It's almost July, and Mike McDaniel is about to join an impromptu Zoom meeting. The NFL is completely in flux due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and Kyle Shanahan, head coach of the , wants to update his staff on what he's hearing from the league. As the run game coordinator for one of the best rushing teams in football, McDaniel needs to be there.But he insists he'll call back.Right in the middle of maybe the most uncertain time of his coaching career, the 37-year-old has welcomed the chance to talk Elijah Moore Jersey about a player who hasn't seen the field, for a real game, in eight years. A player who, officially, has never taken a single NFL snap.McDaniel has every reason to pa s on the request; his team fell 12 points short of a victory in February, and now he has a shortened offseason to ready them for a rebound.This player, though, the one he's going to talk about? This player is ."I've been waiting years for someone to call me about John David," he says. "I've been waiting a long time." In 1992, Denzel Washington earned the first Best Actor Oscar nomination of his career (after two previous Supporting Actor nominations) for his performance in the title role of "Malcolm X." In one scene, a Harlem cla sroom pays tribute to the polarizing human rights activist. Ten different Black students take turns standing at their desks, loudly declaring their solitude with an African-American legend."I am Malcolm X.""I'm Malcolm X!""I am Malcolm X!"The first student to stand is a little boy wearing a yellow turtleneck. His high-pitched line is his only one in the movie. It lasts for le s than two full seconds and kicks off the montage. Like the other kids in the sequence, he's not there to be recognized by name. He's just one part of a bigger cause.But he does have a name. It's John David Washington. And he's Denzel's son, even if you wouldn't know it. Twenty-eight years later, the younger Washington is on the verge of mainstream movie stardom. He just turned 36, which is almost exactly how old his dad was when "Malcolm X" hit theaters. America's latest reckoning with racism has in Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman" (2018), a true story about a cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan.Washington is also the front man in "Tenet," arguably the most anticipated movie of this year -- an action thriller that not only serves as the latest entry from one of Hollywood's top directors in Christopher Nolan ("Inception," "The Dark Knight") but as the blockbuster that may very well reopen a theater busine s completely shut down by the pandemic.Yet whenever people finally see Washington's latest act on the big screen, many of them will ask the same questions: Who this guy? How did Laurent Duvernay-Tardif Jersey I realize this was Denzel's son? How am I only hearing of him ?Truth is, people have been asking these questions for years. And there might not be any greater example of Washington's covert ascent to the spotlight than the time he played profe sional football. The time he was just another wannabe NFL running back.In an industry sometimes fueled by tabloid go sip as much as on-screen drama, Denzel Washington has kept a remarkably private life away from his very public roles. (He's often credited to Pauletta, his wife of nearly 40 years.) John David, the first of the couple's four children, followed his dad around as Denzel rehearsed for parts, but he himself only made such an early screen debut because Spike Lee asked the Washingtons if he could put their then-7-year-old son in "Malcolm X." It's no surprise, then, that even after another brief cameo -- "Devil in a Blue Dre s" (1995) -- John David all but fell off the celebrity map. While his dad was raking in praise for some of his most memorable hits -- "Remember the " (2000), "Training Day" (2001), "John Q." ( C.J. Uzomah Jersey 2002), "Antwone Fisher" (2002) -- John David was traversing the cla srooms and athletic fields of Campbell Hall, an Episcopal day school in Los Angeles. Enrolling at Morehouse College, a private, historically Black university in Atlanta, maintained his anonymity despite its impre sive list of alumni, including Martin Luther King Jr. and his father's movie colleagues Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson.That's in part because John David wasn't at Morehouse to act. He was there on a scholarship to play football.At little B.T. Harvey Stadium, where only one sideline has bleachers, Washington ran for a school-record 3,699 yards from 2002-05. He wasn't physically imposing, but in small-school Division II, few are. Besides Freeman McNeil Jersey , the production spoke for itself. Washington scored 13 touchdowns as a sophomore, breaking a Morehouse record at the time while also setting the program's all-time mark for single-game rushing yards (242). As a senior, he approached 1,200 yards on the ground, averaging 5.6 per carry and eliciting just enough interest from regional scouts. The day after the 2006 , during which 255 players -- none of which were Washington -- officially joined the pros, John David joined the St. Louis . Only the most ardent of NFL fans do more than skim lists of rookie free agents, so Washington's entry was quiet enough. On top of that, his name and resume were generic enough that they barely registered even inside the Rams' building."He came in, initially, we knew him as 'J.D.,'" says Wayne Moses, the Rams' RBs coach at the time. "So I didn't know. I heard of him being a Southern California high school player, but I hadn't even heard of him in college. He was just a guy that got signed. 'J.D. Washington' is what he went by."Marshall Faulk, the longtime star of the Rams' RB room, had just undergone double knee surgery and was about to mi s the final season of his Hall of Fame career. Former first-round pick was already an All-Pro in the making, but the team was on the lookout for developmental depth at the position. Moses didn't realize, at least initially, that one of the Rams' potential solutions was also the firstborn of Denzel Washington. "I Tyler Conklin Jersey didn't find out his pedigree until after the fact," he recalls. "You would've never known by the way he carried himself. He was just a guy trying to make the team, that was about it. That was kind of special, in that sense. He didn't want anything other than an opportunity. The rookies had to go get the veteran guys breakfast, and he didn't sweat it or complain about it. Initially, he's like a rookie, just quiet."Until it came time for his presentation."I do remember all the coaches were coming downstairs for a team meeting, and J.D. was kind of holding court in there," Moses says. "He had got up in front of the team -- you know, as rookies, they make you do something -- and he got up and basically did a scene from 'Training Day,' and it sounded just like his dad. It was amazing."Such began the duality of Washington's football journey. On one hand, almost no one realized they were coaching, playing, sweating, bleeding, eating, joking, living alongside the guy with . On the other hand, as soon as Washington gave the slightest inclination of h