HarveyWallbangers
08-28-2006, 08:14 AM
It's hard not to root for a guy like this making the practice squad.
Devoted to the dream
By Jason Wilde, Wisconsin State Journal
Where do we begin? Where do we start when we don't know how Ben Brown's story is going to end?
Do we start in one of those stock rooms in Atlanta? And which one? The Toys "R" Us? The Sports Authority? The K-Mart?
Maybe we should start at the end of the conveyor belt in that Safeway grocery store in Sacramento, listening to him ask that same question - Paper or plastic? - over and over and over. Or maybe at the security company, where he worked overnights wearing that stupid rent-a-cop uniform and walking the perimeter, with all that time to dream.
Or do we start at tiny Tabor College, the 471-student Christian liberal arts school in Hillsboro, Kan., which might not be in the middle of nowhere, but it's not far down the road? Or should we go all the way back to Los Banos (Calif.) High School, where he was MVP of the football and basketball teams and fell in love with Shrell, the cheerleader and track star who would someday be his wife and would never stop believing in him?
No, let's start here. Right here, in John Dorsey's office at Lambeau Field, with that pile of videotapes sitting on the table. This is where the odds finally started to turn in Ben Brown's favor. This is where he went from not a chance to maybe, just maybe.
The tape
Dorsey is the Green Bay Packers' director of college scouting, general manager Ted Thompson's right-hand man when it comes to NFL prospects. In addition to contributing to the high-profile decisions, such as drafting No. 5 overall pick A.J. Hawk, it's Dorsey's job to oversee the evaluations of every college player deserving of NFL consideration. And even those who aren't.
Dorsey estimates that he gets 500 to 600 unsolicited highlight tapes mailed to him each year. Most of them he farms out to his assistants, who are more than qualified to tell him that they're not worth his time. But after reading the letter Brown wrote and sent along with his tape, and after getting a call from Mike Gardner, Brown's coach at Tabor, Dorsey turned on his VCR.
"After I watched it," Dorsey says, "I'm going, 'This guy's the real deal.' "
What Dorsey didn't know was that Ben and Shrell had spliced together the highlights using their VCR and one they borrowed from a friend, that they'd dubbed 32 copies to send to every NFL team, and that they had no idea how unlikely it was that their hard work would get them anywhere. Thompson estimates that once every three or four years a tape leads to a tryout, and he can't remember a single player who made it to the 53-man roster that way.
"We worked on those tapes night and day for three days. We had no idea what we were doing," Shrell says. "But we knew we had to get them out. We knew something was going to happen. But we didn't know what."
The dream
Tonight against the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium, the Packers' star running back, four-time Pro Bowl halfback Ahman Green, will return to game action for the first time since rupturing the quadriceps tendon in his right leg last October. It should be the story of the night for Packers fans.
Another, less-heralded running back - Brown - might not even play after missing two days of practice last week with an injured tailbone. And even if he does get on the field, you probably won't notice.
He is just another number on the 84-player roster - No. 43, in case you're still tuned in by the time he finally does get in the game - and even though they all have their own stories, many of them never get told. After next Sunday's final cuts, 31 of them will be gone, and for many of them, that'll be it. The dream will be dead.
"I ain't gonna lie to you: I feel like I got to get it done," Ben Brown says. "There's no going home. There's no more three-jobbin' it. My family deserves more than that. Whatever I've got to do to make that happen, I'm going to do it.
"Because I have more than just, 'Oh, this is your dream.' I've got a family that has to eat. I can't go home and say, 'Oh, well, it just didn't work out.' That's unacceptable right now."
Not after what he's been through to get this far.
The journey
Brown admits his route to the NFL might have been more traditional had he done better in school.
Fresno State recruited him out of Los Banos, but when he didn't qualify academically, the Bulldogs lost interest and he and Shrell enrolled at nearby Bakersfield Junior College, where he was a starter in 2000 and '01. Again, Division I schools took notice - UCLA, Arizona, Arkansas all called - but then his priorities changed.
Shrell was pregnant.
