They call him "Mr. Suggs"...

I've been following his career for 13 years. The first time I saw him play football was back in 1997. I was a staff sports writer for the Chandler Independent at the time and I was sitting at my desk when I received a phone call on a Thursday morning from a local football fan who wanted me to keep my afternoon free. The fan said I'd be very interested in seeing a running back perform at a Chandler High JV game.

I kept the afternoon free, went to the game...and I witnessed a man among boys as the big running back ran around, over and through the much smaller defenders. He scored, if I remember correctly, four touchdowns that day...maybe more. I went back to my newspaper office, sat down at my desk, and wrote a lengthy article about the young man.

In the headline I wrote: Remember this name, Terrell Suggs.

Well, for all my readers out there who are pro football fans, now you know the rest of the story.

Suggs of course, went on to graduate from Chandler Hamilton High School, played at Arizona State University and signed with the NFL in 2003.The Baltimore Ravens' pass rusher has accumulated 516 tackles in his six-year pro football career, but that total will not rise for a while thanks to a chop block by Cleveland's Brady Quinn during the third quarter of Monday night's NFL game. Suggs will be out indefinitely. Hopefully, he'll be back sooner than later.

It's hard to believe how the years have flown by since I witnessed the young man's performance on a Chandler High School football field in front of, maybe 75 people at the most. Suggs now does his thing in front of 80,000 fans (actually 69,023 in Cleveland last night). I hope he's back on the field soon.