Courtesy Vancouver Sun:

Howard University in Washington, D.C., is the No. 1 producer of Afro-American PhDs in the United States, but for defensive end Cameron Wake it has become the symbol of a football career that nearly went Pfft.

Out of the game for a year, Wake reached the height of his frustrations this spring when he showed up on the Howard campus and expected to see a group of prospective players auditioning for the B.C. Lions. They were nowhere to be seen.

In a panic, he phoned around and discovered he had been given the wrong instructions. The tryout camp was being held at Hampton University, in Virginia, about three hours’ drive away.

“I thought, ‘What now?’ I’ve blown it,’ ” Wake recalled Wednesday, after he was named a finalist for the Rogers CFL Player Awards in both the rookie and defensive player categories.

Wake, whose career might have stopped far short of CFL stardom, if not for an extraordinary break extended by the Lions, is one of four B.C. players up for individual awards as determined by the Football Reporters of Canada.

Left tackle Rob Murphy is the West Division’s nominee for most outstanding lineman for the second straight year, slotback Jason Clermont, a two-time nominee who won the award in 2005, is the West’s choice for Canadian player of the year, and CFL combined yards leader Ian Smart is a finalist in the special-teams category.

Wake, who went undrafted following a college career as a do-everything linebacker at Penn State, was signed by the New York Giants in April 2005 but released later that year without playing an NFL game. Despite his remarkable range of skills (Wake can dunk a basketball flat-footed) he was considered undersized for a defensive lineman and too oversized to be a linebacker — a classic ‘tweener.

His dream of a football career might have ended there. Then he heard about the Lions tryout. Here was his lifeline. He couldn’t contain his exuberance. But it went all went south very quickly. Wrong place, wrong time. It was back to being an anonymous mortgage specialist at a Maryland bank, or so he thought.

“Derek’s agent told me the tryout was at Howard, so I relayed the message to my son and told him to be there,” recalled Alvin Wake Jr., his father. “He got over there early, looked around and found out that nobody was there. The agent had made a boo-boo. Derek was crushed. He told me, ‘I guess my football career is not meant to be.’ ”

Fortunately for the Lions, they didn’t compound one mistake by making another. Player personnel director Bob O’Billovich had seen enough of Wake on tape to issue him a training camp invite, sight unseen.

Now Lions fans know him as Cameron Wake, an exceptional player, though he’s “Derek” to his family in Maryland. Derek Cameron Wake decided to go with his middle name last year because it had more gravity, it was more “business-like,” and business is where he thought he’d have to make his future mark.

“It was a downer for him not to play football last year, but we tried to keep him encouraged,” said Alvin Wake. “We told him that, if football was something he wanted to pursue, he had to go ahead and do it now. We didn’t want him to look back years from now and say, ‘Coulda, shoulda, woulda.’ You’ve got to take the initiative, son, to make it happen. And he did.”

Why his son’s career was derailed, however, was as perplexing to the father as it was to the son. Derek, who switched from basketball to football in the 10th grade, got the star treatment from legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno after only one season of football at DeMatha high school in Hyattsville, Md. He made the switch from hoops, his first love, because Derek topped out at 6-4, and the kids playing centre ahead of him were 6-8 and 6-10 and headed to the NBA.

“When one of the premier coaches in the land, from one of the storied college football programs, comes to your house and says he wants your kid, it’s a phenomenal honour,” said Alvin Wake. “Maryland, Miami, schools from all across the country wanted him. And he only played one year of high school football. I was beaming.”

He fully expected to be radiating that same aura two years ago, during the NFL draft. Yet despite calls from several NFL teams throughout the two-day affair, Derek went unclaimed.

“A lot of guys I was rated ahead of ended up getting drafted,” Wake said. “I’d watch them on TV and I’d think, ‘I’m better than that guy. I’m just as good as he is.’ So I kept in shape, I worked out, I made myself ready for another chance, whenever it came. I wasn’t ready to accept that it was over.”

Indeed, the journey didn’t end. It kept going, and it kept getting better. Listed as No. 4 on the depth chart at defensive end for the start of Lions training camp, Wake knew he had to be all-business from the start. He kept to himself, he didn’t socialize, he brought intensity and emotion to every snap.

“When something you love is taken away, you fight to get it back,” Wake said. “To say I was hungry is an understatement. It’s hard to explain, but I was literally burning. I wanted to use the best of my ability to its fullest extent. Nobody was going to outwork me.”

Though he hadn’t played defensive end for six years — in his last season of high school — Wake quickly showed he was the answer, and more, to the loss of Chris Wilson to the Washington Redskins. Wake announced himself by exploding for three sacks and seven tackles in his first CFL game against the Toronto Argonauts, and he quickly solidified his reputation as one of the league’s most relentless yet joyful players. The Happy Warrior’s 16 sacks lead the CFL, and his 68 tackles lead the Lions. Though he’s a publicist’s dream — animated, expressive, well-spoken, respectful of the media’s demands — Wake leads an austere, disciplined life. He lives alone, foregoing television, video games, clubbing and the usual pursuits of a 25-year-old young man in full flower.

“I just have a bed, and some food, I study game film, and I work out. That’s all I do,” Wake said. “It’s a game I love, and we’re here [practice, team meetings] for only four hours a day. If I can put seven or eight hours into football every day, and other guys are only putting in two or three, I’m a step ahead, and so are the Lions, for giving a guy who thought he’d lost one a second chance.