The birth of a ‘Hurricane’: How UM commit Rueben Bain became a record-setting sack master
The “Hurricane” started swirling almost 30 years ago, years and years before Rueben Bain was even a thought in his father’s mind and long before the elite edge rusher was one of the crown jewels of the Miami Hurricanes’ Class of 2023.
It all started, fittingly, at “Traz” Powell Stadium in Miami, where Rueben Bain Sr. — just like his son — played his home games and wreaked havoc as a two-way lineman for Carol City. Willie Wilcox, the stadium’s iconic public address announcer, gave him the nickname because of his physicality and tenacity, inspired by the story of wrongfully imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter.
“On the field, he was a force to be reckoned with,” Bain Jr. said Dec. 13, just before winning the Nat Moore Trophy. “They just passed the name on to me.”
It turned out to be something like a premonition from Wilcox. After a solid career with the Chiefs, Bain Sr. graduated, played at Division II Morris Brown College in Atlanta, moved back to Florida, where he started a family. He had a few sons and gave one his own name, and, with it, his own nickname, once Bain Jr. started playing for Miami Central and Wilcox realized who he was. He became the latest in a long line of Bains to star athletically in Miami-Dade County, starting with grandfather Herman Bain, who was a three-sport star at Northwestern.
It turns out, Wilcox had something like a premonition. Not only is “Hurricane Jr.” going to sign with Miami once the early signing period begins Wednesday, but he also embodied the nickname in a way not even his father could, with four state championships in four years, 58 1/2 sacks across his final two seasons at Central and finally a nod as the MaxPreps Florida Player of the Year in on Tuesday.
“He’s taken it to another level,” Bain Sr. said.
Wilcox, who has watched more South Florida football stars and handed out more nicknames than just about anyone, takes it even further.
“He’s one of a kind,” he said. “We’ve had some good players come through Miami and come through here, but he’s one of the top.”
It’s not easy to pick a place to start to explain why. Those four state titles are impressive, of course, and so is the fact he was an all-county performer — or almost certainly going to be one — on all of them. There were the record-setting 29 1/2 sack season he had as a junior, rewriting the Rockets’ record book on the way to earning All-American honors from MaxPreps, or even the fumble he returned for a touchdown as a freshman in the playoffs against Dillard — in his father’s mind, his first signature moment at Central.
It probably makes most sense to start at the end, whether it’s with the 29-sack, 39-tackle for loss senior year he put together or the picture-perfect ending he manufactured Friday.
On his final play as a Rocket, Bain dove to the ground and recovered a fumble to seal Central’s 38-31 win against Plantation American Heritage in the Class 2M championship at DRV PNK Stadium in Miami. It made him immortal as a Rocket — he lost just five games in four years — and yet it wasn’t always a guarantee it would be so smooth.
Almost exactly a year prior, Bain tore the medial collateral ligament in his left knee in the Class 5A championship, keeping him from being on the field for the end of this third title. He also missed the entire spring and most training camp this year, and only played in 10 games because of “load management,” as Central coach Jube Joseph termed it, and still in his first game back he had three sacks to spark the Rockets’ August upset of Bradenton IMG Academy in Bradenton.
“He’s a mutant,” Joseph said, the only way he could explain the 6-foot-2, 250-pound defensive lineman’s astonishingly quick recovery.
“He busted his behind,” Bain Sr. added.
There’s one big way father and son are different.
Bain Sr., in Miami, was just as much known for his boisterous personality as he was his play. He was a bit like a hurricane in all aspects of his life.
His son is the opposite, quiet — both in the sense he’s “a man of few words,” as Joseph said, and literally relatively soft spoken — and deathly serious, aside from those occasions when his wry smile and dry sense of humor poke through. When Bain celebrated his lone sack of the 2M title game by throwing up the U three days after his oral commitment, it counted as one of the flashiest celebrations of his Central career.
“I think I had a little more dog in me,” Bain Sr. said, “but he’s got a better motor than what I had. I’ve got to be honest with that.”
“They know Rueben Jr.,” Wilcox added, “more for his performance on the field.”
