Sooner captain learned lessons in discipline from older sibling

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By Jake Trotter
Staff Writer

NORMAN — In the middle of one night, Joe Baker stormed into Lewis Baker's room and got him out of bed.

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Lewis had left crumbs on the kitchen table.

And Joe wanted the table cleaned right then.

"He was super hard on me. I wasn't used to that,” Lewis said of his older brother. "I thought he was going overboard, but he was just trying to teach me discipline.

"I didn't see it then. I see it now.”

Lewis Baker, Oklahoma's starting outside linebacker and its captain, grew up the youngest of five children with his parents in Ocala, Fla., a town of about 50,000 where 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Lewis' was one of those families.

For a reprieve from the troubles of a broken home and the rough streets of Ocala, where drugs and violence were rampant, Lewis spent the summer before his sixth-grade year with Joe, his wife and three daughters in Dallas.

The visit led to a permanent move when Joe relocated his family to suburban Carrollton, Texas.

"My parents had gone through a nasty divorce,” said Joe, who had just ended a six-year stint in the Army and now works in sales. "Me and my wife gave Lewis more of a family foundation. We took him in, and I became a father figure to him.”

Joe gave Lewis two years to acclimate to his new household.

But when Lewis entered Carrollton Hebron High School, the rules changed.

"He'd wake me up in the middle of the night if I didn't do something I was supposed to do,” Lewis said. "If I went to school and didn't make my bed, he'd go nuts when I go

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Sooner captain learned lessons in discipline from older sibling

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