It’s Marty Booker’s little joke on everyone, the ultimate contradiction. The easy-going, slow-talking kid from Jonesboro, La., makes a run at the Pro Bowl with speed no one knew he had and at a position where fast talking is the NFL norm. Booker’s real laugh, however, is the one he has on himself, the one that reminds him just how far he has come and just how close to the truth the doubters really were.
He is a survivor more than anything, the small-town star who no one but the college down the road really wanted; the small-college star who NFL scouts thought was lazy; the third-round draft pick who won a battle of attrition as much as anything else.
He can take satisfaction in it now that he sits second among NFC receivers in touchdowns with seven, third in receptions with 73 and ninth in receiving yards with 812. That with Curtis Conway and Bobby Engram falling short before him, he is the unlikely successor to Johnny Morris, just 20 catches shy of the single-season franchise record.
But Booker sees all of that as a product of the journey.
“He’s Louisiana through and through,” says former Bears receivers coach Mike Borich, who coached at Louisiana Tech when Booker played for rival Northeast Louisiana. “He goes about things in his own time, and time moves a little differently down there.”
The only son and youngest child of Vera, a secretary for the local junior high, and Calvin, a postal carrier, Booker, the school’s star quarterback, admitted he learned bad habits.
“In high school, Mondays was offensive day, Tuesdays was defensive day and Wednesdays, we split both. We didn’t have a backup quarterback, so I only practiced on Mondays,” Booker laughingly recalls.
“In sports anyway, I was definitely spoiled, and it just stuck with me after a while.”
In college–converted to receiver despite the fact he once threw a pass 74 yards in the air–the bad work habits continued in practice, routes were cut short in games and Booker thought his draft status suffered because of it.
At the NFL combine, there were enough flashes to convince the Bears that Booker was well worth a third-round pick, even though they had chosen D’Wayne Bates seven picks earlier. Now, Bears coaches and players alike compare Booker to former perennial All-Pro Sterling Sharpe.
“Dick [Jauron] fell in love with Marty at the combine,” says Borich. “He was the one who said he was going to be something special. Then in the first rookie camp, we had to go indoors and the photographers were [in the balcony] and Marty ran an out-route, the ball was thrown high, he planted, jumped and made a one-handed catch and the flash bulbs were just popping. That’s when we all said, `We got something here.'”
Of course, it helps to have the hands with a reputation all their own, hands that might appear normal if you were only glancing at Booker’s palms, but end at the tips of fingers that “are so long,” says Dez White, “it’s ridiculous. We’ll have to get together as a group and come up with a nickname for those things.”
Booker’s speed, on the other hand, is a strange thing. Clocked at 4.4 seconds in the 40 as a redshirt freshman, it shouldn’t have been a question. Yet even to this point, there are those who don’t consider him a prototypical deep threat.
“He’s a guy who, if he ran track, a lot of guys would beat him,” says Ed Zaunbrecher, offensive coordinator at Marshall and Booker’s head coach at Northeast Louisiana. “But because he’s so strong, his speed carries over to the field and he’s just as fast in pads, which a lot of guys aren’t.”
Bears receivers coach Todd Haley says Booker is as fast as he needs to be. “That’s been the best surprise to me,” says Haley. “When you see him running away from people, you think he’s going to get caught and that’s when he’s turned a 40-yard play into his couple 60-yard plays.”
Booker’s first NFL catch in his first pro start went for a 57-yard touchdown on a slip screen, one of two touchdowns and seven catches for 134 yards. But he only caught 19 passes his rookie year, time both he and Jauron thought he needed to get acclimated.
“Marty’s really got special abilities, but it takes a while to figure it out in the NFL,” Jauron says. “It took him a year and a half to two years and also, we didn’t ask him to do it. Quite possibly if we had, he might have been the same. But it also might not have worked at all.”
Booker guesses it would have been the latter.
“It was really overwhelming at first,” he says of the NFL. “I’m from a small school and a small town, more laid back than most and it seemed to hurt me. I heard coaches say I was lazy, that I wasn’t taking the game seriously. I didn’t think that was the case, but you have to play the game sometimes, so I tried to be more upbeat and go along with the plan.”
Still, he admits that with Conway, Engram and Marcus Robinson ahead of him, it was easy to slip back to his old ways. “I felt like those guys would take the pressure off me, that they could get it done,” says Booker. “I was kind of sitting back in the wagon.”
“At the time,” says Borich, “I tried to be as realistic as I could and I told him, `Marty, you have to realize, they will get another guy. They’re not going to wait around for you.’ But more than what I said, it was just a credit to him figuring it out.”
Booker spent every available hour in the off-season catching passes from quarterback Jim Miller, working hard this season to improve his blocking skills and developing a well-earned reputation for making the tough catch and taking the blow.
“There’s a little more pit bull in him than he shows,” says Haley. “I told him from the start if it was up to him sometimes, he’d be sitting under the tree in the shade. But he’s pushed himself hard and it’s great to be around a guy that’s quiet and just goes about his business.”
As for getting beaten up on a weekly basis, the 5-foot-11-inch, 215-pounder says he enjoys the ultimate contradiction as marquee receiver and human punching bag.
“I take a lot of pride in that,” says Booker. “It’s a violent game, I’m going to get hit. I like doing the dirty work for my team. This is probably the first time in my career I’ve been getting beat up every Sunday.”
One of the season’s signature hits was the one Tampa Bay safety John Lynch put on Booker on his 28-yard touchdown reception, the first of Booker’s three on the day three weeks ago. “When you get rocked like I did by Lynch, it hurts but after you check all your body parts and make sure everything is intact and see that you scored a touchdown, it doesn’t seem to hurt as much,” says Booker. “And you get a lot of respect from your teammates.”
Booker’s fellow receivers joke about him being anti-social and avoiding group get-togethers. But Booker, who would rather stay home with his fiance, Tamala Carter, is still thought of as the group’s big brother, thrust into a position of leadership when Robinson was injured.
“Todd [Haley] will be running up and down the sideline yelling at somebody and we’ll just go hide behind Book,” says White.
“He’s the guy,” says David Terrell, “who when things go wrong, you look at him and he gives you confidence and tells you it’s going to be OK.”
It was Booker who first put an arm around Terrell as the rookie left the field following his first dropped pass last Sunday. “I’m not a real vocal leader,” says Booker, “but we are a young group and sometimes you have to pull guys aside and say, `Look, everybody is going to say we couldn’t get it done when our top guy went down. We have to buckle down. We know we can play, we just have to go out and do it.'”
Now his teammates and coaches are pushing him for the Pro Bowl.
“Half the battle is just making it 16 games and the guys left standing at the end are the guys who everyone will recognize,” Haley says. “If Marty keeps up this pace and continues to work and push and fight, he may be one of the last ones standing.”
