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London broil Rams' middle linebacker 'primed' and ready
Posted: Thursday January 27, 2000 12:53 PM
By John Giannone, CNNSI.com
ATLANTA (CNNSI.com) -- Watch the middle of the St Louis defense for a second and you'll swear the Rams have suited up the Tasmanian Devil, put a number 59 on his back and spun him loose. If you're astonished at this whirling dervish, imagine London Fletcher's opponents. Even his teammates. "He looks like he's mad all the time," said defensive tackle D'Marco Farr. "He's got the sweat flying out of his mouth when he speaks. Half the time he doesn't know what he's calling, it's just, 'We're gonna get that other team.'" London Fletcher, human wrecking ball, 6 feet tall, 241 pounds in your program, 5-9 1/2 in your worst nightmare if you're an offensive player in the NFL. And this second-year phenom out of tiny John Carroll University in Cleveland actually asked that they have his height in the program corrected. "A lot of times young kids get discouraged because others tell them they're too small to do this, too slow to do that," Fletcher said. "I wanted them to be able to look at me as an example and say, 'London Fletcher is 5-10 and plays middle linebacker in the NFL. Look at me,' so they can say, 'If he can do it, I can do it, too.'" This is a complicated young man who could have gone a thousand different directions as a kid. His mother was an addict and his 18-year old sister was raped and then killed when London was just 12. "I looked at those as reasons to better myself, go to college, get a college education, graduate from college [and] making it in the NFL," he says. "I've always looked at those things in a positive, rather than a negative way." And built a fortress within his modest frame in which beats an enormous heart. Underrated two years ago, Fletcher sent a football tape to Charlie Armey, the Rams' player personnel director, whose own heart began to beat furiously at the sight of Fletcher. "Everything on this tape was done competitively, was done at an extra effort, with extra desire, with more enthusiasm than you see most players play with," notes Armey.
"From the day I wasn't drafted," said Fletcher, "I just had the attitude that I'm going to take it out on every offense that I came up against." "London says every week, 'I hate these guys,'" Farr said. "Well, London," Farr responds, "you hate everybody." And he smiles and says, 'Yeah, I do.'" Fletcher came to the Rams as a free agent, working special teams until the last game of 1998 when he got his chance. It came at middle linebacker against the San Francisco 49ers and he made 17 tackles Armey recalls a conversation he had with another general manager about the Rams' newfound weapon. "After last year when we played San Francisco where he makes the 17 tackles and Green Bay is getting ready to play San Francisco in the playoffs, Ron Wolf calls me and says, 'Where in the world did you get this middle linebacker? He's the best middle linebacker I've seen all year." And very few people since then have asked how tall London Fletcher was. For they've seen the size of his heart. "People get too caught up in size," Fletcher says. "A guy, a middle linebacker, should be 6-5 and 250. Well, I mean he can be built like that and have the heart of a 4-foot guy," he says with a smile. "If you don't have the heart to match that size, you're not worth anything. Heart is something you can't measure." If it was, London Fletcher, or Stuart Little as his teammates call him, would be one of the tallest men in pro football. As it is, he's become one of the best.
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