The Super Chief : Okoye Has Come a Long Way in a Short Time to Become One of the Best Backs in the NFL

The unlikely, improbable and slightly unbelievable football career of Christian Okoye began roughly six years ago, when he walked into the football office at Azusa Pacific University.

Okoye, a Nigerian discus thrower at the time, told the football coach, Jim Milhon, that he was interested in trying out for the team. In the ensuing conversation, Okoye, 23 at the time, let it out that not only had he never played football, he had never even handled one.

Milhon handed him a football. Okoye inspected it, then told the coach: “Very interesting, but an impractical shape.”

Christian Okoye, a remarkable athlete out of Africa who is built like Mike Tyson and runs as fast as Jerry Rice, led the National Football League in rushing last year and is being called by some the most effective running back in the NFL.

If Christian Okoye had never left Nigeria, his story would be dismissed by any fiction editor as too far-fetched, too off-the-wall.

Even NFL scouts were afraid to swallow it, in the spring of 1987, when they paraded to the campus of the 1,800-student college with their stopwatches to inspect the man who had averaged 186 rushing yards a game during his senior season.

For most of them, their minds were made up, Milhon remembers today. Sure, the guy had an NFL body, and sure, he could run . . . but this was NAIA football, they muttered. He had been playing against guys wearing glasses. He never had even played high school football.

Then they watched him dunk a basketball, squat with 720 pounds on his shoulders, run like the wind and long-jump 23 feet in tennis shoes. No more muttering.

“We were almost afraid to tell all those scouts what kind of tools Christian really had,” Milhon said recently. “He’d run 4.4 (seconds for 40 yards) for us, but scouts are very skeptical people, so we told them he could run 4.5 for them any time. So we downplayed everything, and scouts from every NFL team came, and then many of them started coming back, three and four times. Christian exceeded everything we’d said about him.”

One thing Milhon did tell the scouts gave them a little insight into Okoye’s competitive fires. As a discus thrower, all of Okoye’s best throws had been against the most important international and collegiate competition.

An important figure in Okoye’s pre-NFL period was Azusa Pacific’s sports information director, Gary Pine, who spent hours on the phone with Senior Bowl officials in Mobile, Ala. Finally, Okoye was invited to play in the postseason all-star game, sort of a dress rehearsal for NFL scouts.

He scored four touchdowns, and the Kansas City Chiefs drafted him in the second round of the 1987 draft, the 35th player chosen.

So the Chiefs, who perhaps at the time thought they were going out on a limb with this guy, are enjoying the rewards. This is what the man who had never touched a football until that day in 1984, did in 1989:

--Led the NFL in rushing with 1,480 yards, becoming the first Kansas City back to do so.

--Was selected by NFL players as the AFC’s most valuable player.

--Was voted first-team all-pro and started in the Pro Bowl game.

And Kansas City Coach Marty Schottenheimer said recently of Okoye that the best is yet to come.

After a 90-minute scrimmage on a muggy afternoon in Liberty, Mo., during which Okoye twice ran the length of the football field through Schottenheimer’s defense, the coach recalled another battering-ram type back from his own playing days in the old American Football League, Cookie Gilchrist.

“Christian is built like Cookie was, but Cookie never had anything like Christian’s speed,” he said of the mid-1960s star of the Buffalo Bills. “And Christian, really, is still learning how to play football. The best part is, he’s got these great physical tools and he’s also highly motivated to be even better.”

Okoye has a tendency to run upright with the football, and the Chiefs’ coaches constantly urge him to show a lower profile target. “Running behind his pads,” Schottenheimer calls it.

While he talked at the Chiefs’ training table recently, Okoye put away a formidable steak, a halibut steak, two bowls of bean soup and two rolls. He would have put away two tall glasses of apple juice, too, except he spilled both of them, knocking them over with a gesture as he described his janitorial duties on his old campus job at Azusa Pacific.

“I mopped floors in all the buildings at night, took out garbage, vacuumed the floors, did a lot of painting and cleaned up the college cafeteria,” he said, with the sweeping gesture that tipped the juice.

Then, summoning the old janitorial skills, he quickly produced a handful of napkins and tidied everyone up, apologizing all the while.

Back to eating again, he talked confidently about a new, improved Okoye (pronounced o-KOY-ya).

He agrees with Schottenheimer’s criticism that he runs too straight-up.

“I need a lot of improvement,” he said. “I want to improve in all areas--pass blocking, pass receiving and run blocking.”

He hinted that Schottenheimer needs improvement in one area, too--drawing up plays where the ball is thrown to Okoye. He caught only two passes last season.

“I want to catch the ball more,” he said. “I am a better receiver than the coaches think.”

But Schottenheimer probably won’t alter the profile of a player he thinks can take the Chiefs to the Super Bowl. Kansas City football, the way Schottenheimer sees it, is pretty simple stuff: Chiefs get first-half lead. Chiefs sit on lead as Okoye runs in second half. Chiefs win.

