The Legend of La Crosse : Rams Don’t Know if Draft Pick Newberry Blocks, but They Know He Can Take a Punch
The truth is, the Rams really don’t know all that much about their second-round draft choice, Tom Newberry, an offensive guard from one of those colleges with a hyphen, Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Film isn’t easy to obtain from backwood, NAIA-division schools that don’t even give athletic scholarships.
Word has it that Newberry did a great job blocking against Pacific Lutheran last season, but who couldn’t?
How he’ll do against the NFC West is anyone’s guess.
But if the Rams were looking for toughness when they took Newberry in the NFL draft on April 29, then they definitely found the right guy.
NFL scouts and perhaps the police should have been in the downtown civic auditorium in La Crosse, Wis., on the night of March 5, 1985.
It was there and then that Newberry, all 6-foot-1 and 290 pounds of him, became the Legend of La Crosse.
For a winner-take-all purse of $1,500, Newberry and 15 others behemoths signed on the dotted line for the privilege of beating each other to a pulp in what was affectionately referred to as the town’s “Tough Man Contest.”
At least Newberry’s motives were well intended.
“I got in it for the money,” he said.
They tried to call what these guys did in the ring boxing, but that’s only because they strapped 16-ounce gloves around their hands to lessen the blood flow.
“It was just a bunch of big, beer-drinking guys,” Newberry said.
What could be nicer?
The object was simple enough: In a 16-man, single-elimination tournament, it took three wins to get to the title bout, wherein the victor would be clubbed and then crowned, “Mr. Tough Guy.”
Sure, there was strategy. If your opponent got up, you hit him again and again until he didn’t.
Newberry, though, never even got a chance to show off his fancy footwork. Not only did he knock out all four of his opponents to win the title, it took him a combined total of less than two minutes.
His first bout lasted seven seconds.
“He was about 260 pounds, a Navy guy,” Newberry said.
Newberry quickly reintroduced him to some familiar ground--the deck.
“I just came at him with a left jab and then a right,” Newberry said.
His second fight lasted a minute, but only because his opponent lacked some basic boxing sense.
“I knocked him down but he kept getting up,” Newberry said. “You’ve got to give him credit. He had heart. I knocked him down three times and they finally called it.”
Newberry only needed a “jab-jab-jab-right” and 22 seconds to win his semifinal match.
The title brawl was about as quick as Muhammad Ali’s second fight against Sonny Liston.
Newberry won the bout in a neat and nifty 27 seconds, knocking his opponent unconscious.
Actually, Newberry isn’t a real-life thug and almost always walks away from trouble.
But he had seen these Tough Guy things before and couldn’t resist the chance to pick up some easy money.
Most of his opponents were big and clumsy, he said.
Newberry is anything but, and he said that’s the trick to beating big, clumsy beer drinkers.
In fact, Newberry’s athletic skill is what convinced the Rams to draft him, even if no one else had paid him much mind.
“When you can pick up a guy with good athletic ability, it doesn’t make a difference where they played,” Hudson Houck, Ram offensive line coach, said.
Newberry, in town this week to attend the Rams’ annual mini-camp, was a two-time National Division III shotput and discus champion at Wisconsin-La Crosse.
And if Rams coaches were wondering where he got his quick feet, Newberry was a 200-pound fullback in high school back in his hometown of Onalaska, Wis.
He went to Wisconsin-La Crosse on an academic scholastic (he’s getting a degree in geography in June) and while there, gained 90 pounds in four years. Newberry, not surprisingly, said he did a lot of eating in college.
The Rams were convinced he could play in the NFL after seeing him in the college Blue-Gray All-Star game, where he competed mostly against major college players.
But Houck said there’s more to finding a player than that.
“You have to look at whether the guy is a competitor,” he said. “You want to know what his intensity level is. This guy wants to be good and he’s willing to pay the price.”
Newberry, in fact, is returning to Wisconsin only long enough to pack up his girlfriend and belongings.
He’ll be back in Orange County on Tuesday to begin a two-month training session with Houck before the Rams open camp in July.
Though Newberry is short for a guard by NFL standards, Houck doesn’t see it as a problem.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I look at a guy’s ability to carry weight. There are some disadvantages in being too tall.”
Anyway, even if he is too short, who’s going to tell him?
Ram Notes Reserve running back Barry Redden notified the Rams through his agent that he would not be attending mini-camp because of his lack of playing time. Redden has been fined $1,000. Note: With the Rams moving to a two-back offense this year, Redden figured to move into the starting lineup. . . .The Rams ended mini-camp Thursday and the only other no-show was running back Eric Dickerson, who was in Kansas City giving a speech on drug prevention.
