Adopted by his cousin, offered a scholarship by a school he’d never heard of and plucked by the Ravens, Williams found his way

The Ravens locker room, even on the quietest of days, is a churning, bubbling storm of music and voices. Most of the time, it feels as chaotic as a busy train station, as crowded and lively as a food market. A high-stakes game of bean bag toss in the middle of the room fuels perpetual shouting and arguing. Terrell Suggs’ frequently leaves movies blaring on the Blu-ray player set up in his locker, but he ignores the dialogue to rib his teammates, or the media, with his booming voice. Terrence Cody has music thumping from his iPod speakers so frequently, his teammates dubbed the area surrounding his locker as “Patterson Park,” and Cody responded by writing those words on a piece of athletic tape, then slapping it on the wall above his locker.

But in a corner of the room, in an area near the showers that is partially removed from the daily clamor of professional football, you can typically find cornerback Cary Williams sitting by himself, tapping away on his white iPhone. He’s a happy person, but he doesn’t smile a lot. It’s taken him years to feel comfortable talking about himself. He isn’t shy, but he doesn’t open up to many people. The scars of his childhood healed a long time ago, but the memory of how he got them still occasionally lingers.

If you ask the right questions, though, Williams will tell you his life story. You have to lean in close to hear it, because the chaos of an NFL locker room doesn’t pause, or quiet down, and offer up an environment that welcomes deep reflection. When Williams talks about how he arrived at this moment, how he became a starting cornerback on a playoff team that has a real chance to make it to the Super Bowl, it’s not just a story about an late-round draft pick from a Division II school who defied the odds and became an unlikely NFL success story. It’s also a gesture of faith. It requires a measure of vulnerability.

Because it’s the most important story Cary Williams can ever tell.

‘They’re not existing anymore’

Liberty City — the Miami neighborhood where Williams was born and raised — is about as far removed from the glitz and glamour of South Beach as you can possible get. It’s reputation as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the entire United States is well earned. Violent crime was the backdrop for much of Williams’ childhood. Poverty and drugs were almost impossible to escape. People would argue in the streets, someone would get killed, a funeral would be held, and a few days later, the cycle would repeat itself. Gunshots were sprinkled throughout the soundtrack of Williams’ childhood.

“People would get shot a lot,” Williams said. “A lot of my teammates growing up, they’re not existing anymore. They’re dead.”

Williams’ father, Cary Williams Sr., was determined to do whatever it would take to keep his two sons alive, to keep them from joining a gang, but the burden was enormous. Both father and son agree on this much, even to this day. Williams’ mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when her two sons were very young, and Williams estimates he and his younger brother Ronald lived with her for no more than 10 months throughout their lives. They would visit her every time she checked into a mental hospital, always hoping and praying that this time, someone would help her get better. Those prayers were never answered.

“Every time she’d have one of her spells, she’d go into the mental asylum,” Williams said. “That was the majority of my life. We’d go to different mental asylums and see her when she wasn’t in the best condition. I felt like I didn’t have a mother to a degree, because we didn’t have a mother-son relationship. I loved her, but we were never able to sit down and have a real conversation, a heart-to-heart. It hurts me every single day when I think about it.”

Cary Williams Sr. will admit, right up front, that he struggled to keep his head above water as a single father. He was confused, overwhelmed, and occasionally angry. He was too proud, he says now, to ask for help. At some point, he told himself the most important thing he could do for his sons was keep them away from drugs, and keep them alive. He had been a high school track star growing up in Dade County in the 1970s, and Cary and his brother never tired of hearing the neighborhood urban legend about the day their father outran a car in a street race. Sports, Williams Sr. believed, provided the only chance he had.

“I wasn’t a perfect parent, but I always put my sons first,” Williams said. “Cary was such a competitive kid, even when he was 5-years old. I always had him play with kids older than him because you could just look at him and see he had that fire burning inside him.”

Sports were structured. Sports were simple. Williams and his brother were enrolled in the local football league at an early age, and he has distinct memories of pretending to be Ray Lewis during a game with his friends. The economic realities of Williams’ life were far more complicated. They frequently had to move because they fell behind on rent. At one point, Williams remembers his father having to ride a bike everywhere because he no longer had a car. He and Ronald were expected to make their own dinners because there was never a time in Williams’ childhood that he can recall when his father wasn’t working at least two jobs. He worked as a security guard for various hotels, and, for a time, at the Miami Herald newspaper. There were plenty of nights when Williams Sr. would beg his bosses at the hotel’s front desk to let his two boys sleep in an empty room while he worked, because otherwise, he’d have to leave them alone at home.

