COLUMBIA, S.C. — Terrell Hemingway isn’t exactly sure why everyone calls him Tonka.
“You’ve got to talk to my dad about that one,” South Carolina’s sophomore defensive lineman said.
It’s not because his son played with Tonka trucks as a child, Kenneth Hemingway said. It’s because he impersonated one.
“He would always fall, jump, tear up anything he had,” Kenneth said. “We bought him one of those little hot rod cycles from Walmart with the battery to it, and I had to always monitor him because he was a daredevil. We were going over to my mother’s house and my uncle had a trailer there that was pretty high off the ground, and Tonka was going so fast that he couldn’t stop that thing so he ran dead into that mobile home and the bike went under the mobile home and it knocked him back off that bike. He jumped up and got on the bike and kept going.
