completing his academics, the hope he had for what a scholarship could do for him.

Keeley Dorsey had learned the hard way not to take his life for granted, and at some point in the past year, he got a tattoo that covered his back, with a large cross and banner that read: "Enjoy life today. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow may never come."

Mike Dorsey said he struggled to explain the death to his 12-year-old son, who looked up to Keeley. Elton, too, remembers the way Keeley would toss a football with his young twin sons.

The family will gather in Tallahassee next week to bury a teenager, to remember Keeley not for what he'd been through, but for what he wanted to accomplish. As for the tattoo, Elton said he has suggested the quote serve as the epitaph on Dorsey's headstone, and said he plans to get the same message on his body, to remember his nephew.

"He saw that big picture," he said. "We talked about how nobody owes you anything, that you have to live for today."

Greg Auman can be reached at auman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 19, 2007, 01:42:01]