Published: June 22, 2009 12:39 am      

HERTZEL COLUMN - Wiley applies WVU football lessons to acting

MORGANTOWN — Grant Wiley made a stop at Amos Zereoue’s restaurant in Manhattan recently and came across a group of West Virginia University fans. The former consensus All-American at linebacker made his way over to their table to introduce himself.

“Y … y … you’re Grant Wiley?” one of them said, looking incredulously at the now almost slender Wiley.

His physical appearance is not the only change Wiley has made since leaving WVU, for he has allowed the actor that was bottled up inside his once heavily-muscled body to break free.

As we sat in the darkened theater seats at the Creative Arts Center, the candidates for the Miss West Virginia pageant going through their final rehearsal before the evening performance that Wiley would emcee, Wiley thought back to the turning point in his life.

“I’d always said I was going to leave football on my terms,” he said, holding in his hand a spiral notebook filled with notes for him to memorize before the show.

He’d just hurt his shoulder in the Minnesota Vikings training camp and was looking at having no say in when his career ended at all.

“I was in a down mental state of mind. I was not happy,” he explained. “As a man I was still growing and learning so much about myself. The problem is that football doesn’t allow you to do that. I felt boxed in.”

It was almost as if, to use an acting term, he had been typecast.

“People would look at you and say, ‘You’re a football player,’” he admitted.

And that was not what he wanted to hear.

“Acting was the only other thing I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

Wiley recalled being in camp with his roommate, Anthony Herrera, a former University of Tennessee player who was one of the Vikings’ offensive guards.

“I told him that sometimes I feel like catching the next plane to Los Angeles and starting my acting career,” Wiley said.

While he never got on that plane, he did begin taking acting lessons and doing some modeling after leaving the Vikings, moved to New York and started down what is one of the most difficult career paths any person, male or female, can take.

In many ways, Wiley is using the same approach to his acting career as he used in football.

“You have to work your butt off and pay attention to the little things,” Wiley said. “It isn’t just getting out there and acting.”

It was the lesson he passed on to West Virginia’s linebackers on Friday when he met with them.

“You win games in this room,” he said, referring to the meeting room in which they were situated.

He told them how hard he studied opponents, how he would take the four plays that ran the most and ran them over and over on tape, getting so he knew the plays as well as the offense did. If they were going to beat him, it wasn’t going to be with those plays.

He has come to learn that the same is true with acting.

“It’s a lot more than just memorizing your lines,” he said, talking about how you had to get into the mind of the person you are portraying, how you have to be able to become him or, at least, make him become you.

Wiley believes that at 28 he’s reaching the point where his career should begin to move forward. To date he’s been mostly taking acting classes and doing background work, which can be steady but unfulfilling.

“I’ve got to get into networking now,” he said. “Like anything with life, you have to know people who are willing to put themselves behind you and give you the opportunity.”

Landing the emceeing job at the Miss West Virginia pageant was an example of what he meant.

“A guy I tailgated with, Todd Walker, who’s a chef at Mylan and who gave me vats of this great seafood gumbo texted me one day and asked me if I’d be willing to emcee Miss West Virginia.”

Wiley says he gave it serious thought … “for about a second.”

“I just texted back, ‘Hell, yeah”.

He figures someone may see him and, even if not, he’s helped a good cause and come to West Virginia for a few days.

“I saw Coach Nehlen for the first time in a couple of years,” he said. “He’s ‘The Godfather’, you know, the main reason West Virginia football has succeeded. He is the same loving kind of father figure he was when he recruited me.”

In fact, little has changed with Nehlen over the years.

The same can’t be said of Wiley, who has learned to let himself reach his full potential as a person.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.