The Latin Bulldozer diary
Here i am, at the door of the Hall of Fame building in Canton, Ohio. I can smell the football history from here. I can only dream about having a shirt with my name inside, it’s just a dream… but as my mum says, the dreams can become true if you fight enough for them, and she really knows about fighting.
My name is Ivan Carrillo, I’m a Latin kid from Toledo, Ohio. I’m 6’ 0” and 231 pounds and I have a good shaped body, full of muscle. Probably I inherited it from my mother, who was a great amateur boxer, yes, you read it well, my mum. She retired from boxing when my parents decided to have kids and those days, she was the state amateur women champ of boxing. That was 26 years ago, but she still has a good shaped body close to her 50’s. I have seen videos and pics from her fights and she was pretty muscular, with massive muscled arms and shoulders for a woman, but with a pretty face and curved body, strong but feminine. I have her shoulders and huge arms, but probably my father genetic helps too, he was an high school golf champ and attended school with a golf scholarship. He had also a great IQ of 124 and excelled on his studies, so he ended leaving the sport and never became pro. He had a powerful drive stroke and muscled arms too.
I have also a brother, Mario, who is 25 years old and who also played football in high school and college as DE, but a bad injury on his shoulder turned off his pro football dreams. Even only being 4 years older than me, he is my best trainer. He is so determined and doesn’t let me stop to workout until I’m totally exhausted, he doesn’t care if i puke because the effort, he just keeps yelling at me, KEEP RUNNING MOFO!!
I practiced a lot of sports since I was a kid, but didn’t decide about football until I entered high school. In fact when I was younger, I wanted to become a pro boxer, but my mum was never so happy about it. She knew how it hurt to be hit and hit night after night and that in pro boxing, without the protections, you can suffer from brain damage. It was the high school coach who looked at my muscled body, pretty developed for a kid already, and told me, hey kid, do you play football? Yes sir, I play it from time to time. Nice, we need a powerful RB in our school team, I would like to try you if you want. Sure sir, I would love it. Ok, this afternoon after classes we will be at the football camp, come there and let’s see.
And that was how I started to play in high school. My big body helped me to hit hard the holes open by my offensive line. I never was a really fast guy, but I was agile and could avoid the tackles easily, and if a defender wanted to tackle me hard, I wouldn’t ever try to avoid the hit, in fact I enjoyed the sound of the helmets and pads when crashing hard. I also played middle linebacker in high school, I was so strong and a hard hitter who forced a good amount of fumbles.
The high school years past and I was starting to get attention from some major schools. I had some scholarship offers, even the Gators showed some interest but I decided to stay close home and to attend to the Toledo university. The Rockets were my favorite team, and the MAC was a fun conference to play in.
My college years were fun, but I had already decided to become a pro player so I didn’t party a lot, I was also a shy guy, not the typical popular football player in the college. I was always the last guy to leave the gym and expended hours and hours on the track trying to improve my speed. In the team I was the short yardage RB, it helped me to get a good amount of TD’s as I was the powerful RB chosen to run when we were into the red zone. Those days they started to call me the Latin bulldozer as I looked like trying to demolish the walls when I hit the defensive line. About studies… well… I prefer not to talk a lot about them. I ended with an Athletic Training degree from the Exercise science/kinesiology college but I must admit that my football skills helped somewhat to get it.
Then the college season ended, I returned home and kept training hard with my brother and father. We knew that my best attribute was the power and we kept improving it with really heavy workouts and a good diet ( I never tried enhancement drugs even when I was offered them in the school by some team mates, the health or suspension risk was not worth for me).
Suddenly a voice woke me up from my dreams. Hey kid, we are closing the doors, you can come back tomorrow if you want to keep studding the HOF history. Oh I’m sorry, I said, I’ll be back, you can be sure, but hopefully it will be in a few years to show my kids my own shirt inside. The guard smiled at me, sure kid, keep your dreams and fight for them.
As I’m walking down the stairs of the HOF building I’m thinking about how the time has past since i was in high school. I remember most of the important stuff but I miss some details, so a thought came to my mind; Hey, why not to write a diary from now? Maybe someday I’ll show it to my kids so they will learn how hard his father pursued his HOF dreams.
And this is how this diary started. I hope you readers will enjoy it. I’m not a good writer, in fact I’m not even an average one. As my parents are Latin, we used to talk Spanish at home and as kid it was nice and made me feel we had something special but now I see it was not a good idea when you need to study in English later at school. So my English writing will be far from perfect but I’ll try to do my best to tell you about my football career.
Note from the author: Well this is my first attempt ever at writing a game dynasty. As some of you know I'm from Spain and English is not my main language. I'll try to do my best to not to make a lot of grammar mistakes but you are welcome to correct me anytime as I'll use this also as a good way to improve my English knowledge. My English vocabulary is a bit limited so probably I'll repeat some phrases a lot but I'll try to avoid it. I haven't ever been in Toledo (Ohio) or most of the places i'll name in this dynasty but to make this dynasty more enjoyable, I'll try to make a good documentation job about the cities, newspapers, places etc and will use real names and situations as much as i can. I hope you guys will enjoy this and that i could keep your interest high during the full dynasty.