By John Sleeper
Herald Writer
SEATTLE — It was days after Ben Mahdavi’s arrival at the University of Washington and he really had no clue what was going on.
He was a walk-on, in a group with the rest of the inside linebackers putting themselves through a drill before position coach Tom Williams.
Mahdavi was off to the side, told to just observe the drill. Instead, he was off to the side, going through it himself.
"When I saw that, I knew he was somebody who really had a burning desire to succeed," Williams said. "Guys just don’t do that. At that point, Ben was just another guy, but he showed signs."
Even then, just hanging around, Mahdavi was right in the middle of it. And now, he is the Huskies leading tackler with 36 stops, 10 more than the next Husky. Mahdavi’s 15 tackles against USC Saturday earned him the Pacific-10 Conference Defensive Player of the Week award.
"Ben’s cool," said Jamaun Willis, who plays beside Mahdavi at the other inside linebacker spot. "We have real good chemistry. We’re always on the same page. We look out for each other."
Mahdavi let others know what his name was in his first game as a Husky, the 1999 season opener at BYU. As a long snapper on punts, Mahdavi fell on a fumble in the end zone for the Huskies’ first touchdown of the season.
One year later, Mahdavi made two of the Huskies’ biggest plays against Idaho, scooping up a fumble and racing 35 yards for a TD in the second quarter and then blocking a Vandal punt and recovering it on the 1-yard line.
Mahdavi was a backup then. He wouldn’t be a backup for long. He’d just received a scholarship, the only one awarded to a walk-on at that time. His stock was rapidly rising.
"He had the best spring that year out of all the linebackers we had," Williams said. "He was going to start. We had to give him a scholarship."
Mahdavi, a 6-foot-2, 235-pound junior, is difficult not to notice, which makes it difficult to fathom that few college programs recruited him. Even at Washington, the Huskies awarded the last of the scholarships they would give to linebackers in 1998 to Derek Noble.
Noble plays for Western Washington now, having been beaten out at Washington by Mahdavi.
"People thought I was slow," Mahdavi said. "Wazoo coaches told me they thought I was slow. I didn’t think I was slow."
In a way, then, the talk motivated Mahdavi. Certainly, the athletic talent and drive, he believed, was there, given that he was a state wrestling champion as a senior at Mercer Island High School.
Mahdavi accepted the only Division I scholarship offered to him, at the University of Utah, in 1998. He went through two-a-days there, but decided to leave. Utah, he thought, wasn’t a great fit for him and he wanted to be near his family.
Mahdavi decided to walk on at Washington, where he wanted to prove to coaches that he was, after all, good enough to play at that level.
As a transfer from another D-1 program, Mahdavi was ineligible to play in 1998, but he practiced with the Huskies. That was the year the Huskies played Air Force in the Oahu Bowl. Mahdavi practiced with the team for as long as the Huskies stayed in Seattle, but as an ineligible player, Mahdavi had to stay in cold, snowy Seattle while his teammates frolicked on Waikiki Beach.
"That sucked; I’m not going to lie," Mahdavi said, smiling. "But maybe it made me a better player."
Maybe it didn’t hurt. Mahdavi was determined to show the new coaching staff what he could do, and, as Williams said, he did. The scholarship was a validation of what Mahdavi had known all along.
"I thought I was good enough to play here," he said. "But when the coaches gave me a scholarship, they were saying to me, ‘You are good enough to play here.’"
It just takes some longer than others to find out.
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