RENTON — Ben Obomanu has been called a lot of things in his NFL career. Before last week, however, starting receiver wasn’t one of them.
Obomanu, pronounced Oh-buh-MAHN-ew, has heard his last name butchered for as long as he has been playing football, but it has never bothered him. Yet even as he enjoyed one of his best games as a pro against Arizona last week, the Fox broadcasting crew still couldn’t get his name right.
“They’ve been pronouncing my name incorrectly since I was in peewee football, so I look forward to hearing the different ways that people pronounce it,” Obomanu said.
Apparently getting TV people to read a pronunciation guide is a little bit tougher than impressing a coaching staff, which is what Obomanu has done this year, earning him a start last weekend and another one in New Orleans this weekend.
“He deserves it,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “He just kind of earned his way. This is the classic opportunity about guys continuing to compete and battle and work at your position and all. He earned it and when he got out there he did really well. So he’ll start this week and we’ll just see how it goes. Everybody was really pumped up for him. He’s a great kid in this program, everybody loves him.”
Obomanu took advantage of his first career start, grabbing four passes for 60 yards and rushing twice for 17 more on end arounds. The yardage total was the second highest of Obomanu’s career, falling 12 yards short of a 2007 game against New Orleans, which also featured his first career touchdown. His solid performance last week came on the heels of a game against the Giants in which he caught a 36-yard touchdown pass, the lone highlight of an otherwise dismal loss.
“It felt even better to get the win more than anything else, but to go out and get a chance to start, it gave me a little satisfaction to be able to sit back and say, ‘One of those things on my list of goals I want to accomplish, I got a chance to accomplish one of those,’” he said. “At the same time, it gives me a chance to look forward, to continue to grow on it and build on it this year and in my whole career.”
That Obomanu has a career to even build on was far from a given in recent years. He came to Seattle as a seventh-round pick out of Auburn, and spent the 2006 season on the practice squad. He made the team the following year, and other than that game against the Saints, made his mark mostly on special teams. A broken collarbone ended his 2008 season before it could get off the ground, then in each of the past two years, he has spent training camp as a player on the proverbial bubble when cuts come around. This season, as the Seahawks brought in receiver after receiver during the summer, Obomanu hung around and won a job. Now he’s becoming a major contributor to the offense.
“Every training camp, every preseason, for some reason I was always the guy on the bubble,” he said. “No matter how good I did, no matter how many plays I made the day before, the year before, for some reason it always was one of those things where, ‘Man, he’s a guy who should get cut,’ or, ‘he’s a guy that’s on the bubble.’ It’s one of those things where it makes it a little bit sweeter.”
And despite having played very little on offense prior to this season, Obomanu actually has experience on his side. What he lacks in game-day playing time he makes up for with five seasons worth of training camp and practice. So while Matt Hasselbeck continues to learn the tendencies of Mike Williams, Deon Butler and Golden Tate, he has a built-in comfort level with Obomanu.
“You know, I do actually, I do,” Hasselbeck said. “We ran a play today and we were talking about how he did his motion on the play and I said, ‘Hey, I was thinking maybe you should do it this way.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, like Darrell used to do it?’ And I was like, ‘Were you here with Darrell Jackson? You’ve been here that long?’”
Hasselbeck, like Obomanu, looks back now at the days of having 19 receivers at training camp and wonders why there was so much question about his spot on the team.
“You know, you forget sometimes just because he’s so steady, he always does things right,” Hasselbeck said. “Just going back from the day that Pete and his staff got here, we’ve talked about so many different guys becoming ‘the guy’ at that wide receiver position. It just seems like there’s been so many more guys than him, and as we sit back we’re like, ‘Wait a sec, this is a guy that’s been doing it right every time. He’s steady, he’s dependable, all those things.’ So I’m happy that he’s finally getting an opportunity to be ‘that guy.’”
Being that guy, however, still may come with a few comical interpretations of a last name that really isn’t that hard to figure out. Though nothing, not even an ill-prepared Fox broadcast team, will likely top Obomanu’s favorite version of his name, one that goes back to his youth-football days.
“Ooboomoonu,” he said when asked about the worst attempt at pronouncing his name. “I don’t know where all those Os came from.”
If he keeps this up, Obomanu won’t have to hear his name butchered up for much longer.
“To have him show up like that in his first opportunity — you know it’s, ‘Here’s your chance. What are you going to do with it?’ — and he did something,” Carroll said. “So we’ll count on Ben to do that again, and they’ll get to pronounce his name right if he does it a couple more weeks in a row.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more Seahawks coverage, check out the Seahawks blog at heraldnet.com/seahawksblog
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