Brown’s Paul Raymond, trying to deflect a pass in a game against Holy Cross last October, has the speed to play in the NFL.

AP / Stew Milne

PROVIDENCE — The word is that Paul Raymond, a wide receiver from Brown, is the only Ivy League player to have a chance to get taken in the NFL Draft this weekend

So how does someone who is only 5-foot-9 have a chance to go from the Ivy League to the NFL?

Well, that’s part of the story.

And, in truth, it’s not even the most important part.

For how does someone go from inner-city Miami to Brown in the first place, arguably a more difficult journey than going to the NFL? Especially when you consider the first time he ever got a recruiting letter from Brown, he had never heard of it.

Brown?

What was Brown?

And the Ivy League?

Fact is, the Ivy League didn’t come up in a lot of conversations he had in inner-city Miami, where he grew up in what’s called “Little Havana,” a place where too many young dreams never come true, a place where he, his mother and his little sister “always struggled.”

“Luckily, we always had something to eat every day,” he says, “but my mother often worked three jobs and we never had a car, so we even struggled to do everyday chores.”

He was born in Haiti, came to Miami as a young child, came for the oldest of reasons, the fact that his parents wanted a better life for themselves and their two children. He remembers living in one room for a while, then his parents got divorced and it was never easy.

He was still a kid when he realized how much his mother struggled so they could all survive. This is the way he came of age, watching his mother work tirelessly, getting a daily lesson of what it takes to one day be successful, even if he didn’t know he was getting it at the time.

The other thing his mother did was emphasize education. For a while, she didn’t even want him to play football. But this was South Florida, where football was king. South Florida, which is one of the best high school football regions in the country. South Florida, where football essentially is a year-round sport, and he went to school just down the street from the Orange Bowl.

And from the beginning he had speed and quickness. These were his gifts, but in the football world of South Florida he was just one of many, all of whom had dreams of one day playing for the University of Miami, or Florida or Florida State.

He had some interest from Miami as a junior, but he was switched to quarterback as a senior and all of that went away.

What he had was a letter he got from some place called Brown in his junior year.

He first came to Providence in January of his senior year. There was snow on the ground and he had never seen snow before. It all seemed a long way from Miami.

“But I knew I wasn’t going to be playing football forever,” he says.

That awareness came from seeing kids around him in Miami that hadn’t made it in football, for one reason or another. All the kids with worlds of potential who either didn’t have the grades or the opportunity, all the ones left behind with their broken dreams and the echoes of lost cheers bouncing around in their heads. The kids who never left the neighborhood, their futures full of might-have-beens.

“You see it every day,” he says. “It’s all around you. It’s impossible to miss.”

It’s now four years later and Raymond’s world is very different.

Five NFL teams came to Brown to watch him work out, there primarily because he runs the 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds, the kind of speed that gets scouts’ attention, no matter what league a kid plays in.

But it’s more than that. In the beginning, he had to make the big adjustment from an inner-city Miami high school to an Ivy League school. Then he had to find a way to get on the field at Brown, find a way to use his gifts.

After his sophomore year, disappointed with the way he had played, he began running track, looking for a way to redeem himself. And even though he had never run track before, he became the fastest guy in the Ivy League.

He’s also used college to do what it’s supposed to do: change your life.

For the last couple of years he has tutored his teammates in math. It started out with just a handful of kids, but quickly grew. One year it was as many as 20 kids.

“Did you ever think that was strange?” he is asked.

He pauses a beat.

“Not really,” he says. “I’ve had people help me out my whole life. Teachers. Coaches. All sorts of people. And no ever asked for anything in return. I’ve been blessed so many times.”

So this has been his way of giving back, something that has nothing to do with football, but everything he’s learned on his four-year journey that’s taken him from inner-city Miami to this world that’s so different from where he came from. This journey that not only has changed his life, but also now has him with his childhood dream of being in the NFL so close he can almost reach out and touch it.

Even if he now looks at it differently than he once did.

“There’s so much more to life than I knew growing up in Miami,” says Raymond. “So much more to life than football.”

Could there be any better epigram for a college football player?

Could there be any better epigram for a college experience, this realization that he’s already an unbelievable success story, no matter what happens today in the NFL Draft?

breynold@projo.com