Browns rookie in midst of unlikely journey

[Valin]

Yahoo Sports:

Les Carpenter
5/24/10

BEREA, Ohio – He cannot bear to leave the practice field, almost as if doing so would nullify the dream he has lived these past two weeks. And so defensive tackle Kwaku Danso(notes), perhaps the unlikeliest Cleveland Brown ever, finds reasons to stay after a springtime workout even as his new teammates head for the locker room. He pushes against a blocking sled. He runs sprints. Then he lags behind the last group of players signing autographs for some children until, at last, he is alone on the wide green prairie behind the Browns offices.

“I can’t believe this,” he says, laughing into the afternoon sun. “Look at me.”


Danso is originally from Kumasi, Ghana.

Who could have imagined? Rarely is there such a thing as a 28-year-old rookie in the NFL – let alone one raised in Ghana who learned to play the game just three years earlier, after walking into the head coach’s office at East Carolina and saying he wanted to join the team, then never once making a tackle. Sometimes he must wonder if one of the Browns coaches will run onto the field and pull him off, saying it is all a mistake.

But there is no error. The Browns have indeed signed an undrafted free agent whose entire college career consists of three brief appearances at the end of ECU blowouts. And they did so because a few weeks earlier, defensive coordinator Rob Ryan – observing on East Carolina’s pro day – noticed Danso step through a door at 6-foot-5, 336 pounds and gasped “Who the hell is that?” to the Cleveland scouts standing beside him.

Unfazed by the information that Danso had never advanced beyond a brief appearance at second string on the East Carolina depth charts, Ryan was transfixed as the player bench-pressed 225 pounds 39 times. So much so that even after Ryan continued to scout players with much better pedigrees at more important schools, Danso was the one he kept remembering. And when Browns head coach Eric Mangini told him he could have one player to bring in with the intent of keeping around for most of the year to develop, Ryan knew immediately whom he wanted.

“I like the look in his eye,” Ryan says. “You have to root for a guy like that.”

Standing alone on the practice field, Danso can only giggle, almost speechless about his good fortune. He starts to say something, then stops. It’s all too overwhelming. So many times he thought of quitting football at East Carolina, figuring he was wasting his time. Now he is here? In the NFL? Finally he begins again, his words sometimes hard to decipher through a thick accent.

“This is a blessing,” he says. “This right here is a blessing. This tells you that life is what you make it.”

Then he shakes his head and laughs again.

“It’s taken a lot of hard work,” he says.

He came to the U.S. in 2002, from Kumasi, which is Ghana’s second-largest city, with the hopes of playing basketball at an American college. Most of his family was already here. But a brief trial at tiny Wilkes University in Pennsylvania didn’t work, he ran out of money and he was forced to move in with his brother Kojo in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

To raise money for school he took on three jobs: working days as a butcher at Sam’s Club, stocking shelves overnight at Target and cooking at Burger King. On the weekends, Kojo – who stands 5-foot-11 – brought his much bigger, younger brother to his part-time job as a bouncer at a D.C. nightclub.

Kwaku soon drew the notice of Redskins players who came into the club and suggested he might make a fine football player......(Snip)