“He always kept us in the latest sports gear, and we’d shop at thrift stores for clothes,” Williams said. “He would say ‘Nothing is going to be given to us, so you can’t take anything for granted.’ That helped me in sports and it helped me in life. He was a good guy, and he wasn’t stupid. It just so happened that it was too hard for him to do those things for us.”

Hurt, but saved

Williams can’t remember exactly when his father started abusing him and his brother. The passage of time has sanded down the rough edges of his memories. His father had always been a stern disciplinarian, someone who struggled to control his temper. But at some point, roughly around the time Williams was 9 years old and Ronald was 7, the hitting started to get worse. Williams, a A-student who was enrolled in several gifted programs, started to lash out. He felt like he didn’t have anyone he could talk to. His grades plummeted, and he no longer wanted to play sports. One night, he and his brother decided they were going to run away. They spent the night sleeping in a park on one of the coldest nights of the year in Florida.

“My dad wasn’t a bad person,” Williams said. “He just handled things the wrong way.”

It might have continued, but a middle school counselor noticed a series of bruises and cuts on 10-year-old Ronald Williams’ body. He was taken to the hospital to be examined, and one of the cuts was so deep you could see the white part of the muscle. When the hospital examined Cary Williams, there was blood soaking through his clothes from a cut on his leg.

Williams isn’t sure what would have happened if his cousin, Calvin Golson, hadn’t been clued into the situation by someone in the Florida Department of Children and Families. Golson was 25 at he time, and he had never been particularly close with Cary and Ronald because of the age difference. But he was an ordained minister, and he had a job as a social worker. He felt like God had called upon him to offer Cary and Ronald safe harbor. He immediately petitioned a judge to grant him full custody.

“The decision was never tough,” Golson said. “I tried not to cry when I saw how beat up they were. They were keeping it hidden. … Those kids were being beaten to death.”

A father gone astray

Cary Williams Sr. has a different view of the way everything unfolded, as you might expect. He admits he got physical with his sons. He admits he made a lot of mistakes as a parent. He does not believe they should have been taken away from him.

“I’m still highly angry,” Williams Sr. says. “I still get highly upset sometimes. I felt like, because I was a single father and I wasn’t out there running drugs, that the system would help me. I feel like the system let me down. I wasn’t asking for much. They had shelter. They had clothes on their back. I was trying to look at the big picture. Looking at only one aspect of the situation instead of seeing what was going on in my neighborhood made me feel like I was an animal. There are people out there using drugs, using women, and you come take my kids? I’m not proud of the way I had to discipline those boys. If I did it over again, I would do things differently. But I did what I had to do to keep them above ground.”

It would be a tidy end to this story if Williams’ life was suddenly perfect after Golson and his wife became his adoptive parents. But hurt and anger would linger for years in Williams’ life.

“The transition was hard,” Williams said. “There was a time when I was a rebel, when I didn’t want to listen to Calvin because he wasn’t my father. I thank God they never wavered, that they always felt like we were special kids. They could have given us back to the government, and they didn’t. They cared enough to take us into their own home, even though they were a newlywed couple who had been together for all of three months. They stuck with us and were patient, and they didn’t have to do that.”

Family counseling, and weekly treks to the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sundays, helped heal some of Williams’ emotional wounds. Whatever rage remained, he tried to channel into sports.

“He was such a good baseball player, people started calling him Junior after Ken Griffey Jr.,” Golson said. “When he was 13 years old, he ended up playing on a baseball team for 16-year-olds. People were always saying ‘This kid is going to go to the majors!’ He was a great basketball player as well, but he always told people he was going to play in the NFL.”

Williams’ skills as a cornerback were obvious when he got to high school. He grew to be 6-foot-1, and he was fast and could change directions gracefully, but attending three different high schools in three years scared away a lot of recruiters. After his junior year, he was caught using a false address so he could attend a better public school in Coral Gables, and was told he needed to return to Chaminade High School Hollywood, Fla. Even then, it was a long trip.

“I had to take a bus at 5:30 a.m. just to catch another bus so I could go get to school,” he said.

