Draft 1987 : Okoye’s Work About to Pay Off : Running Back From Nigeria, Azusa Pacific Could Go in First Round

Old Raiders are peeking through the back windows of the locker room while management tries out a prospective new Raider. There isn’t much those veteran eyeballs haven’t seen but wonders await today.

This prospect is a halfback the size of a middle linebacker and he runs like a rabbit in a gale. In lore, such phenoms exist, but this is flesh--6 feet 3 inches and 255 pounds worth.

His name is Christian Okoye. He is 25 years old and is from Nigeria. He came to Azusa Pacific, an NAIA school where students attend chapel three times a week, to be on the track team and never held a football until he started playing the game three years ago. Aside from that, he’s just like your average prospect.

“He’s a real African,” says one of the Raider veterans.

“I know how he started running so fast,” says another. “Lions were chasing him.”

Okoye lines up for his 40-yard dash. To make him feel at home, the veterans start to roar like lions.

Okoye knocks off the 40 post-haste. The Raiders won’t say what their watches show but Okoye normally covers the distance in 4.5 seconds, with or without benefit of sound effects.

With 255-pounders, this isn’t something you see every day, or any day, which is why this aged, inexperienced, ex-discus thrower from Tiny School USA is being projected as a second-, or maybe even a first-round pick in Tuesday’s National Football League draft.

Okoye’s college coach, Jim Milhon, says the Raiders’ three workouts on campus plus two at El Segundo make them the most interested team. Christian was even supposed to have lunch with Al Davis, who probably just wanted to know if he was really Raider material , but that didn’t come off. Like everyone else, the Raiders will just have to go on what they’ve seen.

“If you have seen him,” Milhon says. “If you’ve stood next to him. . . . Whenever you tell people about him, they go, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I mean, we’re a small little college, a tiny little place.

“He weighs 255, he runs fast. He has long jumped 24 feet. If you can picture standing next to someone like that and finding out how much agility he has, how much elasticity, he becomes an impressive thing to watch.”

Okoye weighed 215 when he arrived on campus from his home, Enugu, Nigeria’s second-largest city. Any kid who’s been to the zoo has probably seen as many lions as Okoye. He was a weight-event man who also played soccer. People here told him he should consider playing football, too. To figure out what they were talking about, Okoye had to watch his first football games on TV.

“I just watched a little bit,” Okoye said. “I didn’t have any interest in seeing it or watching it. It looked brutal.

“People would come up to me right from the beginning and say I should play. I said, ‘No, I would never try this game.’ First of all, I didn’t understand it. It was a funny game.”

In 1984, however, with Okoye throwing well over 200 feet in the discus, he somehow failed to make Nigeria’s Olympic team. He doesn’t know why. Since he was out of the country and there were no tryouts, he says maybe they just forgot about him back home. Or perhaps it was because he was a member of the Ibo tribe, which faces some discrimination in Nigeria. Nigerian officials deny it and a year later, Okoye was selected for the national team.

By then, he was up to 250 and had decided to see about this football.

“For a small school, we have a very good weight training program,” Milhon says. “Ordinarily, if you tell people about someone who went from 215 to 250, they smell steroids. That isn’t the case here. We’re very close to our athletes. There was none of that with Christian.”

Now he was a football player but where to put him?

Okoye was bigger than both Milhon’s offensive tackles. He looked as if he could be a fearsome defensive tackle but opponents might just run away from him. He might have wreaked real havoc as an outside linebacker, but perhaps just on every fourth or fifth play. So Milhon made him a tailback.

“We wanted him where he could affect the contest the most,” Milhon says. “I remember the first time we played against La Verne and the coach I played for, Roland Ortmayer. He said, ‘I thought I taught you better than that. The big ones go in front. The little ones go in back.’

“Of course, you never knew what would happen the first time someone put his headgear into Christian’s ribs. He might just get up and walk away. That first season, he ran way too straight-up. He took some terrible shots to the body.

“There was one game when he jumped in the air and somebody caught his feet and he landed on his helmet. Everybody on the sideline just groaned. They said, ‘Hey, get the ambulance.’ Christian sat up, adjusted his headgear and went back to the huddle.

“Sometime late in that first season, he began to hit back. Up until then, he was just kind of running behind his pads.”

The game, of course, didn’t stop being puzzling all at once. One day in a passing drill, Milhon told Okoye he was responsible for blocking the linebacker. “I didn’t tell him, only if the linebacker rushed, though,” Milhon says.

The linebacker dropped into the hook zone. Okoye ran downfield and buried him. Okoye ran the wrong way so often that backup tailback Joe Schulter brought a large cardboard arrow to practice. When Christian zagged instead of zigging, Schulter hauled the arrow onto the field and pointed it in the right direction.

Laughing all the way, they went 19-3-2 in Okoye’s three seasons. Christian had a 7.2-yard rushing average. He gained more than 200 yards in each of his last five games but before the Senior Bowl, who knew?

“I wish I could take the credit for getting him in the Senior Bowl but I think it was our publicist, Gary Pine,” Milhon says. “We kept saying, ‘People don’t know how good a football player he is. We’ve got to find a way to have him play against major college competition.’ We believed there just aren’t very many people who are his peers as far as physical ability goes. If you’re talking about overall football ability, that’s another thing.

“Gary talked to people and called people. I think some of the scouts had a lot to do with it, too, and they responded.”

At Mobile, Ala., Okoye was the talk of the camp. He played with a sprained ankle but wound up scoring touchdowns on four short runs and was voted the game’s Most Valuable Player.

“It was a little scary,” Okoye said. “You know, I was going against NCAA guys. But when I got there, it was a different story. I just had to get used to playing against them.”

Was Milhon worried?

Nahhhh . . .

“First of all, he’s very competitive,” Milhon said. “He’d been all over the world for track. I’d seen him throw against Mac Wilkins, against the Russians. He’d been in Stockholm, Tokyo, Melbourne. He’d been up against the best in the world and he always got off his best throws against them. Of course, I didn’t think any of those discus throwers were going to hit him.

“Secondly, he’s a really, really good young man. He’s such a coachable young man. He’s got a good heart. He wants to please people. I didn’t think he’d have any trouble at all. Coach (Don) Shula said exactly that.”

Since that week surely made him a premium pick, you could say it was worth anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million to him. How much depends on how premium and he’ll find out Tuesday. However it turns out, it’ll have been worth the trip. All the trips, in fact.