Steve Milton: Is Lawrence Woods III the heir to the Ticat runback throne?

Lawrence Woods III heard about the elite lineage, so immediately had to check out his predecessors.

I looked at film from 2019 and there was No. 37," he said referring to Frankie Williams, the CFL's special teams player of that year. And I felt I fit into that system fairly well. I was, like, synonymous with it."

Indeed, as the 2022 season begins to define itself, Woods looks every bit the successor to an incredible, and virtually unbroken, of impactful Ticat kick and punt returners that stretches back nearly four decades to Earl Winfield but really intensified over the past 15 years with the likes of Marcus Thigpen, Chris Williams, Brandon Banks, Frankie Williams and Papi White.

Woods ranks second in the CFL in all-purposes yards, with 811, trailing the 1,052 of Saskatchewan running back Jamal Morrow but unlike Morrow, and every other member of the league's top 15, exactly zero of his yards have come from scrimmage. No rushes, no pass receptions. All returns, all the time.

After making the team with a dynamic punt return touchdown in the Guelph pre-season game against the Argos, Woods has already returned a kickoff for a touchdown, and come close to breaking a few other returns. That includes last Saturday when he went 88 yards with a late-game punt, which should have been a touchdown but when he turned on the afterburners, down I went," he says with a self-deprecating laugh.

Woods says of his quick success, We have a lot of guys who are blocking really well for me, it goes without saying."

Like so many CFLers, Woods has an intriguing back story filled with success, adversity and gaps in live game action. He is an all-round athlete, played four different sports McCluer High School in the Greater St. Louis City of Ferguson, finished fifth in the Missouri state wrestling championship and won the state 4 x 400 relay championship. But he played football in only his freshman and senior year because he was so focused on a wrestling career.

He played football at Truman State, a lowly-ranked Division 2 program located in fairly rural Kirksville, three hours north of St. Louis, but despite his obvious intelligence and his strong high school academics - he was a member of the National Honor Society - he was obliged to sit out his freshman year because his marks were low.

It was a culture shock coming to the city to Truman," he said. Being redshirted made me sit back and be more humble. I had to put the weight on my own shoulders and mature mentally even though I was mature physically."

He got tutoring, returned to play in 2018 and led all of Division 2 with a 50-yard kick return average, and was the conference special teams player of the year. But in the fourth 2019 game he tore his ACL. With the injury, and COVID-19 restrictions affecting his rehab, he eventually decided to go professional" but wasn't chosen in the 2021 NFL draft. He was immediately signed by the New Orleans Saints and got into one pre-season game, but didn't have a chance to return a kick and was released. The next spring, he was in Hamilton.

So, over the previous three years, he'd played a total of five games, the same total he's already played in the Ticats' regular season.

I'm very happy about it," he says of his return to live action. Even in Guelph, after I returned that punt for touchdown want to go back into the game. I can't get enough."

His hometown of Ferguson, Mo. a predominantly African-American city, was the trigger point for the Black Lives Matter movement in August 2014, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in August 2014. That triggered riots and protests and brought the media eyes of a nation to the harsh militarized and prejudicial manner in which police dealt with the unrest, all later condemned by the Department of Justice.

Woods willingly talks about the effects it all had on him, including the culture shock" he encountered at Truman, which was about 90 per cent white. He never been part of a predominantly white crowd and before his white teammates reached out to him he stayed to himself because I was walking on egg shells, and didn't know how I fit in. I didn't want to talk to anyone about Ferguson."

But now he speaks openly of it.

The murder happened about five minutes from where I lived," he says. The riot happened all up and down my block. It was a tough for a lot of people, a lot of kids were shut out of life necessities like education, and even food. They shut down the schools. I was heavily into wrestling. They had to put push sports back and we all had to learn very quickly when we went back.

We just thought this is a point in our life that, If we don't change stuff it's just going to keep happening.' I'm glad it happened - not necessarily the way it did - but I'm glad something happened regardless of whether it was the rioting or the peaceful activists.

It put a little fire under the movement. And we all needed that."

Steve Milton is a Hamilton-based sports columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: smilton@thespec.com