It’s this personality Joseph credits for Bain’s one-of-a-kind career and his place in the top 100 of the 247Sports composite rankings for the 2023 recruiting class.
The lineman was already well known by the time he got to high school — a star on both lines, at tight end and even at running back for the Miami Gardens Vikings in Pop Warner Little Scholars — and he was immediately in the Rockets’ rotation on defense. By the end of the year, he was a starter — and earned all-county honors from the Miami Herald with 5 1/2 sacks and 20 tackles for loss — and he never slowed down.
As a sophomore, he had 13 sacks in just six games as the season was shortened because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hurricanes offered him a scholarship. By then, the signs of who he would become were obvious.
At one point in a postseason rout of Fort Myers Dunbar in Fort Myers, Joseph, who was the defensive coordinator at the time, decided to needle his underclassman rising star.
“Do you have a sack yet?” Joseph, notoriously fiery, asked him in the third quarter. Bain told him he had one.
“I told him, ‘I guess these guys can block. I guess they can block you tonight,’” Joseph recalled.
On the very next play, Bain sacked the quarterback, knocked the ball loose and Dunbar took a safety.
“[He] comes up to me calmly and was like, ‘Is that good enough for you?’” Joseph said. “It just shows you the yin and yang of Rueben Bain.”
Joseph — who takes pride in how quickly some of his former players, including linebacker Wesley Bissainthe, are able to contribute at the next level — found a unlikely counterpart in Bain.
As talented as he is and as high a motor as he has, Bain is still, by the highest-level standards, pretty small for a defensive end and he doesn’t have the speed or length to profile as an obvious freak prospect. Instead, he wins with reaction time, burst, strength and, above all else, strategy. Almost anytime he discusses about his success, Bain starts by talking about watching his keys — the tells an offensive lineman or offense will inadvertently and inevitably display to give a perceptive defender an inkling of what’s coming.
This, Joseph said, is where Bain thrives.
“We joke between my coaching staff and me is you know when teams change Gatorade flavors on the sideline,” he said. “It’s the same about Bain. Bain’s the same type of kid where I’ll be like, ‘Hey, Bain, what kind of car does that left guard drive?’ ... It’s funny, but that’s how intricate his details are.”
It all meant the name “Hurricane” boomed out over the speakers at Powell Stadium more than just about any other for the last few years and the original couldn’t help but get emotional whenever he heard it.
The first time Bain Sr. heard it, he smiled — a flashback to his youth — and it still made him emotional all the way until the end.
“It makes me proud. It’s a proud-dad moment, man,” Bain Sr. said. “He’s a great kid, my son — not just on the field, but off the field, no problems or anything. It just makes me proud to be able to call him my son.”
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Miami commits entering signing day
QB: Emory Williams (Milton); RB: Mark Fletcher (Plantation American Heritage); RB: Christopher Johnson (Dillard); WR: Nathaniel Joseph (Edison); WR: Robby Washington (Palmetto); TE: Riley Williams (Bradenton IMG Academy); TE: Jackson Carver (Loomis Chaffee School (Windsor, Conn.)); T: Francis Mauigoa (Bradenton IMG Academy); T: Samson Okunlola (Thayer Academy (Braintree, Mass.)); T: Frankie Tinilau (LaSalle); IOL: Antonio Tripp (Bradenton IMG Academy); IOL: Tommy Kinsler (Ocala Trinity Catholic); DL: Collins Acheampong (Santa Margarita (Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.)); DL: Joshua Horton (Langston Hughes (Fairburn, Ga.)); EDGE: Rueben Bain (Miami Central); EDGE: Jayden Wayne (Bradenton IMG Academy); LB: Malik Bryant (Orlando Jones); LB: Raul Aguirre (Whitewater (Fayetteville, Ga.); LB: Bobby Washington (Palmetto); LB: Marcellius Pulliam (Sandy Creek (Tyrone, Ga.)): LB: Kaleb Spencer (Life Christian Academy (South Chesterfield, Va.)); CB: Cormani McClain (Lakeland); CB: Robert Stafford (Melbourne Eau Gallie); S: Antione Jackson (Dillard).
This story was originally published December 20, 2022 at 11:12 AM.
