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Kwaku
Danso |
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Kwaku Danso,
a Ghanaian rookie in the NFL
(Courtesy of ECU)
Les Carpenter,
Yahoo!
Sport
Who could have imagined? Rarely is there such a thing as a
28-year-old rookie in the NFL – let alone one raised in
Ghana who learned to play the game just three years earlier,
after walking into the head coach’s office at East Carolina
and saying he wanted to join the team, then never once
making a tackle. Sometimes he must wonder if one of the
Browns coaches will run onto the field and pull him off,
saying it is all a mistake.
But there is no error. The Browns have indeed signed an
undrafted free agent whose entire college career consists of
three brief appearances at the end of ECU blowouts. And they
did so because a few weeks earlier, defensive coordinator
Rob Ryan – observing on East Carolina’s pro day – noticed
Danso step through a door at 6-foot-5, 336 pounds and gasped
“Who the hell is that?” to the Cleveland scouts standing
beside him.
Unfazed by the information that Danso had never advanced
beyond a brief appearance at second string on the East
Carolina depth charts, Ryan was transfixed as the player
bench-pressed 225 pounds 39 times. So much so that even
after Ryan continued to scout players with much better
pedigrees at more important schools, Danso was the one he
kept remembering. And when Browns head coach Eric Mangini
told him he could have one player to bring in with the
intent of keeping around for most of the year to develop,
Ryan knew immediately whom he wanted.
“I like the look in his eye,” Ryan says. “You have to root
for a guy like that.”
Standing alone on the practice field, Danso can only giggle,
almost speechless about his good fortune. He starts to say
something, then stops. It’s all too overwhelming. So many
times he thought of quitting football at East Carolina,
figuring he was wasting his time. Now he is here? In the
NFL? Finally he begins again, his words sometimes hard to
decipher through a thick accent.
“This is a blessing,” he says. “This right here is a
blessing. This tells you that life is what you make it.”
Then he shakes his head and laughs again.
“It’s taken a lot of hard work,” he says.
He came to the U.S. in 2002, from Kumasi, which is Ghana’s
second-largest city, with the hopes of playing basketball at
an American college. Most of his family was already here.
But a brief trial at tiny Wilkes University in Pennsylvania
didn’t work, he ran out of money and he was forced to move
in with his brother Kojo in the Maryland suburbs of
Washington, D.C.
To raise money for school he took on three jobs: working
days as a butcher at Sam’s Club, stocking shelves overnight
at Target and cooking at Burger King. On the weekends, Kojo
– who stands 5-foot-11 – brought his much bigger, younger
brother to his part-time job as a bouncer at a D.C.
nightclub.
Kwaku soon drew the notice of Redskins players who came into
the club and suggested he might make a fine football player.
This was also the opinion of a track coach who was working
with Kojo, then a graduate student and aspiring track
athlete at nearby Bowie State. They pushed Kwaku to get into
shape, directing him toward weekend flag-football leagues to
let him get a feel for the game. By 2005, he had saved
enough money to go back to school, this time with a new
athletic dream.
He chose East Carolina because an uncle taught chemistry at
the college. After dropping out for a year to again raise
money for his schooling, he finally walked into the office
of the head football coach Skip Holtz, saying he was from
Ghana and wanting to walk onto the football team.
“You mean soccer?” he remembers Holtz asking.
“No, no, football,” Danso said. “I want to play the game
where you put things on and hit.”
At first, the East Carolina coaches didn’t know what to do
with Danso.
“If you put the football on the ground he could kick it
through the goal like a soccer ball better than anybody, but
getting into a stance and playing football, he couldn’t do
it,” remembers Greg Hudson, who was the defensive
coordinator at ECU before taking a job as Florida State’s
linebackers coach this year. “Football to him was Chinese
arithmetic.”
For a time they worked him on the offensive line, partly
because he was so big, but Danso had no grasp of the stunts
and the traps and the play calls that the others had learned
from playing their whole lives. Even after he was switched
to the more instinctive position of defensive tackle, he was
bewildered when the coaches started talking about filling
gaps.
He learned quickly but it was tough to keep committing to
the game. He bonded with ECU defensive line coach Donnie
Thompson, but Thompson left in May 2007. And even as he
improved, his progress was blocked by the two starting
tackles Linval Joseph (notes) (a
second-round pick last month of the New York Giants) and Jay
Ross (notes) (who is with the New
Orleans Saints). Plus, the coaches didn’t feel they could
dedicate the time to him. He was taking an aggressive load
of classes in pursuit of a construction management degree,
hoping someday to return to Ghana and build buildings. And
because he didn’t have a football scholarship, he had to
work – often on Sundays, which was an important meeting day
for the players.
