Inside the improbable football journey of Oklahoma State's Nathan Latu
Scott WrightThe Oklahoman
STILLWATER — Nathan Latu’s college football career is reaching the truest of full-circle moments as he prepares for his final home game as an Oklahoma State Cowboy.
That game, set for 2:30 p.m. Saturday, will be against Brigham Young University.
BYU was the first program to offer a scholarship to Latu and his twin brother, Cameron, when they were at Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
BYU was where the Latu brothers committed when they were just sophomores.
BYU was where Nathan believed he was destined to play out his college football life — until a few twists in the road sent him down a far different and more challenging path.
Eight years after receiving that scholarship offer, and six years after remarkably reviving his football career, Nathan Latu and the 20th-ranked Cowboys will face BYU for Senior Day at Boone Pickens Stadium with hopes of earning a berth in the Big 12 Championship Game.
Yet how Latu got here — or how he got himself on a college football field at all — is a rather improbable tale.
After those BYU scholarship offers, Cameron continued to flourish on the field, drawing interest from even bigger programs. But in the latter years of high school, Nathan’s path diverted because of a brief period of what he described as poor choices and negative influences.
Cameron eventually signed with Alabama, but by that time, Nathan’s academic standing had dropped so far, he couldn’t graduate from high school.
“It was really hard for Nathan,” said Jill Argust, the Latus’ mother. “He started not making great choices, but it was very short-lived.
“But by the time he realized, ‘Hey, I’m messing up my opportunity,’ it was too late.”
Nathan earned his general education development diploma and got a job as a clerk at the Macy’s department store in a Salt Lake City mall, working full time and wondering what was next.
That could’ve been the end of Nathan Latu’s athletic journey, yet with an abundance of family support and a mental reset of his own, it instead turned into the start of a new chapter.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
From Southern California to Northern Minnesota
The Latu brothers were 3 years old when Argust decided to move herself and her sons — including the boys’ older brother, Sioka — from Lawndale, California, near Torrance, to the tiny town of Chisholm, Minnesota, about four hours north of Minneapolis.“One of the best things I ever did,” Argust said. “As opposed to California, where I felt like I couldn’t let them out of my sight, they got to go be kids, go ride their bikes, stuff like that.”
Nathan and Cameron don’t remember anything of their SoCal life, but Chisholm was a booming spot for a couple of sports-loving boys.
Football wasn’t big there, but basketball was. Same for baseball, wrestling, track, hockey and curling — yes, curling. And the Latu brothers did it all.
“Curling is huge up there,” Nathan said with a laugh. “I wanted to do it all. It was just stuff to keep us busy and we loved it.”
The small-town atmosphere, plus the abundance of sports made Chisholm almost perfect.
“Everybody knew each other,” Cameron said. “For those 10 years, my friends all lived literally blocks away. We always was outside, always was active. Any sport we could play, winter, spring, fall, summer, we was doing. We were very competitive and we wanted to stay active.
“Our friends would be doing the same thing, so we’d all meet up and have fun.”
The twins’ athletic skills were obvious early, but their lives took another turn in 2013 when Argust moved her boys to Salt Lake City.
“That’s where Nathan got introduced to rugby,” she said. “And he fell in love. He was very, very good at it. He was just a natural.”
They both began playing football, and that’s where Cameron found his passion. But for Nathan, football was a way to pass time in the fall until rugby season returned the next spring.
Thanks to his size and natural physicality, Nathan was a starter on the varsity team as a high school freshman.
“It was my favorite sport,” Nathan said. “If they handed out scholarships for rugby like they do football, I’d be playing rugby.”
Cameron wrestled in the winter and was a thrower on the track team in the spring. Every year, he’d tell his mom he wasn’t going to play rugby, but he’d eventually change his mind and join in.
“I was more dialed into football and had more fun, I guess, and Nathan was just drawn to rugby and how free that was, running around, no shoulder pads,” Cameron said. “And he was very good at it.
“He was always faster than me, stronger than me, so he played the positions that got the ball more. He would score more and made it look natural.”
The opportunities provided by football were too much to ignore. The BYU offers were monumental, because they saw the potential to play college athletics, and they committed rather hastily because of that excitement.
But as more offers came, they had to re-evaluate their plans.
Cameron landed at Alabama, where he ultimately developed into one of the top tight ends in the country. Last spring, he was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers, though a torn meniscus ended his rookie year during the preseason.
Yet while Cameron was learning the game from Nick Saban in the summer of 2019, Nathan was folding clothes and running the register at Macy’s.
