Humble Giant: The Story of Sidney Fugar’s Strength, Sacrifice and Spirit

Ahead by a field goal with three minutes remaining in a closely contested matchup against Oklahoma State, Baylor running back Dawson Pendergrass wanted to call “ball game.”

His aspirations of sealing the deal and breaking off a big run, however, were temporarily put on pause after he took the handoff out of the backfield from quarterback Sawyer Robertson and tripped on someone’s foot somewhere near the line of scrimmage.

A rumbling and stumbling Pendergrass suddenly was face-to-face with a 6-foot-7, 275-pound Cowboy defensive lineman, who enveloped him in an attempt to wrestle him to the ground for a gain of a couple of yards. 

In his periphery, left tackle Sidney Fugar, with swaths of sweat dripping down from his old-school middle-bar facemask — an homage to the offensive lineman that came before him, as well as an intentional ploy to look like the nastiest and meanest player on the field — saw Pendergrass churning his legs and battling to keep the play alive, refusing to go down easily onto the McLane Stadium turf.

Fugar, who never turns down an opportunity to help a teammate, barreled over to the scrum and instinctively picked up Pendergrass with both arms, safely carrying him for a few yards to evade the jaws of Oklahoma State’s defense before letting go and giving him a slight push in the back.

In the blink of an eye, Pendergrass regained his balance and was off to the races while Fugar, and all 345 pounds of him, raced after him and waved his arms, screaming “Go! Go! Go! Go!” trying not to get left in the dust for his teammate’s 55-yard game-sealing touchdown run.

“I was trying to show off my athleticism and catch up with him, but he was gone,” Fugar said jokingly as he reminisced on his favorite memory from last season. “I was excited for Dawson, not because I helped out, but because we strained so hard to overcome that drive. As offensive linemen, we don’t get touchdowns, and we don’t get touches on the ball. When our teammates score and are benefiting from our hard work, it makes our job so much easier and makes the game so enjoyable.”

That particular play in mid-October was a microcosm of Baylor’s offensive success down the stretch of last season, and according to almost everyone around the program, the key to the team’s turnaround after a sluggish first month and a half was the insertion of Fugar at left tackle, who started the season on the bench.

"Once we put Sid at left tackle, you could feel that connection between all of us," center Coleton Price said. "We understood that we were all on the same page, and that was a big change for our offense, and it helped us a lot."

Before Fugar started at left tackle against Iowa State, Baylor averaged 29.4 points, 146.2 rushing yards, 222.6 passing yards and 368.8 yards of total offense per game, with a 2-3 record. With Fugar starting, Baylor went 6-2, averaging 37.5 points, 199.1 rushing yards, 285.5 passing yards and 484.6 total yards of offense per game.

Fugar, however, in typical offensive lineman fashion, doesn’t want to take the shine; he doesn’t want the spotlight. He wants to deflect the praise to his teammates and coaches and doesn’t see himself as the sole reason for the team’s turnaround.

“When people say I shifted the season, I don’t believe that,” he said. “I believe that all five of us on the offensive line did as a union because I wouldn’t have been successful or we wouldn’t have won any of those games, if I didn’t have those four guys right beside me going through the trials and tribulations of the season. It wasn’t me, it was all of us.”

While spending the first month and a half of the season mostly on the bench as a reserve left guard, Fugar remained steadfast in preparing for his eventual opportunity, studying film and learning Jake Spavital’s offense. Although he’s 6-foot-5 and 345 pounds, Fugar wants to shatter the narrative that offensive linemen usually aren’t very bright.

“If you want to be a great offensive lineman, you have to be very technical and smart,” he said. “Not a lot of people know that offensive linemen are really smart, and so for me, if I want to get where I say I want to go, I have to be smart and detail-oriented in everything I do. I have to see what I can do to be a step ahead of other people. I really harp on IQ and details, because at the end of the day, that’s what brought you into the sport and that’s what’s going to keep you successful in the sport.”

Paired with his intelligence is an insatiable edge that’s been carried with him throughout his life, but especially after he transferred to Baylor from South Carolina last spring. At South Carolina, Fugar appeared in 10 games with four starts, but played poorly and was passed up on the depth chart, something that he never wants to happen again.

“I had a lot of haters coming into Baylor from my last school; that was something that I let be a chip on my shoulder to give me an edge,” Fugar said. “I looked at all the things I did wrong at my old school and looked at myself in the mirror and told myself, I’ll never put that type of stuff on film. Whenever I got my opportunity to start, or even think about coming in to start, I knew that I was going to be prepared, regardless of what the circumstances were. I needed to make sure that my coaches trusted me to give my all to this team.”

