Raphael chucked the football into the air, using his old football prowess to hurl it what looked like a mile high to young Xavier, and he had to make sure his son found it. Dad had accomplished lots in life: At Eastern Washington, he became a Big Sky champion, an all-conference performer, and he held master’s and doctorate degrees. What he felt most proud of, though, was right in front of him, hauling in football after football after football.

As they performed the ritual, Raphael and Xavier chatted about life, dad imparting teachings. Standing in that front yard, Xavier soaked in dozens of lessons: What it meant to be a man, why faith was so important, how to work hard for what you want, how to put it all together. It’s a wonder Raphael didn’t throw his arm out, tossing hundreds of balls skyward almost every day, hoping that before he died, his only son would go bigger and better than he did — in life and in football.

“As time went on,” Xavier says, “it just kinda became second nature.”

In the years that followed, it showed. On weekends, Raphael would drive Xavier five hours to Ford Sports Performance in Seattle, a training facility where the younger Guillory honed his wide receiver skills. When he became a teenager, Xavier played football at Lewis and Clark High School, where he racked up accolades that resonated around the area. As a senior, he made 45 catches for 725 yards and 11 touchdowns, earning first-team all-league honors and a three-star rating on 247 Sports.

Leading up to his graduation in 2019, Xavier had collected a number of offers: Montana State, Idaho, Army, Air Force. He chose to become a Falcon and attend Air Force Prep Academy. Months later, after Xavier played in a few games and completed basic training, Raphael drove through the night — exactly 16 1/2 hours from Spokane to Colorado Springs — to attend his son’s graduation.

When they drove back to Spokane, though, Xavier made a decision. He wanted to transfer. He had decided military life wasn’t for him. He just wanted football. So as he began to explore other options, Raphael checked on the other offer Xavier had earned in high school: Idaho State. Was that still on the table? Raphael emailed then-head coach Rob Phenicie to find out.

Phenicie delivered a quick reply: yes. So Xavier decided his next stop would be back south, only closer this time, to Pocatello.

If it feels like Raphael is becoming a theme here, it should. As he raised his son and four daughters, he colored Xavier’s life in countless ways. He passed on the importance of faith, the importance of hard work, the importance of prioritizing others above yourself, and that in the end, it’s about family. In part, that’s why Raphael chose to leave behind his dream of playing in the NFL.

So that fall, as Xavier’s life began to change and he prepared to enroll at a new school, he thought about those values more than ever. Now, as one of Idaho State’s best wideouts, he realizes it wasn’t because he got bored or something. It was because in October 2019, Raphael was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer.

***

Xavier Guillory had never felt so uncomfortable playing football. Ten months ago, as Idaho State slogged through its worst season in a decade, he felt lost. Nervous. Unsure. He had played hundreds of snaps, dozens of games, even a shortened spring season six months prior.

What he hadn’t done before was play football without his father around. Shortly before Raphael died, in November 2020, Xavier left him with a message: Dad, I’m gonna take care of the family. I’m gonna be a great college football player. I’ll make the NFL.

“I gave him all these promises,” Guillory says.

So the next season, Guillory set out to begin delivering on them. He soon realized he could not, at least not right away. As the 2021 season began, he couldn’t get his mind off his father. He thought about him in class, on the practice field, during games. “There would be times where I’d be on the field and I’d get an anxiety attack,” Guillory says, “just because of all those emotions that I was feeling, from seeing what happened to my father.”

Guillory also couldn’t avoid the pressure. It felt like a weighted blanket with spikes underneath. He had to perform, had to catch, had to be perfect. Check out his numbers from last season, his freshman campaign, and you realize the weight he was carrying around: 21 catches for 264 yards and one touchdown. He struggled on the field, so to make up for it, he built a rigorous work ethic. “You could walk into Holt Arena, walk through those tunnels, and it would be Xavier running routes by himself,” says former ISU receivers coach Hagen Graves. “That was a typical thing to watch.”

To casual observers, it may have seemed like Guillory was delivering a promising freshman season. To those who knew him best, he was doing anything but. The truth is that Guillory became his own worst critic. He knew his capabilities, but the more the memory of his father weighed on him, he understood he could not reach them. He lost some speed. His eating habits suffered. He worked out, but he went through the motions. During practice, when he dropped a pass or jumbled a route, he lashed out at himself.

“That ultimately came to crush him,” says Tanner Conner, a star receiver on last year’s team. “And it crushed him for a while. He had low droughts in football, where he wasn’t performing the way he wanted. He couldn’t remember plays. He was messing up. He was allowing his mistakes to really take over him emotionally.”

“I didn’t really care about football at that time. I wanted to quit,” Guillory says. “I didn’t want to play no more.”

Understand the memories that were swirling around his head and you understand why.***

In October 2019, Raphael began to get sick. He had “some pains,” his son called them. But Xavier never thought anything of it. “My dad is one of those guys that is going to tough out anything,” Xavier says. “He hardly got sick and when he did, he would just sweat it out. Next day he was fine.”

