10/6/2004 - Football
Kyle Eckel: A Philadelphia Story

Despite so much of what you've probably already read or heard, the comparisons between Kyle Eckel and Rocky Balboa can only go so far.

Perhaps, they've even gone too far.

"Everybody talks about it all the time, it's like beating a dead horse," says Eckel, the real-life Navy fullback who hails from the same streets as the fictional pug who punched his way from club brawler to heavyweight champion.

Sure, Eckel - like the character created by Sylvester Stallone - is very much a Philadelphia story.

And granted, he is quick to recall the scenes from the original and its many sequels when debating teammates about one's favorite movies.

But contrary to the mythical impression some might have, Eckel didn't become one of the nation's best fullbacks by gulping raw eggs from a glass, bounding up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art or bouncing off carcasses hanging in a neighborhood meat-packing plant.

"I don't think it's overdone," he says of the attention paid to his South Philly roots, "but some angles of it are, like the Rocky thing."

Besides, while Kyle can trace part of his heritage back to the Old Country shaped like a boot, he is less the 'Italian Stallion' and more a multi-ethnic Brahman Bull.

And as far as comparisons are concerned, between the on-field person and an on-screen persona, Eckel might best be linked to another best known simply by a single name. One who mostly inhabits a coffee shop, not a boxing ring.

"I like Kramer," says a chuckling Eckel, referring to the bumbling figure whose untidy life somehow makes perfect sense within each episode of the television sit-com 'Seinfeld'. "I think there's a deepness to Kramer. People laugh when he falls, but there's still a little bit more to the fall. It's not just falling, it's the way he does it, the way he makes his sounds."

Though admitting - albeit with a laugh - that he might be reading too much into the pratfalls of TV's Kramer, Eckel's on to something. That "deepness" made this man of mystery from a show about nothing a pop-culture phenomenon.

Just as the many layers of Eckels' personality have made him a cult hero - from the corridors of the Academy's Bancroft Hall to the intersection of 18th and Johnston Streets in Philadelphia.

After all, Midshipmen don't routinely chant his name by the thousands - filling the stadium air with a chorus of "Eck-el, Eck-el!" - simply because he's rushed for more than 2,000 yards and 20 touchdowns since his sophomore year.

Nor do they proudly hold up cardboard cut-outs bearing his black-and-white likeness - willing to conceal their own identities behind his - because Eckel appears on the watch list for the Doak Walker Award or has invitations to postseason all-star games.

They do so because of how he plays. Bruising up the middle and barreling into the secondary. Constantly driving his legs and, usually, taking a pile of defenders for a ride up field.

He appears blue collar to the core, even in his Navy whites. And despite a well-intended strong will, he is easy-going enough to be both the source and butt of laughter.

"He's a funny guy," says head coach Paul Johnson. "(Kyle's) just one of those guys who's fun to hang around, because you never know what he's going to do or say. I think he's a good-natured kid, just kind of naturally a leader in that way."

"With Kyle, there's so much you can say," fellow senior Frank Divis, one of Eckel's closest friends, says with a sigh. "He's just one of those guys who's not like anybody else. He's got his own personality and he's got to do everything his way. It's his view and no one else's view, but he's a great guy and a great leader on the field, just a fun guy to be around."

Who Eckel is, as person and player, was first influenced near the southern end of Broad Street, not far from Veteran's Stadium.

Not that he and his buddies spent much time on hand watching the Phillies or Eagles. Too often they were too busy with their own games.

"I was from Packer Park," Eckel says. "When I was younger we played football and basketball all the time and stick ball in the summer. Every neighborhood has one spot where all the kids would go. You know who's who by where he plays at."

By high school, though, Eckel moved away from South Philly, leaving for Haverford. Being both a child of the city and a kid from suburbia, Eckel is subjected to the good-natured jabs of doubting teammates when anything Philadelphia comes up in conversation.

"People ask me where I live and I say, 'Haverford, Pennsylvania,'" says Eckel, clarifying once and for all. "That's where I live, out in the suburbs. When they ask me where I'm from I say, 'Philadelphia.' I was born and raised in South Philly.

"People are still from where they were born and raised."

And Eckel is still loyal to his geographic roots.

"I like living where I live, it's a nice place," he says. "But I love where I'm from. I know my friends from (South Philly) would kill me if I said I wasn't from there."

Maybe it's the magnetism Johnson and Divis describe that allows Eckel to stay close to the neighborhood pals of his early youth as well as the friends he's made outside city limits.

One such relationship helped lead him to Annapolis. Eventually, if not directly.

It began in eighth grade, when Eckels' parents joined a new Catholic parish, St. Dennis, and he came to know the Persons - arguably, the first family of Navy football.

The three oldest Person brothers would all letter for and graduate from the Academy between 1996 and 2003. The youngest, Joe, would later follow their lead and is currently a sophomore.

Ironically, it was Fran - who was closest to Eckel - who strayed from family tradition to attend the University of South Carolina. But not before his friend from South Philly stepped in to sustain the pipeline from Episcopal to Annapolis.

Though there'd been calls from Penn State and a visit to his school by a West Virginia assistant a year earlier, Eckel was left with few college football choices as a high school senior.

"To be honest, my senior year I don't know what happened," he says. "It was getting down to where I was probably going to a prep school of some type."

Until the Person family - at Eckel's request - alerted a coach on Navy's staff that the so-called big-time recruiters were suddenly shying away from the all-city running back.

"Coach (Dale) Pehrson wasn't recruiting me (at the time)," recalls Eckel. "He thought I'd get looks from other schools."

Soon after Pehrson made contact, Eckel - at the urging of his parents, Richard and Maureen - was on his way to the Naval Academy Prep School in Newport, R.I.

