Jonathan Crompton
Demonte Bolden

KNOXVILLE — The Get-By Guy.

We’ve all known them. Some of us have been them. Do just enough to get by, be it in our relationships, work or play.

“I’d been that guy a lot,” Tennessee senior defensive tackle Demonte Bolden said Saturday. “I decided last December that I didn’t want to be a Get-By Guy anymore.”

He had been the Get This Guy Signed Guy coming out of Tyner in 2004, when the Knoxville News Sentinel named him the state’s No. 1 high school football lprospect. But even then, not quite getting by academically forced him to play a semester at Hargrave Military Academy before enrolling at UT.

“Military school made me grow up,” Bolden said two summers ago. “It made a man out of me.”

He was always good at saying the right things, which is often requirement No. 1 for any Get-By Guy. And he was basically a good person.

“Oh, Demonte’s one of the nicest kids you’d ever want to meet,” said UT defensive line coach Dan Brooks. “But he’ll also make you pull your hair out. Our guys know that we expect them to play all out every down, and Demonte hasn’t always done that.”

Still, Bolden started all 12 regular-season games for the Vols last season. He then tied a personal best with four tackles in the SEC Championship Game loss to LSU. Given that he was about to enter his senior year, the Outback Bowl against Wisconsin figured to showcase a Bolden worthy of NFL attention for the entire 2008 campaign.

Then his grades from the fall semester became final. He hadn’t passed enough hours to remain eligible. Along with teammates Rico McCoy, Lucas Taylor, Kenny O’Neil, Chris Donald and Ricardo Kent, he was suspended due to academic issues for the Outback Bowl.

“Embarrassing,” UT coach Phillip Fulmer said. “But we take young people all the time and work with them and try to make them not just better players, but better people. We weren’t going to give up on Demonte. We wanted to do what we could to help him get back on this football team.”

But Fulmer might have been the least of his troubles. For the past four years, Bolden has dated former Lady Vols basketball forward Nicky Anosike, who, like most of Pat Summitt’s players, has never experienced academic problems. They are now engaged, though no wedding date has been set.

“Nicky wasn’t very sympathetic,” Bolden said. “She said, ‘What are you doing? What are you going to do with your life if you get kicked out?’”

Bolden wasn’t sure what he would do without a college education. But he was pretty sure he knew a way to ensure that didn’t happen.

“I made up my mind that I was going to study harder,” he said. “I went to the Thornton Center (UT’s academic facility for athletes). I did what I could do.”

Describing Bolden’s goal to become academically eligible as “a monstrous task,” Brooks worried that passing four political science classes in the spring semester would be too much.

Thornton Center tutor Shannon Crabtree thought differently, however.

“I was a little nervous,” she said Tuesday morning. “I’d heard his story. But from what I’ve heard he became much more open to change and listening to others. He went to class consistently and he probably averaged more than 10 hours a week inside the Thornton Center during the spring semester.”

Bolden said he also began looking around at a lot of his contemporaries, as well as adults he has watched throw away their lives because they didn’t value education.

“They dropped out of school or they never went to college or trade school,” he said. “They do drugs or they’re drunk all the time. They’re 25 or 30 years old and they’re just big teenagers. Why sit around and be bums? Why should the working class have to support people like that?”

So he studied. Hard. On the advice of Crabtree, he visited his professors so they might get to know him as something more than a football player. Fulmer helped out by excusing him from a couple of spring practice workouts a week.

By the end of the spring semester, Bolden was not only eligible, he was an honor student with a 3.0 GPA.

“I put up a sign in my office calling him my ‘Study Hall Rock Star,’” Crabtree said. “Demonte had around 20 study hall hours one week right around finals. He really worked hard, but he was also a fun guy, always telling jokes. I haven’t seen him much this summer. I’m kind of going through withdrawal.”

Bolden went through a different kind of withdrawal the day of the Outback Bowl.

“I didn’t even watch the game,” he said. “I can’t watch anything I’m not a part of. If I wasn’t playing, I wasn’t watching.”

McCoy backed that up. He called Bolden during the second half of the Vols’ eventual win, only to be told his teammate was hanging out with family and without the TV on.

“I think I knew then how upset he was,” McCoy said. “But that experience made Demonte grow. He’s much more dedicated to both his studies and football now.”

Come the Labor Day opener at UCLA, Bolden will wear a Vol Scholar patch on his game jersey, a symbol of that dedication to his studies.

Then he’ll attempt to show the nation why Fulmer says his 6-foot-5, 290-pound defensive lineman with 4.6 speed in the 40 “is capable of being a guy who can take over a game. Demonte’s definitely going to have a chance to play on Sundays a year from now.”

Said Bolden: “I feel like this is my year to shine.”

Spoken like a true study hall rock star.