Where else does Fugar get his edge from? He says it comes from being underrated, from being overlooked, from being ignored by coaches who didn’t think he was good enough, aggressive enough, fast enough. He also says it has everything to do with his upbringing and the sacrifices his family members had to make to put him in a position to succeed.

“When I get mad or want to bring that edge out, I think about all the struggles I’ve been through in life,” he said. “I think about how I grew up and how I was raised and what my mom had to do to sacrifice for me — that was No. 1. My No. 2 is thinking about all the coaches who doubted me and told me I wasn’t good enough. I had to take that on the chin. No. 3 is all the people who have passed away in my life, like my grandmother and uncle. Those three things are like a commandment in my mind. I would never come on the field and not go hard because these people have influenced me, whether it’s good or bad, and have pushed me to be the person I am today.”

Fugar owes everything to his mother, who grew up in Ghana, a third-world country in West Africa, as a water girl selling snacks to people on the road. Often living in places with no roof over her head, she moved to the United States in the 1990s in search of better opportunities, where she braided hair and worked three to four jobs in the Washington, D.C. area to try to escape poverty.

“With all the struggles my mom has overcome, she’s never sat there and said, ‘I want to give up,’ so why should I? I’ve seen her wake up at 4 a.m., and it doesn’t matter if it’s snowing outside or not, and she would go do her job and she wouldn’t complain,” he said. “She’d maybe have four hours of sleep, and she’s back to it. She’s Wonder Woman. She’s unbreakable. It inspires me to be a better man for her. What can I do to make her proud to make sure she’s done working for the rest of my life? I’ve gone through this life of struggle and sorrow, but she’s always taught me to turn things into a positive light. That’s what gets this diesel going.”

When Fugar was seven years old, his family had been evicted from their apartment, and facing dire financial circumstances, his mother made the incredibly difficult decision to send Fugar back to Ghana to live with family while she tried to gather her funds, so that she could comfortably provide for her three children.

“Having to move away from my mom at a young age, who’s prepared for that? I was there for two years, and I got to learn the language,” Fugar said. “I got to spend time with my grandmother until she passed, which hurt me a lot, too. I learned how life is different compared to the U.S.”

While in Ghana, Fugar was exposed at a young age to what it was like to see people live well below the poverty line with virtually nothing, an experience that has stuck with him ever since.

“I saw people begging on the streets, and nobody would acknowledge them, and they'd be filthy,” he said. “They’ll have urination stains all over them. The struggle is even more sad there. You’ll have a bunch of people where the economy is low. Everyone’s so poor. Who’s giving out jobs? Who’s giving out opportunities? People just give up. They’ll have little kids with them, and you can see their skeletons because they haven’t eaten in months.”

He added, “It humbled me. I would never waste food, or I’d never do certain stuff, because I know what their struggle is. For example, let’s say you have a flat-screen TV and you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a flat-screen TV. You’ll have little kids come up to your window watching, not because they want to steal it, but because they want to watch TV, and they don’t have one. It’s so sad because it’s a Monday. Why aren’t you in school?”

School isn’t promised to everyone in Ghana; in fact, Fugar’s mother’s education had stopped at seventh grade. In most places, you have to pay for school, starting as early as pre-kindergarten, and the majority of people aren’t fortunate enough to have the funds to go through school up until university.

“That’s why education is so important to me,” he said. “In America, we have free education through high school, which is a blessing. Two, I worked my butt off to make sure I got a full-ride scholarship, so my mom doesn’t have to pay for anything. Those two things are never a gamble for me. It’s a must that I finish school. It’s a must that I need to do the things I need to do. I come from a place where those opportunities that we don’t take advantage of are somebody else’s blessing.”

While in Ghana, Fugar’s uncle, before his untimely passing, took care of him and taught him how to be a man, as well as showing him the importance of education, giving back to people and having faith.

“We’d go out and go preach to people every Saturday, asking people if they wanted to hear the Word of God,” Fugar said. “We’d sit there for maybe an hour or two, and he’d install all this knowledge of faith into people, and I was like, ‘Wow. This is so beautiful.’”

After two transformative years in Ghana, Fugar returned to the U.S., and his mother and two sisters relocated to a nicer area in Waldorf, Maryland. Interestingly enough, Fugar didn’t play football growing up, nor did he have any knowledge of the game outside of a few big-name players, such as Robert Griffin III, Ray Lewis and Marshawn Lynch.

