SOUL MATES

The struggle seemed endless; the frustration, insurmountable.

But, finally, Jeremiah Trotter found his answers through the dream.

*

Months after his father, Myra, died, Jeremiah dreamt.

But his mother, Ethel Lee, felt Myra's presence long before that. The night before they buried Myra Trotter, Ethel Lee felt something grab her leg under the kitchen table. It was Myra's hand, she knew.

*

Trotter, now in his third professional season, starts at middle linebacker for the Eagles. He is a rising star, perhaps the most talented player on a superb defense; certainly, as head coach Andy Reid says, Trotter is its soul.

After recording 202 tackles and 2 1/2 sacks last season, he is a preseason pick for a Pro Bowl slot. It is where he seemed destined to be when he entered the league three years ago.

Trotter left Stephen F. Austin after his junior season, a year removed from a season-ending knee injury that cast doubt over his ability to play in the NFL. Had he stayed a year longer at the school in Nacogdoches, Texas, he likely would have been a first-round pick. But mounting family debt at his home in Hooks, Texas, led Trotter to turn pro.

His father, Myra, was 75. After decades of toil, months and days and years of work without a day off - without an hour off, except for church - Myra broke down.

This man and his wife never saw Jeremiah play a football game. They figured their work and their Lord were more important.

So, when Myra stopped working, it was as if a giant fell. There had been too many days, too many years of cleaning lawns and janitoring and chopping wood to sell.

Myra's strength created for him a legend.

They tell now of how he lifted 50-gallon oil drums. Full ones. Did it well into his 60s.

They say once lifted a cargo van off the leg of his son Alex, then 10, now 28, the fourth of the eight children. Jeremiah is No. 6.

But Myra's strength left him in 1997, so it fell to Jeremiah to finish what Myra began - the raising of the family, the prospering of the brood.

They discussed it. Myra asked Jeremiah; Jeremiah obeyed. He always obeyed.

"I would have stayed," said Jeremiah, who was on track to graduate with a degree in criminal justice.

"There's nothing like college. No time like it in your life. "

Really, what choice did he have?

*

Three months after they laid Myra to rest, Ethel Lee awoke with a familiar start. She felt her feet tickled. She opened her eyes.

She expected to see her husband at the foot of the bed. He always woke her by tickling her feet.

He was, of course, not there.

"At first I got scared," she says. "Then, I just figured it was his spirit."

*

Jeremiah spent his life watching Myra work from daybreak to well after dark. The kids would rise and go to school and Myra would already be gone. By the time they returned, Myra had a tree cut and ready to split.

They all split and toted and loaded it onto the waiting pickup truck; two loads a day, every day, even Sunday. And they didn't start on Sundays until they got back from church in nearby De Kalb.

Leave school? There was no question.

"Jeremiah didn't care if he was a first-round pick or a seventh-round pick," said his agent, Jimmy Sexton. He also represents Reggie White. He says the pair match. "Jeremiah had to go to work. "

All Trotter knew was work. Work, and God.

Myra denied him junior-high football. Jeremiah practiced with the team, worked as hard or harder than any of the players, pounding through workouts under the 100-degree East Texas sun on a field planted with grass but as forgiving as concrete.

Jeremiah practiced, but practice took place during school hours. They played games on Thursday nights, and Thursday nights meant church and work.

So Jeremiah never played a down before his freshman year.

Jeremiah had to come home, split wood until dark, then into the night under a yard light. A mound remains behind the house where sawdust piles grew to the height. Then, the Trotters would shovel the sawdust onto the truck and haul it away.

Work? What was this work they would pay him so much to do?

Lift weights? Hit people? Travel? Play?

If football could be his life's work, it would be a sin to delay it.

Myra had stopped working. He spent days at a time in bed. Debt collectors called.

There was no choice.

The Eagles chose Trotter in the third round of the 1998 draft. They introduced him as their new middle linebacker.

That was April 18, and Myra was still sickly. He'd been in the hospital twice, once for a couple of days, once for a week. Three weeks after the draft, Jeremiah threw Myra a birthday party at their home in Hooks .

Much remained for Myra to address with Jeremiah.

Jeremiah stood, at 21, the head of his family, its provider. He faced the struggle of starting in the NFL in a complex system after simply following his nose to the ball. He stared marriage and fatherhood in their daunting faces.

He figured that Myra would lend him his 75 years of collected knowledge of men and mankind. It would be a trade of sorts between them: wisdom for security.

*

The dream came in the middle of the 1998 season. Ethel Lee says her husband sent it to Jeremiah as a message of strength; a confirmation that Jeremiah's path was correct; an assurance that he, Myra, was in a better place.

