The Road Warrior

This could be wishful thinking from an ailing campaign. But it's worth keeping in mind just how wrong the media echo chamber can be when it comes to predicting winners and losers. At about this time four years ago, Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was the press-anointed darling who could seemingly do no wrong in Iowa. Dour John Kerry was scorned by reporters as the should-have-been who had blown it and couldn't possibly win. But on caucus night, Kerry wound up the victor—and Dean wound up screaming. Reporters were left to wonder what they had missed. One story the talking heads may be missing this time: just how badly John Edwards hates to lose.

The desire to get ahead—to win—is no small thing for Edwards. He was raised in the depressed town of Robbins, N.C., where his father, Wallace, worked in a now long-gone textile mill. It's a biographical detail the candidate mentions so often in speeches and campaign ads that it can sometimes border on self-parody. Yet his father's story is what Edwards's campaign, and political career, is all about. His dad worked his way up in the mill and was promoted to supervisor. But without a college degree, there was only so far he could rise. "He heard his mother and I talk about it at the dinner table, so he knew what I was faced with," his father tells NEWSWEEK. Money was scarce. Wallace was determined that John and his younger brother and sister, Wesley Blake and Kathy, would attend college. He set an example of self-improvement. He took classes offered by the mill, and tuned in to the education channel on TV early each morning when the station aired lessons in statistics and probability.

Tall and good-looking—and he knew it—John Edwards was a popular student and a star football player, skinny but fast. His high-school friend John Mashburn remembers Edwards as a leader. "In a little redneck town, he was different," he says. There was still racial tension in Robbins in the early 1970s, and black students were sometimes mistreated. In protest, several of them once held a sit-in. Edwards persuaded his white friends to join in. "Johnny got a lot of the athletes, myself, our girlfriends … he was instrumental in encouraging us," Mashburn says. John Frye, another high-school friend, says it was a gutsy thing to do. He "stuck his neck out," Frye recalls. "There was a price to pay in how some folks treated him after that. We had people who didn't embrace desegregation even though it had been a bridge crossed years earlier."

Edwards's father was a lifelong Clemson football fan, and often took John to games. When he graduated from high school, John enrolled at Clemson, in hopes of winning a football scholarship. "I don't think it was his original idea," his mother, Bobbie, says. "I think it was just to please his dad."

Clemson wasn't at all how he imagined it would be. Though just nine miles from where he was born, the relatively privileged campus was a world away. To save money, he lived with his grandmother in her small house not far from school. He was no longer a star on the playing field. The other athletes were bigger, heavier and stronger. Edwards made the team as a lowly walk-on, hoping to prove himself and earn the scholarship. It was a low point in his life. He didn't get to play, and during practice, Edwards and the other bench warmers were used as tackling dummies by the first-string players. Every day, he'd limp off the scrimmage field. Friends recall Edwards's saying he was "getting beat to death." In the team photo taken at the beginning of the year, Edwards sports a huge grin. But as the months passed, he became quiet and withdrawn.

He couldn't afford to stay at Clemson without a scholarship; after a few months, it became clear he wasn't going to get it. He certainly didn't make an impression on his coaches: none of the four NEWSWEEK contacted remembered he had been on the team. After his first semester, he decided to leave Clemson and enroll at North Carolina State. For the first time in his life, his best wasn't good enough. "I wasn't used to failure," he wrote in his book, "Four Trials," "and I was miserable that I had failed my dad." But Edwards must have also realized that if he kept wasting his time and talents where they weren't wanted, he'd never fulfill his father's desire for him to get ahead.

At NC State, Edwards was himself again. He still couldn't afford the tuition, so he worked nights at UPS for about $8 an hour unloading boxes from 18-wheelers. He was broke but happy, and didn't outwardly envy his better-off friends. "He wasn't the type that would say, 'Man, I came from a poor background'," says his old dorm suitemate John Huffman. "He knew what he had to do and what his situation was, and that was it." Edwards's friends teased him about his long, blond-streaked hair and surfer looks. He would "kind of fluff his hair up," Huffman says. "We'd cut up with him about being a pretty boy." Huffman says Edwards "came across as rather cocky at times. I would even throw in 'arrogant,' but always in good fun."