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Next-to-Last Man Standing

Andre King, the 245th player taken in the NFL draft, goes pro.

By Martin Kuz 

The last day of training camp lures the faithful to the Browns' practice complex in Berea. These are not Dawg Pounders, but parents and children who fall into mute reverence as players jog onto the field. They stare, hypnotized by the sheer real-lifeness of Tim Couch and Courtney Brown, whose jerseys are mandatory attire in the bleachers.

No fan wears No. 18. It's the jersey of a bona-fide Nobody: rookie receiver Andre King, the 245th -- or next-to-last -- player taken in the NFL draft in April. Which explains why no one pays him much mind during the team's morning drills.

They miss a poetic display of asymmetry. The offense splits into two squads, and King lines up at cornerback, as befits his second-team status. He first defends against the team's highly touted second-round draft pick, Quincy Morgan. A few minutes later, he shadows Kevin Johnson, the team's leading receiver last year.

The symbolism is acute: Johnson, receiver of the present. Morgan, receiver of the future. King, receiver of the doomed. The odds are not lost on the last-round long shot, who spent his entire career at the University of Miami as a backup.

"You have to be aware of that kind of thing," King says after practice. "You're trying to make an impression, and you're trying to get the coaches to notice you. That's part of trying to make the team."

Despite a sub-zero chance of hooking on with the Browns, King may be the happiest player in camp. A rookie older than most veterans -- at 27, he's AARP vintage by football standards -- he came to Cleveland best known as a washed-up minor-league baseball player.

His career ended in 1997, four years after the Atlanta Braves drafted him. But after four years at Miami, King hoped to relive the baptismal euphoria of being drafted when the NFL draft began on April 21. He almost didn't get the chance.

It was Sunday, deep into Day 2 of the draft. He and his wife, Jessica, parents of a five-month-old daughter, had invited family and friends to their Miami town house for a second straight day.

The mood was funereal. Everyone figured that King, who scored high in pre-draft workouts for NFL scouts, would be selected on Saturday during the first three rounds. When his name wasn't called, hopes bobbed back to the surface for Day 2.

But by late afternoon, only two picks remained. Jessica had recoiled from the living room an hour before to watch the bitter end on the bedroom TV with the sound off. The others lingered as ESPN's Chris Berman and Mel Kiper Jr. yammered away.

King, anticipating the worst, called his agent to find out what teams would invite him to training camp as a free agent. He didn't realize that the Browns, who earlier in the seventh round took Boston College guard Paul Zukauskas, held another pick.

Then King's name squawked out of the TV. Cue the Hallmark moment.

"I was crying, my wife was crying, the baby was crying," King says, smiling. "Tears were everywhere."

Elation mingled with relief as the King family embraced for a group snuffle. On paper, given his age and ho-hum college career, King looks like a player who at best would ride pine in the Arena League. Or who would tuck away his sports dreams and shuffle into the real world to make use of his business management degree. But the Browns offered a chance -- one made more poignant by King's awareness that, save for a single what-if, he might already be a four-year NFL veteran.

In early 1993, nine years after he arrived in Fort Lauderdale with his parents from their native Jamaica, King signed a letter of intent to play football at the University of Michigan. An all-state split end in high school, he planned to bleed blue in Ann Arbor for the next four years -- until the Braves selected him that summer in the second round of the amateur draft.

Rare is the person of any age who can resist a $450,000 signing bonus. An 18-year-old King bit hard when the Braves dangled the money, and its taste never soured. The deal left him "retirement rich," he says, and enabled him to care for his mother.

"She wanted a Toyota Camry," he says, laughing. "So that's what I got her. Those were the cars to get, back in 1993."

Signing with Atlanta also kept him closer to Fort Lauderdale and Jessica Vogel, whom he met in high school and who would become Mrs. King in 1997. "The way I see it, going into baseball gave me my family," he says. "If I had gone to Michigan, it would have been harder for us to stay together. And if we hadn't stayed together, I wouldn't have my daughter."

His on-field bounty proved less plentiful. King, a solid center fielder and an average hitter, suffered the nomadic rigors of the minor leagues. He ascended no higher than Double-A while playing for affiliates of the Braves, Cincinnati Reds, and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, drifting from Chattanooga to Durham to Wherever. By 1997, he heard his athletic clock ticking.

"I gave myself a timetable of four years to make it to the majors," he says. "I'd seen guys who would get called up to the show for a week or two at the end of a season, and that's all they ever got. I didn't want to be like that."

Nor did he want to be "one of those guys who goes back to real life and drives a UPS truck." So King stopped wandering baseball's back roads to walk on at Miami, which had courted him as a high schooler. He would earn a degree, if not an NFL career.

Initially, the decision could not have seemed worse. He soon learned after arriving that a pair of fellow freshmen, Santana Moss and Reggie Wayne, were the team's preordained stars at receiver. Next to two teenagers, the then-23-year-old King resembled a new baby-sitter.

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