OKLAHOMA CITY -- She went to her bedroom and cried that night, not because of what the man said but because she knew the whole world was wrong. One hundred and five faxes, 104 "no"s, all he wanted was a scholarship.If you sign Wes, his mom said, you won't be sorry. If you sign Wes, he'll change your program. This is not a story about a little man (5 foot 9) playing on the world's biggest stage. That's too cliché. It is about doors. Nine years after college football shunned him, four years after the Chargers cut him, Welker is a mega star headed for the Super Bowl with New England. He is a big reason the Patriots are 18-0 and flirting with NFL history. And none of it would have happened if Welker had accepted one “NO.” "We tried to teach that, to run after your dreams, don't let people tell you no. That's why it's such a great story. When one door would close, another one would open." Shelley says. When Welker reached high school at Heritage Hall, a private college prep school he'd play offense, defense, and special teams in practice, then dive to the line on wind sprints because no sir, he was not going to be beat. He'd vomit at least every other week during a game. Coach Rod Warner still has it on film. See Wes run 50 yards for a touchdown, charge back onto the field to kick the extra point, then turn and ask for a minute so he can throw up on the 10-yard line. "It wasn't nerves," Warner says. "He just pushed his body so hard.” "The people in the stands would just start applauding. He gave it his all every single drill, every sprint, every play." Before Welker, Heritage Hall had just one 10-win season in 30 years. It has averaged 11 wins a year since. Welker led them to a state championship as a junior and scored 24 points a game as a senior…in football. And when he was named the state's Gatorade Player of the Year, his followers assumed he was headed for the big time. They didn't know prototypes. Being 5-9 was one thing. Being 5-9 with a 4.55 40-yard dash is enough to make you recruiting repellent. The weekend before letter-of-intent day, Warner sent out 105 faxes. "This kid is still available," he said, "if anyone is interested." He called Tommy McVay, an old friend who was working at Texas Tech. "Tommy, he's the best player I've ever coached." “Everybody says that”, McVay said. But Tech coach Mike Leach, a spread-offense guru known around Big 12 circles as the mad scientist, tried to open his mind as he popped in the video. "You go through the internal debate the whole time," Leach says. "Wow, he's just a little too small, ooh, he's a little too slow?" Welker flew to Lubbock after signing day.Within weeks after school started, the Tech coaches were calling Welker "The Natural." "Everybody," Leach says, "seemed to feel like he could do anything." As Welker's numbers exploded and the legend grew, people outside of Lubbock, Texas, wanted to know more about his will. "I remember when they brought him in, he was 5-9 and very unassuming," says former Red Raiders quarterback Kliff Kingsbury. "We're offering this kid a scholarship? Definitely on looks, he didn't pass the eye test. But on the field, he was unbelievable." Within a few months, Welker was in the starting lineup as a true freshman. In four years, he caught 259 passes for 3,019 yards and 21 touchdowns. His eight career punt-return touchdowns still tie an NCAA record. He played most of his senior year with turf toe, an injury so painful Welker hobbled around campus in a protective boot on the off days. When he graduated from Texas Tech in 3½ years with a business degree, he was certain he was headed to the NFL. The Welkers held two days of draft parties in 2004, and the house grew silent when the final pick was named. If this doesn't work out, Warner told him, there are other …"Don't even go there, Coach," Welker told Warner. "I'm going to make it in the NFL. There's no other option." The Chargers kept him through training camp, and Welker thought that meant he was safe. They cut him after the first game. One friend says Welker is "massively pissed off" at San Diego to this day.After he got cut the Miami Dolphins signed him. A month later, Welker became just the second player in NFL history to return a kickoff and a punt, kick a field goal and an extra point, and make a tackle in one game. He did it against the Patriots who has a coach that just happens to love that kind of throwback versatility. When the Dolphins didn’t resign him the Patriots quickly did. They knew he was a perfect fit in New England, the land of no-nonsense. Men with stern faces walk around with purpose, as if they're headed to the bank to open an IRA … minutes after they've won a playoff game. Belichick wants a team full of role players. Welker fought half his life for such a role. While defenses keyed on stopping Randy Moss this year, Welker quietly had a franchise-record 112 catches. "Perfect place, the perfect situation for him," says running back Kevin Faulk. "I told him when he first got here that he couldn't have come to an offense that was better for him, that fits his ability and what he does as a receiver." Wes continues to prove to all the doubters that you can’t measure heart. Even though the Patriots lost to the Giants in an epic super bowl, Wes Welker tied the Super Bowl record for most catches with 11. Not bad for someone that nobody wanted.