"When I found out, I told her I was going to be the one to bring home the money," Brown says. "But, I said, 'I'm still going to make it to the League. I'm going to put it on hold, but I'm still going to get there.' "
His brother got him a job in Sacramento working for FedEx, and Shrell transferred to Sacramento State, working part time at Sears. Ben's FedEx gig didn't pay enough, though, so he quit and took the jobs at Safeway and the security company, working 18-hour combined shifts. They got married, and Nia arrived on Valentine's Day 2002.
First, the three of them lived with Ben's parents, then Shrell's mother, then her father.
"It was frustrating for us, and for them," Shrell says.
Needing a change, Shrell suggested Atlanta, where she could go to school at Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts school for women. So they up and moved, the three of them, across the country, only to learn upon their arrival that she'd missed the enrollment deadline by a matter of days.
But they stayed, and when Ben Brown couldn't find full-time work, he took the Toys "R" Us, Sports Authority and K-Mart jobs and structured his schedule so he could work all three of them. But it wasn't enough.
"We weren't doing good at all," Brown says. "The bills weren't getting paid, we had no furniture in the house. We was just broke. Barely eating every day. And then my friend called me."
The call
Laron Mitchell and Ben had been friends since high school, teammates on the football team. Now Mitchell had heard about a small NAIA school in Kansas that was looking for players. He was thinking about going. He wanted Ben to come along.
"He said, 'You want to play football again?' And I was like, 'Yeah!'" Brown says. "I just had to do it."
Mitchell ended up not going, but Ben went - by himself, while Shrell and Nia moved back to California.
"The only thing I told him was that if he wanted to pursue this, he had to go at it 100 percent," Shrell says. "Otherwise, there was no point."
At Tabor, Ben was a two-year starter at fullback, leading the Bluejays to an 11-1 record and the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference championship last year by rushing for 507 yards on 77 carries.
"He played fullback in our system, and the kid he blocked for (Roger Butler) ended up tying an NAIA record with 32 touchdowns," says Gardner, now the coach at Malone College in Canton, Ohio. "But that's part of what makes Ben so great. If he'd have played tailback, he could've done the same thing. But we needed someone to play fullback, and we didn't have anybody as versatile as he is.
"When Ben came to Tabor, he said he had the dream of playing in the NFL. He has sacrificed everything to be where he is. He just wanted a second chance, and if not for Laron Mitchell, I would have never heard of him. He's one of those types of people that you only get a chance to be around once in your lifetime. He's an inspiration."
Shrell and Nia moved to Kansas midway through last season, and after the final game, they put together the tape that eventually landed in Dorsey's VCR. It was a start.
Dorsey, whose in-laws live 45 minutes from the Tabor campus, called Kansas State coach Ron Prince and asked if he would let Brown work out at the Wildcats' pro timing day in Manhattan this past spring, and Prince agreed.
"I worked him out hard. I put him through the gantlet," says Dorsey, who also gave Brown several psychological tests and the Wonderlic intelligence test. "And the kid did everything that you wanted."
Enough to earn an invitation to the Packers' post-draft minicamp in May. Not a contract, like the dozen undrafted rookies the Packers signed after the draft, but a tryout - a chance to have a chance.
"It was a tryout, and we felt like he'd just gotten drafted," Shrell says. "It was very overwhelming, but we didn't get caught up in the moment because we knew we still had a lot of work to do."
And Brown went right to work, showing the NFL game wasn't too big for him.
At the end of the three-day camp, the Packers offered the 25-year-old, 6-foot-1, 246-pound fullback a non-guaranteed contract. They kept him through the second minicamp and the organized team activity practices, then brought him to training camp July 28. That meant a weekly $600 rookie stipend, which is pocket change for most veterans but "more than I've ever made in my life" for Ben Brown.
And yet, he's not in awe.
"I feel like I belong here. I've always felt like I belonged here," Ben says. "Even when I was working at Safeway, bagging groceries, I always knew I belonged in the NFL."
The odds
He probably won't make the 53-man roster. When the cuts are made - the first round of them are Tuesday; the final cuts are Sunday - Brown's name will almost certainly be among them.
