MKRob Sports

Jay Brophy would pull his helmet over a big Afro and a menacing black beard when we knew him. He was a kid becoming a man and those were some of the good old days for football in Miami.

Brophy was a defensive force, helping the Hurricanes win their first college national championship in the 1983 season, and the very next year he was an NFL rookie playing for the hometown Dolphins in what would be their last Super Bowl appearance.

”I played for a national championship back to back years for the same city. How fantastic that was!” Brophy said Thursday. “Now nobody even remembers me playing. Kids today would have to Google me.”

Brophy has a whole new look at age 48, clean-shaven with a bald head, and a whole new claim to fame, too.

‘The most-asked question of me now is, `Did you coach LeBron James?’ And, ‘What’s LeBron James like?’ ”

King James is the biggest star in the NBA today and arguably in all of sports, a perch feathered by the 49 points he scored for the Cleveland Cavaliers in Wednesday night’s playoff game vs. Orlando.

Watching on TV from his home in Akron, Ohio, though, ”I was remembering him as this 14-year-old freshman with the skinny frame and the long body,” Brophy said. “I’ll admit I was thinking how there’s a little tiny piece of me somewhere in how he turned out. I sat in my chair and just chuckled.”

What are the odds? What were the chances that a former University of Miami linebacker and three-year Dolphin would go on to coach LeBron James — not in basketball, but in football — and be an eye-witnesses as the kid began to become a national phenomenon.

Brophy called his receiver, “L.J.”

James called Brophy, “Coach Bro.”

Basketball was the sport that drew national attention to James and St. Vincent-St. Mary High in Akron. Games were moved off campus to the University of Akron arena to accommodate the demand, and sold out. ESPN began to televise all of James’ games.

”It was a road show,” Brophy said. “It was nuts. Everyone wanted to see LeBron.”

But James also played football his first three years of high school, the last two with Brophy as his head coach.

He was no less phenomenal with the oblong ball.

His junior year he caught 61 passes for 1,245 yards and 16 touchdowns, obliging hundreds of autographs seekers after most games. He was all-state.

If James hadn’t opted for basketball — and nobody on Earth would dare claim he made a bad decision — the consensus is he would have been a star in the NFL, too. Are you kidding? A 6-8 receiver with his combination of strength, graceful athleticism and leaping ability?

He portrays a Cleveland Browns receiver in a State Farm commercial, and that was his dream before the NBA ever was. Football was his first love; he still returns to Akron every summer and plays flag football with old friends. Cavaliers general manager Danny Ferry says he thinks James could have been an all-pro in football.

James, 24, agrees. ”If I put my mind to it,” he said recently.

”A cross between Harold Carmichael and Randy Moss,” guesses Brophy. “When we got him he was a 6-4 freshman making one-handed catches effortlessly. By his junior year he was a huge, strong 6-8 guy who could fly, lining up against cornerbacks who were 5-6, 5-7. It was funny.”

Brophy recalls how admirably James handled the surrounding circus and stampeding celebrity. Recalls a team clown who kept his teammates loose with his antics when the cameras weren’t around.

”Once in a practice,” Brophy said, “he runs the option without his helmet on and keeps running for a hundred yards, screaming at the top of his lungs the whole time.”

Gravity’s pull — not so much nature’s gravity as the gravity of future mega-millions to be made — led him away from football to concentrate full-time on his meal ticket after his junior season.

(Can you blame Brophy for keeping James’ helmet and pads that whole next season in case the phenom might change his mind?)

These days Brophy is head coach at McKinley High in tiny Sebring, Ohio, a village all of 2.1 square miles. It is a volunteer job, and he says it will be his last in coaching before retiring. He has two grown children and grandkids from a first marriage and a 2-year-old daughter from his present marriage.

Football beat him up pretty good. He receives NFL disability payments. A second hip was just replaced. He has had surgery on his foot, shoulder, thumb and groin, too. Takes shots in the back for a disk problem.

Brophy is working on a book that he hopes will give voice to the typical NFL career. Not the career that results in stardom and riches and a waiting job yakking on ESPN, but the uncelebrated, brief career of ”the marginal player like me who gets to that level but then has to return to the real world.” He says on bad days it is a ”chore” to tie his shoes or pick up his toddler.

The book won’t be all sad, though.

A UM championship ring will be sparkling somewhere in its pages.

So, much later, will the memory of the player who caught passes for ”Coach Bro” before he went on to become King James.

”We won’t see the likes of him again,” Jay Brophy said. “And I got to be there. It was a hell of a ride.”