Ryan Clady was able to share his special moment with about 150 of his favorite loved ones.
His younger brother and two younger sisters were there. Aunts, uncles, cousins, both sets of grandparents, dad. Even 93-year-old great-grandmother Elmia was at Clady’s draft party Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, sharing in the joy that erupted the second NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced the Broncos had selected Clady with the No. 12 pick.
Everybody was there but Mom.
“I would give billions of dollars to have her here right now,” said Ross Clady, Ryan’s dad.
Sharon Ross was 53 when she died suddenly of a heart attack in 2000. Ross and Sharon had been married 20 years, but nevermind his heartache. Ryan was 13, the oldest of four children.
“You lose your mom at such a young age, it’s probably the most horrible thing that could happen,” Ross said from the LAX hotel that’s about a 50-minute drive from where he raised his family in Rialto, Calif. “It was very devastating. But we hung together. He just kind of dove into football. I think that became his sanctuary.”
Ryan Clady was not playing football when Mom died. He had tried to play in the Pop Warner Leagues, but those darn weight restrictions had become a burden no child should ever endure.
“Every week I had to cut weight,” Clady said. “I finally had enough of that.”
So at 10, Ryan quit playing football. He liked the game. There just wasn’t a place for such a big kid to play. The plan was always to start playing again once Ryan got to Eisenhower High School.
There was no plan for Mom dying when Ryan was in the eighth grade. Dad and his relatives decided it was best if his daughters lived with their grandma and aunt closer to Los Angeles. The boys, Ryan and Chris, stayed with him outside the city.
“My big brother took care of me,” Chris said. “I just tried to follow in his footsteps.”
Ryan admits it took him a while to become a positive influence.
“When Mom died, it was such a shock,” he said. “I was kind of quiet and reserved before she died, and then I was even quieter after that. I hardly spoke to anybody. It took me, I would say, at least two years to get over it. I was sad, I guess, is how you would put it.”
Mom’s passing wasn’t the reason Clady started playing football. But football helped him move on. He played defensive end in high school, but said he only had two scholarships to play college, and both programs thought he projected as an offensive tackle. He picked Boise State, which was then coached by Dan Hawkins, who is now in charge of the Colorado Buffaloes’ football team.
“We just thought he was a big guy who had great feet,” Hawkins said Saturday in a conference call with the Denver media.
The kid too big to play Pop Warner is now 6-foot-6, 309. Yet, all people seem to talk about are his feet.
“The thing that impresses you is his feet,” Broncos coach Mike Shanahan said after making Clady the team’s highest drafted offensive lineman since Chris Hinton in 1983. “I haven’t been around a tackle that has that type of feet. He’s got the longest arms in the draft.”
Long arms, quick feet, big body, superior agility. Not a bad combination for stepping right in to play in the Broncos’ highly regarded zone-blocking system. And Clady will step in the second he steps into Broncos headquarters today for his introductory news conference.
“He will start at left offensive tackle the day he comes in,” Shanahan said.
Say what? Shanahan, whose idea of relaxation is shooting a round of golf in less than 2 1/2 hours, proclaiming a rookie to start before his first training camp? Believe it. Ryan Harris, the Broncos’ third-round pick in last year’s draft, had been penciled in at left tackle until Clady was selected. Harris will now compete with Erik Pears and Chris Kuper at right tackle.
If Clady is to consistently protect quarterback Jay Cutler from the likes of Shawne Merriman, he will have to get stronger, especially after straining a pectoral muscle while bench pressing during the scouting combine in late February. But in the Broncos’ blocking system, strength is secondary to mobility.
“I played a lot of basketball when I was young and growing up, and that may have helped me out,” Clady said.
The Broncos also considered two other left tackles — Vanderbilt’s Chris Williams and Virginia’s Branden Albert — with their first-round pick. But superior athleticism made Clady the easy choice.
The Broncos thought so highly of Clady, they figured he would have been taken by the Kansas City Chiefs at No. 5. And the Chiefs probably would have, had they not traded star defensive end Jared Allen last week.
Once open to trading down, the Broncos received calls from teams willing to deal. But with Clady there, the Broncos lost interest in moving. They wanted the big kid throwing the party at an LAX hotel.
“I knew what their mama would have wanted and out of all of them, she wanted Ryan to make some kind of contribution,” Ross Clady said. “She didn’t want him to be a deadbeat. She wanted him to be a doctor, lawyer, governor, something. Newscaster, anything to make some kind of contribution.”
Here in Denver, the plan is for Sharon Clady’s oldest son to contribute immediately.
Mike Klis: 303-954-1055 or mklis@denverpost.com