"That's a big jump, from Tabor College to the Green Bay Packers. He's learning, but it takes time," Packers offensive coordinator Jeff Jagodzinski says. "He's got some talent, but he's real green, real raw. He may be a guy for down the road."
Realistically, the best Brown can hope for is a spot on the eight-player practice squad, where he'd make $4,700 a week - less than the $84,033 perday quarterback Brett Favre makes with his $10 million base salary during the 17-week regular season, but plenty to bring Shrell and Nia to Green Bay.
Dorsey, for one, hopes it happens. He's no softie - he played linebacker for the Packers for five years in the 1980s, and his job now is to make harsh, this-guy's-not-good-enough decisions without a trace of sentiment - but he can't help himself when it comes to Brown.
"It's a big long shot. Let's make no mistake about it. He's got to have some cards turn his way," Dorsey says. "Deep in the back of your mind, you root for the kid. Ultimately, he's got to win the job out. But you hope he succeeds, because there's nothing better than watching a kid work his (expletive) off to accomplish something.
"The kid will do everything within his means to make this roster. And that's all you can ask of any human being in any endeavor. If in fact you don't make it, you can look back and say, 'I did everything I possibly could. I had my shot and I chased my dream.' And he's chasing his dream."
The last word
So where do we end? Where do we type the traditional journalism -30- on a story that still hasn't been fully written?
Do we end with Ben's favorite Bible passage, Hebrews 11:1? ("Faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.") Or do we end with Shrell's charmingly blind optimism, her sweet inability to see anything other than the love of her life reaching his goal? ("We made it this far," she says, "we're going to go all the way.")
No, this is where we end, with Ben Brown's words, with his hope. He's made it this far. He'll tell us where to end.
"I ain't gonna lie to you. It's hard," he says, a smile stretching across his face. "But it's doable, you know? It's a lot easier than having three jobs, I tell you that. It's a lot easier than having to work 18 hours a day and having to come home and try to baby-sit and spend time with your family, I tell you that.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I can't afford to sit back and think about it. I'm just going to make the most of it. God done blessed me a whole lot, and he still is. I just go 100 percent and leave it in his hands. That's all I can do. I know at the end of the day, God has the last word."
Devoted to the dream
By Jason Wilde, Wisconsin State Journal
Where do we begin? Where do we start when we don't know how Ben Brown's story is going to end?
Do we start in one of those stock rooms in Atlanta? And which one? The Toys "R" Us? The Sports Authority? The K-Mart?
Maybe we should start at the end of the conveyor belt in that Safeway grocery store in Sacramento, listening to him ask that same question - Paper or plastic? - over and over and over. Or maybe at the security company, where he worked overnights wearing that stupid rent-a-cop uniform and walking the perimeter, with all that time to dream.
Or do we start at tiny Tabor College, the 471-student Christian liberal arts school in Hillsboro, Kan., which might not be in the middle of nowhere, but it's not far down the road? Or should we go all the way back to Los Banos (Calif.) High School, where he was MVP of the football and basketball teams and fell in love with Shrell, the cheerleader and track star who would someday be his wife and would never stop believing in him?
No, let's start here. Right here, in John Dorsey's office at Lambeau Field, with that pile of videotapes sitting on the table. This is where the odds finally started to turn in Ben Brown's favor. This is where he went from not a chance to maybe, just maybe.
The tape
Dorsey is the Green Bay Packers' director of college scouting, general manager Ted Thompson's right-hand man when it comes to NFL prospects. In addition to contributing to the high-profile decisions, such as drafting No. 5 overall pick A.J. Hawk, it's Dorsey's job to oversee the evaluations of every college player deserving of NFL consideration. And even those who aren't.
Dorsey estimates that he gets 500 to 600 unsolicited highlight tapes mailed to him each year. Most of them he farms out to his assistants, who are more than qualified to tell him that they're not worth his time. But after reading the letter Brown wrote and sent along with his tape, and after getting a call from Mike Gardner, Brown's coach at Tabor, Dorsey turned on his VCR.
