He Had to Sit Tight

He was born with everything he’d need to become a great football player.

The wriggling baby had genes that foretold size, speed and great hands.

He even had the name.

But Kellen Winslow Jr. wasn’t allowed to play football until he was in high school.

His Hall of Fame father said so.

“Every time the season would come around, from 9 or 10 years old, I’d get real angry, cry all the time,” said Kellen Jr., a sophomore tight end who leads defending national champion Miami in receptions after replacing Jeremy Shockey, the New York Giants’ first-round draft pick.

The boy tried to find a way around his father’s rules. Once, he carried his hockey pads out to a football field and tried to sneak onto a youth league team with a borrowed helmet.

Flag football or games in the park were all right. But Kellen Sr. was firm on the subject of tackle football.

“He would just tell me no, really,” Kellen Jr. said. “He would just say, ‘Not yet.’ That’s about it. Not really why. He just said, ‘You’ll understand one day.’ ”

One day.

If Kellen Jr. only had a dollar for every time his father told him that.

“Oh, he didn’t understand,” Kellen Sr. said. “It was ‘Why this? Why that?’ Kids are about the moment. I’ve always told him, ‘You think short term, I think longer term.’ ”

They laugh about it now, and about most of the other times a father’s convictions stood in the way of a son’s yearnings.

They aired a disagreement on television the day Kellen Jr., then a senior at Scripps Ranch High in San Diego, was supposed to announce which college he would sign with on Fox Sports Net, where Kellen Sr. is a college football studio analyst.

Instead of ending the suspense, father and son ended up still debating the merits of Washington and Michigan State after they got to the studio, neither one ready to budge.

With no announcement, the impasse ended days afterward when Kellen Jr. signed with Miami instead and went on to win a national championship as a freshman reserve.

A season later, Kellen is a starter for the unbeaten and second-ranked Hurricanes, who face Tennessee on Saturday as Miami tries to prove it hasn’t lost its edge in a bid for a second consecutive title.

Meanwhile, Washington is 4-5, and Michigan State fired Coach Bobby Williams on Monday after a 49-3 loss to Michigan left the Spartans at 3-6.

Kellen Jr. thanks his lucky stars he ended up at Miami.

“[My father] just said, ‘Put your trust in me and you’ll understand later,’ ” Kellen Jr. said. “Like Pop Warner, I guess.”

The roots of his father’s convictions were in his upbringing.

Kellen Sr. didn’t start his own football career until he was a senior at East St. Louis High in Illinois.

Hardly handicapped by lack of experience, Winslow went to Missouri, became a first-round draft pick in 1979 and went on to star at tight end for the San Diego Chargers for nine seasons, twice leading all NFL players in receptions.

He still recalls the burnout he saw around him in the NFL.

“I remember one guy I played with on the Chargers. He was in his second year with the Chargers, and he had been playing football 12 years total,” Kellen Sr. said. “I was near the end of my career, and I had only been playing 12 years.

“I come at it from a different perspective as far what you can and cannot do and what you should or should not do. I’ve always tried to raise him to have more going on than just sports.”

Still, “Kell,” as his father often calls him, was allowed to play many other sports.

“He could play flag football, but not organized tackle football where most kids are wearing equipment that’s too big and trying to do things they shouldn’t,” Kellen Sr. said. “And I’m down on yelling by coaches too.”

Nor did he want his son lifting weights too early, jeopardizing his body’s development, or absorbing hits from a young age.

“He just wanted me to grow more, physically,” Kellen Jr. said. “He didn’t want me to get hurt early. He’d say, ‘You’re going to have a lot of football ahead of you.’ ”

It certainly looks that way.

Kellen Jr. has the skills of a receiver in a tight end’s body -- a 6-foot-5, 233-pound build that’s still maturing.

His 32 catches lead the Hurricanes, and his average of 50.6 yards a game is second only to receiver Andre Johnson.

“It’s unbelievable some of the things he does,” quarterback Ken Dorsey said.

“The thing with Kellen when he first came was he could make any catch, and he could run like a receiver. But the route-running and blocking and the intricacies of college football were something he had to learn and still is learning. I think by the end of the year he’s going to be extremely polished.”

That he ended up at Miami is a story in itself.

Though he originally favored the Hurricanes, Kellen Jr. wanted to go to Washington after Butch Davis left Miami to coach the Cleveland Browns.

But his father -- briefly a teammate of Rick Neuheisel’s with the Chargers the year Neuheisel appeared as a replacement player during the 1987 NFL players strike -- was not enamored of the Huskies’ recruiting tactics, feeling the coaches went behind his back to contact his son.

He also pointedly faulted Washington for the racial makeup of its staff. (Washington currently has two black assistants, neither one a coordinator.) Instead, he wanted Kellen Jr. to consider Michigan State, where Williams, an old acquaintance, was coach.

“The athletic director and the head football coach were black at the time, and I felt very good about the environment,” Kellen Sr. said. “Michigan State was also the only school that took him to meet the university president.”

The day before Kellen Jr. was to announce his decision on television, his father asked him what he planned to do.

“He said, ‘Dad, I’m going to go to Washington.’ I told him, ‘If you go on this show and tell people on national television you’re going to go to Washington, I’m going to tell you no on national television,’ ” Kellen Sr. said, vowing never to sign his son’s scholarship papers.

“This is not a situation where I’m going to let you make the wrong decision and then say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

It made for more drama than anyone in the studio anticipated, but there would be no television announcement.

“We came home that evening after taping the show and went to dinner with his godparents,” Kellen Sr. said. “We needed a third-party mediator.

“He told his side. I told my reasons. They agreed with me. He was pretty upset, even to the point he wasn’t going to go to college. I said, ‘OK, you better get a job because you’re not staying here.’

“A couple days later, he came downstairs without any more serious conversation about it and said, ‘Dad, I’m going to go with my original choice, Miami.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a great school and you’ll be surrounded by athletes of your caliber.’ It’s the right spot.”

Now some people figure the next great father-son debate could come next year, when Kellen Jr. might be tempted to jump to the NFL after his junior season.

“He’d probably just say, ‘Just finish school,’ ” Kellen Jr. said. “I’d be like, ‘What if I get hurt?’ He’d just probably say, ‘You’ll understand later.’ ”

Last spring, he made a gesture his father says almost made him cry.

“I pick him up from the airport, he puts his bag in the trunk, and then says, ‘Wait, man, I’ve got to get something,’ ” Kellen Sr. said.

“He pulls out a ring case. Of course I never had a national championship ring of my own. He’s so nonchalant, talking about how they need to remain hungry and he really didn’t earn it. He said he wanted to be a major contributor on the next one and asked me to hold it.

“I said, ‘Don’t give it to me, but I’ll keep it for you, to keep you from sitting in your dorm room looking at the past.’ I was overwhelmed by it. Here was a young man, 18 at the time, thinking in these terms, wanting to get better.

“As a parent, it made me feel like maybe I did something right.”