Jake Larson was one of the greatest athletes Butte High has ever produced.

Whether he was competing in football, basketball or track, he played with an edge that made opposing fans hate him. He still has that rough edge when he plays slow-pitch softball.

That edge is something that helped make him great. It was what helped him continually rise to the big moment when playing receiver at Montana Western.

He knew he was better than you, and he was never afraid to let you know that.

When I ran into Jake the other day, I asked him if he had been talking with Tommy Mellott, the former Bulldog who became a legend with the Montana State Bobcats.

Jake gave me a puzzled look and asked why I would ask him such a thing.

“Because Tommy Mellott pushed over that trashcan,” I said. “When I saw that, I said, ‘That’s a Jake Larson move.’”

Jake, after all, famously gave the home fans in Kalispell the double Butte Salute when he was playing basketball for Butte High. Knocking over a trash would be child’s play compared to that.

We have all seen the video many times by now. Two days after he received the Walter Payton Award, which is billed as the Heisman Trophy of the FCS, Mellott scrambled for some yardage in the FCS National Championship Game against North Dakota State.

Tommy ran out of bounds on the NDSU sideline. As he stopped, he put out his hand almost to brace himself. Then, he used that hand to tip over a trashcan that appeared to be full of discarded drink cups.

Now, I have no idea if Tommy did that on purpose, and neither do you. But it sure looked like it was an intentional move by Mellott.

From this point forward, we will assume that his gently tipping over the trashcan was, indeed, on purpose. We will assume that because it seems everyone else already has jumped to that conclusion.

Forgetting that no person has earned the benefit of the doubt more than Tommy, that video has become the talk of the state — and beyond.

I have seen where people have referred to Mellott as “Trashcan Tommy,” making a play on the nickname, “Touchdown Tommy,” that he earned early in his freshman season at Montana State.

Montana Grizzly fans, in particular, have piled on with the comments, and many of them have pointed out that he is from Butte.

“Typical Butte.”

“That’s so Butte.”

“You can’t take the Butte out of the boy.”

Even though those comments are written on social media, you can tell they come with the “oh you’re from Butte” tone that we Butte Rats know all too well.
Well, you can make fun of us for our dirty water, which is likely cleaner than yours. You can mock us for our mine dumps, and you can poke fun at us for being gullible every time the latest Monorail salesman comes to town.

But you can never shame us for Tommy Mellott.

In Butte, we like to play the “Oh Yeah Game” when talking about Tommy.

“You heard Tommy rescued a family of cats from a burning tree? Oh yeah, well listen to this.”

Then what follows will be an even more incredible story about the 2020 Butte High graduate.

He is, after all, the boy who went to a birthday party of a kindergarten-age girl he had just met. He was a mentor for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Butte through his high school days. He was the guy who was invited to speak at sixth grade graduations by three of Butte’s six elementary schools in Butte before his senior football season was over.

When COVID wouldn’t let his alma mater, Margaret Leary Elementary, host a graduation ceremony, he wrote a very touching letter to each of the sixth-grade graduates.

I could go on and on about Tommy’s strength of character, but it is hard to top what he did when the Montana East-West Shrine Game was canceled in 2020. (I’m sure somebody will, though.)

While players around the state — and their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends — felt anger and sadness out about losing the game, Tommy thought about the patients at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Spokane.

On the weekend the game would have been played, Tommy led the way as the Butte players picked for the Shrine Game held a socially-distanced cornhole tournament at Copper Mountain Park. That tournament, along with an auction, raised more than $50,000 for the hospital.

That was about half the amount that was raised when the game was actually played the year before.

When we tried to give credit to all the players from Butte named to the Shrine Game, they turned it away. They were just doing what Tommy told them they were doing.

So, if you are going to come at our boy Tommy, you better have more than a little bit of trash to throw in our face.

Tommy has long been a beacon of class in a sea of unsportsmanlike conduct.

The sporting world today is full of end zone dances, bat flips and shooshing. It is full of Lambeau Leaps, flag planting and receivers pointing for first down.

It has trickled down from the professionals to the college to high school to Little League.

With Deion Sanders again being treated like a hero in college football, things are only going to get worse in this regard, too.

For the last four years, however, we’ve had Tommy Mellott showing the young athletes how it should be done.

After the Bobcats beat the Grizzlies in Bozeman in 2022, Tommy went on television to beg MSU fans to stop with their taunting of the UM players. He knew how hard they worked and how much the game meant to his biggest rivals.

That was the epitome of elegance in victory, and that was a from-the-heart gesture that could not easily be faked.

None of that can be tarnished because Tommy pushed over a trashcan on the North Dakota State sideline.

The thought that Tommy did that on purpose, though, gives me even more hope for his future in professional football.

I once asked a college basketball coach about a player he signed being a jerk on the court. He was so bad that he made Jake Larson look like a choirboy.

The opposing fans hated him, and so did the game officials. His teammates did not even seem to like him.

This player came across as so dislikable that I could not help but like him.

I asked the college coach if he worried about adding a player like that to his program.

“Nah,” the coach said. “I like a player with a streak of a–hole. I know I had a streak of a–hole when I played, and it made me a better player.”

It is true that a rough edge like that can make a good player great. Players like Pedro Martinez, Aaron Rodgers and Larry Bird all had a streak of a–hole in them. Jake had a streak of a–hole in him.

That streak was part of what made those guys so dominating. It was part of what made them fun to watch.

Throughout his career, Tommy Mellott has been the total package. He has seemed almost too good to be true. If you wrote a movie and included Tommy as a character, it would not be believable.

If that gentle flip of a trashcan lets us know that Tommy, too, has that nasty streak in him, then I would definitely move him up on my draft board if I was the general manager of an NFL team.

Touchdown Tommy with an edge has Hall of Fame written all over it.

And to answer the question, Jake Larson was not talking to Tommy before that championship game in Frisco, Texas. Tommy did that on his own.

Jake also said he would have never flipped that trashcan on its side like that.

“I would have kicked that damn thing over,” Jake said. “I would have kicked that garbage all over the place.”

 — Bill Foley, who has more than a streak of a–hole in him, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.