This was the exception. Raphael didn’t like to show it, but his condition worsened. Xavier figured it was something small, maybe a stomach ache. “And then weeks go by, and months go by, and he’s still having it,” Xavier says. “We’re like, are you OK? You should go get checked out.”

Raphael did, and initially, prognoses were good. Some doctors diagnosed him with an infection. Others prescribed varying conditions. None indicated cancer. Still, as weeks turned to months and Raphael’s condition continued to decline, it became clear that cancer was a serious possibility.

When Raphael delivered the news to Xavier and the rest of his family that he had cancer, he looked like himself: Composed, no tears. “I just want you guys to know,” Raphael said. “Don’t be scared. I’m not scared.”

“I didn’t even know what to do when he told us,” Xavier says. “It was just a shock to me. I didn’t know how to process what he just said.”

For Xavier, learning to live with it was a beast unto itself. In the next two months, before he moved to Pocatello, Xavier would tag along with his dad to the classes he taught at Eastern Washington in Cheney, where he helped his dad walk around from class to class as he grew weaker. Still, Raphael maintained an active lifestyle. He ran stairs, even went to the gym — “just to put on a strong face,” Xavier says.

When Xavier found time to return to Spokane during the school year, he understood his dad couldn’t always do so.

“He was like a different person each time,” Xavier says.

For the youngest son, it was hard. Here was his dad, a 6-foot-2 specimen, a former D-I football player who liked to spend time with his son doing physically demanding things. They played catch. They often went on five-mile runs together. Now he could hardly muster the energy. “His cousins would tease him,” Gloria says, “like, oh, we don’t wanna hang out with you. Your dad’s gonna make us go with you. They wanted to go play, go swim, go ride bikes.”

Raphael also established himself in the Spokane community. He was a preacher, a youth football coach, a mentor to several kids in the area. He never drank, smoked or swore. “None of that,” Xavier says. To his five children — Xavier and his four sisters, Imani, Sophia, Aiva and Adoniah — he was a bastion of humility and hard work, of selflessness and righteousness.

So as that version of Raphael turned into a weaker one, as the chemotherapy took its toll, Xavier felt his heart sink like an anchor in the ocean. When he returned home, he knew he was about to meet a frailer iteration of his dad. On and on the process went. Raphael became feeble. About a year later, as November 2020 entered its final week, the family knew his time was coming soon.

The day came on Nov. 29. At 49 years of age, Raphael died in front of Gloria. She called Xavier to deliver the news, and he drove the eight hours from Pocatello to Spokane. Four days later, the family hosted a memorial service.

“I just didn’t think that my dad could die,” Xavier says, “because he was my superhero.”

And so in a matter of days, Xavier lost the person he looked up to most, the figure he formed so much of his identity around. To think: Xavier’s middle name is his dad’s first name. If someone showed you a photo of each at age 20, you would accuse the person of showing you duplicate pictures. They share the same deep voice, the same thoughtfulness, the same mannerisms, even the same stance. “We’d have our arms folded and our leg out,” Xavier says.

In many ways, as he grew up, Xavier came to gauge his accomplishments through the lens of his father’s. When he began to grow to his dad’s height, Xavier felt proud. When he could make his dad laugh, Xavier knew he had done something special. Few could coax a laugh out of Raphael. Here’s how he did it.

“Dad,” Xavier would begin, “did you know that on average, more people are killed by cows each year than sharks?”

“And Raphael would just bust up,” says Gloria, “and he always said, oh, those killer cows, huh, son?”

When Xavier thinks about stories like these, he smiles. Only months ago, he wouldn’t be able to. The emotions would be too much. He would break down. He’s made a lot of changes since then. Some are physical, but most are mental, up in his head where his worst impulses used to fester. Now that space is home to healthier thoughts.

Thing is, he wasn’t always sure Idaho State was the place where he wanted to work on himself.

***

In January, weeks after new head coach Charlie Ragle took over the program and hired an almost entirely new staff, he set up a team meeting. Coaches asked each player two questions, which could have been surface level or something deeper.

Guillory was asked about the hardest thing he’s ever gone through.

“It was a tough thing for him to talk about,” wide receivers coach DJ Steward says. “He had to get up and take some time to gather his thoughts.”

The wound was still fresh, still tender. But he found a way to share about Raphael. He told his teammates about his twin, about the man who he missed like all hell. He shared the lessons his father passed down. He explained why he holds them so dearly.

As he watched Guillory talk, it clicked with Steward: Guillory needed someone to talk to about this. So days later, Steward invited Guillory to sit down and talk. “You gotta feel those emotions. You gotta be able to deal with those emotions,” Steward told him. “You can’t use football as an escape necessarily, because it’s not the healthy way of dealing with things. You need to deal with that loss.”

When Ragle heard about that conversation, he knew he wanted to chat with Guillory. So they set up a meeting. “I just sat down,” Ragle says. “I said, look, I’m gonna tell you a story.”

Ragle confided in Guillory something he has never shared publicly: When he was 23, he lost his father, also named Charlie, to cancer. Ragle talked about the loss, the circumstances around it, the way it affected him then, how it affects him now. There’s a reason few people know about this part of his life.