In Jeremiah's dream the family's eldest, Carl, 36, asks Myra as he lies on the hospital bed, "Dad, are you hurting? " "No. I ain't hurting. " Myra's voice is weak, barely audible. "C'mon, Dad. "

Sternly: "Son, I don't lie."

*

As Jeremiah deposited his $420,000 signing-bonus check in a Dallas bank, his cell phone rang. It was Tonya, his older sister.

"Come home," she said. "Dad went to the hospital. "

Trotter hopped into his new Lincoln Navigator. He burned up Interstate 30, heading east, sometimes at 100 mph. It's a two-hour ride. Halfway there, he phoned his parents' home. His 10-year-old niece, Deja, answered, sobbing.

"Papa died. "

Jeremiah pulled over to the side of the road and cried.

*

A week after his birthday party, Myra Trotter's insides had failed him. His spleen had burst. Doctors operated, to no avail. He lasted two days. He died May 24.

It says on the death certificate that Myra Trotter died of internal bleeding from the ruptured spleen.

But Jeremiah knows that his father just worked himself to death.

*

"Dad," Jeremiah asked in his dream, "did you know you were going to die? "

"Yes, I knew," Myra replied. "I knew. But I wouldn't say anything.

"I didn't want to worry anybody."

*

And so Jeremiah was left alone to struggle in his first big city. To founder on a team with a lame-duck coaching staff desperate to preserve any chance of winning, even at the cost of young players' development.

Trotter sank into confusion and anger and frustration. He couldn't get off the bench, not even to supplant James Willis, an undersized career backup.

"I was thinking,'Did I do the right thing?' " Trotter said.

Had he stayed in school another year, he probably would have been a first-round pick. That means instead of the three-year deal he signed that was worth $1.2 million, he would have earned at least $1 million a year for five years.

Jeremiah played like a million bucks last season. Ray Rhodes and his staff cast Trotter as an unteachable ballhawk. Rhodes was fired after Trotter's rookie season. He was replaced by Andy Reid, who hired linebackers guru Jim Johnson as his defensive coordinator.

Trotter, suddenly smart enough for Johnson's more effective scheme, blossomed.

Now, he stands poised to make millions; 35-year-old Hardy Nickerson, an aging Pro Bowler, got $4 million a year from Jacksonville as a free agent in February. So did Giants free agent Mike Barrow, 30.

Trotter, at 23, can expect at least a similar offer.

He is a restricted free agent after the season, meaning the Eagles can match any team's contract offer or receive compensation in the upcoming draft. Don't expect any of that to matter.

The Eagles and Sexton already have had discussions Sexton characterized as "very preliminary. " The team usually extends its players in late October or early November. Trotter is No. 1 on their list. They entered the season with about $7 million free under the salary cap. Expect Trotter to wire that Dallas bank with a lot of that loot.

It will be the payday Myra envisioned. It, finally, will be the end of any chance of Jeremiah toiling the way Myra had to toil.

*

Jeremiah is now rich, and Myra is healthy. Jeremiah says, "What do you want, Dad? A new house? "

"No, son, I don't want that. "

"A car? A truck? "

Myra drives a 10-year-old truck and a 9-year-old van.

"No, son. I don't want anything."

*

The work certainly forged Jeremiah. He is 6-1 and 261 pounds with linemen's legs, as thick as those tree trunks he used to split, and an upper body carved from granite. He looks as much like his favorite superhero, the Incredible Hulk, as perhaps anyone in the league.

Jeremiah's work ethic is an NFL inspiration. In high school, he would return from a practice or game or a track meet around 7 p.m. and Myra would be there, sitting in one of the 11 metal chairs on the ground-level porch. Myra would simply point out back, where, under that light, Trotter would chop wood until 10, and then go to bed.

"He would stay after, lift, run, whatever," said Steve Walles, now the head coach at Hooks after coaching linebackers during Trotter's stint there. "What did he have to go home to? "

"He never complained," Ethel Lee said. "He was a good boy. There was no reason to complain. "

Complain? Hilarious. Complain is not in Trotter's lexicon.

As a sophomore, this kid one fall morning opened a 4-inch gash on the back of a hand with a chain saw.

As blood poured out of the wound, he thought, "Oh, man. They aren't going to let me play football now. "

He steeped a rag in coal oil, tied it around his hand and went to school. Walles saw the cut and took Trotter to the school nurse.

"Playing meant that much to him," Walles marveled.

Football was, to Trotter, the grandest recreation. He cared little for its constrictive rules or its sportsmanship guidelines.

Once, against rival Atlanta, he nailed its quarterback a step from the sideline as the quarterback sprinted for safety.

He routinely decimated unsuspecting opponents, sometimes 70 pounds lighter than he, even away from the play, just so he could hit somebody.

"He led the team in butt-chewings," said defensive coordinator Jim Rice.

And win? Hooks went 38-8 during Trotter's stay, but he wanted to beat everybody, all the time, and he wanted you to want to, too.