"After I watched it," Dorsey says, "I'm going, 'This guy's the real deal.' "
What Dorsey didn't know was that Ben and Shrell had spliced together the highlights using their VCR and one they borrowed from a friend, that they'd dubbed 32 copies to send to every NFL team, and that they had no idea how unlikely it was that their hard work would get them anywhere. Thompson estimates that once every three or four years a tape leads to a tryout, and he can't remember a single player who made it to the 53-man roster that way.
"We worked on those tapes night and day for three days. We had no idea what we were doing," Shrell says. "But we knew we had to get them out. We knew something was going to happen. But we didn't know what."
The dream
Tonight against the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium, the Packers' star running back, four-time Pro Bowl halfback Ahman Green, will return to game action for the first time since rupturing the quadriceps tendon in his right leg last October. It should be the story of the night for Packers fans.
Another, less-heralded running back - Brown - might not even play after missing two days of practice last week with an injured tailbone. And even if he does get on the field, you probably won't notice.
He is just another number on the 84-player roster - No. 43, in case you're still tuned in by the time he finally does get in the game - and even though they all have their own stories, many of them never get told. After next Sunday's final cuts, 31 of them will be gone, and for many of them, that'll be it. The dream will be dead.
"I ain't gonna lie to you: I feel like I got to get it done," Ben Brown says. "There's no going home. There's no more three-jobbin' it. My family deserves more than that. Whatever I've got to do to make that happen, I'm going to do it.
"Because I have more than just, 'Oh, this is your dream.' I've got a family that has to eat. I can't go home and say, 'Oh, well, it just didn't work out.' That's unacceptable right now."
Not after what he's been through to get this far.
The journey
Brown admits his route to the NFL might have been more traditional had he done better in school.
Fresno State recruited him out of Los Banos, but when he didn't qualify academically, the Bulldogs lost interest and he and Shrell enrolled at nearby Bakersfield Junior College, where he was a starter in 2000 and '01. Again, Division I schools took notice - UCLA, Arizona, Arkansas all called - but then his priorities changed.
Shrell was pregnant.
"When I found out, I told her I was going to be the one to bring home the money," Brown says. "But, I said, 'I'm still going to make it to the League. I'm going to put it on hold, but I'm still going to get there.' "
His brother got him a job in Sacramento working for FedEx, and Shrell transferred to Sacramento State, working part time at Sears. Ben's FedEx gig didn't pay enough, though, so he quit and took the jobs at Safeway and the security company, working 18-hour combined shifts. They got married, and Nia arrived on Valentine's Day 2002.
First, the three of them lived with Ben's parents, then Shrell's mother, then her father.
"It was frustrating for us, and for them," Shrell says.
Needing a change, Shrell suggested Atlanta, where she could go to school at Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts school for women. So they up and moved, the three of them, across the country, only to learn upon their arrival that she'd missed the enrollment deadline by a matter of days.
But they stayed, and when Ben Brown couldn't find full-time work, he took the Toys "R" Us, Sports Authority and K-Mart jobs and structured his schedule so he could work all three of them. But it wasn't enough.
"We weren't doing good at all," Brown says. "The bills weren't getting paid, we had no furniture in the house. We was just broke. Barely eating every day. And then my friend called me."
The call
Laron Mitchell and Ben had been friends since high school, teammates on the football team. Now Mitchell had heard about a small NAIA school in Kansas that was looking for players. He was thinking about going. He wanted Ben to come along.
"He said, 'You want to play football again?' And I was like, 'Yeah!'" Brown says. "I just had to do it."
Mitchell ended up not going, but Ben went - by himself, while Shrell and Nia moved back to California.
"The only thing I told him was that if he wanted to pursue this, he had to go at it 100 percent," Shrell says. "Otherwise, there was no point."
At Tabor, Ben was a two-year starter at fullback, leading the Bluejays to an 11-1 record and the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference championship last year by rushing for 507 yards on 77 carries.
"He played fullback in our system, and the kid he blocked for (Roger Butler) ended up tying an NAIA record with 32 touchdowns," says Gardner, now the coach at Malone College in Canton, Ohio. "But that's part of what makes Ben so great. If he'd have played tailback, he could've done the same thing. But we needed someone to play fullback, and we didn't have anybody as versatile as he is.
