Born to hit, smile

Brandon Graham loves to hit people. But he does it with a smile.

"That's my personality, I just like to smile. That don't mean I ain't going to get the job done," the Eagles' top draft pick said Friday, a day after the Birds traded up to take him with the 13th pick in the NFL Draft.

The speedy pass rusher hopes quarterbacks see his glee soon. "I'll hit somebody and smile right over them and let them know I'm coming back," he said.

Graham, 22, wasn't hitting Friday, but he still bore a look of joy, teeth flashing between a trim goatee, his eyes shining under the brim of a white Eagles cap.

He had obvious reasons to be happy. Graham's selection Thursday night was a landmark step for a Detroit native who played much of his high school football on a mostly dirt playground alongside I-75, within sight of the Lions' Ford Field. When it got dark, parents kept practices going by turning on their car lights.

Now, he is set to make millions to pound quarterbacks on one of the biggest stages in sports. Graham, however, barely made it past his first year playing football. The game seemed too rough for him.

This was when Graham was 7, growing up on Detroit's east side with his sister, Brittany, about one year his junior, and their mother, Tasha, who worked at Chrysler helping build axles for cars.

Tasha demanded discipline from her children, saying there were "a lot of traps" where they grew up.

He was a good kid but hyper. He always wanted to race his relatives or the neighborhood kids or try to learn backflips. He would do his schoolwork, but once it was finished, his rambunctious nature took over.

"He was a little wild boy," Tasha Graham said.

She spoke to Brandon's father, Darrick Walton, who suggested football as a way to put Graham's energy to good use and instill discipline.

But at age 7, Graham wasn't nearly as fond of hitting as he is today. While running the ball, Graham said, he got crushed by a 10-year-old. He hated it and promptly quit.

"My daddy was mad at me," Graham recalled Friday. Walton took him back the next year. This time, Graham stuck with the game, with far different results. The story is now part of family lore.

By the time he got to Crockett Technical High School, Graham was dishing out punishment.

"He really started hitting guys hard. I used to feel sorry for them," his mother said.

In school, though, Deborah Hurst, then Crockett's assistant principal, remembers a levelheaded student.

"He's one of those kids, you take him right to your heart," said Hurst, now the school's principal. And he had "that 1,000-watt smile," she added.

His coach, Rod Oden, said Graham was a smart player and a leader. He volunteered to play offensive line when the team was hit by injuries. He led warm-ups when Oden was late. On the field, he sometimes outthought the coach, rearranging plays to get out of bad calls.

On conditioning days, the team jogged three-quarters of a mile to Ford Field as a reminder of the excellence they were working for, Oden said.

The linebacker graduated with a 3.5 grade point average and a scholarship to Michigan.

At first, he would go home from college nearly every weekend for home cooking. His suits were ill-fitting, hanging off of his body, and his room, well, "you would not want to go in there," Tasha Graham said.

But soon, Graham began to mature on and off the field.

As a sophomore, he said he realized the importance of fitness and began slimming down from 300 pounds to 260, around the weight he expects to play at in the NFL.

Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez remembers Graham, before games, sitting near the locker-room door, looking "like a puppy dog," eager to go out to play.

When Michigan coaches asked him to play special teams, he obliged, blocking two punts his senior year.

"He said, 'Is there any other special teams you want me to do coach?' " Rodriguez said.

Tasha Graham said her son also grew up as a man. He stopped coming home every weekend. He bought his own groceries and started cooking for himself. His suits began to fit well, and his clothes, well, "I won't say they're all folded, but most of them are put away," she said.

He still comes home for a good meal - salmon croquettes and homemade biscuits. And Friday, as he visited Philadelphia, he said he must have called his mother more than 10 times.

"I wish she could have been out here with me," he said.

On stage in the auditorium at the Eagles' NovaCare Complex, Graham, wearing a striped navy blue suit, flashed his smile as he fielded reporters' questions. He said his motivation comes from "fighting for a cause bigger than me."

Hitting people, he said, relieves stress. He wants to be "somebody you can always expect is going to bring the 'boom' to somebody."

Later, he posed for photographs wearing a midnight green Eagles jersey, No. 1 on the chest and back. He wore it over a light-blue shirt and blue tie. On his cuff, his initials, "BLG" were embroidered in a fancy script.

A reporter reminded him of a scheduling coincidence: the Eagles' second game of the season, Sept. 19, is in Detroit. That week, Graham will play on a field that, from the right angle, he might have seen in the distance while he spent afternoons on the dirt patches outside Crockett.

Graham said he has already heard from loads of friends and family who plan to be there. And he smiled.