Buccaneers Seek Crown With Their Young King

This is home country for the kid. And the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had always been his team.

His formative years were their formative years.

His heroes were their players.

He loved James Wilder and Steve Young. And, as he gravitated toward the quarterback position, he focused on whomever was throwing the ball for the men with the skull and crossed cutlasses on their helmets.

Soon, the kid was preoccupied with his own dreams. He played quarterback so well at Gibbs High in St. Petersburg, his hometown across the bay from Tampa, that he became nationally known after throwing for 4,808 yards and 60 touchdowns in his final two seasons.

The kid went off to college and came back a man. Shaun King became the greatest quarterback in Tulane history, setting school records for everything from passing yards (8,419) to touchdown passes (70).

Even with all his success, King had a backup plan for getting to the Buccaneers. He would use his brain if his arm failed him. He majored in marketing and would go to graduate school to get a master’s degree if necessary to get a job in the team’s marketing department.

It never came to that.

His fantasy became reality. His hometown team was interested in him. And for more than marketing. They were considering drafting him and putting one of those skull-and-cutlass helmets on his head.

Would he be available to work out for them before the draft, they wanted to know?

Where and when, he said.

A date was set up last April at Gibbs High, on the field where he had already had so much success.

This wasn’t merely a politically correct tryout offered the hometown star. They were all coming to watch King--Tampa Bay General Manager Rich McKay, Coach Tony Dungy, offensive coordinator Mike Shula and quarterback coach Clyde Christensen.

Shaun had a chance to be king, at least for a day. What more could he ask for?

Decent weather would have been nice.

Instead, it turned out to be one of those days. Winds off the bay were whipping through St. Petersburg at more than 35 mph. Trying to throw a football into those currents would be like trying to surf a tidal wave.

Would King’s dream of playing for his hometown team be gone with the wind?

He never wavered or complained.

“Most guys would have canceled,” Christensen said. “But not him. His demeanor never changed. He never even asked for the wind to be at his back. He just asked what we wanted.

“When we told him to just throw the ball, he chucked away. He threw it into the wind. He threw it against the wind. Sometimes, he had to throw it sideways against that wind.”

King didn’t release any John Elway-type bombs under those conditions, or even many tight spirals. But he earned the respect of a football organization looking for a kid who could deal with the adverse conditions the Buccaneers sometimes had to operate under.

Dungy, who had coached King’s squad in the 1999 Senior Bowl, had already been impressed by King.

King’s performance in the teeth of that wind cinched Dungy’s opinion. In the second round of the 1999 draft, King became a Buccaneer.

It was supposed to be a relatively pressure-free year for the rookie. Nobody was asking him to be a Peyton Manning, to drag a struggling franchise to respectability. Trent Dilfer was Tampa Bay’s starting quarterback and Eric Zeier was Dilfer’s backup. King would watch and learn.

King did get some valuable playing time in exhibition games, then took his seat on the bench and waited. He did not throw a pass in Tampa Bay’s first 10 games.

In early November, he moved up a notch when Zeier bruised his ribs.

And then, in the third quarter of a game at Seattle in late November, with the Buccaneers in the midst of a battle for the division title, King became the quarterback. It happened in the time it took Seahawk defensive end Phillip Daniels to smash Dilfer to the Kingdome’s artificial turf, breaking Dilfer’s right collarbone.

Was King intimidated?

Yeah, about as intimidated as he had been by the wind at Gibbs High.

His role limited by the concerned Buccaneer brain trust, King, despite the noise and confusion all around him in arguably the NFL’s loudest stadium, held onto the Buccaneer lead he inherited and Tampa Bay went on to win, 16-3.

The next week, an even bigger challenge. King started against the Minnesota Vikings, with first place in the division on the line, in front of his hometown crowd and a national viewing audience on “Monday Night Football.”

Now that had to be intimidating.

“I didn’t think of it as pressure,” said King, whose first reaction to any daunting situation seems to be a shrug. “I looked at it as an opportunity.”

And again, he made the most of it, completing 11 of 19 passes for 93 yards and two touchdowns in a 24-17 Tampa Bay victory.

Those numbers may not seem overwhelming, but that’s by design. King, whose height--he’s 6 feet--and arm strength have been question marks, has been successful because his role has been structured.

These aren’t the Buccaneers of old, a team always in search of a superstar who could pull them out from under the shadow of the Miami Dolphins, the football powerhouse downstate.

But now, even with the emergence of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay has forged its own identity in this football-rich state, an identity built around a strong defense and a multidimensional running game. All the Buccaneers needed was a quarterback who could punch the right buttons and keep the machine moving.

They were not asking King to be Mark Brunell or a young Dan Marino. They only needed King to be as good as Trent Dilfer.

How hard is that?

“The best thing he does is decision-making,” Dungy said of King. “He’s got good people around him. Every throw he makes does not have to be a game-winner.”

Occasionally, King reminds people that he is still a rookie. On one play, he went to the line of scrimmage so concerned that his linemen hadn’t heard the snap count that he held up a few fingers to show it to them--and the grinning defense across the line.

“No, no, I told him. We don’t do that. That’s real kindergarten stuff,” said guard Frank Middleton, a grin on his face at the mention of the incident.

Having weathered all previous challenges, King faces yet another today when he leads the Buccaneers into the playoffs against the Washington Redskins at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium. King will be only the sixth rookie quarterback to start a postseason NFL game and the first in nearly a decade, since a left-hander named Todd Marinovich did so for the L.A. Raiders in 1991.

King will take the field today with impressive numbers for a rookie in a controlled situation, having completed 61% of his throws in his six games for 875 yards and seven touchdowns, with four interceptions.

Off the field, King is even more impressive. He comes from a solid family, quotes the Bible often and has no history of trouble in his youth.

He insists he won’t allow himself to become too materialistic after signing a three-year, $2.1-million contract, saying “You can allow money to become your god if you focus on it too much,” and admits that he sometimes looks around the stadium during pregame warmups to soak in the moment and remind himself how lucky he is.

Come on. Nobody is this perfect. There have to be some skeletons in his closet somewhere, skeletons a good reporter can unearth.

“Well,” King at last admitted sheepishly, “there were a few things in school. I got into trouble for talking too much, and for passing notes.”

Aha. Knew it. It was obvious this kid’s story was just too good to be true.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Long Live New King

Statistics for Tampa Bay rookie quarterback Shaun King, who took over for injured Trent Dilfer. King is 4-1 in his five starts, 5-1 in his six games and 3-0 as a starter at home:

Attempts/Completions: 146/89

Completion Percentage: .610

Yards: 875

Touchdowns: 7

Interceptions: 4

Quarterback Rating: 82.4