"When Ben came to Tabor, he said he had the dream of playing in the NFL. He has sacrificed everything to be where he is. He just wanted a second chance, and if not for Laron Mitchell, I would have never heard of him. He's one of those types of people that you only get a chance to be around once in your lifetime. He's an inspiration."
Shrell and Nia moved to Kansas midway through last season, and after the final game, they put together the tape that eventually landed in Dorsey's VCR. It was a start.
Dorsey, whose in-laws live 45 minutes from the Tabor campus, called Kansas State coach Ron Prince and asked if he would let Brown work out at the Wildcats' pro timing day in Manhattan this past spring, and Prince agreed.
"I worked him out hard. I put him through the gantlet," says Dorsey, who also gave Brown several psychological tests and the Wonderlic intelligence test. "And the kid did everything that you wanted."
Enough to earn an invitation to the Packers' post-draft minicamp in May. Not a contract, like the dozen undrafted rookies the Packers signed after the draft, but a tryout - a chance to have a chance.
"It was a tryout, and we felt like he'd just gotten drafted," Shrell says. "It was very overwhelming, but we didn't get caught up in the moment because we knew we still had a lot of work to do."
And Brown went right to work, showing the NFL game wasn't too big for him.
At the end of the three-day camp, the Packers offered the 25-year-old, 6-foot-1, 246-pound fullback a non-guaranteed contract. They kept him through the second minicamp and the organized team activity practices, then brought him to training camp July 28. That meant a weekly $600 rookie stipend, which is pocket change for most veterans but "more than I've ever made in my life" for Ben Brown.
And yet, he's not in awe.
"I feel like I belong here. I've always felt like I belonged here," Ben says. "Even when I was working at Safeway, bagging groceries, I always knew I belonged in the NFL."
The odds
He probably won't make the 53-man roster. When the cuts are made - the first round of them are Tuesday; the final cuts are Sunday - Brown's name will almost certainly be among them.
"That's a big jump, from Tabor College to the Green Bay Packers. He's learning, but it takes time," Packers offensive coordinator Jeff Jagodzinski says. "He's got some talent, but he's real green, real raw. He may be a guy for down the road."
Realistically, the best Brown can hope for is a spot on the eight-player practice squad, where he'd make $4,700 a week - less than the $84,033 perday quarterback Brett Favre makes with his $10 million base salary during the 17-week regular season, but plenty to bring Shrell and Nia to Green Bay.
Dorsey, for one, hopes it happens. He's no softie - he played linebacker for the Packers for five years in the 1980s, and his job now is to make harsh, this-guy's-not-good-enough decisions without a trace of sentiment - but he can't help himself when it comes to Brown.
"It's a big long shot. Let's make no mistake about it. He's got to have some cards turn his way," Dorsey says. "Deep in the back of your mind, you root for the kid. Ultimately, he's got to win the job out. But you hope he succeeds, because there's nothing better than watching a kid work his (expletive) off to accomplish something.
"The kid will do everything within his means to make this roster. And that's all you can ask of any human being in any endeavor. If in fact you don't make it, you can look back and say, 'I did everything I possibly could. I had my shot and I chased my dream.' And he's chasing his dream."
The last word
So where do we end? Where do we type the traditional journalism -30- on a story that still hasn't been fully written?
Do we end with Ben's favorite Bible passage, Hebrews 11:1? ("Faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.") Or do we end with Shrell's charmingly blind optimism, her sweet inability to see anything other than the love of her life reaching his goal? ("We made it this far," she says, "we're going to go all the way.")
No, this is where we end, with Ben Brown's words, with his hope. He's made it this far. He'll tell us where to end.
"I ain't gonna lie to you. It's hard," he says, a smile stretching across his face. "But it's doable, you know? It's a lot easier than having three jobs, I tell you that. It's a lot easier than having to work 18 hours a day and having to come home and try to baby-sit and spend time with your family, I tell you that.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I can't afford to sit back and think about it. I'm just going to make the most of it. God done blessed me a whole lot, and he still is. I just go 100 percent and leave it in his hands. That's all I can do. I know at the end of the day, God has the last word."