“I’ve never accepted it,” Ragle says. “We share the same name. Because of my dad being who he was, a dominating figure in my life, and then listening to X say the same thing as how he looked at his father, I can certainly relate to that. I just think there’s a bond that’s formed in those same strifes.”

As Ragle and Guillory grew closer, the head coach felt his sympathy grow. He didn’t give Guillory special treatment or anything resembling it — “I’m gonna demand the same rules that I demand for everybody else,” he says — but he did give himself time to think about Guillory. When Guillory makes mistakes and lets his frustration show, Ragle pauses. What is he going through? Ragle asks himself. Why is he doing this?

“It’s my job to understand that,” Ragle says.

In truth, these are the relationships that convinced Guillory to stay at Idaho State. He wasn’t always so sure he would. Last winter, after the football season ended and ISU fired the head coach Phenicie, Guillory sat down to think. To pray. What was his plan? Maybe he would hit the transfer portal and find a new school. Perhaps he would stick it out in Pocatello. What he really wanted was his dad, but he wasn’t in Spokane anymore.

So Guillory decided to wait things out, to see who the Bengals would hire as their next head coach.

“Then they hired Coach Ragle, and I was like, whoa. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect that at all,” Guillory says. “Like, Cal Berkeley, OK. Then he kept hiring good coaches, and I was like, OK. I like these guys. It gave me confidence. I prayed about it hard, and God gave me an answer.”

Around the same time, after the nightmare season ended and something like hope was on the horizon, Guillory thought about the past few months, about how he had accomplished a fraction of what he felt he could, about the waste of a season he considered it to be. A thought pinged into Guillory’s mind.

My dad put in too much work for me to be like this.

“I looked myself in the mirror and said, I’m changing everything,” Guillory says.

He started with tangible adjustments. He changed his diet, opting for leaner foods. He texted Conner, a former ISU track star who signed an undrafted free agent deal with the Miami Dolphins in the spring, asking for tips on building speed. These days, Guillory’s body fat hovers around 2-3%.

More importantly, Guillory began to come to peace that his father was no longer around, which made the rest of his transformation possible. It started with Gloria, who reminded her son that he didn’t need to be perfect. Raphael didn’t expect him to be. He knew Xavier had the drive, the motivation. He just didn’t want him to be consumed by it.

“I love you for you,” Raphael would tell Xavier. “You’re not just a football player. You’re my son.”

Around the same time, Guillory began to understand another way he had changed since his father passed. “It really messed me up in terms of how to process things,” he says. “Just (being) scared to love something again, because I don’t want to lose it.” The more he learned about the ways Raphael’s death impacted him, even on subconscious levels, the more he could find ways to keep developing — to make his father proud.

If Xavier’s metamorphosis is a Corvette, his father’s memory is the V8 engine. It drives Xavier to keep going, to keep getting faster, to keep getting faster, to keep getting stronger. When he drops a ball and feels angry at himself, it’s because he wants to do better for Raphael. When he hits the practice field outside Holt Arena, sets up the JUGS machine and hauls in 1,000 balls in a day, it’s because he wants to deliver on his promise to his father, to make the NFL.

“That’s Xavier for you, right there,” ISU offensive coordinator Taylor Mazzone says. “This is a way for him to escape from whatever he’s going through. That’s what football is for him.”

For Guillory, it still is. The difference now is as he walks through this dark tunnel, he’s no longer feeling for the walls. He can see the light.

***

Earlier this year, Guillory was enjoying one of his better days. He had a good practice. Then he hit the Holt Arena weight room, where he hit a new PR in one exercise. Excitement flooded through him.

“I’m like,” Guillory says, “oh man, I gotta call Dad —.”

In the arena basement months later, relaying the story, Guillory frowns. “I’m missing that outlet to talk to him about stuff like that,” he says.

Which is why Guillory feels so ecstatic about the changes he’s made, about the ones that have descended upon Idaho State’s program like sunlight on a Saturday afternoon. For one, he loves Ragle, Steward, Mazzone, the new crop of coaches who have taken on the herculean task of turning around this moribund program. Guillory likes their football acumen, but what he really cherishes is their personalities, their willingness to open up and help him navigate this challenging time in his life.

They’re more than happy to do it. Ragle speaks for the rest of his coaching staff when he shares this sentiment: To turn ISU into a winner, you have to get players to play hard, and to do that, you have to earn their trust. That’s why Steward invited Guillory back to his office. It’s why Ragle opened up to Guillory in a way he seldom does.

Guillory has responded in a way that felt all but impossible less than a year ago. Which leaves us here, on the doorstep of Saturday, when Idaho State visits UNLV to open the season.

To get ready for the opportunity, Guillory has been catching balls, running routes, eating better. He thinks this is the start of something promising in Pocatello. In reality, he’s been preparing himself since he was a toddler, squinting up into the sky, listening to his dad emboldening him to chase down everything he ever wanted.

Find it! Find it! Find it! Find it!