It wasn’t until 2019, his senior year of high school, that he stepped foot on a field, only to be a scout team defensive lineman for most of the season. In the playoffs, however, Fugar had a breakout game, totaling three sacks, seven tackles for loss, and started to think for the first time, “I love the game of football.”

With no college offers on the table because of minimal exposure, Fugar went to St. Thomas More, a prep school in Connecticut, a seven-hour drive from his home in Maryland, where the coaching staff moved him to the other side of the ball and he became the starter at right tackle — a match made in Heaven.

“I started being a film junkie watching a couple of dogs like Andrew Thomas, Jedrick Wills, who had gotten drafted that year,” Fugar said. “The next step for me was, what’s going to make me money in the future? They told me pass protection was the most important thing that you can work on. I searched up who was the best pass protector in NFL history, and it said Joe Thomas. Ever since that day, I loved Joe Thomas. He plays the game differently, and he’s one of those vicious guys that’ll always be my No. 1. He was one of my inspirations.”

Fugar had a great season at St. Thomas More and landed at Western Illinois, an FCS program in the same conference as North Dakota State, South Dakota State and South Dakota. He quickly realized it wasn’t where he wanted to be, feeling a bit homesick and having to work a job to pay the bills, while doubling at the team’s star tackle.

“Imagine you have a whole game and you have to get undressed and you have an hour until your shift starts, and you don’t get off until 4 a.m. I was doing security at my old school, while I was playing football, not because I wanted to, but because there was no money in it, and they weren’t paying guys. We were 0-11, and I was surrounded by people who had other things on their minds. They were thinking about starting their family. They were thinking about starting their careers,” he said.

Fugar added, “I still had the right vision to be a great football player, but I wasn’t around the right people or the right coaches. I sit here and thank God that I didn’t get into trouble in my years there. He also made sure I’m always proactive and always doing something, never sitting there idle. And I have a lot of people to worry about. Those three things always keep me in line and keep me maturing. That’s what has built my character.”

Following a few standout seasons at Western Illinois, Fugar’s recruitment took off, and he landed at South Carolina for a year before entering the transfer portal again and choosing Baylor over Colorado, UCLA and Washington, a decision he’s come to believe was one of the best things he ever could have done.

“You have coaches that care about you and that love you for who you are, on and off the field; they are the same person that they portray,” Fugar said of Baylor. “They're going to be hard on you, but that's what a coach is going to do. But it's about how close they want to be with their players. How much do they want to invest in their players? And that's the beauty of being at Baylor. I thank God for this experience.”

Since being in Waco, the money Fugar has received from Name, Image and Likeness deals is more than he’s ever had or seen in his life. With that in mind, Fugar had written down on a piece of paper a while ago, “When you have a certain amount of money, give back to your people.” 

His ultimate goal is to build a hospital in Ghana eventually, but in the meantime, he’s putting his money toward food drives both back home and in the Waco area. 

In Fugar’s home village, there’s barely any power or running water. If the people in the village want to take a shower, they have to walk 10 miles, in addition to having minimal food. This summer, Fugar sent money back home to his cousin and to stockpile a year’s worth of rice, vegetables, oil, and other essentials, as well as footballs, basketballs and soccer balls for the children.

While Fugar was unable to attend due to fall camp practices, his mother was able to help deliver all of the food while rocking a No. 69 Baylor jersey. Although he wasn’t there in person, Fugar still sent a video to the children with a motivational message, hoping to attend next year.

“I basically was telling them that I understand where they are coming from,” he said. “I’ve lived in your shoes before. I understand how you can live without eating for days — I understand that completely. My blessing to you is to let me give you guys food, so you can focus on getting an education or on work. I told them to always follow their dreams. Don’t let anybody tell you what you are or what you aren’t. At the end of the day, only God knows what’s going to lead you into a better path or a better career. You’re the only person God’s given that vision to, so don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I’ve come from nothing, and I’ve done something, and I still don’t feel like I still have steps that I want to accomplish.”

While a life of giving back and service awaits Fugar after his playing days are over, everything that life has thrown at him up until this point motivates him even more to take advantage of the physical gifts God has blessed him with and to play football for as long as he can with the goal of being selected in next year’s NFL Draft.

“One thing I’m gonna always do is praise God,” Fugar said with a big smile. “I’m gonna be thankful for every little thing that I’ve gone through because without him, I’d be nothing.”

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