Trezelle Jenkins is BACK baby!

[Hammock Parties]

Star is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/22...minder-of.html

They stop and look as he passes, a giant walking past the tables in this suburban Detroit restaurant.

Trezelle Jenkins is still 6 feet 7 and more than 300 pounds, and for someone this big, it’s not easy to hide from the past. Strangers and coworkers track him with questions. Why was the NFL a bad fit after the Chiefs drafted him with the 31st pick in 1995? How did he become the picture of poor drafts and misjudged scouting?

“It’s a test,” Jenkins says, sitting at a table in a sunlit corner. “One guy said, ‘Yeah, man, I read you were a bust.’ He knows I can’t touch him.”

Now 16 years after that draft, Jenkins represents what no first-round draft pick wants to become. The anatomy of a draft bust is often complicated, but many high picks fall short of what they could be. The Chiefs’ top choice this year, wide receiver Jon Baldwin, has yet to play, more than nine weeks after breaking his hand in a fight with teammate Thomas Jones. It’s too early to label Baldwin a bust, but Jenkins’ path reveals that a No. 1 pick encounters many threats — some of his own doing, some circumstantial — while chasing his potential.

Back then, Jenkins was seen as the Chiefs’ left tackle of the future. He was big and strong, with a pedigree from the University of Michigan. But he also was seen as a long-term project who’d require patience and a delicate coaching touch. Instead, his career wilted for several reasons — a stubborn approach by the team, endless hazing by teammates, and Jenkins’ flickering commitment to a sport that requires dedication and passion.

“Sometimes there’s a disconnect,” former Chiefs coach Marty Schottenheimer says, “and that disconnect produces errant play, and all of a sudden errant play produces a lack of confidence. And it’s a spiral — a downward spiral.”

Jenkins played in nine games in a little more than two seasons before the Chiefs gave up on him. After the 1997 season, he was out of the league, one NFL start to his name. He’s 38 now, with a master’s degree that helped lead to a recent promotion at a manufacturing plant in northern Ohio.

But 16 years later, it’s what Jenkins didn’t do that follows him.

“People don’t let you forget,” he says.

• • •

Lynn Stiles sat in a film room in the spring of 1995, watching the big Michigan tackle. Jenkins was raw, but Stiles, the Chiefs’ vice president of player personnel, marveled not at what the big man was but what he could be.

“He had the size; he had the athleticism,” Stiles says now. “… You saw the athletic talent.”

Jenkins was a redshirt junior who’d left college early. He wasn’t an all-American or all-Big Ten after his final season in Ann Arbor, and his technique and footwork were flawed. But the Chiefs were mesmerized by the idea of drafting a lineman who might develop into one of the NFL’s best blockers — particularly with Art Shell, the Hall of Fame former lineman, as the team’s line coach.

“He still had some growing to do,” Stiles says.

The NFL’s draft advisory board, which projects a player’s draft value, predicted Jenkins would be taken between the third and seventh rounds. Not only that, but the Chiefs didn’t need an offensive tackle. The incumbent, John Alt, turned 33 in May 1995, and he wouldn’t retire for two more seasons.

Still, the team couldn’t shake the idea of plucking a potential superstar at a value, focusing on Jenkins and Texas’ Blake Brockermeyer. After Carolina drafted Brockermeyer at No. 29 overall, the Chiefs had their man.

“The decision,” Stiles says, “was made for us.”

• • •

A few days after signing his contract, which included a $500,000 bonus, Jenkins was conflicted. He was to report to Kansas City for his first practice the same day as Michigan’s graduation. That was too important to skip, so he attended both.

Insignificant as it seemed, it was an early signal that Jenkins didn’t possess a tireless dedication to football.

“I still loved to play the game,” he would say years later. “Coaches want a guy who lives, breathes, drinks football. But I had other interests.”

Once he joined the team, he was social and confident, although that would soon begin to erode. Jenkins says the problems began when Schottenheimer, who had a history of bringing youngsters along slowly, told him he wouldn’t play much, if at all, as a rookie. Maybe not in his second season, either. Alt was the Chiefs’ starting left tackle, and that wouldn’t immediately change.

Jenkins just accepted it, which was a red flag.

“He could’ve pushed harder to take that spot,” Alt says. “He was a little bit too resigned to the fact that I was going to be there.”

Jenkins admitted later that his love for football faded after he reached the NFL. It became more difficult to remain committed, he says, with no promise that he’d play. His hunger for the game began to dissolve.

“How are you going to hold hunger for two years?” he says.

• • •

Months passed, and Jenkins remained inactive on Sundays. Teammates began teasing the big rookie, expressing impatience at his slow development.

Derrick Thomas, the late Chiefs linebacker, branded Jenkins with a nickname: “Stealth.” It was nod to the Stealth bomber, a high-dollar military project whose unveiling was delayed for decades — and never fully reached its potential.

