Small wonder why Darren Sproles is as good as he is

Darren Sproles piled up 328 total yards in the Chargers' playoff win over the Colts. Robert Beck/SI

After a while, as a sportswriter, you get used to coaches calling. A coach in the mountains of North Carolina called the newspaper again and again to come do a story on his punter, who was averaging something like 55 yards a kick. When a reporter finally gave in and weaved along the icy two-lane roads, he found the town and he found the punter. The problem was: The guys keeping the box score were measuring the kid's punts from where he kicked the ball -- some 12 yards behind the line of scrimmage.

So it goes. This pitcher throws 97 mph. This basketball player scored 48 points a game. This kicker makes 60-yard field goals. More often than not, it turns out that they measure the pitcher's speed with the same radar gun the local sheriff uses to nail passing tourists, the basketball player takes 45 shots a game, the kicker makes those in practice with a 12-step running start.

So it's probably fair to say that I was a bit skeptical a few years ago when a coach called to say that I needed to come out to a game in Olathe, Kan., so that I could see this running back, the greatest high school football player I would ever see.

I asked: "How big is he?"

The coach said: "He couldn't be taller than 5-foot-5."

I asked: "How tough is he?"

The coach said: "I don't know, I've never seen anyone get a hit on him."

I asked: "How fast is he"

The coach said: "Fast enough."

Well, no one can resist that sort of story, right? We all have a little bit of the scout in us, right? We all want to say we saw Springsteen before he got big, we caught Tom Hanks at a dinner theater, we bought a priceless painting from some street artist before she became famous. So I went to the game and watched a tiny little football player, who looked barely old enough to cross the street without holding hands, play on a high school football field under spotty lights. I saw him disappear and reappear. I saw him split in two and then split in two again. I saw him fly and stretch like a rubber band and transform himself into different shapes. He was remarkable.

He's still remarkable. That kid was Darren Sproles.

*****

Everybody loves Darren Sproles. What's not to love? He's 5-6 now, still baby-faced, and he's everything you would want in your sports hero. He has played his entire pro career behind LaDainian Tomlinson, the most iconic running back in the game, and yet you never hear him complain. He returns kicks (two touchdowns the last two years) and punts (one career touchdown). He catches passes (five touchdown receptions this year in only 29 catches). He runs the football with abandon (for his career he averages 5.1 yards per carry). He blocks ferociously, which might give you an idea why, no matter his size or the innocence of his face, he has been called Tank pretty much his whole life. He is the ultimate teammate.

And when he gets the chance to be a star ... well, you saw him last week in that playoff game against the Colts. He went for 328 all-purpose yards -- 105 rushing, 45 receiving, 106 kick returning, 72 punt returning -- and he scored the walkoff touchdown in overtime and he left everyone gasping for air. When it ended, he was typically humble, typically quiet, but he was not surprised. He could not be surprised. He had left them gasping for air all his life.

That's the thing that you can forget about the NFL and really all professional sports. Backups are hometown legends. Special teams players were once Heisman candidates. Guys on the taxi squad were All-American. When Darren Sproles started playing peewee football, he was so fast and so elusive that they passed a league rule that he was not allowed to run sweeps. That's because he scored touchdowns, literally, every single time he ran a sweep. His father, Larry, was so annoyed by this, he pulled Darren out of that league and tried to enter him in a bigger league, in which he did not meet the weight requirement.

"That's OK," Larry told the league officers. "There's nobody in this league fast enough to tackle him." And there wasn't.

He was a high school sensation. Then he went to Kansas State, and his junior year, 2003, he led the country in rushing and ran Kansas State to a huge upset of Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game. He could have gone pro, he was ready to go pro, but he had promised his mother, Annette, that he would get his diploma. So he announced that he would go back to school. On the Sunday of the NFL draft, Annette died in their home, finally succumbing to the cancer that had been killing her for five years.

He went back to Manhattan, Kan., and played on, silently. Darren had always had a bit of a stuttering problem, and he was not comfortable in crowds. Television cameras made him jumpy. He fumbled a few times during his senior year, and teams filled the box with defenders, and Kansas State wasn't quite good enough that year to give him much of a chance. Even so, nobody ever heard Darren Sproles complain.

The Kansas State coach then -- and again now -- Bill Snyder was never one to show his emotions. But nobody could miss how much he loved Darren Sproles. Well, shoot, everybody did. Then in 2005 Sproles was drafted in the fourth round by San Diego, which already had LaDainian, and he went to San Diego, and he made everyone there love him too. He worked hard on his stutter -- clench his hands, take his time, get the words flowing -- and he wants to be a role model for people with speech problems. He worked hard as a football player to become the best backup running back in the NFL.

"The guy who typifies our season and what our guys are about is Darren Sproles," Chargers coach Norv Turner said after the Colts game. It's more than that. He typifies what's right.

*****

When Darren Sproles was finishing his sophomore year in college, I wrote a column about him. In it, I talked about how special he is as a player, and how special he is as a person. I wrote that he was the greatest high school football player I had ever seen, just like the coach said. I also mentioned that he stuttered, and that it made things hard for him in the spotlight. I wrote that he lets his thoughts loose and his creativity free when he's running the football.

Annette called. She was enraged. She thought the story embarrassed Darren by mentioning his stutter. I didn't really know what to say. I told her that Darren was amazing and I hoped that came across in the story and that I only mentioned his stutter because it was part of what shaped him (he majored in speech pathology). She would not be soothed. She hung up angry. I did not know, of course, that she was in pain, and that in 16 months she would be gone.

A couple of hours later, Larry, his father, called to apologize, to say that he had tried to explain to Annette how positive the story was, how much I clearly admired Darren, but she would not listen to him either.

And Larry said this: "You have to understand something. As an athlete, Darren takes after me. But as a person Darren takes after his mother. They both will fight for what they believe in. And nobody will ever stop them."