"Whether I liked it or not wasn't really the issue," he says with a laugh. "I just stuck it out."

So too he stuck it out the next year as a plebe mired on the J.V. team, while the Mids' varsity program was spinning in disarray through a winless season and a coaching change.

And though Eckel remembers it being "difficult for anyone to make an impact" during a 2-10 sophomore campaign, he was emerging in Johnson's triple option offense. He started eight games and rushed for 510 yards before suffering a knee injury in early November.

Less than a year later, he was an Academy icon. Thanks in great part to an early-October appearance in Landover, Md.

"I think the Air Force game is when I really felt this could be one of those points when you turn the corner and do some really good things," Eckel says of his career-best 176-yard outing. "It wasn't even just me. I got the ball and you could see the line just pushing. We'd just keep pushing and pushing and pushing."

Most memorable was the late run that secured a 28-25 victory - Navy's first win over the Falcons in seven years. It's a play his coach remembers as well.

"Fourth and one, down on the (Air Force) four-yard line," says Johnson, re-creating the situation. " I said, 'We need a yard, can you get it?'"

"I was nervous as heck," says Eckel. "It was a timeout and you actually have time to catch your breath and realize the situation. I thought, 'Oh geez, fourth and one, this is big time.' The line did a great job, they saw the blitz coming and they blocked down. I just came right off the tackle and I don't think I got touched. It was the line's touchdown, really.

"At the end of (that) game, I just thought, 'Man I could play another game.' I just felt really good. Usually, after games I'm really tired. (But) with the emotion of the game, the fans and the fact that we'd beaten them for the first time in a long time, the fact that everyone was making such a big deal about it and the way the team played, it felt great. You didn't want it to end."

Really, it never did. The game ended, but the feeling lingered. Resonating like the sounds of those syllables - "Eck-el, Eck-el!" - shouted over and over that afternoon at FedEx Field.

What had started as the chant of a few at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium had now assumed a much larger life, being repeated abroad by the masses.

"The first time I heard (the crowd), it didn't sound like many people so I knew exactly who was doing it," says Eckel, who credits Matt McCutchan, an ex-teammate now at the University of Kentucky, for starting the chant. "Then after a while, it became pretty cool. It gets you pumped up."

The more he carried the ball, the louder the echoes. By season's end, they were being heard around the country.

In the 11th game - a home rout of Central Michigan - Eckel averaged an amazing 9.3 yards a carry. His 167 yards rushing made him just the seventh Midshipman to reach the 1,000-yard in a season and the first non-quarterback to do so since Napolean McCallum in 1985.

Two weeks later, he was on a frozen patch of grass close to his boyhood turf at Packer Park. Calling it "the coldest game I've ever played in," Eckel again broke out for 152 yards and two touchdowns in a 34-6 win over Army at Philly's Lincoln Financial Field.

Most vivid are those times he ran into the end zone and - as if his own Seinfeld episode - stepped into the 'Bizarro World'.

"When I scored my first touchdown, I gave the ball to the ref, looked up and I saw all my friends leaning over the railing." Eckel says, laughing. "It was like a Seinfeld moment. The next time was right down there again, and they were going crazy. Mentally, I broke away from the touchdown and it was like, 'Huh?'"

Meanwhile, completely unaware that the 240-pound package of speed and power was having flashbacks to his favorite sit-com, the press box scribes were voting Eckel the game's MVP.

He was supposed to receive his award at the annual Philadelphia Sports Writers Association Dinner in late January. Inside the Hilton in Cherry Hill, N.J., a seat for Eckel was reserved at the same table as Philadelphia Flyers executive Bobby Clarke - the one-time soul of hockey's Broad Street Bullies.

Unfortunately, the chair remained unoccupied, as a blizzard swept through the region and kept Eckel snowbound in Annapolis. In his place at the dais was Richard Eckel.

"Him receiving that award was perfect. It was meant to be because he's the biggest part of (my success)," Eckel says of his father. "I don't think I ever told him that, but it's important for him to know.

"When I wanted start playing football, he's the one who talked to my mom. My mom said, 'No way.' I was in third grade and I played soccer. During the summer, he would drive two hours from the (Jersey) Shore back to Philly for baseball tournaments. I'm sure he liked it, but still it was a great thing he did for me. That's why I am where I am."

Where Eckel is today is at another crossroads in his career. Here he is on the verge of joining the top five rushing leaders in Academy history while trying to help Navy extend its best start in a quarter century with its first win over Notre Dame since 1963.

At the same time, he can give his boys back in Philly something else to cheer about, his shipmates something else to shout about and his teammates something else to talk about.

They're all part of the universe that surrounds Eckel, who, like Seinfeld himself, is wont to volunteer his musings on the world. Some of which are bound to spark a few locker-room arguments.

For instance, when the subject is food, he'll take on the Mids' many Texans.

"Those guys from Texas will tell you about Texas barbecue," Eckel asserts. "But that's ridiculous. I can't cook and I can barbecue. So there you go, there's barbecue for you."

If it's football, Ohio is fair game.

"Freshman and sophomore year it was a big deal, 'Who's got better football, Ohio or PA?'" says Divis, a proud Buckeye. "It will come up every once in a while and we're all still adamant about our respective states. (Kyle) doesn't let anything slide."

And then there are the random thoughts expressed in a daily dose of Eckel's top-five rankings, conjured up to pass the time before practice.

"In the training room waiting in line to get taped, I would just start talking about some random stuff," Kyle explains. "Top five plays, top five movies and so on. It gets everybody involved and everybody starts laughing."

But there's one list he has yet to compile.

"Football moments?" a bemused Eckel says when asked about the top-five memories from his career to date. "Haven't even thought about it."