“We didn’t know if he would be consistently around,” says
Hudson. “He sometimes had to miss practices for work and
he’s smarter than four or five players put together. He had
a lot on his plate.”
Danso would constantly ask his coaches: “What can I do to
get better?”
But ECU was a small school trying to take on bigger
programs. It had to play big teams in nonconference games to
build credibility, depriving Danso of the opportunity to
play in blowout games against weak teams. Mostly his role on
game days was to warm up in front of opposing team’s
benches, looking as big as he could, hoping to intimidate
the other teams.
“You could see every head turning and looking at him,”
Hudson says. “We’d stand in the end zone and watch laughing.
The other coaches would be looking through their flip charts
and saying, ‘Who is this monster?’ ”
Danso seemed to enjoy teasing the other teams. But he longed
to play and the less that looked like a possibility, the
more discouraged he got.
His salvation came in William Jennette, a onetime strength
and conditioning coach at North Carolina who had worked with
NFL star Julius Peppers (notes).
Introduced by Thompson, Danso drove from Greenville, N.C.,
to Jennette’s MBS Fitness gym in Durham for a meeting.
Jennette still keeps a video from that first day. Danso
seemed in shape but had no football fitness. Asked to do a
simple routine with 10-pound dumbbells, Danso dropped his
arms in exhaustion after only a minute.
Still, much like Rob Ryan, Jennette was charmed by his new
protégé.
“He is like a big sponge,” Jennette says. “He was just
trying to soak up as much knowledge as he can.”
Soon Danso was driving to Durham as much as he could. And
Jennette, too, came to Greenville, sometimes as often as
once a week to push Danso.
“You can make it,” he told him, urging him not to worry
about his lack of playing time at East Carolina. An NFL team
will see past that, he said. Somewhere, he added, a
professional coach will fall in love with that size and
desire.
This spring, Danso had enough credits to graduate. Holtz and
his staff had moved on to South Florida. Even though he had
another year of eligibility, Danso figured now was the time
to try the NFL. When the school held its pro day for NFL
scouts and coaches, he showed up.
Several of his former teammates laughed at him, he says. But
then Ryan saw him and Jennette’s words proved right: An NFL
coach was indeed interested.
“What jumps out at you is his size and he’s all muscle,”
Ryan said. “Shoot, he can be a two-gapper. He’s as strong as
an ox.”
He immediately saw Danso as the perfect fit at nose tackle
in Cleveland’s 3-4 defense, which unlike ECU’s 4-3, calls
for a single, giant tackle to stand in the middle, be big
and tackle ball carriers.
“I like to think I know players,” says Ryan, who helped turn
former Cardinals safeties Kwamie Lassiter and Brent
Alexander and current Browns player Marcus Benard
(notes) from undrafted free agents into NFL players.
“I don’t care what happened at East Carolina. That doesn’t
matter. This is the NFL and the only thing that matters is
what happens between those white lines. They’re going to see
what kind of man you are when they snap the ball.”
Only Danso had no idea of Ryan’s interest that day at East
Carolina. That wasn’t clear until a few days before the
draft, when the coach called him on his mobile phone.
“I said, ‘Hold on, someone is playing a joke on me,’ ” Danso
says with a laugh.
But it was no joke. The Browns invited him to a tryout camp
the week after the draft, just so Ryan could be sure Danso
had the same strength and desire he saw that day at East
Carolina. He did. A day after the camp, he was signed to a
contract.
Back at East Carolina, a couple players who played ahead of
Danso were stunned, he says. How was it possible that he had
gotten this chance and they hadn’t?
Standing on the Browns’ empty practice field, he shrugs.
Then laughs.
“Too many people said, ‘You’re that kid from Africa, nobody
gives a crap about you.’ But I’m glad I tried,” he says.
“Now I’m here at Cleveland Browns Stadium. I can’t believe
it. My mother, she cries every time I talk about it. I don’t
have words to say it. It’s like, ‘Who am I?’ I look around
and say, ‘Why?’ ”
He shakes his head.
“I say, ‘If I quit, none of this would have happened.’ ”
Only it has.
And finally, more than half an hour after practice has ended
and his NFL teammates have showered, Danso picks up his
orange Browns helmet and slowly leaves the field of his
impossible dream.
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