His senior year, no one would throw the ball to his side of the field, and he had only one interception. Florida State defensive coordinator Chuck Amato told Golson he really wanted to offer Williams a scholarship, but he’d just received a commitment from Antonio Cromartie, and didn’t have another that he could offer. Williams said his father, who he had intermittent contact with, talked him out of accepting a scholarship offer to N.C. State, convinced the University of Miami would eventually show interest. Miami never made an offer.

Williams picked Fordham University from the offers that remained, but it was never a great fit. Frustration and bitterness from his childhood bubbled up every time a coach barked at him. It opened up old scars he thought had faded. He was clearly one of the most talented players on the team, but he got in a petty argument during practice one day with an assistant coach over why he had to take his helmet off on a freezing cold day. Fordham suspended him, and at the end of the year decided his attitude was so toxic they booted him off the team.

“It was a good learning experience for me because I had to learn to shut my mouth, regardless of how I felt about the situation,” Williams said. “I was one of those guys who didn’t care about anyone’s feelings but my own, and it was just a selfish attitude.”

Football exile

He moved home to Florida, and moved back in with the Golsons. He struggled with depression, and eventually took a job working for DirectTV. He worked with the company for nearly a year, taking calls in the call center or going out in the field and installing satellite dishes. Williams might be the only cornerback in the NFL who has not only installed the league’s Sunday Ticket package at a customer’s house, but also appeared on that same satellite dish years later.

“It was a humbling experience,” Williams said. “It was not one of the best situations for me. I wasn’t in the best shape mentally. It was a hard transition. I knew in my heart of hearts, the negative stuff wasn’t me. That wasn’t a part of my personality I wanted to show. I knew I had to change. I was a hurt kid, trying to deal with a lot of stuff. But I knew it wasn’t my destiny to be sitting at home working for DirectTV.”

Washburn, a tiny Division II school in Topeka, Kansas, threw him a lifeline. They called and offered him a scholarship on the condition that he redshirt his first year, and he accepted it sight unseen. He knew it was the last chance he was going get to be the football player he wanted to be. He spent two years dominating the competition, intercepting virtually “every pass” thrown his way (he picked off 11 in two years). He left some of that pent-up anger on the football field in Topeka.

Kansas University invited him to attend their Pro Day, and after a strong showing, the Tennessee Titans took a flyer on him in the seventh round with the 229th pick. He spent a season and a half in the NFL’s version of limbo, bouncing back and forth between the practice squad and the active roster. The Ravens director of pro personnel, Vince Newsome, had always been a fan of Williams size and speed, and he figured at the very least, Williams could be a good special teams player. The Ravens snatched him off the Titans practice squad, intrigued by the prospect of molding him further.

“I didn’t even know the Ravens were interested in me,” Williams said. “In Tennessee, I had been off the squad, on the squad, then back off, and for them to come in and give me an opportunity was crazy. The day they called, my phone was off. I went to pick it up and saw I had like 12 missed calls.”

Letting it go

He kept his head down in Baltimore, worked hard in the weight room and in practice. John Harbaugh told a reporter how impressed he was with how willing Williams was to take advice from the coaches. Williams called Calvin and Trina constantly to remind them how thankful he was that they came into his life, and to check in their two biological kids, Calvin Jr. and Aryana, who he considered his younger siblings. He didn’t share his story with very many people, but one day, he was sitting by himself in the locker room when Ray Lewis walked across the locker room and sat down next to him. They had never really exchanged more than a few pleasantries. Williams kept thinking about the times when he was a kid, pretending to be Ray in the park with his friends.

Lewis wanted Williams to know something. He too had been physically abused as a child. By his step father. And there was a time when he was hurt and angry, but putting his faith in God helped go away.

“I told him ‘All that pain you have, build up your pain to be a better man,’” Lewis said. “Don’t build up your pain and let your frustrations come out. That’s the testimony. I didn’t have the blueprint. My dad didn’t give it to me. The only blueprint I had was God’s work. That’s the lesson you can always carry with you.”

During the lockout, Williams traveled to Georgia to speak with his father. They’ve kept in touch over the years, but their relationship has been understandably complicated. At one point, earlier in his life, Williams had told his father he hated him, and, justified as those words may have been, he wanted to forgive.

“I had to forgive him for what he did,” Williams said. “I had to forgive myself too.”

