In one hand, Cristina Garcia clutches her phone. In the other, her rosary.
And as she sits behind her desk at a law firm in Ft. Lauderdale, waiting to hear if her son Cristian has made the University of Florida football team, all she can do is pray.
Cristian is a journeyman, having attended three universities in three semesters before landing at UF in Fall 2015.
Upon arriving, he immediately enrolled in the team’s walk-on tryout with more than 20 other hopefuls.
UF took only two players from that group. Garcia, a 6-foot-1, 231-pound linebacker, was one of them.
“It was surreal,” he said, “like something I’d been waiting for for so long.”
Garcia had been waiting ever since he sat out a year to focus on academics, ever since he transferred to a new college without telling his family and ever since he was shunned by major college programs as an undersized defensive end.
Through it all, he never lost faith that he’d achieve his goal of playing football at the highest level.
And neither did his mother.
About 300 miles south of Gainesville, the text message finally flashes across her screen. Her eyes swell.
Her prayers have been answered.
“I just burst into tears,” she said. “I was so happy for him. This is everything we wanted for him.”
• • •
With the district championship in jeopardy, it’s Garcia’s time.
Angel Aparicio, the defensive line coach at Miami’s Belen Jesuit Preparatory school, calls on the then-sophomore. All Garcia has to do is clog the running lane of future University of Miami star and current Cleveland Brown Duke Johnson.
He goes the wrong way.
Johnson hits the hole, rockets past the secondary and arrives in the end zone.
Aparicio turns to Garcia immediately.
“I went the wrong way coach,” he remembers Garcia telling him, his expression like that of a dog who just knocked over a vase. “I’m really sorry.”
Luckily for Garcia, his team won the game and Garcia was able to hone his skills over the next year and a half.
By the time he was a senior in 2013, he was receiving interest from some smaller schools and one larger university: Bowling Green State.
According to Aparicio, BGSU recruiter Nick Monroe came to visit Garcia and was “all over him.” Monroe told Garcia he was going to go back to Ohio, show the other coaches Garcia’s tape and likely extend a scholarship offer, Aparicio said.
But an offer never came.
So when it was time to pick his school, there was only one hat on Garcia’s table: Malone University, a small school in Ohio.
What stood out about Malone?
“Nothing, really,” he said. “Just the fact that they offered me a full scholarship.”
Garcia’s mom said he wasn’t happy, and even though he played consistently as a freshman, he transferred after one semester.
“He was a great kid for us,” said Eric Hehman, Garcia’s coach at Malone and current head coach of Olivet Nazarene University. “High-character, hard worker. Just went too far from home.”
So he transferred to Florida Tech, a small school on Florida’s east coast, hoping to play football closer to home.
Things only got worse.
After enduring spring football under a coaching regime he didn’t like, Garcia dropped out of Florida Tech after his first week in Fall 2014 and came up with a new plan.
He was going to play for the Gators.
“I guess I just had a mental lapse at that moment,” he said. “It was honestly one of the best decisions of my life.”
• • •
Through his phone, Garcia could hear the distorted echoes of his mother’s furious voice.
“I was pissed,” she said. “I was very, very upset.”
The single mother of two couldn’t understand her son.
She couldn’t understand why, one week into the semester, Garcia sold his furniture, terminated his lease and headed northwest toward Gainesville, already enrolled in Santa Fe College.
Even more, she couldn’t understand why he did all of it without telling her.
“I thought it was a very irresponsible decision,” she said. “And then he wasn’t gonna play football for a year, and I got really scared because football is what makes Cristian tick.”
Getting into UF from Santa Fe wouldn’t be easy, nevermind making the team once he did. Garcia admits he’s always had a football-first mentality. This was the first time he had to focus on academics.
“Football got me everywhere in life,” he said, “but that was one point where I just had to buckle down academically.”
Still, he found a way to get involved, becoming a video assistant for the UF football team. His duties included filming practices and editing the film for players and coaches to watch.
He balanced those duties and his grades with expert precision, and by the time he applied to UF, he did so with a 4.0 GPA and connections on the football team.
So it’s unsurprising that he was accepted into the school, made it to the tryout and earned a spot on the team.
His plan paid off.
“He’s a guy that works hard,” teammate Marcell Harris said. “And his story, you know, coming from the lows that he came from just to actually get on this team, it’s amazing.”
• • •
The temptation is to stop him and ask why.
Why wake up at 5 in the morning for workouts when you’ll see the field five times in a game, if you’re lucky?
Why get pummeled by players larger than you on a daily basis?
Why act as a stand-in tackling dummy so that other guys can take all the glory?
“A lot of the coaches,” Garcia said, “they don’t know your name, and they’ll treat you like dirt.”
So why do it?
Because he said he loves playing football, and he wants to give coaches a reason to know his name. He’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.
“Wherever they need you, they say, ‘Hey, Garcia, go over here.’ That’s where you go,” he said. “And if they say ‘Jarrad Davis, hit him as hard as you can,’ you have to stand there and get hit.”
So far, he said he’s taken his share of hits. But over time, he’s also started to deliver them. And his teammates, including Davis, have taken notice.
“The way he plays is not like other walk-ons,” Davis said. “You can really tell that he’s very genuine and he really loves this game. I appreciate the effort and the passion he comes to practice with every single day, you know? I really love it.”
Davis isn’t the only one.
“I’d have to say that I was one of the doubters at first,” Aparicio, his high school coach, said. “... Because walk-ons get treated terrible.”
Since walking on, though, Garcia’s managed to work his way up from no game action at the beginning of 2015 to playing in the Citrus Bowl against Michigan at the end of last season.
“He proved everybody wrong,” Aparicio said.
And aside from playing meaningful minutes, that bowl game also marked another milestone in Garcia’s mind.
For the first time, he was sure coach Jim McElwain knew his name.
“He knows it now,” Garcia said. “I’ve made my way on the team now.”
• • •
It’s probable that Cristian Garcia will forever be known for something that isn’t football.
There are dozens of articles about how Garcia, while working security at 101 Cantina, a Gainesville bar, stopped a man from raping an unconscious woman.
A tornado of media coverage followed, culminating in an interview on Good Morning America.
His mother remembers it well.
“He said, ‘Mom I couldn’t help it,’” Cristina said. “‘It was like a knee-jerk reaction. He was hurting her and I just got him off.’”
But Garcia hopes his hero status isn’t the only thing people will remember him for.
He has professional aspirations, hoping to one day play in the NFL or the Canadian Football League.
And even though he’s not a scholarship player at UF, he’s slowly forced his coaches to give him playing time. He hasn’t given them a choice, according to teammate Joey Ivie.
“He came in and busted his butt,” he said, “and he’s earned the right to play.”
While playing on special teams — which is where he spends most of his time right now, — probably won’t land him in the NFL, Garcia understands it’s an incremental process.
A year ago today, nobody expected him to be contributing to the Gators.
The year before that, nobody expected him to play for the Gators at all.
But he did, and he’s hoping to do more than that.
“I was pretty much a dummy,” he said. “I mean, obviously getting hit every day and waking up, you feel like you’re doing it for no reason. But eventually it paid off, and then gratitude finally set in.”
His mother, Cristina, also hopes her son sees the field more and more over the next two years. And even if he doesn’t, she’s at least sure he’s where he wants to be.
“He’s living in a dream right now,” she said. “His future is just very optimistic, and as a mother I couldn’t be prouder and I couldn’t be happier for my son.”
Contact Ethan Bauer at ebauer@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter @ebaueri.
He might not see the field every game, but linebacker Cristian Garcia is living out his dream at Florida.
