Bears' Benson passed on baseball

Bo Jackson did it. For a while anyway. So did Deion Sanders and Brian Jordan.

All three had varying degrees of success while trying to play two professional sports at once. Talk to Jesse Benavidez, and he'll tell you that Cedric Benson could have matched any of them.

Benson will take the field Sunday in Miami, looking to help the Chicago Bears win their first Super Bowl in more than two decades. But Benavidez, who coaches baseball at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, believes that Benson could just as easily have been helping the Dodgers in their playoff push last October.

Benavidez has been the coach at RELHS for 16 years and was one of the first people to see Benson's potential as a baseball player. He certainly wasn't the last, though. The Dodgers, also sensing they may have found a Bo Jackson clone, selected Benson in the 12th round of the 2001 First-Year Player Draft, despite the fact he had already committed to the University of Texas to play football.

"He had all the tools to make it in the big leagues," Benavidez said. "To me, looking at him was like looking at the next Bo Jackson. He was a center fielder, and he had the tools. If he had spent more time with baseball, he would have been great at baseball. But they play so much football here that he didn't have a chance to participate in [serious] baseball [instruction] until the very end.

"He was a good ballplayer. He had good hand-eye coordination and a quick bat. He really came into his own as a senior. I wasn't disappointed when he gave up baseball, though. I told him to do whatever he thought was best for him. It was his decision, and after looking at what he did in football I don't blame him one bit."

Benson, who was a Parade All-American running back, hit .361 with four home runs and 14 RBIs in District 4-5A games as a senior at RELHS before the Dodgers gambled on him. He took the summer of 2001 off before joining the Gulf Coast League Dodgers the following season. Benson played only nine games of rookie ball that summer, hitting .200 (5-for-25) with two RBIs. He had three doubles, a pair of triples and 10 strikeouts as it quickly became apparent that Benson would have trouble working both sports into an already busy schedule.

Ed Creech was the director of scouting in Los Angeles when the Dodgers drafted Benson. Like Benavidez, he saw Benson's enormous potential but wasn't able to sway him from the powerful University of Texas football machine or the allure of the NFL. The Dodgers had been paying Benson's tuition at UT before he accepted a scholarship in March 2004 and gave up baseball.

"He could hit the ball as far as you could see and run before it landed and catch it himself," said Creech, now the senior director of scouting for the Pirates. "We drafted him because of his athletic ability, not only because of his baseball skills. You just have to roll the dice on guys like that. Fortunately for him, he had a few avenues to go on. Our scouts back then just loved him and kept pushing him, and everyone we sent there loved him.

"He liked baseball, but we didn't give him an enormous amount of money in baseball terms. It was in the neighborhood of $100,000. We rolled the dice in case football didn't work out because you never know what could happen career-wise. But we didn't do anything like the Cubs did with the right-handed pitcher [Notre Dame's Jeff Samardzija]."

Samardzija, a star wide receiver for the Fighting Irish, also was expected to go in the first round of the upcoming NFL draft. He passed, however, signing a five-year, $10 million deal with Chicago last month. With options, the deal could pay him as much as $16.5 million.

The Dodgers were offering only a fraction of that to Benson, which probably made his decision that much easier. He certainly has no regrets about his choice to play football. He was a four-year starter at Texas and finished his career as the sixth-leading rusher in NCAA Division I history with 5,540 yards.

Benson was drafted in the first round (fourth overall) by the Bears in 2005 and has rushed for nearly 1,000 yards in two seasons. He ran for 105 yards and a touchdown in Chicago's playoff victories over Seattle and New Orleans.

"I've always been a person who, if you're going to make a decision, go with it, never look back, keep working hard, and things will work themselves out," Benson told The Chicago Sun Times in October in regards to his aborted baseball career.

Still, both Creech and Benavidez believe if he put as much effort into baseball as he did football, something special could have happened. Creech said that if Benson had taken baseball a little more seriously, the Dodgers would have taken care of him financially.

"But I left and went to the Pirates the next year," Creech added. "I wasn't there to push him and get him back for the next Spring Training or those half-seasons. There was also a big turnover in the Dodgers organization, and that's not to say they didn't like him. They just grew apart, from what I understand. It was a situation where he decided to plat football. Oh, well."

Creech also drafted Tom Brady (1995, 18th round) out of Junipero Serra High School (the same school that Barry Bonds and Lynn Swann attended) in San Mateo, Calif. while he was working with Montreal. Brady was a left-handed-hitting catcher of some promise but opted to go on to Michigan to play football. He was selected by the New England Patriots in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft and quarterbacked them to three Super Bowl victories.

"That would have been an interesting Super Bowl for me had New England made it, watching them go at each other," Creech said. "We took Brady to San Francisco to hit with the big-league club when we were out there, but he decided to go to Michigan. It looks like he made a pretty good decision.

"Our decision [with each organization] was that they were both big-league baseball players. When you can play any sport like that, you're a special athlete."