He let go of the last bit of anger still inside him. A few months later, he got dressed in the locker room of M&T Bank Stadium and prepared to play the Pittsburgh Steelers as a starting NFL cornerback. When he ran onto the field, Calvin and Trina swelled with pride. They fought back tears as they watched their son — who came to them as a broken boy, so many years ago.

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Cary Williams

Born Dec. 23, 1984 in Hollywood, Fla.

6-foot-1, 182 pounds

3rd year as a pro

Selected in the 7th round (229 overall) of the 2008 draft by the Tennessee Titans

Signed from the Titans’ practice squad Nov. 24, 2009

Started his first NFL game shortly after joining the Ravens and played in five games total, making eight tackles

Appeared in 13 games and made six tackles in 2010

Started every game this season, making 78 tackles and defending 18 passes

The ritual of signing autographs still feels a tad surreal to Webb, even though this is his third year in the NFL. Even if you could get him to concede he has quietly become one of the best young cornerbacks in the NFL — a statement that makes him smile, but one he’s reluctant to make on his own — there is a part of him that still feels like the skinny, shy kid who grew up in tiny Opelika, Ala., dreaming of big things.

Because of this, Webb does not merely sign autographs. He lingers for a moment with each person, unconcerned the line is moving slowly. He always makes eye contact, especially with kids. He asks questions, poses for pictures and he gives out high-fives. For some professional athletes, signing autographs seems like a weary exercise, something to be done with your head down and with mechanical efficiency. But for Webb, it’s a constant reminder of life’s many blessings.

Fans will be expecting him to play well this Sunday against the Cleveland Browns, but Webb’s own expectations are even higher. He would like to be a great player, certainly, but along that journey, he’d also like to be known as someone who connected with his community.

“I know people aren’t just coming to get autographs; they want to meet you,” Webb said. “They get to keep the autograph to say, ‘OK, I met this guy. I know him.’ But if I’m their favorite player, I want them to have an actual moment to remember. Because I remember a lot of them. Some of the kids, I’ll even remember their names. I love kids, and I hate to see kids struggling. I hate seeing kids in need. So if I can do anything to positively influence their lives, if I can help them stay off the street, I’m down for it. That makes my day.”

A number of Ravens have charitable foundations and make appearances, but Webb is one of the youngest players to take on such an active role. This summer, he held a free football camp for 300 kids. In October, the Lardarius Webb Foundation hosted a charity bowling event to raise money for underprivileged families. At Thanksgiving, he helped teammate Ben Grubbs provide Thanksgiving dinner for those who couldn’t afford it. He’s hosting an American Idol-themed karaoke party this month to raise money for cancer research, and he and his teammates will take turns behind the microphone. He’s already nervous about singing in front of a big crowd, but he’s leaning toward doing his version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

“I’m hoping I have the nerve,” Webb said. “I’m going to be there, happy and joyful, either way. But I don’t know how much singing they’ll get out of me.”

Webb’s desire to connect with people, however, would feel like little more than a footnote with fans if he hadn’t blossomed into one of the best cornerbacks in football this year. Name a statistical category and he’s already left his mark. He leads the team with four interceptions; he’s third on the team in tackles with 55 (trailing only Ray Lewis and Jameel McClain); and he’s had a sack, a forced fumble and a defensive touchdown. In the Ravens’ Thanksgiving win over the San Francisco 49ers, he made one of the biggest plays of the game, making an interception just before halftime, never losing focus, even though receiver Braylon Edwards was yanking on his dreadlocks as he caught the ball. Barely a week goes by that one of Webb’s teammates doesn’t lobby for him to make the Pro Bowl.

“He’s already a great corner, but he’s on his way to being one of the best,” Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo said. “He’s a shy guy, so he doesn’t like to talk about himself. But every day he’s going to come to work and try to get better at something. When he has to make a tackle, boom, he’s going to make a tackle. When he needs to break up a pass, he’s going to go up and do it. He’s the kind of teammate you want to have, a guy who is always trying to get better. Being good isn’t good enough. He’s on his way to greatness.”

Even if Webb merely continues to play at his current level, he will still likely go down as one of the Ravens’ great draft-day steals.

Webb led the state of Alabama in interceptions as a high school senior, which led to a scholarship offer from Southern Mississippi. And his first two seasons there, he showed tremendous potential, finishing sixth on the team in tackles as a sophomore. But after his second season wrapped up, he was kicked off the team for “violating team rules,” and it left him with an uncertain football future.