8.18.2007
notes
Herm Edwards – “The leader has to be the calmest guy on the ship.”
Tom Coughlin – “Coaching is making players do what they don’t want to do so that they can become what they want to become.”
Jim Valvano“To me, there are three things everyone should do every day. Number one is to laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is to think-spend some time in thought. Number 3, let your emotions move you to tears. If you laugh, think and cry, that’s one heck of a day.”
Be a Successful Failure The successful entrepreneur has averaged 4 business failures in his lifetime. According to leadership expert John Maxwell, "Failure is the price you pay for success." The key is to fail well...meaning you learn from your mistakes. It’s no different when our team loses a game. Are you a successful failure? Or does your pride in not admitting your shortcomings build a wall between our team? The best thing we can do for our team is to get ready for the next game. The idea is not to have a perfect team but a learning team. And that can only start by admitting mistakes.
Tom Coughlin – “Coaching is making players do what they don’t want to do so that they can become what they want to become.”
Jim Valvano“To me, there are three things everyone should do every day. Number one is to laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is to think-spend some time in thought. Number 3, let your emotions move you to tears. If you laugh, think and cry, that’s one heck of a day.”
Be a Successful Failure The successful entrepreneur has averaged 4 business failures in his lifetime. According to leadership expert John Maxwell, "Failure is the price you pay for success." The key is to fail well...meaning you learn from your mistakes. It’s no different when our team loses a game. Are you a successful failure? Or does your pride in not admitting your shortcomings build a wall between our team? The best thing we can do for our team is to get ready for the next game. The idea is not to have a perfect team but a learning team. And that can only start by admitting mistakes.
random notes
“Every game before the game, I make 10 threes from 10 spots on the court. That’s 100 threes.” –Washington Post [Gilbert Arenas pre-game work] Pro Sports Front Office- 20/20
Vision Known as the Wizard of Oz during his Hall of Fame career as a Browns tight end, Ozzie Newsome has been every bit as innovative running the Ravens’ Front Office. Most of Newsome’s talent evaluators start out in what’s known as the 20/20 Club: twenty-somethings, generally recent college grads or summer interns, who work for $20, 000/year. They copy playbooks, make coffee, edit film and drive people to the airport. (The Ravens give draft prospects “Van Grades” for how they act on the way to and from the airport-when they think no one is paying attention.) By the time a young scout is ready for his own territory, according to Ravens pro-personnel chief George Kokinis, his immersion in the team’s inner workings has taught him exactly how to identify the DNA of a potential Raven. Just to be sure, though, Newsome holds a scout school at training camp, where the coaches speak to the scouts for half an hour about the exact kind of player they’re looking for at each position. When the Ravens decide to change from, say lanky wide receivers to smaller, more explosive pass-catchers, their scouts are on the road the next day with the ideal prototype in mind.
Vision Known as the Wizard of Oz during his Hall of Fame career as a Browns tight end, Ozzie Newsome has been every bit as innovative running the Ravens’ Front Office. Most of Newsome’s talent evaluators start out in what’s known as the 20/20 Club: twenty-somethings, generally recent college grads or summer interns, who work for $20, 000/year. They copy playbooks, make coffee, edit film and drive people to the airport. (The Ravens give draft prospects “Van Grades” for how they act on the way to and from the airport-when they think no one is paying attention.) By the time a young scout is ready for his own territory, according to Ravens pro-personnel chief George Kokinis, his immersion in the team’s inner workings has taught him exactly how to identify the DNA of a potential Raven. Just to be sure, though, Newsome holds a scout school at training camp, where the coaches speak to the scouts for half an hour about the exact kind of player they’re looking for at each position. When the Ravens decide to change from, say lanky wide receivers to smaller, more explosive pass-catchers, their scouts are on the road the next day with the ideal prototype in mind.