He excelled in track, where he ran the hurdles and still holds the school discus record, at 177 feet, 10 1/2 inches.

As with former Detroit Lions running back Billy Sims before him, football was Jeremiah's ticket out of Hooks, population 2,684. It's a place where businesses get named after the town because there's only one of each type ( Hooks Pizza, Hooks Tire Service, Hooks Dry Cleaners, Hooks Video and Auto Sales).

It's a place like this: Trotter has played in Dallas three times. His high school coaches don't even think about asking him for tickets.

"He's got enough to worry about," Walles reasoned.

It might sound idyllic, but it's not. There's little future in Hooks, Trotter said. You don't get to leave places such as this if you don't get noticed, and you don't get noticed if you don't win.

"We'd be working out in somebody's yard and I'd see my friends playing across the street in their yard," Jeremiah said. "I'd say,'Dad, why we gotta work all the time?'

"He'd say,'Pay the bills, son. Pay the bills. I hope you never have to do this kind of work, but if you do, you know how.' "

Jeremiah knew he didn't want to work like that. Sometimes, he couldn't control his fervor. On road trips, he and his teammates would exit the team bus and run onto the field, echoing Trotter's favorite movie, "The Program":

"Who we gonna kill? Everybody! "

In Jeremiah's junior season, Redwater was walloping Hooks . He exploded at halftime, entreating his coaches to let him play fullback, wide receiver, "everything," Rice recalled. "I think just about every coach on the staff gave him a butt-chewing that day. "

That fire landed Jeremiah at Stephen F. Austin. It fueled him through the rehabilitation from the knee surgery; in fact, the school's trainers had to slow his recovery to make sure the joint fully healed.

Jeremiah was setting weight-lifting records as he rehabbed.

Jeremiah stayed at school for parts of his summer breaks. He worked landscaping jobs for money.

And he sent the money home.

*

Jeremiah married Tammi Johnson, his college sweetheart, on July 4, 1998, soon after the funeral. Jeremiah bought a modest, two-bedroom townhouse in Mount Laurel, N.J., where they are raising their daughter, TreMil, now almost 16 months old.

TreMil was born May 23, 1999, 363 days after Myra died. Jeremiah does not believe it is a coincidence.

Jeremiah sent Tonya, 32, and Vonya, her twin, to nursing school. He bought his mother a candy-apple Chrysler 300M. He made things comfortable for Michelle, 22, now a star hammer thrower at Texas A & M, and Nick, 18, who has now followed Jeremiah to Stephen F. to play linebacker.

He paid the family's bills. He began his football career.

But something wasn't right. He couldn't master the defense. He couldn't think straight.

"I'd get in the room and I couldn't concentrate," Jeremiah says. "I've never been one to talk about it. I'd pray about it. Talk to Tam about it.

"There were all those questions I wanted to ask. "

He would find himself at a loss. He would sit in his New Jersey home, sit and watch videotape of Myra's last birthday party.

And then, he dreamt.

*

"Dad," Jeremiah said at the end of the dream, "Dad, was you hurting? Tell me, Dad. "

Myra turned on the bed and he smiled. "No, son. No.

"When you don't feel any pain, you know it's time to go."

*

Suddenly, life cleared. Jeremiah simply became like Myra.

"I'd find myself thinking,'What would he have done?' " Trotter said. "I'd find myself correcting Tammi, the same way he corrected me. "

Trotter spent the first half of the season not even dressing for games. After the dream, he earned playing time at backup linebacker.

Unconvinced of Trotter's ability, Reid and his staff drafted Barry Gardner in the second round to replace Willis at middle linebacker.

Trotter has been dominant; Gardner cannot come close to unseating him.

Trotter entered Sunday's game at Dallas a player on the rise. He lists among his goals for the year a trip to the Pro Bowl, which would seem an afterthought, should he compile the eight sacks and five interceptions he wants. He hoped to launch his breakout season in style at Texas Stadium.

He did. His interception return for a second-quarter touchdown gave the Eagles a 21-0 lead en route to a 41-14 evisceration of the favored Cowboys. It broke their backs; after it, the Cowboys quit.

"I can't tell you how good that felt," he said after the game, tying his tie in the visitor's locker room. His eyes moistened as he relived the moment:

Trotter flew in front of tight end Jackie Harris, snatched a pass from Texas demigod Troy Aikman and sprinted 27 yards into the end zone - the east end zone, the one closer to Hooks and Ethel Lee and the grave of Myra Trotter .

There, on the baked blue turf of the end zone, Trotter knelt and looked skyward, raising the ball toward the hole left in Texas Stadium for God to watch his favorite team.

Trotter figured that, his work finally done, Myra was watching this one, too.

Send e-mail to hayesm@phillynews.com