By Keith Sharon, Oregonian 11/20/2014
Story ran in 11/26/2014 print editions of the Oregonian and the Oregonian-owned Hillsboro Argus
The airplane bound for Grand Forks, N.D., rattled and jerked, and the teenager looking out the window could see the snow, like his life, had gone sideways.
When he and his dad got in the rental car, it was minus-5 degrees outside. They drove about 15 miles per hour on an icy and lonesome highway toward the University of North Dakota -- any faster would have surely caused a spin-out in blizzard conditions.
It was January 2013.
"What am I doing?" the 17-year-old thought to himself.
A few months earlier, Sam Riddle had been a hotshot Century High School quarterback with a secret, one that would surely get him banished from the football team and kicked out of school. If you would have asked him then, Sam would have told you the secret he carried would ruin his life.
Sam knew what would happen in Grand Forks that weekend. He would be offered a scholarship and the football coach would ask him for a verbal commitment to attend the University of North Dakota for the next four years.
"I can't do this," Sam thought.
Sam struggled for a way to tell the coach, and his father, what he really wanted to do.
He wanted to stay home.
So when the moment came, when the coach smiled and offered Sam a chance to fulfill his lifelong dream to play Division I college football, when his dad looked more proud than he had ever been, Sam was sweating.
He knew what he needed to say. He knew he needed tell everyone no, stop, I don't want to do this.
But this is what he said ...
"OK, I'll accept."
That decision to leave his family and move from Hillsboro to Grand Forks to play football wasn't the most difficult, but it would prove the worst of Sam Riddle's rapidly spiraling life.
In high school, he had met a girl and fallen in love. She became pregnant. And that weekend in Grand Forks, he had decided to leave that girl and his as-yet-unborn son behind.
On a recent Tuesday, Sam Riddle, now 19 ("A 30-year-old in a 19-year-old's body," he said), sat in a Starbucks at Linfield College talking about his fight to get home, about the notebook pages on which he printed "Adoption" vs. "Parenting," about the whispers that stung him, and about the friends who supported him when he was at his lowest. He talked about disappointing his dad and what it's like to play quarterback when you've already endured more drama than a television reality show.
He talked about Briahnna, the girl who made his jaw drop when he first saw her.
And he talked about a little boy in North Plains, Oregon, who knows how to say "tickle" and the best word Sam Riddle has ever heard.
"Daddy."
• • •
She was a transfer student from Southridge High.
Briahnna Krokum took a seat in Sam Riddle's Spanish class at Century, and he was speechless.
At the time, she thought her future would include beauty school, or real estate sales or marketing -- in other words, she didn't know.
This is what Bri thought when she sat down in Spanish class: Why is that cute guy glaring at me?
When they got to know each other, they flirted a little, but each was dating someone else. She was a junior and played on the basketball team. He was the sophomore star of the football team.
In three years, Sam would lead Century to 3-8, 6-4 and 8-3 records, turning around a program that hadn't had much success.
"I was kind of The Guy when it came to sports at school," Sam said.
A year passed before Sam and Bri became an item. She drove him home from Buffalo Wild Wings after a basketball game, and he asked her if he could call her his girlfriend.
She said yes.
When Sam was a senior, Bri enrolled at Portland Community College. "She was like part of the family," Sam said. "We were just a couple of kids having fun."
On the football field, his senior year started great. His team was undefeated heading into the game against Glencoe, which is Century's bitter rival.
On the Sunday before the big game, Sam was at Bri's house when she — after a couple of nervous weeks — took a pregnancy test.
She showed him the results, and Sam breathed a sigh of relief. The pluses and colors and dashes, in his mind, said not pregnant.
But, of course, he was a high school boy with no experience reading pregnancy tests. He had read hers wrong.
She was pregnant.
"I almost passed out," Sam said. "I thought about not graduating from high school, not graduating from college, working at a minimum wage job the rest of my life. I thought of the worst — I am going to be the joke of the school."
(Sam's fears, by the way, did not come true. He continued in school and on the football team. There are no official penalties for being a teen father.)
"I thought my life was over," Bri said. "This is a train wreck."
They had become a statistic, a cautionary tale and they were keenly aware of how difficult their lives were about to become. According to the office of U.S. Health and Human Services, there are 57 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage girls (2010 statistics).
"I was in total shock," Bri said. She went to a clinic for another test to make sure, then another doctor's office to make triple sure.
They made two decisions right away. First, she was going to have the baby. Neither of them is particularly religious or political, but they didn't feel like abortion was the right choice for them.
Second, they would only tell Sam's best friend, Brad Bennett.
"You guys can do this," Brad said.
• • •
Bri was pregnant, and Sam had a secret growing inside him.
His football team crushed Glencoe, but over the next three weeks he played two of the worst games of his life. When basketball season started, Sam wasn't any better. Bri wore loose sweaters to his games, but rumors started to spread.
"I was depressed at school," Sam said. "People started looking at me like I was an alien."
Sam and Bri put together a notebook with one page labeled "Adoption" and another labeled "Parenting." They wrote down the pros and cons of giving away and keeping the baby.
After passing the first trimester, they decided to tell their parents. Bri's family was "devastated, scared and disappointed," she said.
Sam told his mother first because he feared what his dad would say. His mother didn't take it well. She implored him to tell his father.
Sam waited until Thanksgiving Day. He went into his dad's room and closed the door. When he finally heard the news, Dave Riddle gave his son a hug as an offer of support.
"Things happen," Dave said.
