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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Rain the perfect
accent to a perfect dayIT rained. How perfect. If there is an optimum growing condition for football dreams, it would have to be a steady drizzle.
There's nothing like football in the rain to make a little boy love the sport forever. Nothing. And that's why you go to an event like yesterday's Christian Okoye Football and Soccer Clinic, if you're an adult. To watch the kind of smiles only small kids can have. To see those eyes glow. To watch kids sprint through the wet grass while old pros beam at every small feat.
That, and to meet a guy named Kwame "Human Seal" Apea.
But alas, Okoye says, Human Seal, the Ghana Olympic soccer hero, had an emergency, and had to return to Africa at the last minute.
"He almost cried," Okoye says, "because he loves this. He loves kids." He would have put on a 30-minute show filled with ball-bouncing tricks, the kids gathered all around.
You could see why the Seal might love it so.
I remember my first football camp. I'd played for a few years by that point, so perhaps it was already too late for me. I remember bending all the way over to touch my toes.
"That's excellent!" Dick Tomey said.
I was the camp's No. 1 toe-toucher.
Unfortunately, I did not fare nearly as well on the rest of the physical tests. Not height, weight (short, light). Not the 40-yard dash or the shuttle run (my combine scores revealed that I had potential for a great future in the couch, pupus and TV remote aspects of the game). Yet somehow, during the competitive aspect of the afternoon, I got behind my man and caught a glorious long bomb.
(The guy who threw that pass was William Young. He would later develop into a fine high school quarterback, but I will always remember him as the guy who went into a premature touchdown dance on the 5-yard line during Pop Warner days.)
I think this shows there is hope for us all.
For anybody, with football dreams.
Especially these lucky boys, receiving instruction from a lineup of former NFL pros.
But the coaches never quite introduce themselves, never flout their credentials to the boys. You might go through the whole day without ever quite knowing just who they were.
"I have no idea. I'm just the Gatorade guy," the Gatorade guy says.
No matter. The kids don't know either. "Do you know what a Hall-of-Famer is?" Okoye says.
No one quite grasps the concept.
"Does anybody like the Raiders?" he says.
Nobody likes the Raiders.
"Does anybody like the Rams?"
Nobody does.
Beside him, Eric Dickerson just grins. As if he knows that a second later nobody in the crowd will profess to being a Chiefs fan either.
(Does anybody look more different than his playing days than Dickerson does? He should have to wear goggles and a Lionel Richie wig for public appearances like these.)
But the kids love it. They don't care who these guys are. The old players love it, too.
Dokie Williams, the old Raider, pulls the old "left-left-left-right!" trick in breakdown drills. Brad Booth, the old Eagles Super Bowl DB, lofts long passes. John Jackson, the Cardinals receiver, tutors punt returners by breaking the halo rule -- yelling, grabbing, stealing a hat, holding his cup of water in a very threatening manner -- while the ball is in the air.
The kids can't stop smiling, even when the ball bounces in the grass.
Prospective linemen go through an agility drill. "Oh!" says Dan Saleaumua, the old Chiefs noseguard, when one kid does it just right. "I like it!"
He does, and former Packer Lance Zeno does, too. So does former Charger Derek Harvey.
And potential running backs take hand-offs and then throw their best moves, breaking away from a waiting Dickerson. That was something joyous to watch.
But the best part was the beginning, when Okoye called everyone down from the bleachers, down all around him. "Come close to me," he says. Every kid in Nanakuli is there. They came on a magic bus.
Okoye, the old Chief, stands up on his tiptoes and raises his hands.
All around him are mirror images, all stretching their arms to the sky.
They are going to jog around the Mililani track, to warm up. "Don't pass me," Okoye says in that wonderful accent of his. "If you pass me, you do 10 pushups.
"Ready? Let's go!"
And then off they are, all these boys following their 250-pound pied piper. A horde of kids, and in the middle, smiling, the biggest kid of all.
Giddy in the moment, half of them pass him. Of course they do.
In April, I asked Okoye why he does clinics like this. He said because all kids are inherently good.
Of course they are.
Still, they did pushups.
They did them with gusto. They were football players on a rainy day.
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Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com