This may not encourage the masses who long for someone to commit sanctioned battery inside the Georgia Dome. But once upon a time, they called the Falcons new designated hit man “Cotton Candy” because little Keanu Neal was as soft as spun sugar.
Heaven knows Neal as a youngster had many of the essentials for a future career in football.
“He was an angry little kid,” big brother Clint Hart said. “When he was a baby, he was very feisty — biting, temper tantrums.”
And a childhood spent in tiny Webster, Fla. — a map speck located somewhere in the palmetto and pines between Ocala and Tampa — did not offer an extensive list of distractions or alternatives.
“There is literally nothing to do in Webster,” said Neal, the Florida safety who the Falcons made their No. 1 draft pick Thursday night.
But after a brief pause, he did think of one thing. “There’s a flea market that you can go to on Mondays,” he said.
So the kids would spend long hours in the sultry summer playing a game of their own invention, calling it Pick-’Em-Up-and-Bust-’Em. The rules were primitive: Toss a football in the air, somebody catches it and everyone else chases down the foolish ball carrier and sets upon him like hounds on a rabbit. Think rugby meets PBS nature programming
“No one wins. It’s just a long, long game,” Neal said.
Still once Neal took all this experience to the Pop Warner field, it did not seem to translate well. “I always stood around the play. I didn’t like contact,” he said. Thus came the Cotton Candy slur, utilized by coaches, and even family members, as a motivational poke with a sharp stick.
It must have worked. Neal got angry. Then he started hitting people. Then he discovered he liked hitting people and not getting in trouble for it. Soon enough, nobody was calling him Cotton Candy any more.
To his coach at South Sumter County High School, Neal was a prodigy, playing on the varsity when he was just a ninth-grader and leaving a lot of satisfied smiles in his wake. “He never wants to let anybody down,” Sumter County coach Inman Sherman once told a Florida writer. “He fights to be successful at everything he does.”
By the time Neal was in 11th grade, his older brother was certain there was another NFL player in the family. Hart (who goes by their mother’s maiden name) had made it to the league in the most round-about way. A one-time community-college baseball player, he worked his way through every obscure pro league — indoor and out, in the U.S. and overseas — before catching on as a safety first with Philadelphia and then, for six seasons, with San Diego. His experience told him his brother, eight years his junior, was equipped for the NFL life.
Big brother had his suspicions the day he came to Tampa Bay to play the Bucs, and he waved young Neal down to the field level seats for a pregame chat.
“I saw in his eyes, he was so lit up,” Hart remembered. “He was so close to that field, and he saw that he wanted to do that and be a part of it.”
At Florida, recruited there when Falcons coach Dan Quinn was still the Gators’ defensive coordinator, Neal was a three-year fixture in the secondary after Quinn left for the NFL.
When a communal “OOOOHHH” erupted from the stands of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, long-time Gainesville Sun columnist Pat Dooley said he didn’t have to look up from his keyboard. He knew Neal had made another molar-rearranging hit. Dooley would class Neal as among the hardest-hitting Gators he had ever witnessed.
“The kid is lethal,” Florida receiver Ahmad Fulwood once proclaimed.
Such bad intentions — although it should be noted that the hard-hitting Neal never drew a targeting penalty in college — were irresistible to the Falcons.
They would use their 17th pick in a draft that must produce at least three starters, per the command of their antsy owner, on this instrument of violence. At his previous stop in Seattle, Quinn had himself a safety, Kam Chancellor, around whom the fortunes of his defense revolved. He recognized the same potential in Neal.
In Chicago, NFL draft central this year, a family celebrated this turn of events that was unforeseen just weeks ago (the NFL draft advisory panel had told the Florida junior that he was a likely second-rounder). Neal’s father, Clinton, who works at a sawmill in Florida, and mother Kathy, an elementary-school custodian, looked on as their boy was fitted with the yoke of so many Falcon hopes.
Also included in the family gathering were Neal’s three brothers, one of them the man who had planted all the possibilities now bearing fruit, the one whose first professional team was some lower-rung arena outfit called the Tallahassee Thunder.
“The Man Upstairs said, ‘I’m going to give you that (first-round) experience through your little brother,” Hart said.
“Now I had the opportunity to see what it was like to be in the green room because I never would have if I hadn’t been Keanu’s big brother.”
“A reach” some observers would call the pick, an unwise use of a top-20 pick on a player who might have been available significantly later.
Not a critique that impressed Neal’s college coach.
“That is the farthest thing from the truth,” Florida’s Jim McElwain said. “Our phones were ringing off the hook from a couple different clubs very late in the process. If it wasn’t (the Falcons) taking him, there were other people right in that same boat.”
“The value of a skilled secondary player is high because of the personnel groups you see a lot of these days — having that ability to play in the secondary, but still having the ability to fill inside the box. Football people know that value and the direction that (the game is) going,” McElwain said.
A reach? Neal shrugs.
“Everyone has an opinion,” he said Friday. “I don’t look too deep into it. I know what I can do. I’ll let my play speak for itself.”
In a way, he senses the criticism the same way he does the perfect hit, which is to say not at all. “You don’t feel it,” he said. “I call it a sweet spot. That’s a part of the shoulder pads that when you hit ’em with it, it’s like you feel it but you don’t feel it, if that makes sense.”
Make enough of those kind of surreal plays, and they don’t call you Cotton Candy or “a reach” anymore.
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