Just past midnight and Alfred “Mazda” Morris is handed a cellphone in the middle of a locker room full of broadly grinning men in black “NFC East Champions” baseball caps.
“Who’s he talking to?” someone asks.
- Mike Wise
- Columnist
For Washington Redskins’ Alfred Morris, it’s too good to be believed
Redskins running back Alfred Morris talks about giving back to the community at a charity drive at FedEx Field.
“Peter King.”
Sports Illustrated and NBC tonight, ESPN tomorrow. Why not just put the White House on in a few weeks?
“Man, if you had told me I would play on a 1-11 college team a year ago and I’d be standing here in the middle of all this . . .”
Morris gathers his belongings, scans a locker room of 300-pound smiling and laughing behemoths, some as big and strong as DeMarcus Ware and the Dallas Cowboys he had used as traffic cones an hour ago.
Then he walks into a 30-degree night with no jacket, toward the players’ parking lot, where men and women pushing 50 behind barricades chant “Al-fred Mor-ris!”
A bearded man in a Santa Claus suit, resplendent with a John Riggins jersey protruding underneath and a cigarette dangling from his lips, hands Morris a black Sharpie, pleads with him to sign his cardboard sign that reads, “Hey RGIII, Throw It To Me.”
“Crazy, huh,” he says, scribbling his signature, half-smiling.
No. More like surreal.
Two hundred yards and three touchdowns in a division title game. The equivalent of more than 16 football fields for the season, almost 100 yards more than anyone in franchise history had ever rushed for in a season. Oh, and Robert Griffin III telling him after the game, “You’re my Terrell Davis.” Which kind of makes RGIII Morris’s John Elway, no?
“I can’t believe this is all happening,” Morris says. “I really can’t.”
The last night of the regular season has morphed into the last day of the year. And incredibly Alfred Morris — all 5 feet 9, 216 stumpy pounds of him — and this team are still here.
He didn’t get cut. He wasn’t shelved on a practice squad for eternity behind Tim Hightower, Evan Royster and Roy Helu Jr.
Instead he put his head down, lowered his shoulders and careened off bigger, stronger men paid millions more than his relative pittance of a rookie minimum salary.
And here was the payoff, a sixth-round pick plucked out of Florida Atlantic, tucking the game ball under his right arm and running off the field with Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” booming over the stadium loudspeakers — one week from his first playoff game!
Alfred Morris, the perfect window into a team that used to be 3-6: NFL long shots to late December legends, both of them. Just like that.
A few things bear asking:
Who imagined three rookies — two of whom only an NFL scout and the players’ parents had heard of this time a year ago — would account for 204 points this season?
How did Kai Forbath, a place kicker cut by Tampa Bay, replace Billy Cundiff and set an NFL record for 17 straight makes to begin a career, including some pressurized boots that kept the season going?
How did a defense that nearly gave up 5,000 yards passing make all the stops they needed to the past seven weeks, make rookies and veterans alike run for cover and wilt in the waning moments?
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