Did he ever. "At Virginia Union, you get one pair of cleats to make it through the whole season," says Alvin Parker, one of Hunter's best friends and the special teams and running backs coach for the Panthers. "You get two jerseys, one for practice, one for games. That's it. If you get a hole in your jersey, we take it to the cleaners and they patch it up."
It was no wonder, then, that when it came time to send out highlight tapes to the scouts, Hunter had to, uh, improvise. There was no real video equipment at Virginia Union, no team videographer. So Hunter did it himself. He grabbed the game footage (shot on home video cameras) and stuck two VCRs together and made a tape that way. The quality of the finished product was pretty poor. "It looked like a bootleg off the street," Hunter says with a chuckle. "It was all grainy and shit. You could barely see me."
One of the tapes he shipped off landed in the hands of Pendergast, who saw something through all the gray static. Rather than sending a scout, the Boys' secondary coach went out to see Hunter for himself.
"The day before [Pendergast] showed, the locker room was cleared out," Hunter says. "See, this is how things went at Virginia Union. We didn't get new shit; we got all our shit reconditioned. So the day before he came to see me, they took all the cleats to be reconditioned. When he got there, I didn't have any cleats to wear for the workout. I'm looking around the locker--I wear a size 12--and I see a pair of shoes way over in the corner, almost hidden behind a box. It was an old-ass pair of shoes. Size 10. That wasn't even all. I'm saying, these shoes were old...they weren't even the cleats with the screws in them, they were the molded kind. The molded plastic kind--Nike Sharks from like 1986. You remember them? Yeah, that's what I did my workout in. Old-ass cleats that were too small for me."
Pendergast kept telling Hunter to stop working out, to not worry about it, considering the circumstances. "I was like, nah, you came all the way out here to see me; I'm gonna finish the workout. And I did. You know, the whole time I was worried about my feet, just thinking about my shoes. But it turned out that I ran, like, a 4.4 [40 time] that day. He must have liked what he saw."
