UCLA offensive tackle Xavier Su’a-Filo arrived in 2009 to much fanfare, the team’s highest-rated offensive line recruit in more than a decade.
His return from a two-year mission, though, might be even more crucial to the Bruins.
I sat down with Su’a-Filo for an hour to talk about faith and football, about how he’s changed in two years, and more importantly to UCLA football fans, how he’s stayed the same. So, to clarify: He is 310 pounds, grew a little taller, worked out on his own quite often, and he expects to be rounding into shape come spring football, with a target goal of getting to his post-freshman level by the fall.
More importantly to him, though, was his change from boyhood to manhood during what was a trying two-year period of his life.
Check out our chat below…

Jon Gold: Have you noticed fundamental changes in you? Personality? More patient? Quieter?
Xavier Su’a-Filo: “No, I don’t think so. Definitely not quieter. It’s more like, before I couldn’t wait to talk. I listened, but I couldn’t wait to say what I had to say. Now I’m still me, I’ll still talk it up. If you ask any of my friends I’m still me. But I guess I’m more analytical. I listen to people. Really being able to hear people. On a mission you meet people with life’s problems, who’ve been through different situations. When you have the opportunity to zero in and listen to them, to hear them and figure out what’s going on, that takes a lot of patience and understanding. So if you asked my parents, my friends, everyone if I’m the same me, yeah, I have the same personality. But it’s better. I have the ability to listen. To pay attention.”

JG: The biggest thing you do as offensive lineman is open doors. Your job as a missionary was to open doors. Little different, but tell me about the hardest day you had out there, because you’re not someone who likes those doors shut.
XSF: “The hardest day, whew. There are a lot of different ways that missionaries judge their success. Some missionaries unfortunately judge their success by the number of baptisms. Some by the amount of people they talk to, some by service hours they had. But realistically, success of a mission comes from your personal diligence and your success in working in a companionship, getting closer to the Lord, helping people. When those things are interrupted, it’s hard and it’s easy to think negative.
“My hardest day on my mission was probably one day when I was serving in second area, in Foley, Alabama. We were serving in an area with a small community of Hispanics in a trailer park area. There had been missionaries there for so long, same old people had been run into. When you were knocking on doors, they already knew who you were. They were not interested. My companion and I were tracting – knocking on doors, which wasn’t the most effective thing to do but was what we had to resort to. Earlier that day, two of our top investigators, people we were teaching, had dropped us. They told us for whatever reason they’re not interested, they don’t want us to come back. It was really disheartening. We could see how much they were progressing, see how much they were changing. For something to suddenly happen without any explanation … they just all at once told us we don’t want you to come over anymore
“It was real discouraging, but we kept going on. That was early, around 1. We were tracting, meeting people, they were nice to us but not wanting the message. Later in the evening, a good friend we had met had a heart attack in the hospital, and she was a very old woman, and it was damaging to her. We went to the hospital, but then later in the evening, we had another person we knew get robbed at their home. She called us, not knowing what to do, kind of almost casting the blame on her starting to meet with us. She thought now she had bad luck. So that whole day, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was raining, too, and we got soaked all during the day. It was just a tough day.”

(I don’t want to clutter the page, so check out more quotes after the jump…)

JG: What was the next day like?
XSF: “Pretty much the same thing…just not the heart attack and the robbery. Lot of days like that, where you try and try and try to meet people, and it’s not happening. Then you wonder sometimes, was it us? Was it what we were doing? Sometimes you don’t have success, but there are people out there waiting. God is testing if you’re diligent enough. The whole week was pretty bad like that, but on the last day, we got one phone call from a member who gave us a referral, ‘I have a good friend, been talking to them about the church, they want a copy of the Book of Mormon and they want to meet with you, can you come over?’ We were like, ‘Yeees, we’d love to!’ We set up an appointment that next week and went over and taught her, and after a whole week of grinding through rough and tough hard work, we were rewarded with one call with a referral and a little bit of success. You know what, had we not worked hard earlier in the week, I don’t know if we would have. See, as much as it was for the other people, it was for us, too. To really see how faithful we are ourselves.”

JG: That’s what it’s supposed to do, why you do that for two years. Do you think about what you could’ve been doing instead? Now you’re a 21 year old kid and you’ve been through this, at what point do you have to say I’m keeping that with me or I’m letting it go and moving on to the next phase of life. A lot of people become defined by that mission for two years and can’t let go of the experience…
XSF: “A lot of guys I’ve met, that’s all they think about. They wish they were back there. But it’s in the past. Those two years are gone. You have to live life now. You have to go to school, continue on. It’s not worth living in the past, living in your mission. It’s great to take everything you learned, to remember the hard times and experiences and apply them to life now, but you can’t dwell on them.
“When I came home, I decided with coming back to UCLA, alright my mission was great. I learned a lot of things. It was hard, very humbling, overall a great experience. Now what can I take from it good and bad so that I can ensure success in college, in life? Obviously I dedicated two years to the Lord serving Him, and I know he’ll take care of me and bless me, but i still have to do my part. A lot of people who do their mission, expect to be blessed and forget to do their part. I know that blessings from God are conditional. As long as you do your part, he’ll bless you. I made the decision right before I came back, I couldn’t sit on the fence. I’d be on one side or the other. Making that decision will affect the rest of my life, and I’m committed to doing that.”