Dave Riddle has been a physical education teacher for more than three decades. He thought, at the time, he knew how to talk to kids. His first bit of advice to his son was reassuring. "We're going to be OK," Dave said. "We're going to work through this together."
But the more Dave thought about it, the more he wanted his son to pursue a college scholarship than he wanted him to be a teenage dad. Dave knew he didn't have the money to pay for his son's college education. He thought a football scholarship would be the only option if Sam wanted a degree.
Believing his son couldn't juggle football, academics and being a father, Dave suggested abortion as the best option for the young couple.
"We were pushing in that direction," Dave said. "I wrestled with it a lot."
The breaking of the news was merely the first step along a road of uncomfortable family discussions about Bri's pregnancy. Parents, being parents, had a lot of advice. And so did grandparents and extended family and friends and anybody else who heard about the quarterback with the kid on the way.
Secretly, Sam and Bri had already decided she would keep the baby, and they would raise him together.
But their relatives wanted to meet. Everyone pledged their support no matter what the young couple decided. But ...
"We were getting swarmed by opinions," Sam said. "Everyone was pushing adoption or abortion."
"We knew we had such a strong relationship," Bri said. "We knew we could make it."
Decisions are tough, but carrying that baby to term was tougher on Bri.
She was in the hospital "five to seven times" with kidney infections and "cholestasis," a pregnancy disorder in which digestive fluid does not flow properly from the liver.
Sam worried that cholestasis could cause the baby to arrive stillborn. (Although evidence linking stillbirths to the disorder is not clear.)
In the end, his worst fears didn't come true.
Mason Riddle was born May 28, 2013, at 2:22 p.m.
"I cut the cord, and I watched the whole thing," Sam said. "It was the best moment of my life."
Suddenly, Sam's life changed drastically. He quickly found out what it's like to be up all night mixing formula and trying to get Mason fed. For the last month of his senior year, he went to school bleary-eyed.
And the birth had triggered something in the people around him. They stopped being critical. They stopped having opinions about what the young couple should do.
Dave Riddle questions why he ever suggested abortion.
"When I spend time with Mason," the new grandfather said, "I'm almost ashamed of myself. I have changed a lot. I've come to appreciate Sam's handling of the situation."
Relatives and friends chipped in to help with day care, allowing Sam to get a job working as a cook/dishwasher at Duke's BBQ Pit. Bri eventually became a receptionist.
They were like a young married couple, juggling school, jobs and a kid.
But they weren't married.
On July 25, 2013 — Bri's birthday — Sam took her to Paradise Nails. A week earlier Sam, an old-fashioned guy at heart, had asked Bri's father for permission to marry his daughter. Sam was given a ring that had been in Bri's family for years.
That ring was hidden at the nail salon.
In the middle of Bri's manicure, Sam said he got on one knee and the manicurist slipped the ring on Bri's finger. Bri's memory isn't as clear. She laughed when she said she doesn't remember Sam getting on his knee.
She said yes.
• • •
Three days after he proposed, Sam was more depressed than he had ever been.
He had committed to play football at the University of North Dakota, and it was time to go.
On July 28, 2013, he said goodbye to his fiancée and 2-month-old son.
"Having to say goodbye to Mason was the hardest thing I've ever done," Sam said.
Bri said she'd been crying "for three whole weeks" before Sam left. Her last words to him were: "Just go."
"I know," Bri said, "he didn't want to leave. I didn't want him to give up an opportunity."
Before his first week at his new school was done, Sam Riddle had called Linfield College, which was about a 40-minute drive from where Bri and Mason were living with her grandparents.
Linfield, a Division III school that does not offer athletic scholarships, was where Sam had gone to football camps as a young quarterback.
"I told Linfield there's no way I'm going to be able to stay (at North Dakota)," Sam said. "I'm coming home. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I'm coming home."
Sam took classes and went to football practice. But his heart was already in Oregon.
Dave Riddle tried to persuade his son to stay in North Dakota. "I wasn't getting where he was coming from," Dave said. "I just didn't get it. I was thinking of his future. I was financially motivated."
Sam called his dad and said, "There's no way you can stop me."
Before he finished a month at UND, Sam used money he had earned at the BBQ Pit and bought a train ticket home.
He called a meeting with UND head coach Chris Mussman, who knew Sam was struggling.
When Sam walked into the coach's office, a form sat on the table in front of him. Once he signed it, his scholarship would be revoked.
"That was the low point of our relationship," Dave Riddle said.
Sam Riddle signed the form, leaving him one last thing to do in North Dakota.
Get on that train.
He could not have known at the time how perfect Linfield would be. He would get financial grants and aid, and a campus job in maintenance, to help pay for college. He would be the starting quarterback before the third game of his sophomore year.
He would be living on campus during the week and have a short ride to Bri's grandparents' house to join his family on weekends.
His dad would look at him differently. "What I'm most proud of is how he stepped up as a man," Dave said.
He couldn't have known as he sat on that train how he would make Bri feel. "I get goosebumps watching him play," she said. "It warms my hear to have Mason on my lap saying 'Daddy, Daddy.'"
Bri was crying before Sam got home. She was there at the train station with Mason, just the two of them.
Sam saw the sign as the train pulled to a stop. "Welcome home Daddy."
Mason's hand print was on the sign.
It was painted cardinal and purple — Linfield Wildcats colors.
Sam Riddle was finally home.
Note:
--Wildcatville made one edit to this story. Linfield colors changed from "red and purple" to cardinal and purple.
--A link to the U.S. public domain map, which Wildcatville edited to include Hillsboro, Ore., and Grand Forks, N.D., is here.