A December game last year with Green Bay was typical of the way Schottenheimer wants to employ Okoye. Kansas City had a 21-3 lead at halftime. In the second half, quarterback Steve DeBerg threw only eight passes while Okoye, who carried 38 times for 131 yards, ran out the clock.

Final score: 21-3.

In the Chiefs’ camp, Okoye’s physical gifts are a source of wonder to everyone.

Russ Ball, one of the team’s strength coaches, was talking about what might be football’s strongest legs.

“Christian’s upper-body strength, for a guy of his mass, is about average on this team,” he said. “He can easily bench press 300 pounds, but you’d expect that of a guy with his build.

“But his legs are awesome. He does eight to 10 squat (repetitions) with 405 pounds (on his shoulders). We’ve never maxed him out, although he’s done over 700 pounds. Other guys train up to that level, but Christian is there naturally. He could train up to well over 800 pounds, but we don’t want his legs any bigger or he couldn’t get into his pants.

“I really think the guy, had he never gone over to football, could have become a world-class weightlifter.”

Both Okoye and his college coach, Milhon, are sensitive to the subject of Okoye’s muscles. His muscles are a blend of long weight-room hours and Mother Nature, they insist.

“This is a Christian school,” Milhon said recently. “Christian never, never would have used that stuff (steroids), absolutely not. He weighed 215 when he came here (at 6 feet 1, he ranges between 255 and 260 now, at 8% body fat) and he put that strength on through hard work.”

There are other natural forces at work here, mostly a concentration level and a work ethic that are exceptional even by pro football standards. Okoye--his name means Sunday--suffered a pinched nerve early in training camp last year and missed the entire exhibition schedule.

Some on the coaching staff wrote him off for 1989, pointing out that Schottenheimer, in his first season with the Chiefs, was installing a new offense. And remember, they said, Okoye is still learning a very complex game to begin with.

He had only five carries when the Chiefs lost their regular-season opener to Denver, but averaged 26 carries and 114 yards over the next eight games.

“He’s extremely bright,” Schottenheimer said. “He missed the entire training camp, the entire preseason, and never missed a beat. When this guy learns to see the whole field, when he starts seeing his reads better, then you’ll really see something.”

Already, we’re seeing a million-dollar back. Okoye was in the option year of his first Kansas City contract early last season when he signed a three-year deal running through the 1991 season. It could pay him this year, with incentives, $1 million.

Okoye, who married college sweetheart Lauren Brown of Los Angeles last winter, hasn’t really left Southern California.

He bought a home in Claremont last winter and still insists, as he did as a collegian, that he wants to spend his post-football life motivating young high school students in Southern California to excel in the classroom as well as in athletics. His Azusa Pacific degree is in physical education and athletic training. His wife has a business-psychology degree.

“I’d like to explain to young people what a wonderful education system America has, that in some countries, like Nigeria, you have to fight to get into school,” he said.

In Okoye’s youth, he fought to stay alive. Hard yards, every day.

He was 6 and living in the village of Nri when insurgents from his native Ibo tribe seceded from Nigeria and formed the republic of Biafra. It started a three-year civil war that killed 500,000 to 2 million people, most of whom died of starvation. “People carried machine guns in the streets,” Okoye said. “We hid in people’s basements. I can remember the sound of guns and the explosions. We had to stay on the move all the time, to stay ahead of the fighting. When the shooting got too close, we’d move on to the next village.

“Food was very hard to come by. It was a terrible time.”

Okoye is the second of five children born to a former army officer, Benedict Okoye, and his wife, Cecilia.

Okoye’s mother died in 1980. His father has visited him several times in recent years, but chooses to remain in Nigeria. He, of course, knew no more about football than did his son when Okoye went out for the sport in 1984. Now, however, he considers himself something of an expert.

“I tape all the Chiefs’ games and mail them to my dad,” he said. “One of the first things he wanted to know in a letter was if it was legal to use your hands on offense. I wrote back and told him it was. In every letter he’s sent me since, he tells me I’m not using my hands enough to ward off tacklers.”

Okoye, on the subject of rising from NAIA football to the big leagues, says many miss the point. In some ways, he says, Azusa Pacific yards were tougher.

“College wasn’t the same as here,” he said. “In the NFL, I’m getting great blocks from my linemen. In college, blockers messed up a lot. I get praised a lot in the NFL, and I like that, but not enough praise goes to my blockers.”

In Azusa, he is gone but not forgotten.

One of Milhon’s favorite mementos of his Okoye period is a letter from Okoye’s father, written to the coaching staff in 1982, when Okoye arrived as a freshman discus thrower.

The letter reads, in part: “ . . . We hope you would act as his true parents. . . . I submit my son to you.”

When he was chosen to play in the Pro Bowl in Honolulu last year, Okoye bought plane tickets for Milhon and Azusa Pacific track Coach Terry Franson and their wives.

“He never really left us,” Milhon said. “He still spends a lot of off- season time on campus. He’s an amazing individual, and I enjoy telling people that he’s a better man than he is a football player.”