Between The Lines, Aleaga Speaks Up

In a sport, and at a position, where flamboyance is standard operating procedure, University of Washington inside linebacker Ink Aleaga is as quiet as a midnight thought.

Then again, what sound does a shark make?

“He’s mysterious,” defensive end Deke Devers said. “He comes to practice. Then he goes.”

Aleaga and free safety Lawyer Milloy are Washington’s two best defenders, but this might be the last piece you’ll read on Aleaga, a man named Ink who gets no ink. And it’s not because he won’t be an all-conference stud this year for the Huskies.

It’s because he is what’s known in the media biz as a tough interview.

He’s plenty bright and polite, no macho posturer cultivating a tough-guy distance. Aleaga is merely a serious, reserved junior who has all the stage he needs 11 Saturdays in the fall.

“He’s a delight to work with, but he’s very quiet,” said linebackers’ coach Dick Baird. “So much so that I was threatened by it for a while because I didn’t get great feedback. It took a while for him to believe in me.”

The silence has its limits, usually defined by the 120-yard stripe of a sideline, which Aleaga makes into a threshold between his worlds.

“Sometimes it seems like he’s not even there. But when he’s on the field, it’s another story,” defensive end Jason Chorak said. “He’s calling the plays, checking off, moving people around. Everybody hears him then.”

Arizona State, Saturday’s season-opening opponent at Husky Stadium, heard him last year: Fifteen tackles, a recovered fumble, an interception returned for a touchdown. For that he was Pac-10 player of the week. He went on to become a second-team all-league pick.

This season, the 6-foot-2, 225-pound Hawaiian is a preseason candidate for the Butkus Award as the nation’s top linebacker. He also is the last guy to believe the hype.

“I find myself making the same mistakes over and over,” he said at the end of two-a-day drills last week. “I’m trying to be more consistent.”

That statement amounts to a filibuster for Aleaga. As it is with the politicians who master such oratory, his facts are in dispute.

“He has such a good feel for what we’re doing,” Baird said, “that when I just walk over to him, he says, ‘Yeah, I know.’ That’s nice. He’s self-correcting.”“His fundamentals are so sound. I don’t have to yell and scream. I just have to tell him something once.”Aleaga is not a mistake-maker. He’s an offense-breaker.

“The best thing he has is his instinct to find the ball,” head coach Jim Lambright said. “He does things you can’t coach. He takes the shortest angles to the ball. He’s a step ahead of most players, because he recognizes the play earlier.

“It’s as if he almost has another sense of what’s happening.”

The sense comes from a purity of concentration that blesses only top athletes. Aleaga lets almost nothing get in the way of his tasks, from opposing blockers to college-sports administrators.

Popular speculation last year said that the weight of the Pac-10’s two-year sanctions and bowl ban eroded desire and will among the Huskies. As usual, nobody asked Aleaga.

“To tell you the truth, I guess I didn’t really care about the sanctions,” he said. My attitude was still the same.”

From a Husky promotional standpoint, it also might help if Aleaga were a little more expressive. But after teammate Devers tested him during two-a-days, the prospects are faint.

In the training room after practice, Devers scooped a cup of ice water and ambushed Aleaga, figuring to provoke his buddy out of solitude.

“It was really cold,” Devers said. “But he flinched a second, then just sat there and smiled at me.”

Devers discovered you can’t ice the Big Chill. However, Arizona State might discover Saturday, again, that Ink Aleaga can be heated up.