Football is often described with metaphors. Warriors trudging into battle. Linemen fighting in the trenches. But to Penn State defensive end Tamba Hali, who lived in Liberia for half his life, the comparisons seem trivial.

For Hali, the battles were literal. At least until Sept. 15, 1994, when he and his siblings fled the war-torn west African nation, which has been ravaged by 15 years of civil war.

“By coming over here I would open an opportunity for my kids to come to this country to advance themselves,” said Tamba Hali’s father, Henry. “Football and sport was not in my mind it was just so they could advance themselves academically.”

Henry Hali studied at New Jersey’s Fairleigh-Dickinson University in the late 1970s before returning to Liberia to teach in 1980. But after teaching for five years, the unstable political situation led him to move across the Atlantic permanently. He sent for his children nine years later.

Tamba Hali was expected to play basketball, as his father did, but as an eighth grader he caught the eyes of the football coaches at his Teaneck, N.J., high school.

“He was targeted as one of the players that has a great motor and is a great kid,” said Dennis Heck, Teaneck High School’s head coach. Heck fondly recalls the day after Teaneck lost in the state playoffs during Tamba Hali’s senior season, when Hali was the first to arrive to practice the next morning to help fill up water jugs.

“We just went after him and told him this is what you’re gonna do,” he said.

New to football, Tamba Hali played special teams as a freshman, and by his junior year he had blossomed into an all-state starter with a scholarship offer from Boston College. Eventually he, his father and his coach narrowed down over 60 scholarship offers to USC, Penn State, Syracuse, Maryland and Miami.

Now a journalism major, Tamba Hali originally studied computer graphics, and Penn State’s superior department won him over.

Four years and a switch from defensive tackle to defensive end later, he has filled in his 6-foot-3, 267-pound frame and is a viable NFL prospect – he had 2.5 sacks and four tackles last week. But you wouldn’t know it from him.

“I have had a lot of agents try to contact me, but first and foremost it’s not about the NFL right now,” Tamba Hali told the North Jersey Media Group on August 28, 2005. “It’s not the time for that. It’s time for my senior season. That is what is important now. I have to put my focus on the team.”

Instead, he has left the dirty work to Heck, with whom he speaks several times a week.

“He’s directed all of his agents to call me,” said Heck. “He said he don’t want anything to do with that stuff, not until the season’s over. He’s playing and he’s having fun.”

Still, while Tamba Hali focuses on his final season as a Nittany Lion, the lure of NFL riches brings an extra incentive and a reminder that he cannot forget the wars in his homeland. His mother, whom he has not seen since leaving Liberia, still lives in the country’s capital of Monrovia.

Having his mother an ocean away has been difficult for Tamba Hali, and has forced him to mature faster than most people. He speaks with his mother often, but attempts to see her have been unsuccessful, such as when Tamba Hali and his father were unable to obtain a temporary visa so she could see his graduation from high school. But the Hali family hopes that if Tamba Hali can obtain a professional contract, they will finally be able to bring her to the United States.

“It’s difficult for him because his real mother is not here,” Henry Hali said. “But we hope that in the future that will be corrected.”

Tamba Hali’s father and his mother have both remarried, but they keep in touch and Henry Hali sends her money when he can.

Despite not having his mother with him, Tamba Hali has the support system that some only dream of. His father attended every home game his freshman and sophomore years and has been to every game, home and away, since the start of his junior season.

The coaching staff at Teaneck High School also went to Happy Valley for the season-opener against South Florida and routinely visited him during spring practices.

While some draft reports have said that Tamba Hali isn’t large enough to play defensive end in the NFL, Heck disagrees.

“I don’t care what those guys say,” Heck said. “If he’s big enough to play in the Big Ten he’s big enough to play in the NFL – I definitely expect him to play on Sundays.”

Tamba Hali expects his mother to be watching.

Reach David Kalan at [email protected]