The Best Player I Played With: A player's perspective, Chukky Okobi
Player perspective series: Joe Holland | Chris Clopton | Ryan Kerrigan | Travis Dorsch
"Catching Up" series ($): Akin Ayodele | Matt Light | Bernard Pollard | Brandon Villarreal
GoldandBlack.com's 20-year player draft ticker: Nos. 1-51
GoldandBlack.com staff is making its decisions about Purdue's best players since 1997 with a 20-year player draft that'll run through July.
In conjunction with the draft, we also will check in with former Boilermakers to get their perspectives on the best players they played with during their careers. They offer up behind-the-scenes looks at intense work ethics, how players got the most out of their teammates and even reflect on funny stories during their days together.
Next up lineman Chukky Okobi, who played alongside some of the program's best players from 1997-2000, as told to Stacy Clardie:
"The simplest person, obviously, is Drew (Brees). Everybody always thinks about the heroics on the field, but that’s not necessarily the person I know. The first time I met Drew, he was just in high school on his visit. In his first year, he didn’t start. I started. You just get to know people as people. There’s a lot of personality traits that are the reasons why Drew has so much success. It’s not just because he’s just a LeBron James-type athlete. That’s not it. There’s more to it than people understand. That’s why forever and always, he’ll always be my favorite football player. That’s it. From any era, at any level, it’s his approach to life is the reason why he has success. If you want to win at football, learn how to win period. And that’s Drew’s thing. First of all, the most competitive person I’ve ever met in my life. I’m talking about a hand of poker, if he loses, he’s ready to explode. He does not like to lose. That’s the big thing. That’s a start. But in order to avoid that feeling of failure or loss, no matter what it is, he goes above and beyond in terms of preparation. Even as I say that, the things I think about are academics moreso than football. This is a guy who’s in the Academic All-America Hall of Fame. Anything we were doing as a team, anything that people did, he’s always competing. He had to have the best grades. And he did have the best grades all the years he was there. This is a guy who’d sit and do his homework until 10, 11 at night and then go watch film. It’s personality traits. It’s not just, ‘Oh, he has a good arm’ or ‘he throws all these passes,’ yeah, but that’s all the result of his personality and the way he approaches it. That’s what a lot of people don’t know about him, specifically.
"The other person who sticks out right off the bat would be Rosevelt (Colvin). He had a very similar approach to things in that he is a person who is hypercritical of himself and constantly tried to improve his own personal skill set as opposed to just running plays or running the defense. He was a guy who took a lot of pride in his own individual performance. I was a college football fan before I got to Purdue, and I remember seeing Orlando Pace on TV and how great he was — he’s in the Hall of Fame now — and Rosevelt’s the only guy I’ve ever seen beat him. And that was when Rosevelt was a sophomore. That was the only time I’d ever seen anyone beat Orlando Pace in my life, and that was pretty impressive. (laughs)
"You look at Coach (Joe) Tiller’s first year in ’97, our O-line had some returning guys like Mark Fischer and Brian Nicely, but we weren’t the most experienced bunch in the world. You’re going against Rosevelt and Willie Fells, and these guys should just be professional trash talkers. I’m an 18-year-old redshirt freshman and just going against him every day, and not so much just the physicality of playing football and us having to block those guys but the approach that he took to his game, you’re either submit to it or you’re going to fire back (and) you’re going to start to build up your own self image as a football player. I really believe he helped do that for a lot of guys. He made them have to grow up on the field to deal with him. (laughs) I think for me, he was a big influence from Day 1. He probably didn’t realize it, but, to me, he was kind of like, ‘Well, if we can stop him, then we can stop them.’ He had that kind of presence. Whatever happens in practice is what always happens in a game (for him). The way he approached practice — I remember we used to have practice and meetings on Sundays after the game with Coach Tiller, and Rosevelt was in there watching the film 9 a.m. every Sunday morning. We won a lot of games that year, so you know how college is, after games, people are out chasing girls, getting drunk. Not Rosevelt. He was in that film room at 9 a.m.
"Theses are the things that I remember. I remember all the games we played, big plays people made, but when I think about individuals, these are the types of things that pop into my head, the way they approached their business and the way they approached life. That’s the thing I think guys can learn the most in college is not just from your coaches and your instructors but from the people around you. Just observe how they are carry themselves, how they handle their business, the people that are finding success and start to emulate some of their characteristics. We all have different physical strength levels, different speeds, but everyone can try to reach their potential. It doesn’t matter how tall, how short, how skinny. It doesn’t matter. That’s what those two guys specifically illustrated better than anything I’ve ever seen is if you take responsibility for yourself as an individual, you can find out what you’re really capable of as an individual. Super Bowl rings and Drew has like every NFL passing record there is and, to me, it’s not a surprise. If he’s just being himself, then yeah, that sounds about right to me.
"There’s a lot of other guys, too. Matt Light is a guy who is one of my best friends from college and his approach was very different than those other two, but it was equally effective. What I learned from Matt Light more than anything else is don’t take yourself too serious. People stress out so much about football and who you’re playing against and watching film and all this stuff. I’ll never forget this: 1999, we were juniors, our fourth year and we getting ready to play No. 2 Penn State and they LaVar Arrington and Courtney Brown and all those guys. Light’s left tackle and is going against Courtney Brown, and (Brown is) one of the top three college football players I’ve ever seen. Professional, I don’t know. But as a college player, he was frightening. Light was sleeping in the meeting, watching this film. He’s asleep. So I tapped him and was like, ‘Hey, you’re not going to watch this? We’re playing against Penn State.’ I will never forget what he said — and I swear this runs through my head at least once a day — he said, ‘I’m not worried about what he’s going to do. Let him worry about what I’m going to do.’ And he went back to sleep.
"We lost the game by six. We got down to the, I think, 5-yard line and they stopped us. We watched the film the next day, and (Light) destroyed (Brown). This is a guy who was the next season the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, and Light beat him up pretty good. What I got from that is he focused on being the best he could be, knowing who he was playing against. It was like, 'Let me not start thinking about is he going to do this, is he going to do that and let me make sure I bring my A game and do my best.' Games like that are why (Light) got drafted as high as he did and why he had so much success going forward.
"Those are the guys that stick out the most right off the bat."
Membership Info: Sign up for GoldandBlack.com now | Why join? | Questions?
Follow GoldandBlack.com: Twitter | Facebook
More: Gold and Black Illustrated/Gold and Black Express | Subscribe to our podcast
Copyright, Boilers, Inc. 2017. All Rights Reserved. Reproducing or using editorial or graphical content, in whole or in part, without permission, is strictly prohibited.