BOULDER — Darian Hagan Sr. sees a lot of himself in Darian Hagan Jr. For every Colorado fan watching the Buffaloes’ football game at California on Saturday, they too will see a lot of Darian Sr. — every time Darian Jr. takes off his helmet on the Cal sideline.
Folks, his son isn’t just a chip off the old block. Hagan Jr., a California senior cornerback, looks like the same block. Same round, cherubic face. Same scruffy chin hair. Same 180-, 185-pound frame. At 6-feet, Darian Jr. is 2 inches taller. That’s about it.
“I see everything,” said his dad, Colorado’s running backs coach. “From my walk to my competitiveness, he has it all.”
Darian Sr., who helped quarterback Colorado to its only national championship in football, isn’t just talking as a proud papa whose son happened to follow in his footsteps. He’s talking as a dad who watched his son carve his own path, one blocked by the emotional gut punch of an infant daughter’s near death.
Darian Jr.’s daughter, 2-year-old Kaiyana, is fine after beating cancer. So this season Darian Jr.’s new mental stability earned him his starting job back across the line from where his father became famous.
Darian Sr. doesn’t know what his son went through, but he knows the anguish of being a young father. He had Darian Jr. when he was a freshman at Colorado. He almost moved back to his native Los Angeles to raise a family. Instead, he stayed and his son made frequent visits. In his dad’s footsteps in Boulder, at age 1, Darian Jr. took his first steps.
“I was running before I was walking,” Darian Jr. said in a phone interview. “I guess I saw him and started running toward him.”
Yes, Darian Sr. knew he had a football player on his hands. Turns out, though, his son wanted nothing to do with playing quarterback. In the sprawling Pop Warner leagues in Los Angeles, the young Darian found his niche in the secondary.
Funny, that’s where Darian Sr. found his in pro ball, bouncing around the Canadian Football League as a cornerback. One time, when his son was 7, Darian Sr. came home during the offseason and asked his son who was his idol.
“Deion Sanders,” he deadpanned.
“Then I knew he was going to be a DB,” Darian Sr. said.
And what a DB he became. In 2005, in his senior year of high school, he led Crenshaw, only about 15 minutes from his dad’s alma mater at Locke, to its first city championship.
You could package his fourth quarter of the title game and make a Gil Thorpe cartoon out of it. At the L.A. Coliseum, with both sides packed from field to rim, he helped beat powerful Taft High of Woodland Hills with an 85-yard touchdown reception and a clinching interception, the state-record 25th of his career.
And his father beamed from the stands.
“It was like a fairy tale game,” Darian Jr. said.
The honors poured in. He was named first-team all-state. Rivals.com ranked him the No. 5 cornerback in the country. And he just happened to be in his dad’s recruiting area.
Hey, Darian, new CU coach Dan Hawkins asked him, know any good cornerbacks in Los Angeles?
“I tried to recruit him here,” he said. “Mama outrecruited me.”
Darian’s mother wanted him to go to UCLA, where Eric Bieniemy, Hagan’s tailback during that magical 1990 national title season, recruited him. But Bieniemy soon after left for the Minnesota Vikings, and USC had recruited a dozen five-star recruits. Meanwhile, California was only one year removed from a 10-2 season.
“I wanted to go somewhere else and do my own thing,” Darian Jr. said. “I would’ve been in his shadow even if I did make some things happen.”
He was on his way as a sophomore, tying the Cal record for pass breakups with 18. But last fall, tragedy hit. During a routine checkup, doctors diagnosed Kaiyana with Wilms’ tumor, a form of kidney cancer. With her in Los Angeles, Darian Jr. had an awful season in Berkeley. He lost his starting job and was suspended one game for academic issues, yet he never told a soul the source of his slump.
“Out here and being young, I didn’t know how to react to what was going on,” he said. “It was pretty overwhelming. I tried to hide it the best I could. In the end, it didn’t really help me.”
But by May, she had beaten it. Her dad could tell. One day doing pushups back home, he turned and saw her doing the same right next to him. Now he’s back in the Bears’ starting lineup and ready to face Colorado’s new fleet of fast wide receivers.
“He’s really good,” Darian Sr. said of his son. “He has really, really good instincts. He’s cat quick. He has long arms. And he can run.”
Sound familiar?
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
