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Slights Keep Redskins' Fletcher Motivated
Linebacker London Fletcher has been his team's top tackler for nine straight seasons.
(By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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He did have one thing going for him: Dick Vermeil, coach of underdogs past.
In the tradition of Vince Papale, the Philadelphia bartender whom Vermeil plucked out of an open Eagles workout in the early 1970s -- a story that inspired the movie "Invincible" -- and later Kurt Warner, Fletcher became another find from north of nowhere who merely needed a shot.
An undrafted rookie free agent in 1998, he was a special teams player his first season, starting just the final regular season game. But in his second year with the Rams, he won a three-way competition to become the team's starting middle linebacker.
ESPN the Magazine, during the 1999 preseason, published its assessment of each player with a five-point rating system. Fletcher recalled having a rating of 1. The comment section read, "If he's starting by Halloween, we'll buy you a car."
Fletcher kept the page on his nightstand the entire season, a season in which he became the leading tackler on the Rams' Super Bowl-winning team.
ESPN published a follow-up assessment for the postseason. "It said, 'If he's not the leading tackler in the playoffs, we'll buy you a car.' " Fletcher said. "They switched it up. They gave me a rating of, I think, a 4 a couple months later."
Occasionally he would look at the article, which he said helped him play with a "chip on my shoulder" for the first few years of his career. "They didn't really know what my makeup was, what drove me, what God had planned for me."
Today, he is one of only three Redskins players to have won a Super Bowl. Blache, who wants his own ring, also wants to send Fletcher to Hawaii. "Flat-out, one of my goals is to get him to the Pro Bowl," Blache said.
John Carroll recently gave Fletcher more validation, electing him to its Hall of Fame, one that also includes Don Shula. That's why Moran, his former coach, came to Washington, where he taped an interview with Fletcher, the kid he first saw playing one-on-one basketball at Cleveland State University as a young middle school teen-ager in a troubled household.
When he was 11, Fletcher's sister, Kecia Robinson, was murdered in Cleveland. His mother, Linda, was deep in the Cleveland drug scene during Fletcher's teenage years, though she righted herself to again become a guiding force for him until her death two years ago of a heart attack at 53.
His brother, Edward Robinson, has been incarcerated since 1999 on charges of drug trafficking, and is expected to be freed next month.
Fletcher, asked how any player with such personal and physical odds against him is able to survive in the NFL for more than a decade, thought for a minute, and repeated the words, "11 years."
"Nobody knows the plans the Lord has for you," he finally said. "They looked at me as a long shot. But I looked at myself as a sure shot."
