Column: Rookie Amari Cooper is quietly making his mark with the Oakland Raiders
Raiders wide receiver Amari Cooper has 38 reception for 565 yards and three touchdowns.
Amari Cooper is, by all accounts, as mild-mannered and polite a young man as you’d ever want to meet.
For NFL defenses, he’s been a rude slap in the face — the same kind of slap that Cooper felt a few years ago.
The Oakland Raiders receiver is the first rookie since Mike Ditka in 1961 with three 100-yard performances in his first six games. Cooper, the fourth pick in last spring’s draft, and St. Louis Rams running back Todd Gurley are midseason favorites for offensive rookie-of-the-year honors.
The slap Cooper absorbed came on an unofficial recruiting trip to Florida State, after an assistant coach from his high school issued a challenge to Seminoles coaches.
The assistant, Luther Campbell, brought Cooper and others on a tour of colleges the summer before their senior year. So confident was Campbell in his young standout’s receiving abilities that he asked Florida State coaches to position their best defensive back recruit across from Cooper.
“My guy’s going to beat him at least two out of three times,” Campbell promised.
So they lined up across from each other, Cooper and the hotshot recruit. Suddenly, before the snap, the cornerback reached up and slapped Cooper across the face.
“There were other kids from our school there, and they were ready to rush the field and start a fight,” Campbell said. “Amari just said, ‘Stop. Don’t do nothing.’”
Cooper stepped away from the line of scrimmage, shook off the sting of the slap and burned the defender three times in a row, the last on a deep route to the end zone. As he crossed the goal line, Cooper was engulfed by his exuberant teammates.
“They wouldn’t stop whooping,” recalled Campbell, a founding member of the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew before becoming a high school football coach.
The soft-spoken Cooper wound up playing at Alabama, where last fall he led the nation with 124 receptions. He certainly frustrated defenders but has never been the type to incite them with trash talk.
That’s why it threw Campbell for a loop when, in Oakland’s opener against the Cincinnati Bengals, cornerback Adam Jones sat on top of Cooper, pulled off the rookie’s helmet and thrust his head down onto it. Jones was flagged for a personal foul, and many wondered why he wasn’t ejected.
“When I saw Pacman fighting him, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to see Pacman and have a conversation with him,’” said Campbell, using Jones’ former nickname. “I know Amari didn’t say anything or do anything.’”
Those close to him say Cooper is borderline shy. He declined to speak to The Times for this story, Raiders spokesman Will Kiss explaining that the rookie is not interested in discussing the past.
Some great Raiders receivers of the past are happy to talk about Cooper’s boundless potential.
“He makes the game look simple, man,” Raiders great Tim Brown said of Cooper, who will play against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday in Pittsburgh. “The way he runs his routes. Even when he’s running with the ball. Watch that highlight of him running the corner route against Baltimore, and he literally looks like he’s jogging. You look at the other guy, and he’s really digging, and losing ground on Amari.”
Said fellow Hall of Fame receiver Fred Biletnikoff: “What I’ve seen, and in games, you’d never know he was a rookie. He can run all the routes you’d want him to run. He can do that without hesitation. You just don’t see that with rookies.”
Coincidentally — but not surprisingly — Cooper won the Biletnikoff Award last season as college football’s top receiver. He finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting behind Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota, and Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon.
It was at the Heisman dinner where Cooper met Brown, who won the trophy in 1987 and last summer was inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“I spoke to him for a few minutes, and I said, ‘I hope you’re there when the Raiders pick,’” Brown recalled. “He said he was a Raiders fan. Amari doesn’t speak a lot, and then you’ve got 20 Heisman winners walking by you at the same time. If you’re going to be intimidated by a situation, I guess that’s the time to be intimidated.”
Then again, as that Florida State recruit learned, Cooper isn’t intimidated by much.
“He ain’t going to fight you, he ain’t going to cuss,” Campbell said. “He’s just going to beat you.”
Twitter: @LATimesfarmer
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