“I always put it back on me,” Webb said, when asked about his time at Southern Miss. “I was around the wrong people. I didn’t make the best decisions for my life. I wasn’t used to being away from home, and it was too much partying with friends, all the women, drinking, whatever. I was thinking college was supposed to be fun, but there is a lot more to it than fun.”

With just two weeks to pick a new school before the spring semester began, Webb chose Nicholls State, a Football Championship Subdivision school in Louisiana, because the Colonels’ defensive coordinator, Steve Ellis, vowed to mentor him.

“He’s the guy who influenced my whole turnaround,” Webb said. “He’s the one who gave me the confidence that I could still make it. You need somebody like that in your life, and sometimes I try to be that same guy to kids. I made it harder on myself. It was harder to make it to the NFL from a smaller school, and it taught me if I wanted it bad enough, I had to step my game up.”

Webb was so gifted, Nicholls State wasn’t exactly sure where to play him. The first game he played for the Colonels, he intercepted three passes and ran one back for a touchdown. Nicholls State used him at cornerback, running back, quarterback and as a returner. Eventually the coaches stuck him at safety and asked him to do his best impression of Ed Reed. He became the only player in NCAA Division I history to receive the conference awards of Offensive Player of the Week, Defensive Player of the Week and Special Teams Player of the Week in a single season.

Even though he ran the fastest 40-yard dash of any defensive back at the scouting combine, plenty of teams wondered whether he could made the transition to strictly playing corner in the NFL. Even the Ravens were a little concerned, but they couldn’t resist snagging him in the third round when he was still there with the 88th pick in the 2009 draft.

“I think part of the reason he was a college safety down at Nicholls is because he was their best player,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “So they just put him in the middle of the field and let him run all over. … He was sideline to sideline and pretty much made every tackle for them. So he was fast enough to play corner.”

It took awhile, though, for Webb to answer how good his technique could be. Even he had occasional moments of doubt. “I had never truly been out on that island before,” Webb said.

A promising rookie year was cut short when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament in a game against the Chicago Bears. After eight months of rehabilitation, the Ravens needed him to give the team whatever he could, even though he knew he wasn’t quite 100 percent. Webb acknowledges now that he was a little frustrated that fans — and if he’s being honest, the team — didn’t show him a bit more patience in 2010.

“I feel like, whether it was the Ravens or the fans, they kind of forgot that I was coming off eight months of rehab,” Webb said. “They rushed me back on the field. But if they put you in, you’ve got to play. It’s a business. People want to say that I’m playing good ball now like it’s a surprise, well, it’s not a surprise to me. You knew I was good. I knew I was good. But I was coming off an ACL. What did you expect? … Some of the same people who are telling me how great I am, and how they going to vote me into the Pro Bowl, are the same people who were cussing me out on Twitter after I gave up the third-and-16 against the Pittsburgh Steelers [in the AFC divisional playoffs].”

A lot of that frustration fueled Webb’s desire to become a great player this season. When the Ravens used their first-round pick on cornerback Jimmy Smith, and then re-signed Chris Carr to a four-year, $14 million contract, Webb didn’t blink. He was convinced he was going to make an impact somewhere, even if all he did was return punts and kicks. But when Smith and Carr were injured at the start of the year, the Ravens had to lean on him. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, for Webb and for the team.

“I just think he’s a guy that takes the craft of playing corner very seriously,” Harbaugh said. “He pays attention to detail and really tries to be a technician. There are still a lot of things he’ll tell you he could do better. But when we talk to opposing coaches, they have a lot of respect for the way he plays.”

Webb isn’t particularly interested in talking about his chances of making it to the Pro Bowl. He feels like his teammates respect him a ton, and for now, that’s enough. But every so often, when a little kid comes to his radio show and says he wants to take a picture with “the best corner in the NFL,” Webb finds himself unable to suppress a big smile.

It might not be true, at least not yet, but Webb likes the way it sounds

Now, a combination of muscle and mind working together allows Webb to react as quickly as he diagnoses plays.

“I was always nervous about whether I would be here after the injury,” he said.

The injury also went on to force the sixth-round pick out of Tulsa to miss the first two games of the season.

“That was real tough because coming out, you don’t want something like that to set you back,” Clay said.

