Blue White Illustrated

P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> LIVING THE DREAM H I S T O R Y Long-term thinking has enabled former Lion great Brandon Short to turn his goals into reality – not just as an All-America football player, but as a banker and now as a newly elected PSU trustee hen Brandon Short was being re- cruited to play football for Penn State in 1994, no one could have come close to predicting what his life would be like today. Some people in his distressed hometown of McKeesport, Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh, might have worried that he would end up back in the Mon Valley, where he would be subject to the same forces that had landed his father and an older brother in jail. Others probably figured he would get a chance to play in the NFL and then have a career as a football coach. That's what Short believed, too. "My goal was to try and make it to the NFL," he said in a recent telephone interview. "Be- yond that, I thought I would coach and maybe teach or do something football-related." Short was calling from his office in London, a few days after his election to the Penn State board of trustees with the highest number of votes among the four candidates. London and McKeesport are as different as a warm sunny day and a dark stormy night. Short's life is dif- ferent, too, as he has overcome the bleak prospects of his upbringing. He reached his initial goal by playing seven seasons in the NFL, and since 2010 he has been deeply im- mersed in the rarified atmosphere of the finan- cial world. For the past six years, he has worked overseas, first in the affluent Persian Gulf city of Dubai and now in the United Kingdom. None of that would likely have happened without the wisdom and morality instilled in his psyche by the grandmother who raised and guided him, the football coach who inspired him and the Penn State education that trans- formed him. It all started with his fraternal grandmother, Ozella Wilkes, who raised him after his mother, Andrea Short, died when he was 2 years old. His father, Melvin, wasn't around much and wound up in prison on drug-related convictions, the aftermath of a downward spi- ral after being laid off from a steel plant where he had worked for more than a dozen years. The combination of Short's high school football ability, which made him The Associ- ated Press's big school Player of the Year in Pennsylvania, and his solid academics, brought him a scholarship from Penn State. Five years later, he was a consensus first-team All-American and an in- tegral part of the school's famous Linebacker U tradition. He knew by then he would be spend- ing his life in a far different way than he had dreamed about in McKeesport. "McKeesport hasn't changed much since I grew up and probably has gotten worse," he said. "It was just named one of the 21 most | MIDDLE MAN Short finished his career as Penn State's sixth-leading all-time tackler. Nearly two decades after grad- uating, he still ranks 10th on the school's list of top career tacklers with 273 stops. He went on to play seven seasons in the NFL. Photo courtesy of Penn State Athletics W

• Cover