Reality Makes Arizona Defensive Back Focus on Present

TEMPE, Ariz. — The rookie Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie’s road to the N.F.L. contained enough bumps to cause permanent bruising. His parents divorced when he was young and he spent his childhood bouncing between the homes of his mother, Melissa Rodgers, and his father, Stan Cromartie.

On his way to becoming a playmaking cornerback with the Arizona Cardinals, Rodgers-Cromartie attended a handful of high schools and played only one full season of varsity football. Opposing quarterbacks had a hard time tracking him, but so did college recruiters. He received one scholarship offer, to Tennessee State.

Blessed with an abundance of natural speed and spring, Rodgers-Cromartie won the 60-yard dash, the long jump and the high jump at the Ohio Valley Conference indoor track and field championships. He is confident he could have been a 2008 Olympian in track if he had set his mind to it. But his immense physical gifts were countered by one potentially serious physical liability.

When he was 5, one of his kidneys ceased working and had to be removed. A person can function fine with one kidney and so can a football player, but only as long as the organ does not absorb a damaging hit. Rodgers-Cromartie, 22, does not dwell on what he is missing because his family history has imbued him with an unspoken sense of urgency, of getting the most out of today because tomorrow is not promised.

“I just pray a lot and hope that I’ll stay safe,” he said this week after a practice, adding, “I really try not to think about it when I’m playing because things like that can distract you and throw you off your game.”

No opponent has recently been able to sidetrack Rodgers-Cromartie, whose play has propelled the Cardinals into the National Football Conference championship game Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles. He has intercepted one pass in each of his last three games while shutting down the other team’s biggest downfield threat.

The Cardinals’ Larry Fitzgerald, one of the best receivers in the league, said, “Dominique’s gotten better week in and week out, and I’m really happy to have him here because he’s going to make me elevate my game to the next level.”

About going up against him in practice, Fitzgerald said, “I think he’s one of the better guys I’ve already faced in the league.”

To the quarterbacks Rodgers-Cromartie has tormented and the receivers he has shadowed this season, it must seem as if he came out of nowhere. Back in Bradenton, Fla., his hometown, people know better. They look at Rodgers-Cromartie, a 6-foot-2 beanpole with a beaming smile and blazing speed, and it is as if they are seeing a ghost. From his wide smile to his winged feet, he is a carbon copy of his uncle Charlie Cromartie, a Bradenton schoolboy legend who died before he could fulfill his promise.

“My dad is always saying, ‘I see so much of Charlie in you,’ ” Rodgers-Cromartie said.

Rodgers-Cromartie’s father was 7 when his brother, still in high school, died in a motorcycle accident in 1973. Stan Cromartie said in an interview this week that his brother was on his way to an after-school job when he struck a truck that had broken down.

His son’s resemblance to Charlie “is amazing,” Cromartie said. He added, “God has a way of re-creating things.”

The Bradenton community’s dreams for Charlie were passed like a baton to Rodgers-Cromartie. On Sunday he can run with them all the way to the Super Bowl in Tampa, a wind sprint from Dominique and Charlie’s hometown.

“This season’s already been good,” Rodgers-Cromartie said, “but to play in the Super Bowl in Tampa would be the greatest thing ever.”

Better than running in the Olympics? “Yes, ma’am,” Rodgers-Cromartie said. “Track was always something I just did after football. I never really practiced it. I’d just go out there and compete. It was going to be my backup plan, but then football came through for me.”

After his kidney was removed, Rodgers-Cromartie was cleared by his doctor to participate in youth football. He signed a medical waiver before playing at Tennessee State and with the Cardinals. Rodgers-Cromartie’s single kidney was a hot topic of conversation at the N.F.L. scouting combine last winter, as was his time of 4.33 seconds in the 40. On draft day, speed ran circles around risk. The Cardinals selected him with the 16th pick.

The Cardinals’ plan was to bring Rodgers-Cromartie along slowly. He started the season playing about a dozen snaps a game as part of the nickel package. In November he replaced Eric Green in the starting lineup. In 11 starts since, Rodgers-Cromartie has had six interceptions, including one in December against St. Louis that he returned 99 yards for a touchdown to help the Cardinals clinch their first division title since 1975.

Stan Cromartie and his friend Herb Gainer, a former football player at Florida State, were championing Rogers-Cromartie’s cause when no one else was.

“Now everybody’s calling us to talk about Dominique,” Gainer said from his home in Tallahassee, Fla.

One of the first to come around was Deion Sanders, the former star defensive back. After Rodgers-Cromartie ran the 40 at the combine, Gainer received a text message from Sanders, a college teammate, who wrote, “He has stolen the show.”

Rodgers-Cromartie will not be the first player with one kidney to start in an N.F.L. conference title game. In January 1995, San Diego receiver Mark Seay caught the winning touchdown in the American Football Conference championship to send the Chargers to the Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers.

Seay had a kidney removed in 1986 after he was shot in a drive-by attack while attending Long Beach State. He played three seasons in San Diego and two in Philadelphia. His last year in the N.F.L. was 1997, his career cut short, he believes, because of publicity he received as a result of his condition.

“It was a great human-interest story,” he said this week in a telephone interview, “and so people wrote about it and that always kept the thought alive in the organization’s mind.”

Seay said the Chargers required him to wear a flak jacket and provide urine samples after every game. He said the only hits that scared him in his five seasons were three to the head that caused his shoulders to go numb for several seconds.

Rodgers-Cromartie is fortunate, Seay said, because by playing defense, he is the arrow, not the bull’s-eye. “He’s in a much better situation than I was being a receiver going over the middle,” he said. Even so, Seay added, “It does take a little bit more courage to do what he’s doing.”

Randy Fuller, a former N.F.L. defensive back who was Rodgers-Cromartie’s position coach at Tennessee State, said that in the pros, especially, “I thought we were all one hit away from calamity.”

The death of his brother taught Stan Cromartie about the precariousness of life before he was old enough to process it. He recently came across a pile of newspaper articles about Charlie, including one containing a photograph in which he was wearing his youth football Sarasota Ringling Redskins jersey. The story was about a coming game against the Philadelphia Quakers. “I’m going to have these articles laminated and present them to Dominique before the game,” Cromartie said. “I want him to read them before he steps on the field.”

By KAREN CROUSE