Oklahoma's Bradford turning into an emerging force

09.10.2007 03:00 Sport and Travel - Source: USA Today

Before last month, 19-year-old Sam Bradford had never set foot in a college game. But "from Day 1, he commanded everybody's respect," OU lineman Trent Williams says. "If he sees your eyes wandering off, he may raise his voice a little bit and then give you eye contact to let you know that he wants you to be looking right at him."

At 6-5, the redshirt freshman from Oklahoma City is the tallest quarterback to start for the Sooners. Bradford has a big arm, sound mechanics, loads of desirable physical tools.

More than that, however, he has nerve.

He has cool.

He has more poise than OU's coaches say they have seen in any quarterback at a similar stage in his career.

"He's making plays out there. But he's also being smart with the football. He's not putting the team in bad situations, and that's something you typically don't see from a redshirt freshman," says quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel, a former Heisman Trophy runner-up who led the Sooners to their last national championship in 2000. "Shoot, he's a lot better player than I was."

He and Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops are limiting media access to Bradford, who is available to speak only after games. Heupel says that's to keep too much from being thrown at him at one time.

Not that Bradford has given anyone reason to worry.

His first game out, he threw for three touchdowns and engineered an Oklahoma rout of North Texas. In his second, he tossed five TD passes against Miami (Fla.).

More telling have been his first two Big 12 Conference starts, the first an upset loss at Colorado in which Bradford threw a couple of interceptions. That ate up all the margin for error in the Sooners' pursuit of a league championship and national title. Coming next was Texas and an introduction to one of the sport's fiercest, highest-stakes rivalries.

A composed Bradford was virtually flawless. At one point in Saturday's game in Dallas, he had 12 consecutive completions. He passed for three TDs, the last a 35-yarder with less than 11 minutes to play and Texas defender Deon Beasley bearing down on his blind side. He didn't throw an interception.

Oklahoma won 28-21, improving to 5-1 and moving up five spots to a tie for No. 5 in the USA TODAY Coaches' Poll.

Bradford, who entered the game atop the NCAA's pass-efficiency rankings, stayed there with a 71% completion rate, 18 touchdowns and only four interceptions in six games. His overall 187 rating is a point higher than the season-long, major-college record set by Texas' Colt Brennan a year ago.

There is no other freshman — and just one sophomore, Florida's Tim Tebow— among the 18 next highest-rated quarterbacks.

Heritage stands out

That's enough to have placed Bradford in the lasting embrace of most of the state of Oklahoma. The Texas game, alone, would be.

But his appearance on one of sport's biggest stages, and his performance, are especially resonant in a state in which some 8% of the population is Native American and increasingly aware that Bradford has registered Cherokee roots.

According to J.R. Cook, executive director of United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY), Bradford is believed to be the first quarterback with Native American roots to start for a major program since Sonny Sixkiller was setting records at Washington in the early '70s.

"Anyplace you go, you talk a little football," says Chad "Corntassel" Smith, principal chief of the Tahlequah, Okla.-based Cherokee Nation for the past eight years. "You talk OU and how they're back. And being led by a Cherokee."

Cook's Oklahoma City-based agency, designed "to foster the spiritual, mental, physical and social development" of young American Indians and Alaska Natives, started featuring Bradford on its website when he was named the Sooners' starter in August. A new Sports Page tracks him and other Native American athletes, such as Joba Chamberlain of the New York Yankees and Jacoby Ellsbury of the Boston Red Sox.

Cook reached out to Bradford's dad, former OU offensive lineman Kent Bradford, and arranged a brief visit with the emerging young star after the Sooners' Sept. 8 win against Miami.

"There is an old Native saying that may be appropriate: 'The honor of one is the honor of all,' " says Cook, a 1960 OU graduate who is also Cherokee. "Sam's accomplishments give Native Americans pride. He is someone we can cheer for."

At the same time, he says, "I would attribute some of Sam's quiet poise and confident leadership to his Indian heritage."

'We're just normal people'

There is some delicacy in glorifying the connection. Bradford's father is one-eighth Native American descent; his great-grandmother, Susie Walkingstick, was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. Bradford, whose mother, Martha, is white, is one-sixteenth. But until OU began publicizing his lineage, it wasn't a story line in his life.

