Padecky: Scooby Wright gets the message from Cleveland

In the romantic version, the version you dream of as 6-year-old, the news comes with trumpets tooting and a bullhorn announcement and a noise ruckus that sounds like someone landed on the moon. And why not? You're a rookie and just found out you made the NFL. For a kid with a dream, this is his moon landing.

Scooby Wright got the news on a hand-held device. Sort of.

At 4 p.m. Ohio time on Saturday, Sept. 3, each NFL team had to send the league its 53-man roster it would take into the regular season. At 3:32 p.m. Wright's cellphone buzzed. The former Cardinal Newman star was mystified at what he saw.

It was the Cleveland Browns sending Wright Monday's practice schedule.

“Dad, what does this mean?” Wright asked his father, Phil. With his father, mother Annette and girl friend Paige McMahan, the foursome were in a car, having just left Beachwood Place, a suburban Cleveland shopping mall.

You'd think, if an NFL team decided you were good enough to play 16 regular season games for it, you might get a coach or a scout or a general manager or even the ballboy to make a call. Tooting trumpets would be a bit over the top.

So if the Browns were going to release Wright, why did they send him the next week's practice schedule? But if they were going to keep him, might they have added just one little teeny tiny sentence at the beginning? Something like “You made the Browns.” To save time, they didn't even have to say “Congratulations.”

A few minutes later, Annette went to NFL.com and saw her son's name on Cleveland's roster.

“Nobody called me,” Wright said. “It just shows how much a business pro football is.”

A few minutes later, as if Wright needed a reminder, he received a call from his agent, Drew Rosenhaus.

“Don't get too excited,” Rosenhaus said. “A lot can change in the next 24 hours.”

Nothing did but by that time the 6-year-old with the kid's dream now was a fully operational 22-year-old man, his rosy pink glasses discarded along with words like “shucks” and “golleee” and any temptation to dance the jig.

“But I did have my first beer in three months,” Wright said.

With The Biggest News of his young lifetime delivered not even in a whisper, Wright found himself thinking of the just-ended training camp, having watched the ever-changing landscape in front of him, a stark tableau of players here and gone, smiles followed by long faces, dreams possible and then dreams dashed.

“It was a real eye-opener,” said Wright of all the players who came and went from the Browns during the preseason. “You'd see a guy one day, then the next day he's gone and there's another guy in his place. And the next day he's gone. I'd sit in the lobby and watch all this.”

An NFL training camp is not conducted to make a player comfortable. Its very existence promotes anxiety. Unless the player is an established star or starter, a head on a swivel is the order of the day.

Every second, every movement, every word is judged. Even if you can bench press a Porsche or chase down a deer, you won't make to the next morning if you can't handle the pressure. In that, Wright has a clear, simple way to handle it. Hit the throttle every play.

“I'm a gifted athlete,” Wright said, “but I'm not blessed to be one of those one-percenters. I have to run full speed on every play to be effective. There are other guys who don't have to run full speed on every play and still look good. You know what I mean?”

Or to put it another way …

“Imagine the best guy on a college team and he's that one percent who's here,” Wright said. “They're all here. That's why I had to treat every practice like a game day.”

That intensity showed, and Wright is the first to admit it was as much of a reason as his talent as to why he made the Browns.

“Scooby always plays with a chip on his shoulder,” Browns inside linebacker coach Johnny Holland told the Akron Beacon-Journal after a June mini-camp. “Scooby has something you want in a player. He has heart. He's a lunch pail guy. We like those kind of guys. He's going to have a bright future.”

That was in June. When the preseason came around, the Browns didn't play him to those compliments - by his estimate, Wright only played 20 snaps in the first three preseason games. Their intent was unclear. Did they think Wright was a project they thought needed to be developed, hiding him and putting him on a practice squad once he cleared waivers? Did he simply not impress? Did someone else rise from nowhere? Were coaches playing with different defense combinations? The answers were given.

In the fourth and last preseason game, against Chicago, Wright played the entire game at inside linebacker. He had a sack, and stuffed a Bears running back from the 1 on a goal-line stand.

“I always text Scooby before every game he plays,” said his father. “I told him this (Chicago) is the bowl game of your life. Just go out and have fun.”

That Chicago game was the nudge, the talent, the Browns wanted to see, to feel. They made him what he told his teacher in first grade: “When I grow up I want to be an NFL player.” He doesn't, as his nature, walk around now like he owns the place. Even if he did own the place. As someone once said of him, he's Scooby on the field, raising hell. Off the field he's Phillip, polite, respectful, opening doors for some, pulling out chairs for others.

So what he encountered three days after he made the roster came with great surprise.

Wright was walking through the team's facility. As a security guard was passing Wright, he said off-handedly, “Just living the dream, huh?”

Wright blinked in shock.

“It (compliment) took me aback.”

That compliment carried a simple message. Scooby Wright is an NFL player. He is not a wanna be, a could be, maybe one day. He is an NFL player. Sure, for the moment, he is on special teams. He'll take it. He'll grab it. And he'll reach more. Why wouldn't he? It's all he knows.

To contact Bob Padecky email him at bobpadecky@gmail.com.