Bob Knight article excepts
"The way those kids learned to compete in basketball, what better training was there for an officer who had to go into combat and had the lives of other people at stake?" says Knight, who stayed six years as head coach and a total of eight seasons at Army. "I thought it was really important there. And when I went on, that stuck with me. I want a kid to think back that the best class he had in college was playing basketball. I don't worry about how I accomplish it."
People think he's overly tough? Imperious? A bully? They grumble that he crossed the line of proper behavior yet again when he gave Texas Tech sophomore Michael Prince a bop to the chin during a timeout two weeks ago? Knight cares little.
Not a star player
Knight wasn't a great player himself but was good enough to make an Ohio State team that reached three NCAA title games and won one. He has absorbed a lifetime of coaching lessons from fellow Hall of Famers Joe Lapchick, Clair Bee, Fred Taylor and Pete Newell, among others. And he is supreme in his self-belief.
A voracious reader, Knight's attention to one detail of David Halberstam's best-selling account of the country's descent into the Vietnam quagmire, The Best and the Brightest, is telling.
"That was a frightening thing for me to read," he says, "because the Kennedys, every decision they made, was based on polls and how they thought it would affect the next election.
"Do what's right and do what you think you have to do and don't worry about what somebody says. That would be about as simply put as my philosophy could be. If I've felt I needed to get on some kid's ass during a game rather than after the game ... I think I've kind of exposed myself (to critics). But it's never bothered me, because I've thought that's the thing I had to do."
Texas Tech athletics director Gerald Myers, the Red Raiders' former coach, paints his old friend as misunderstood: "I think a lot of people who don't know him make judgments about him (based) on what they've heard or what they've read or what they've seen. You know, none of us are perfect. His good qualities far outweigh his bad."
It is the credo of Knight's allies.
He clashed with Tech's chancellor during a happenstance meeting at a lunchtime salad bar early in 2004, drawing a reprimand from the school. Since then, his famous temper has been in abeyance. (Knight ascribed his exchange with Prince during the Nov. 13 win vs. Gardner-Webb to motivational technique, not anger, and Meyers and the player backed him up.)
Knight nonetheless waves off any suggestion that, at age 66, he has mellowed. Yes, things have been a little quieter here in West Texas but, "I don't think I do things any differently," he says. "I think what happens here is you're a little more removed from things. People don't come out here as much."
Approaching a record
The game, he says, is much the same as it was when he broke in. You prepare kids; you try to get them to compete. What was it the Army used to preach? Be all you can be. Basketball is about that, too.
And Knight is as obsessively about that as any individual the sport has seen.
It may be interesting to gauge the reaction outside of Lubbock to his impending record-setting 880th win. Knight always has had a prickly relationship with the media, and he hardly gets — and refuses to court — the unconditional love accorded a Wooden and a Smith.
Pat Knight, who played for his father at Indiana and, like his dad, is starting his sixth season at Texas Tech, sees the mark as "redemption in a way from all the negative publicity he's gotten over the years. ...
"It's not warm and fuzzy love (that matters). I think it's respect. Even the guys who don't like him, they're going to have to respect him for what he's done."
His dad will take that. Knight's well-known idol was baseball great Ted Williams, who aspired, he told a friend, "that when I walk down the street, folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.' "
Knight has his own version of that wish. Twenty-some years ago, he says, he was being courted to coach the NBA's Phoenix Suns and called Newell, his friend and mentor and, at 91, still an esteemed basketball consultant. "He asked me, 'What do you want to get out of coaching?' "
Knight recalls. "And I told him, 'I want to be thought of by (other) coaches in the same vein that you're thought of by coaches.'
"That," he says, "is the most important thing I could ask for in terms of a legacy in basketball."
