SPORTS MSU Long-Snapper Shapiro Is Realizing 'Ultimate Dream' Save up to 70% on OFFICE FURNITURE & EQUIPMENT GET OUR PRICE BEFORE YOU BUY! . • Design & Space Planning •• Lease Plans & Trade-Ins • 10,000 Sq. Ft. Showroom • In Stock $1,000,000 Inventory CALL FOR OUR FREE CATALOG OR INTERIOR DESIGNER! D.O.E. ‘ Discount Office Equipment, Inc. 548-6900 1991 Coolidge, North of 11 Mile Road, Berkley, MI 48072 Major Credit Cards Accepted GORNBEIN'S tot! • GbRNBEIN. Fidelity Bank Building 24901 Northwestern Hwy. Southfield 357-1056 . JEWELERS NAILS BY KATY '5.00 Off on Manicure with Pedicure (With Coupon) ALSO INTRODUCING LUME NAIL PRODUCTS Salvatore's Salon 4301 Orchard Lake Road 8.5 ., 1-9131 or 851-5380 the New Crosswinds Mall 1 Coupon Per Person The Bright Idea: Give a Gift Sthscliption 50 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1959 THE JEWISH NEWS newspaper ad for a long-ball snapper. Knowing his size (180 pounds) and his father were against him, Shapiro waited until two days later, when he read a story saying the position was still open. Thinking, "If this isn't divine intervention, I don't know what is," he dashed to the MSU football office. He impressed Larry Bielat, punter and placekicker coach, and within two weeks Shapiro went from No. 7 on the MSU list to second team, seeing action in four games as the Spartans took second place in the Big Ten behind Michigan. By taking the minimum amount of credits necessary to stay eligible, Shapiro is now a fifth-year senior and first-string long-snapper for the Spartans. • Since 1988, he's pushed his weight up 28 pounds to 208 through "a lot of weightlifting, a lot -of eating and a lot of sup- plements" but no steroids. His grade-point average is now up to 2.7; he's eyeing a medical career and his RICHARD PEARL Staff Writer I n the quest for his ultimate dream, Michigan State's Mark Shapiro has encountered a few ultimate nightmares. •There was the time last football season when Shapiro, then second-string long-snapper for the Spar- tans, centered the ball right into the leg of one of his own linemen. Up soared the foot- ball and down plummeted Shapiro's hopes for a star- ting role. And the coaching staff went crazy until the next week, when game films revealed the lineman had stepped in the way of the snap. •This season, Shapiro has enountered a Hurricane and a monster. The Hurricane is the No. 2-ranked University of Miami football team and the monster is 6-foot-3, 299- pound noseguard Cortez Kennedy, whom Shapiro, a mere 6-footer weighing 208, faced whenever he centered the ball on punts, field goals or extra-point attempts. Shapiro had two snaps bounce on the turf at Spar- tan Stadium--one on a field goal attempt--as MSU suf- fered a 26-20 loss. "Linemen," Shapiro says, "love to come up the middle on you because you're so vulnerable with your head between your legs." •And there have been the real nighttime dreams, Shapiro says. So intense is the world of major college football, he says, that "Even at night, I can hear the whistles blowing and the coaches screaming." Of course, there's more — like the dents he collects on the back of his football helmet, just above the neck. Other linemen get theirs on the front but Shapiro's foes are into rabbit-punching. "It's illegal for them to do it," he says, "but that's the game." So what's a nice Jewish boy from Farmington Hills doing without a scholarship in a place like that? "It's a very personal thing," he says, "a dream I've always had, something I've always wanted to do" since childhood. Mark says it began in Farmington Hills when, as a high school freshman and sophomore, he watched the Farmington Harrison varsi- Mark Shapiro: Divine intervention. ty team win state football championships. Although Shapiro eventually would be the varsity team's center, Harrison never quite made it back to the top and it left him hungry for more: "I never wore that (champion- ship) ring." His mother, Dee, has a different recollection. She says when Mark was 5, he was the object of anti- Semitic slurs from older European youngsters with whom he tried to learn to play soccer.. At the time, Kansas City-born Mark and his family were living in Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium where Mark's father, plastic- surgeon Mar- shall, was studying his craft. So painful was the experi- ence that, when the Shapiros moved to Michigan, Mark as a boy of 8 insisted on atten- ding Yeshivath Beth Yehudah and wore tzitzit, though the rest of the family belonged to Congregation Shaarey Zedek. And he wanted to play football, not soccer. Shapiro turned into a fine, if albeit small-by-big-college- standards gridder. When only the smaller Michigan colleges such as Michigan Tech, Ferris State and Al- bion showed interest in him after high school, Shapiro decided to put football aside and concentrate on studies. Some high school friends chose Michigan State and Shapiro joined them, plann- ing to study sports psychol- ogy. But old dreams don't die easily. In the spring of 1988, Shapiro spotted a Lansing "Pm playing around the athletic elite," Shapiro says. . parents have become his biggest fans, attending most games. Nonetheless, he has a thankless job at MSU. "If I snap the ball poorly, every- body knows it; otherwise, the punter and the tacklers get the credit," he says. And he's not deluding himself that he's a Big 10- calibre athlete. "I'm playing among the athletic elite," - Shapiro says. "They have more talent in their thighs than I have in my whole body." A combination of dedica- tion and a feeling of in- debtedness to the "divine in- tervention" that put him on the team in the first place led him to play against the Miami Hurricanes this sea- son on Rosh Hashanah. It wasn't one of his better games. He had the two bad snaps, the first causing him to lose his concentration and ability to relax ("Nobody punishes himself more than he did over that," says his mother). But Shapiro says he is learning to put the past behind him. Now, with last week's vic- tory over Iowa behind them,