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Koch: Nakamura Reflects On His History With the Bearcats
http://gobearcats.com/news/2017/9/28/foo...rcats.aspx
By Bill Koch
GoBEARCATS.com
CINCINNATI – Sometimes during his senior year at the University of Cincinnati Haruki Nakamura would wake up in the middle of the night and begin to wonder if there wasn't something more important than sleeping that he should be doing.
On those nights Nakamura would strap on his cleats, proceed to Nippert Stadium and put himself through solitary drills, sometimes at 2 a.m., for 30 minutes to a half hour.
While that might sound hard to believe, even for a dedicated player like Nakamura, he insists it's true.
"I never wanted to miss an opportunity to not only get better, but just to make sure that I was doing everything I could to make sure the University of Cincinnati was going to be what we all envisioned it to be," he said. "I'd just be out there doing drills, kind of thinking to myself, am I doing enough? I'd be staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night just wondering am I doing what's right to lead a team?"
That's how driven Nakamura was to succeed and how much UC meant to him. And still does.
"I was a guy who was the ultimate overachiever," Nakamura said. "For me, that place gave me the opportunity to keep a promise to my mom. She always said that she wanted me to graduate from college. And it allowed me to chase a dream in the sense that I was gonna have the opportunity to play big-time college football, and at the end of the day, it gave me the foundation and the foothold to chase my ultimate dream, which was to play in the NFL.
"It was a place where in your freshman year you're having meetings in cubicles in classrooms and playing in front of maybe 5,000 people, to my senior year winning 10 games for the first time in 50 years and playing in front of sellout crowds every single home game."
Nakamura, 31, will return to Nippert on Saturday night to serve as honorary captain for the Bearcats in their game against Marshall, joining with some of his other former teammates from the 2007 team to celebrate their 10-year reunion.
"I was planning on just coming to the game and they told me like a week ago that I was gonna be honorary captain," Nakamura said. "It was quite a surprise. I have family ties to (UC head coach) Luke Fickell. My brother, Yoshi, wrestled with his brother, Mike, at the University of Pennsylvania. It'll be the first game that I've been back to in a really long time, so I'm pretty excited about it."
Nakamura, who played for five years in the NFL – four with the Baltimore Ravens and one with the Carolina Panthers – was a first-team all-Big East selection at safety during his senior year when he intercepted four passes, led the Bearcats in tackles with 95, and forced three fumbles. He also returned 15 punts for an average of 6.9 yards.
He had planned to go to Ball State out of Lakewood St. Edward High School near Cleveland after he was offered a scholarship by Don Treadwell, who was a Ball State assistant coach at the time. But when Mark Dantoino was hired to replace Rick Minter at UC, Treadwell became part of Dantonio's staff.
"He gives me a phone call to tell me that he had switched jobs and was at the University of Cincinnati," Nakamura said. "He wanted to bring Coach Dantonio to the school to meet me. Coach D came and visited with me at Lakewood St. Ed's. He had known nothing about me. My head coach at the time at St. Ed's popped in my highlight tape. When you're a 5-9, 5-10, half-Japanese kid, you don't think that really translates to football. Let's just say it seemed like he was pretty impressed. He came to my house that night and told my mom that he wanted to offer me a scholarship and have me come down to visit the University of Cincinnati."
It was an unexpected twist that would change Nakamura's life and provide him with an unlikely path to the NFL. And when he got to UC in the summer of 2004, he found a lot of players who were just as motivated as he was.
"Coach Dantonio really looked at my class, at our backgrounds and where we came from and what the University of Cincinnati meant to all of us as a group of guys that could really transform that university into what everybody believed it could be," Nakamura said. "We had great players come before us. We had our Trent Coles, Andre Fraziers, our Gino Guiduglis and Brent Celeks. But there was something about our class that really took it to heart to make the University of Cincinnati into something that no one (else) could ever imagine. I think that's why I played the way I played.
"Cincinnati gave me my chance. It gave a lot of guys that year a chance and I think every single one of us embraced that opportunity. That place was a safe haven for us. It was the greatest opportunity of our lifetime."
Nakamura played mostly on special teams as a freshman in 2004 when UC went 7-5 in its final year in Conference USA. As a sophomore, he led the Bearcats in tackles and intercepted two passes as they went 4-7 in their first year in the Big East Conference. As a junior, he played on a UC team that went 10-3 and upset No. 7 Rutgers at Nippert Stadium on national television, which he says is one of his greatest memories from his college career, along with a 28-23 loss to West Virginia in 2007 at Nippert, during his senior year.
"It was the first time we were literally playing for what was the Big East championship," Nakamura said of the West Virginia game. "We lost but it was the sign that we had basically accomplished what we had set out to accomplish and that we were going to be a BCS contender. That was the first time in the history of the University of Cincinnati that we put ourselves in a position to not only compete for a Big East championship, but also to be able to play in a BCS (bowl) game."
Dantonio left for Michigan State after Nakamura's junior year. In came Brian Kelly, who took what Dantonio had started and built on it. In 2008, the year after Nakamura graduated with a degree in criminal justice with a minor in communications, UC played in the Orange Bowl. A year later they were in the Sugar Bowl, narrowly missing a chance to play for the national championship.
"Coach Dantonio envisioned a culture of toughness and physicality about the game that our group embraced because we all had to play bigger than what we were," Nakamura said "You know, if you get a bunch of guys that have been told that you can't do something, trying to beat you down, telling you that you can't play big-school Division I, the next thing you know we're all seniors and we've got all that great fire and edge and we turned that into what we could turn it into."
Nakamura said the players were so close to Dantonio that they called him "Uncle Mark."
"He was hard on us," Nakamura said. "There were so many times he would kick a kid off the team, but he would bring him back a couple days later because he was concerned that if he kicked a kid off the team he wouldn't be able to live with himself if something would happen and that kid would get in trouble. "It was really hard for him (to leave) because he cared so much about us. The emotional toll was on both sides. We were just lucky to have Brian Kelly come in and see what Mark Dantonio's vision was. He saw the talent, he saw the spirit, he saw the energy. He saw an opportunity which he obviously capitalized on."
Nakamura was selected in the sixth round of the 2005 NFL draft by the Baltimore Ravens, completing the journey from nearly overlooked high school player who was headed to Ball State to an all-conference player in a major conference who was getting his shot in the NFL. He retired from the NFL in 2012 and lives in Asheville, N.C. He's the father of an 8-year-old daughter, Hina, and a 5-year-old son, Hayden.
He considers himself fortunate not only to have played at UC, but to have grown up in a family where he learned the value of setting and fulfilling short-term goals on the way to a bigger prize.
"My dad died when I was five," he said. "My mom basically raised us by herself. When you see a woman day in and day out give everything that she has, you realize what the short-term goals are. Sometimes it's day to day, sometimes it's second to second, so you're constantly just sending yourself into that moment, giving everything you have into every single moment of the day. "
It was that mentality that stirred Nakamura to rouse himself in the middle of the night to practice alone in the moonlight on the Nippert Stadium turf.
Maybe he'll tell his former teammates this weekend about those late-night forays during his senior year. And maybe he won't.
"Not too many people knew that I did that," Nakamura said. "They all would have thought I was crazy."
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years – 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer – before joining the staff of GoBearcats.com in January, 2015.
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