CINCINNATI – The self-authored comments beneath the senior yearbook photos for LaSalle High’s Class of 2003 were mostly what you’d expect from 18-year-old boys — brash, boastful, ambitious, aspirational.
Not Brent Celek’s.
“Things didn’t fall the way I wanted,” he noted glumly, an apparent reference to his 4-7 football team, “but I still had fun.”
In Celek’s case, fun was relative. It wasn’t a concept that classmates, coaches and family members on Cincinnati’s west side now associate with the veteran Eagles tight end.
Instead, when they remember him, and they’ve been doing that a lot in these hype-filled days before Super Bowl LII, they remember a toddler who told his mother he was going to be a football star, a fourth-grader obsessed with making weight in his youth league, a teenager who didn’t date or party, a young athlete obsessed with an NFL future.