Iowa star keeps beating the odds
King’s mom proud how son turned out
To say Desmond King has overcome adversity since he was born would be shortchanging the timeline.
He has been beating the odds since before he was born.
His mother, Yvette Powell, tells the story of being roughly four to five months pregnant with her third son and sitting in a Detroit hospital. The doctor told her crippling news, that she was showing symptoms of having a miscarriage. She began to cry. “I didn’t want to lose my baby,” she says now.
Powell remembers the young doctor, at that moment, saying he normally didn’t do this but telling her, “I want to pray for you and your unborn child.”
“And he did,” she recalls. “And I went home and did what he told me to do — bed rest. And (on Dec. 14, 1994), I had an 8-pound, 151⁄2 ounce baby boy.”
That boy, Desmond King, would start playing football at age 5. As a high school senior, he would become a record-setting player but also deal with the murder of one of his older brothers. A few months later, he accepted the only Power Five scholarship offer to come his way, from Iowa.
In four years in Iowa City, he would become one of the Hawkeyes’ all-time great players, setting a school record for career starts (51) while starring as a two-time all-American — including being named the 2015 Jim Thorpe Award winner as the nation’s top cornerback — and electric kick returner.
And now, he’s hours away from being employed by an NFL team.
“I really want to cry, but I’m trying not to,” Powell says. “It’s right up there with graduation level, watching my son’s dreams come true in front of my eyes. I thank God that I’m here, able to witness this.”
King ’s mom was a big reason he returned to school for his senior season, bypassing potentially millions of dollars if he was to be a first-round NFL draft selection as some projected. The mother-son conversation after the Rose Bowl took less than five minutes.
King told her he wanted to be the first in his family to graduate from college. And he did, in 31⁄ years, with degrees in mass communications and African-American studies.
“I told him, ‘ Now you are grown. You’re able to live your life. You did everything your momma asked since you were 5 years old,’ ” says Powell, who laments never finishing college after she became pregnant at 19 with the first of her four sons. “‘My job is done. Thank you.’ ”
She would like to know the identity of the doctor who prayed with her in 1994. Powell estimates he’d be in his 50s or 60s. She hopes he understands the impact of what he did for her and her NFL-bound son.
“I want to find that doctor and say, ‘ Thank you,’ ” Powell says, “and show him Desmond now.”