Big Man, Even Bigger Potential Wedderburn Appears Ready To Fill Vacancy For Seahawks

The guy is a mountain of a young man, which works out OK, since it takes decent size to get W-E-D-D-E-R-B-U-R-N on the back of your jersey.

The name goes the distance, from shoulder pad to shoulder pad, without abbreviation, without a tightening up or down-sizing of the lettering.

At 6-foot-5 and 340 pounds, Floyd Wedderburn has the kind of back that could double as a message center.

At times, despite his impressive size, the Seattle Seahawks’ new right guard looks like an untried second-year player who has never started, which is exactly what he is.

In better moments, however, he looms like a next-generation athlete, a guard with the proportions of a tackle but the quickness to get outside, where he can blow up a cornerback.

That happened this week, with Wedderburn pulling and bulldozing a DB, with halfback Ricky Watters cutting close off the block into open space.

It’s then that Wedderburn serves notice that he’s ready.

As the Seahawks scramble to fill in backup offensive line slots - signing T.J. Washington off waivers from the Rams earlier in the week and bringing in veteran Jeff Dellenbach Thursday - the massive Wedderburn tries to soothe concerns over the Seahawks’ worrisome right side.

“Got to live up to it, right?” he says of the obvious upside potential he carries into Thursday morning’s practice.

“I have a lot more to look forward to this year.”

With more to play for, Wedderburn has knuckled down, absorbing this new role as a starter in a new spot. A tackle at Penn State, first on defense, then shifted to offense, Wedderburn was activated last year for only five games.

He appeared in none. From that to playing every down is a huge step, but Wedderburn has been making strides since he was 12.

That’s when his mother summoned her husband, who had stayed behind to work, and the rest of her family from Jamaica, to join her in Montreal, where for a half-dozen years she had tackled what Wedderburn calls “a lot of odd jobs here and there.”

She scraped together enough to re-unite the family.

The move from tropical Jamaica, to chilly Montreal took some getting used to.

Hockey, the national game, was relatively expensive, thus out of reach. Besides, Wedderburn said in his soft voice, “I couldn’t see myself getting up on those thin skates.”

There was a language - French - to pick up and finding new things to do. Wedderburn carried a little soccer background from Jamaica and found he could use it in the streets of his new home.

Two years later, the family moved to Upper Darby, Pa.

“I remember the beach, the sands and the coconuts,” Wedderburn said of Jamaica. And the grinding poverty.

“That was real tough,” he affirmed. “I wasn’t in poverty, but there were a lot of people who were.”

You don’t desert paradise. Wedderburn’s father, who stayed behind to work when Floyd’s mother, Pauline, went north, sought better times in colder climes.

“My mom came up 6-7 years before we did,” Wedderburn said. “She worked to get us up here. My dad stayed. It was easier for her to get up and go.”

Jamaica wasn’t exactly a dead-end. Canada is still a land of opportunity for waves of immigrants. “But when you come to a place like America,” Wedderburn said, “you see it’s wide-open. You can think about what you want to do. Like go to college.”

Playing football was something that he said people began to expect of him. Graduating from college was another challenge that apparently very few thought he could meet.

“Football in the streets was fun,” he said of his pre-freshman days. “I liked hitting people. But when I got into organized ball in school, I struggled. I didn’t know about practices all day, and the monkey rolls and all that stuff. I didn’t know what was going on.”

He didn’t even think about where it could take him or what it might allow him to do.

“It just happened,” Wedderburn said. “I started playing, got pretty good, and people started saying, `He’s going to college,”’ Penn State recruiters saw it that way, even if Wedderburn failed to muster enough out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to qualify for a scholarship under NCAA rules in force at the time.

Proposition 48 let Wedderburn attend Penn State, wait out his year’s probation and then accept an athletic scholarship. The understanding, he said, was that he’d not just show up to play, but that he’d learn to learn. He’d study and graduate.

Progress was slow.

“The first year, I was Prop 48,” he said. “The second year, I tore my leg up. I had it in my head that I was a pretty good player but I didn’t prove it from the get-go, know what I mean?”

The coaching staff at Penn State knew that with a little prodding, he could mean business.

“They are the reasons I did what I did,” Wedderburn said. “Joe Paterno is a tough guy but he stays on top of his players. I know a lot of people say they wouldn’t change anything - that they’d go to the same school or do this and that again.

“But I really would do it all the same way. They told me - they told my folks - that when I went up there, I was going to graduate.

“They stayed on top of me until I did.”

Another ex-Packer

When in doubt, go with what - and whom - you know. Mike Holmgren plucked another of his former Green Bay Packers out of inactivity this week, signing veteran offensive lineman Jeff Dellenbach, who can play all five interior line spots and work as the long snapper.

Asked what else Dellenbach can do for him, Holmgren said, “He allows me to sleep a little bit.”

Developing offensive linemen in sufficient quantities has apparently kept Holmgren up at night. “Jeff has been in the league a long time,” the coach explained. “I’m just glad he’s here. He’s a pretty good insurance policy for a lot of positions.”

Why was he out of football after starting 15 games last year at tackle for Philadelphia? “Because he’s probably older than I am,” Holmgren quipped. Close, but not quite. Dellenbach is 37, Holmgren 52.