For everybody else — the writers who wonder if the end justifies Knight's means, the dads who debate whether they'd put their kids in his coaching care — there is indifference.
"You're sitting there ... and you say, 'Boy, I wouldn't want my son to play for him,' " Knight says. "Well, if you want your kid to be a goddamn success, you probably ought to want him to play for me."
People think he's overly tough? Imperious? A bully? They grumble that he crossed the line of proper behavior yet again when he gave Texas Tech sophomore Michael Prince a bop to the chin during a timeout two weeks ago? Knight cares little.
Not a star player
Knight wasn't a great player himself but was good enough to make an Ohio State team that reached three NCAA title games and won one. He has absorbed a lifetime of coaching lessons from fellow Hall of Famers Joe Lapchick, Clair Bee, Fred Taylor and Pete Newell, among others. And he is supreme in his self-belief.
A voracious reader, Knight's attention to one detail of David Halberstam's best-selling account of the country's descent into the Vietnam quagmire, The Best and the Brightest, is telling.
"That was a frightening thing for me to read," he says, "because the Kennedys, every decision they made, was based on polls and how they thought it would affect the next election.
"Do what's right and do what you think you have to do and don't worry about what somebody says. That would be about as simply put as my philosophy could be. If I've felt I needed to get on some kid's ass during a game rather than after the game ... I think I've kind of exposed myself (to critics). But it's never bothered me, because I've thought that's the thing I had to do."
Texas Tech athletics director Gerald Myers, the Red Raiders' former coach, paints his old friend as misunderstood: "I think a lot of people who don't know him make judgments about him (based) on what they've heard or what they've read or what they've seen. You know, none of us are perfect. His good qualities far outweigh his bad."
It is the credo of Knight's allies.
He clashed with Tech's chancellor during a happenstance meeting at a lunchtime salad bar early in 2004, drawing a reprimand from the school. Since then, his famous temper has been in abeyance. (Knight ascribed his exchange with Prince during the Nov. 13 win vs. Gardner-Webb to motivational technique, not anger, and Meyers and the player backed him up.)
Knight nonetheless waves off any suggestion that, at age 66, he has mellowed. Yes, things have been a little quieter here in West Texas but, "I don't think I do things any differently," he says. "I think what happens here is you're a little more removed from things. People don't come out here as much."
Approaching a record
The game, he says, is much the same as it was when he broke in. You prepare kids; you try to get them to compete. What was it the Army used to preach? Be all you can be. Basketball is about that, too.
And Knight is as obsessively about that as any individual the sport has seen.
It may be interesting to gauge the reaction outside of Lubbock to his impending record-setting 880th win. Knight always has had a prickly relationship with the media, and he hardly gets — and refuses to court — the unconditional love accorded a Wooden and a Smith.
Pat Knight, who played for his father at Indiana and, like his dad, is starting his sixth season at Texas Tech, sees the mark as "redemption in a way from all the negative publicity he's gotten over the years. ...
"It's not warm and fuzzy love (that matters). I think it's respect. Even the guys who don't like him, they're going to have to respect him for what he's done."
His dad will take that. Knight's well-known idol was baseball great Ted Williams, who aspired, he told a friend, "that when I walk down the street, folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.' "
Knight has his own version of that wish. Twenty-some years ago, he says, he was being courted to coach the NBA's Phoenix Suns and called Newell, his friend and mentor and, at 91, still an esteemed basketball consultant. "He asked me, 'What do you want to get out of coaching?' "
Knight recalls. "And I told him, 'I want to be thought of by (other) coaches in the same vein that you're thought of by coaches.'
"That," he says, "is the most important thing I could ask for in terms of a legacy in basketball."
For everybody else — the writers who wonder if the end justifies Knight's means, the dads who debate whether they'd put their kids in his coaching care — there is indifference.
"You're sitting there ... and you say, 'Boy, I wouldn't want my son to play for him,' " Knight says. "Well, if you want your kid to be a goddamn success, you probably ought to want him to play for me."
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