San Diego's Darren Sproles turns size deficit to his advantage

FROM SAN DIEGO — In a game of brutes and behemoths, the biggest story in pro football right now stands 5 feet 6, weighs 180 pounds and stutters.

It gets better.

He weighed 10 pounds at birth and acquired the nickname "Tank" as a youngster playing sandlot football. His first sport was soccer, and when he tried football at age 8, his mother hated it.

"The first little hit I took, she didn't want me to play after that," he says. "Then, she saw me score and she was more open to it."

Three days ago, Darren Sproles lifted his San Diego Chargers onto his little back and carried them into the second round of the NFL playoffs.

In a 23-17 overtime victory over Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, Sproles rushed for 105 yards, returned punts and kickoffs for 178 and caught passes for 45 more. That total of 328 all-purpose yards was the third-best ever in the NFL playoffs.

He also scored the winning touchdown halfway through the first sudden death on a 22-yard run he completed with one final clever cutback that razzled the Colts' defense on a day that it had been dazzled from the start by the smallest player in the league.

When Sproles runs, he is a bowling ball, navigating the Redwoods. He is like tackling Jell-o, roping a mustang.

"Sometimes, when I'm out there," he says, "I hear the defensive guys say things like I'm too short for them to get down low enough to tackle me."

Sproles is the only NFL player who might get rejected for a couple of the rides at Disneyland.

He refers to his running style as that of "a slasher, somebody who makes you miss."

A bigger problem for the defenses is not so much missing him as it is finding him in the first place. If he didn't go into football, he could have been the cartoon Road Runner.

Beep Beep. Gone.

Philip Rivers, Chargers quarterback, smiles when he talks about it.

"I've got the best seat in the house," he says. "I hand him the ball, he heads into the line, it doesn't look good, and then, all of a sudden, he squirts through."

Sproles, 25 and in his fourth season with the Chargers, did not squirt out of nowhere into this NFL spotlight, but he also wasn't on anybody's list as a likely star of the playoffs. That's mostly because he plays behind one of the bigger stars in the game today, LaDainian Tomlinson. For the last several years in Chargerland, Tomlinson has been the straw that stirs the drink.