Hardscrabble scramble

From the Alabama woods, Winborn becomes a force

Jamie Winborn has been put to the test many times in his young life and has always come through stronger, tougher, more determined.

As a 7-year old in Wetumpka, Ala., he knew what it was like to pick peas and load watermelons 10 hours a day. And to grow up with a father he'd never known and a mother whose drug problems had her in and out of jail, to grow up in a two-room house in the Alabama woods, where the roof always leaked when it rained and the electricity was turned off most of the time and the toilets and plumbing never worked ... the woods were his toilet.

He knew what it was like to fight in school every day because he thought people were passing remarks about his mother. Somehow he survived, and sports and the schoolbooks became his escape. He wound up at Vanderbilt, an undersized but explosive linebacker, and then joined the San Francisco 49ers as a second-round draft choice last year.

What a journey. It has been made before, of course, not usually as dramatically as Winborn's was. But scratch the surface of any NFL roster and you'll find the ghetto and the backwoods and lives of hardship, saved mainly through athletics. And sometimes you'll find the blemishes, drug or alcohol abuse, occasional appearances on the police blotter, friends from the old days who spell trouble and simply won't go away. Few people people are strong enough to come through the fire untouched, but Jamie Winborn did. Strong and clear-eyed and dedicated. Forged steel.

I didn't know all this when I first met Winborn, and I met him because I was sitting in the press box of the season opener between the 49ers and the Giants, where I saw one of the most remarkable displays of outside linebacker play that I'd ever witnessed. It seemed as if Winborn had stolen the Giants' playbook. He had a read on everything ... runs, passes. He'd shoot the gap and tackle the runner in the backfield; next play he'd drop into coverage and lock onto the receiver at the same time the ball arrived. It was a virtuoso performance, a textbook on how to play weakside linebacker in the NFL. The stat sheet credited him with 16 total tackles, the high number in the league that weekend, but his performance was more about instincts than numbers.

Well, I knew about Winborn as a special teamer and occasional starter last season, and I knew he got the call against the Giants because the regular, Jeff Ulbrich, was out with a hyperextended knee. And the big question in my mind, as I headed for the 49ers locker room, was how do you send a guy like Winborn back to the bench after a performance like that?

I talked to just about all the titular heads of the football operation -- Steve Mariucci, the coach, and John McVay, the director of football operations, and Bill Walsh, the special consultant, and Terry Donahue, the general manager. What I got was a Manchurian Candidate consensus of opinion that almost seemed rehearsed. Yes, Jamie was indeed special, and yes, he would go back to the bench be used in situations when Ulbrich returned, and wasn't it nice to have the extra linebacker?

When I asked for an evaluation of Winborn's ability, one phrase that was repeated by all the brass, and by quarterback Jeff Garcia and Winborn's fellow linebackers, Julian Peterson and Derek Smith, was "flies around. Jamie really flies around out there." I heard it so much that I figured maybe the kid had come in on a broomstick. Mariucci added some snappers, though.

"He's really a fun guy to coach. He's a banquet, a gem."

But, you see, Ulbrich, who's been around a year longer than Winborn has, knows the system, the all-important system.

"That's one of the big problems in the NFL, overcoaching," says a personnel man who likes to remain anonymous because of his repeated anti-establishment views.

"They forget who their players are. They lock people into systems that are much too complicated and then pat them on the back because they can understand them. Meanwhile a kid like Jamie Winborn goes back to the bench, and how can you justify it, after the game he had against the Giants?"

Well, I called Winborn a few days after the game, just to find out what it was like to go through 23 years, always fighting the long odds. This was a guy so dedicated to improving every aspect of his life that he even changed his manner of speaking. When his classmates at Vanderbilt had trouble understanding his Wetumpka drawl, he worked hard to smooth it out, finally reaching the point where he could go out on speaking engagements without any problems.

When his defensive coach in college, Herb Paterra, who had played and coached in the pros, and who described Winborn as "a kid who makes you proud to be part of his life," told him the wild, athletic freelancing Winborn did at Vanderbilt "won't work in the NFL ... there are too many equally great athletes," Jamie spent extra hours in the film room, getting his reads down.

"I think of myself as a person who has been continually tested and has come away stronger each time," Winborn told me over the phone.

"People look at your background and just write you off. I remember one time in the fifth grade I heard a lady talking about me and she said, 'That's just a bad kid. He's gonna end up in jail or dead.'

"Why was I bad? Because I'd fight. The situation with my momma was well known. Drug problems, in and out of jail, and all a kid would have to do was to say the magic words ... 'your momma' ... and I'd be fighting. Happened every day. Then I learned to keep it inside.

"But even while all that was going on, I always did my work in school. Even when I was a little kid, picking peas, loading melons, I used to ask myself, 'Can this be my life forever? Isn't there another way?' I grew up seeing everyone I knew going out and working for very little money, just getting by, with no prospects of ever getting out of that life.

"Well, I figured that there were two ways for me to make it. I could make it through athletics. I was blessed with speed and football ability, but I knew that wasn't enough. What if I got hurt, or I didn't last in the NFL? So I knew I had to make it in the classroom, too. I had to have something to fall back on.

"I was always asking people about their jobs, car salesmen, real estate agents. I had this hunger to know. They were making money, but they were human, just like me, and at one time they had to be taught their trade. So why couldn't I learn, too?

"I had this goal to own my own business, and when I made it in the NFL, it came closer to becoming a reality. I invested in real estate, an apartment building, that's where I started out. From there I branched out to land development. I'm getting a nice return from that."

Life was looking up, but some people, it seems, will always be tested. In the third game of the season, against Washington, Winborn suffered a torn medial collateral ligament in his right knee, not a season-ending injury but enough to keep him out for five to eight weeks.

"I love football," he said. "I love coming to work every day, the practices, the film study. But I never forget that it all can be taken away from you in a minute. The risk of injury is always there. That's why, at 23, I'm preparing for the future.

"I've never forgotten where I came from."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z's Mailbag, click here.

 

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