The Pylons spring edition: The Ballad of Damani Shakoor

Damani Shakoor was a spring game dynamo during his five years as a walk-on running back at Iowa.

It wasn't that long ago when Iowa played actual spring games. Hayden Fry had had black jerseys and white jerseys clashing, with a scoreboard, stats and everything. Of course, the top running backs were a premium. A Sedrick Shaw would play long enough to break a sweat against the second-team defense and maybe put up a TD.

Shakoor, who was at Iowa from 1992-95, always cleaned up. I just started the Iowa football beat at the Telegraph Herald when I covered the '95 spring game. Shakoor came in and went wild, something like 70 yards and a score or two.

When the season would start, it would be all Shaw and some Tavian Banks, who was the No. 2. Pretty heady lineup. Two of the heads on the Mount Rushmore of Iowa running backs, IMO. So, as a walk-on, Shakoor disappeared when, as Fry would say, the "bullets started flying" during the season.

But then, late in the 1995 season, Shaw struggled with an abdominal strain. Banks broke his wrist. Shakoor was, suddenly, front and center.

At that point of his career, Shakoor had 15 rushes for 75 yards, officially. During spring practice, he was a walking Heisman Trophy.

It was the '95 finale. Iowa led Minnesota 17-3, with Tim Dwight catching two TD passes. It was "grind out" time against the Gophers. Shaw had the abdominal deal. Banks had the broken wrist. Suddenly, it was Damani Shakoor's time.

Shakoor, a 5-foot-9, 182-pounder, helped the Hawkeyes put away the Gophers with 91 yards and two TDs on just 16 carries. Hawkeyes won, 45-3, and went on to beat Washington in the Sun Bowl.

"I can't explain that feeling I had when I scored that first touchdown," said Shakoor, who slipped through a wide hole and danced 13 yards for a touchdown with 4:42 left in the third quarter of Iowa's 45-3 win over Minnesota at Kinnick Stadium. "It was unbelievable."

You're waiting for the moral of the story. It's that spring practice matters, game scrimmage or this situational thingie that Iowa started doing under Kirk Ferentz about a half dozen years ago. (On that, you know Iowa and Nebraska are now bunkmates in the Big Ten. Nebraska has a full-on game that attracts about 70 thousand some folks. Iowa doesn't. That comparison will be made and very, very soon. It'll probably set off the great Internet flame wars of 2011 between the two fan bases.)

You want a game. Iowa coaches want repetition, perfect footwork, clean decision-making. They want to see short-yardage, goal line, third-and-long and blitz pickup. It's the 2,000 or so read steps the O-line will take during the 15 spring drills.

Excellent point made here by offensive coordinator Ken O'Keefe.

"It's no different than a concert pianist or great actor," O'Keefe said. "You don't get good by accident. You get good by practicing. And there's never enough time to really get great at what you want to do, just in a two-hour practice, or in a two-hour rehearsal, two-hour recital, whatever it may be.

"Just you've got to do more. It kind of like, [Malcolm] Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule or whatever it may be. There's a lot of sense to that. There's no natural talents. It's just who puts their 10,000 hours in.

"Did you do it like Tiger Woods, start when you were four, finished when you were 14? Or did you do it like -- who know's who, but somebody that took him -- later in life. And really that's what it's allabout and our guys seem to understand that and that's kind of what's helped us the past 12 years."

Spring practice matters, whatever form it takes. Damani Shakoor is living proof.

Who's your Damani Shakoor on Saturday? Let me know. I'm going to throw Steve Staggs' name out there, a walk-on junior wide receiver from Oskaloosa. He's in Saturday because Marvin McNutt is out, but he's been on the cusp of PT. Saturday should be a good snapshot.

Let me know on this.