"I knew I was part Cherokee. My dad had told me that," Bradford says. "But as far as actually talking about it (in depth), no. Nobody really brought it up."

Says his dad, who played with the Sooners from 1975-78 under Barry Switzer and now, at 51, is an Oklahoma City insurance agent: "It is our heritage. Yeah, we're proud of it. But we haven't ever been active in it or anything. I don't know how that topic came up.

"It's not a problem. I'm comfortable with it. But I'm not the one who was claiming Indian heritage. … We're, you know, just normal people. We're not Indian, white, anything."

Beyond Susie Walkingstick's name, the elder Bradford says his family — Sam is an only child — knows little about her.

When the Oklahoma City Indian Clinic, which serves Native Americans in central Oklahoma, honors Bradford at its annual powwow next spring, he says it'll be the first Native American function he has attended.

"I'm definitely proud of my heritage. If it affects someone in a positive way, then I'm all for it," he says. Still, when asked to specify his ethnicity, Bradford says, "I just put 'white' or 'Caucasian.' "

That's in contrast to Chamberlain, a Winnebago Indian from Nebraska, and Ellsbury, a Navajo and member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. Both are steeped in their ancestry.

The Native American populace draws little distinction. The 2000 census counted 4.1 million American Indians nationwide, but there are precious few Chamberlains, Ellsburys and Bradfords making it big in sports.

It's enough for Bradford to play and acknowledge his lineage.

"I really didn't start to embrace my native culture until I had gotten out of college and started my career. Then, you realize, 'I do have a culture. There's something there I can embrace,' " says Harlan McKosato, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma who is host and producer of Native America Calling, a national radio talk show originating from Albuquerque.

"Sam, I think he's going to stay focused on football. I think he's going to stay focused on college. And when he gets done, that'll be the time when he can start to look at what the culture has to offer."

UNITY's Cook cautions: "It's important that we let Sam be Sam … not tug at him from every direction, say he has to do this or to do that. That will come in time."

Made for golf

Bradford's world always has been sports-centric. He played basketball at Putnam City North High School in Oklahoma City, averaging better than 18 points and 10 rebounds as a senior. He also played golf.

The highest pitch of excitement his father remembers hearing in his son's voice came nine years ago, when Bradford was 10 and phoning from the golf course. He'd just finished a round with his grandfather.

He had shot a hole-in-one.

"In the eighth, ninth grade, he was probably truly made for golf," Bradford's father says. "He'd play, go out and practice it on his own. It's a nice, calming sport."

By the time he was a high school senior, though, Bradford was all-state in football and ranked among the nation's top 20 prospects at quarterback.

Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Michigan and others courted him, but there was no question where he was headed once Oklahoma offered a scholarship.

Bradford redshirted, then won a three-man duel for OU's starting job in camp this fall. Junior Joey Halzle, now his backup, was the only one of the candidates who had thrown a college pass, and the position was widely considered the defending Big 12 champion's biggest question mark .

A silly notion today.

Other than limiting media access, Stoops and Heupel have made little concession to their quarterback's youth. Bradford has been given virtually all of the Sooners' offensive playbook to execute.

OU also gives him plenty of offensive help, from big-play receivers Malcolm Kelly and Juaquin Iglesias to talented rushers in Allen Patrick, DeMarco Murray and Chris Brown to one of the biggest offensive lines in school history — averaging 6-5, 3221/2 pounds. The Sooners rank 11th in total offense and third in scoring in the NCAA's Division I-A, generating 482.2 yards and 49.7 points a game.

Get past No. 11 Missouri at home Saturday and they won't run into an opponent currently ranked the rest of the regular season. The Big 12's Dec. 1 championship game beckons, and beyond that college football's top-tier Bowl Championship Series and perhaps a fourth berth in eight years in its national championship game.

"You try to etch out the dream story," says Smith, in his third term as chief of the Cherokee Nation, who already has seen his play out.

"To have this team led by a quarterback who's a Cherokee is the stuff dreams are made of."

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