[Si] TV

In 1927, Ignacio "Lou" Molinet first strapped on a helmet for the Frankford Yellow Jackets. That fall he made history by becoming the first Latino to play professional football. Then in October 2005, when 103,467 fans packed the cavernous Estadio Azteca in Mexico City for a game between the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers, it marked the most people to ever attend an NFL game.

In between these two monumental events, however, the Latino contributions on the gridiron have, unfortunately, been few and far between. Yet, those Latinos who have shined in the NFL have done so very brightly.

Joe Kapp had a distinguished career in the Canadian Football League before quarterbacking the Minnesota Vikings to their first and only NFL Championship in 1969.  To this day he is the only quarterback to start in both a Super Bowl and a Grey Cup (Canada's Super Bowl).

Anthony Muñoz had a Hall of Fame career as an offensive lineman for the Cincinnati Bengals in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.  With two Super Bowl appearances and 11 Pro-Bowl selections to his credit, he is widely considered to be the best who ever played his position. More recently, Tony Gonzalez of the Kansas City Chiefs has emerged as the most dominant tight end in the league and is a first ballot Hall of Famer himself. And Jeff Garcia had three Pro Bowl years quarterbacking the San Francisco 49ers, setting team records for passing yards in a season in 2000.

Add Luis Castillo to this very short and distinguished list. After only three years in the NFL with the San Diego Chargers, he's considered one of the most dominant defensive linemen in the league and sits one game away from Super Bowl XLII.

Castillo attended Northwestern University, a tiny but tradition-rich school in upstate Illinois. Academically speaking it's one of the best schools in the country, the Midwest's answer to Stanford or Harvard. And as one might expect, the high admission standards present the biggest obstacle to attracting the most elite high school talent. In football, NU maintains a relatively low-profile program, though one that competes at the top of the high-profile Big 10 Conference. He played consistently through all four years at NU, earning the starting job his sophomore year and holding on to it until he graduated.

Still, based on his college numbers alone, making an NFL squad wasn't a done deal for this economics major. Not only did he play at a small school, his name rarely appeared with other top college defensive linemen. Early projections had him going in the later rounds of the draft, making an NFL future uncertain. "I was nervous. I didn't know if I was going to be a fourth-round pick, a seventh-round pick, a second-round pick . . . I had no idea," says Castillo.

Then the pre-draft combines came around and Castillo quickly set himself apart from the pack in a series of workouts for coaches and scouts from across the league. In a matter of weeks he went from a hopeful late-round pick to a projected high second-round pick. But even that proved to be off when the Chargers selected him in the first round with the 28th overall pick.

Like a good son, and like the authentically humble young man he truly is, he credits his mother Maria who migrated from DR at age 39 and started her own business by selling shampoo imported from her home country in the United States. "Watching her work hard for all those years, to not only take care of herself but making sure that I was well-taken care of, I could never start something and not give it all that I had."

It was also his mother who instilled in him a fiery pride for his Dominican heritage. Now Castillo stands poised to make an impact for his mother's homeland and the land of his childhood in the most un-Dominican of sports.

"There have been a few Dominicans that managed to bounce around the league for a while, but there hasn't really been one that's made much of a mark," he says. So far, the only thing Castillo has bounced around is opposing quarterbacks and offensive linemen.

He's already established himself as one of the best young defensive tackles in the NFL after three solid years in the league. He started the second game of his rookie season and never looked back. Dominican fans across the United States and DR have followed enthusiastically, even if they don't quite understand the game yet.

"They don't follow football, but they support all of their athletes no matter what the sport. The papers reported every one of my games, writing how our team did and how I did personally.  They'd write things like, ‘Castillo gets 3 tackles against the Raiders.' That's normal newspaper stuff here, but there most people had to be told what a ‘tackle' was exactly and why that was worth reporting," he laughs.

Castillo also understands he's representing not only Dominicans, but the entire Latino fan base. "There are a lot of guys that have Latino roots somewhere in their backgrounds.  But guys that still identify, that look Latino and speak at least some Spanish, there are only like four or five of us. Being part of that group means a lot to me."

And it means a lot to Latinos, too.