But the Miami Dolphins stuck by him, as he has rebounded from the injury to play in the team’s past seven games, starting six of those contests.

In that time, the Dolphins have used Clay in various spots as a fullback/tight end hybrid or H-back. And he has produced with eight catches for 133 yards this season, which amounts to 16.6 yards per reception.

Clay is still going through a transition period, though.

“Just the speed of things and guys are pretty savvy with the way they hide coverages and things like that,” he said. “There is little stuff that I could get away with in college that I can’t get away with now.”

The Dolphins might need Clay to play an even bigger role Sunday against the Buffalo Bills, as starting tight end Anthony Fasano was limited in Wednesday’s practice with a right ankle injury, after missing Wednesday’s session.

If Fasano cannot play Sunday, Miami will call on Clay and Jeron Mastrud to fill in.

“I think they’re both ready to step up,” coach Tony Sparano said. “Charles played 49 plays the other day. That’s a lot of snaps. And the week before that he played 36 or 37 so he’s getting good game snaps right now, and Mastrud has played a lot of plays.”

By Christopher Smith

Nov 15, 2011

Mike Scifres and one of the NFL’s best punt teams face Chicago returner Devin Hester in one of the marquee special teams matchups of San Diego’s season.

By Brian Biggane

Nov. 11, 2011

Dolphin linebacker Kevin Burnett equates rookie tight end Charles Clay to a young offensive lineman so raw he hasn’t learned how to hold and get away with it.

“You just have to do it for one second, which is all you need,” Burnett said. “Once (Clay) learns the game, once he figures out how to use all his tools, he’ll go from being a good player to a great player.”

The Dolphins’ sixth-round pick out of Tulsa, Clay made his biggest splash in last week’s 31-3 rout of Kansas City, catching three passes, including back-to-back receptions of 21 and 22 yards on the second-quarter drive that gave Miami a 14-3 lead.

“He’s been maturing into his role,” said tight end Anthony Fasano, who capped that three-play drive with a 35-yard touchdown catch. “That position is a lot mentally, but he’s been feeling a lot more comfortable in it.”

The role that the 6-foot-3, 239-pound Clay has been assigned is complex. As an H-back, running back and tight end he’s lined up on the line, in the slot and in the backfield. It helps that he did pretty much the same thing in college.

“We moved him around, and in his junior and senior years he really developed into a complete player,” Tulsa coach Bill Blankenship said. “He’s a football player. He created a lot of matchup problems for us.”

A tailback at Central High School in his native Little Rock, Ark., Clay was used as a tight end at Tulsa “because we really didn’t have one on the team,” he said. He caught a career-high 69 passes for 1,024 yards and seven TDs as a freshman.

As his career progressed, his multi-purpose skills were a great help to his team but not so much to his pro prospects, as pro scouts continually questioned where he’d play at the next level.

“That was the toughest thing for him, not having a definitive role,” Blankenship said. “Most (NFL personnel types) wanted him to be either a tight end or fullback, but Charles is a hybrid guy. It limited some of his options in terms of how teams wanted to utilize him, but I kept telling myself the guy can play.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way,” Clay said. “(The versatility) helps more than it hurts.”

Maybe, but offensive coordinator Brian Daboll struggled to find a spot for him in the offense early on. He was targeted only once and didn’t have a catch in the first three games, and had only two catches in the first five.

A nifty one-handed grab for a 29-yard gain against Denver may have been a turning point. In the last three games he’s caught all five passes thrown his way and leads the team in average yards per catch at 18.4.

“You don’t see many tight ends leading their teams in that statistic,” Burnett said. “When you do, they’re great ones.”

Burnett, who often winds up covering Clay in practice, sees that kind of potential.

“Once he gets another year in the league, once he has a full year of lifting, running, catching, all that stuff, he’ll be so much better. Right now he’s just dangerous, because he doesn’t know how good he can be.”

Clay understands that he still needs to improve his blocking. Perhaps that’s why he got so excited when his downfield block took out the last defender on Reggie Bush’s 28-yard TD run last week.

“That was a huge play,” coach Tony Sparano said. “You make winner plays, and that was a winner play. He has (tight ends coach) Dan Johnson working with him, and he’s one of the best blocking tight ends I’ve been around. So he’s learning leverage, he’s learning footwork.

“If he ever figures that part of it out with some of the other things he does well you’ve got a pretty good player.”