“I understood what it meant: You’re a work in progress,” Jenkins says.

For a while, Jenkins laughed it off. Then more teammates joined in.

“A lot of people really believed that if we got him pissed off,” says Danan Hughes, a former Chiefs wide receiver, “we’re going to see the real first-round pick.”

Instead, Jenkins kept ignoring the hazing. Even now, he remembers it as “good fun.”

During a practice in December 1995, Jenkins and defensive lineman Neil Smith were competing, and frustration boiled over. Smith shoved Jenkins, who chased after Smith and pushed him to the ground. Smith stood and told Jenkins that he’d injured his neck.

A few days later, the team traveled to Oakland. In the lobby of the team’s hotel, Smith approached Jenkins, flanked by an aunt, and told him his neck still hurt. What came next was a blur; teammates remember that Jenkins and Smith were soon fighting in that lobby. Teammates had to separate them. Someone had finally gotten to Jenkins. The problem was that it was happening here — not on the field.

It wasn’t Jenkins’ last scuffle with teammates. The hazing — and Jenkins’ reaction to it — was an indicator that the Chiefs’ own “Stealth” project might soon be discontinued.

“The end,” Hughes remembers thinking after the fights, “is near.”

• • •

He was called in during a September day in 1997. Jenkins had been inactive in 25 games during his first two seasons.

“The body of work,” Schottenheimer says now, “was not what we anticipated.”

After two games in ’97, Jenkins was released. Schottenheimer says the problem was clear.

“A lack of confidence,” he says, adding that the team gave Jenkins more than enough time to prove himself.

Jenkins joined the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings after leaving Kansas City but never appeared in another NFL game. He was drafted by the XFL in 2000 but never played.

He mostly stayed home, living near Detroit but ignoring invitations to join his former Michigan teammates because he was embarrassed by his brief NFL career.

In 2005, he decided to pursue a master’s in business, hoping to return to his alma mater for graduate school. Knowing there would be painful questions waiting, he hadn’t returned to Ann Arbor in years. He enrolled anyway.

“I’m ready to turn that page and move on,” Jenkins says.

Nearly a decade after he had left to enter the draft, Jenkins played in a golf tournament with other former players. Some had been successful NFL players; others never had the chance. Instead of facing the questions Jenkins had dreaded, the men just reminisced.

“They didn’t care about all that other stuff,” he says. “Everybody there had a story.”

• • •

They gather near a far wall in the Chiefs locker room, two of the team’s first-round picks laughing on a Thursday afternoon.

Derrick Johnson and Tyson Jackson are among seven top picks on the Chiefs’ roster. They say it’s a rewarding but difficult designation; expectations are fierce and occasionally unrealistic, and patience is limited.

“It’s hard being a first-rounder,” says Derrick Johnson, a linebacker. “There’s a saying: ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ ”

Six of the top picks have responded with varying degrees of success. Some have met or surpassed the draft-day hype. Others have fallen short.

One has more questions to answer than the rest, and on this day, he sits alone in front of his locker. Headphones are on his temples, and a cellphone is in his lap. Baldwin says he tries not to think about the expectations he began facing when the Chiefs selected him at No. 26 overall this past April.

He says his belief is simple.

“Wherever you’re drafted,” he says, “you’ve just got to go as hard as you can go.”

In time, he says, he’ll answer any remaining questions.

• • •

Jenkins sits at the table and thinks about the past. He says he spent years considering how things might have been different if he had dedicated himself more fully to the game, or if he had been selected later in the draft, or if Schottenheimer had given him a chance to play.

In the end, he says, his failure was his own.

“When it was my turn to turn it on,” he says, “I didn’t turn it on enough.”

Now, he says, he focuses on his life’s next chapter, as a working man. In some ways, he says, it’s good that his NFL career ended while he was still young. He opened three franchises of a fried chicken chain, which he later sold, and worked as a supervisor at Chrysler and General Mills. He was recently promoted to assistant plant manager at Johnson Controls, which produces batteries. Jenkins says his annual salary is in the six figures.

It’s different from the life he once knew, but time has taught him to appreciate it.

“You’ve never done a nine-to-five thing. You almost think it’s dirty,” he says.

A moment later, he continues.

“No, it’s not dirty,” he says. “It’s life. It’s real.”

Jenkins says he understands how many people view him, particularly in Kansas City, where he’s still known as little more than a draft bust. No, he couldn’t live up to the expectations he faced as a first-round pick, but he says he wouldn’t trade an experience that, whether he likes it or not, has defined a part of his life that isn’t easy to forget.

“I was disappointed in myself,” he says. “You always have dreams; you have aspirations. What could you have done differently? Was it your fault; was it other circumstances that contributed to it and stuff? I go through a lot of different things in my head.”

He goes on.

“Football,” he says, “it didn’t work out for me professionally. But what are you going to do, cry? You’ve got to move on.”