Richard Parham II

Emmanuel Crawford was three years old when his parents sold him. They lived in Ghana and they were poor enough that they could not feed him. So he was sold into the fishing trade on Lake Volta, which is where a lot of Ghana's trafficked children end up. Here is what a three year old does out there. He sits in a leaky wooden canoe and bails water out of it by hand, all day, so the boat does not sink. And when the nets get caught, he goes in after them. Lake Volta is man made. They dammed a river and flooded a forest to build it, and the trees are still down there, standing dead under the water. The nets snag on the branches, and somebody small has to dive down into water you cannot see through and pull them loose. Children drown doing that. Regularly. Crawford did it for two years. He was five when a man working with a rescue organization came across his canoe out on the lake. Crawford has described it simply. "He felt a tug on his heart from the Lord, that this kid doesn't need to be here." He was taken to a home in Tema, Ghana, run by a nonprofit called Touch A Life that gets children out of the trade. And that is where a couple from Grove, Oklahoma found him. Audrey and Stan Crawford. "When I first met my mom, I jumped onto her, I just climbed her, and we were best friends from the very beginning." The adoption took months. Then Audrey got on a plane and brought a six year old home to a town of about 6,000 people in northeast Oklahoma, where he became the youngest of six kids. He remembers the first day. "I had my first hamburger that day and fries. It was heaven on Earth." Then he grew up and started playing football. As a senior at Grove High School he carried the ball 230 times for 2,304 yards. That is 10 yards every single time he touched it. He scored 36 rushing touchdowns, caught 19 passes for 546 more yards and seven more scores, and Grove went 13-1. He finished his career with 6,777 rushing yards. That is the most anyone has ever run for in Oklahoma Class 5A history. Plus 93 rushing touchdowns. They named him the 2022-23 Gatorade Oklahoma Football Player of the Year. And then he went to Arkansas as a preferred walk-on. No scholarship. The best football player in the state, walking on. He got there partly because Sam Pittman, who was the Arkansas head coach at the time, went to Grove High School himself. Crawford's high school coach texted him about the kid. "The only campus that I felt a real connection was Arkansas. On the car ride home, I was like, 'I know where I want to be.'" He redshirted in 2023 and has been stuck behind a crowded backfield ever since. Pittman got fired after last season. Crawford is still on the roster in Fayetteville. Number 21. Still waiting on his carries. He has waited for worse.