The scar just above Dmitri Patterson’s nose is the result not of playing football all these years but rather his penchant for doing flips – back flips, front flips, whatever – when he was a kid, growing up in Miami.
And he did them “off houses, roofs, walls,” the Eagles cornerback recalled the other day in the locker room of the team’s practice facility.
“This one,” he said, referring to the scar, “was off, like, a stage. I was in a cafeteria. I did a front flip.”
The subject then turned to making the two-footed leap into a starting role, something he might be asked to do Sunday night in Chicago, should Sheldon Brown be unable to go because of the hamstring pull he suffered last week in San Diego. It would be the first start in Patterson’s four NFL seasons.
Brown is listed as questionable, meaning that officially there is a 50-50 chance he will play. But you have to believe he will give it a shot, because he always does. He has never missed a game in his eight-year NFL career, playing in 133 in a row (including 12 playoff games), and starting 88 of the last 89 regular-season games. (Fact is, Brown has never missed a game since he started playing football in sixth grade.)
That kind of toughness always resonates in a testosterone-soaked NFL locker room.
“That’s really big,” Patterson said. “Actually it’s pretty amazing to play eight years and never miss a game.”
As a result, Patterson added, “I watch him a lot. I didn’t really know much about him (before signing with the Eagles as a free agent last January), but now that I’ve been in this scheme, I have a new-found respect for him.”
Which is all Brown is shooting for.
“I care for the guys I play with, and I think I’m an important piece to that sort of puzzle,” he said. “That’s why I play through some things. Not for anybody else – just for the guys that go to training camp and stuff like that. I know they appreciate it.”
As opposed to, say, the front office; he has been miffed about his contract for a while now, and skipped some minicamps as a result. But he promised back in the spring that there would be no drama, that he would show up and play, same as always. And that’s what he has done.
“For me it’s just playing in the game, what I trained for in the offseason to do,” he said. “For me, when I’m training in the offseason, I’m training my mind and mentality to play a 16-game season. When I go to training camp, I’m preparing for that. When you have a setback and miss some of that time, it’s kind of frustrating. ... The game’s the fun part. The other stuff is pretty much crap.”
He played with a sports hernia in 2003, an injury that required postseason surgery, but couldn’t remember any injury before this one that came close to keeping him out of the lineup. And never mind that last week, in the days leading up to the game against the Chargers, he had one of those electrical stimulators hooked up to his right ankle, after rolling it against Dallas.
No big deal, apparently. Almost nothing is, where he is concerned.
Which is why he can be expected to be out there Sunday, giving it a shot. It’s what he does.
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