Dolphins at Dallas: Amari Cooper leads his boyhood team against his 'Boys

ARLINGTON - Amari Cooper has a photo stashed on his phone from a dozen years ago, when the Super Bowl came to his Miami hometown and he posed with cardboard cutouts of some of the Dolphins players he idolized.

“There were always those thoughts,” Cooper says now, when asked he even back then he harbored NFL dreams. "Especially at that time because I think I was (12). I was a football player at that time.”

He's a football player now, too, and an elite one, as today his 2-0 Dallas Cowboys play host to the favorite team of his boyhood. Cooper, a three-time Pro Bowl receiver in just four NFL seasons, stared at Miami Northwestern High, and then of course at Alabama. Before that, though, he learned to play football starting at age 5 on the asphalt of "The Barnyard,'' an after-school program in his old Coconut Grove neighborhood.

Cooper's favorite Dolphins, he's said over the years, include Ricky Williams, Zack Thomas, Jason Taylor, Chris Chambers, Patrick Surtain, Sam Madison, Ronnie Brown.

“Most of my memories from being a young kid come from The Barnyard,” Cooper told the Bay Area media when he played for the Raiders. “It’s where I grew up. It’s where I got my sense of everything.”

He has in the past talked about how "cool'' it was to play against the Dolphins. But Cooper, a three-time Pro Bowler in just four NFL seasons who came to Dallas from the Raiders in last October's blockbuster trade, seems beyond that now. Indeed, his job this week has been not to idolize the Dolphins, but rather to convince his teammates that they aren't as poor as their 0-2 record would suggest.

“When I was on a team that probably got beat like that, I didn’t feel like we sucked,'' Amari says. "I just felt like we had a bad game. That’s how I feel about the Dolphins. I don’t feel like they suck.”

Cooper then noted that Miami boasts some talent, particularly in the form of Xavien Howard the cornerback.

"They have a Pro Bowl corner over there,'' Cooper said.

In fact, Cooper knows Howard first-hand; This will be the third consecutive season Howard's faced Cooper. In 2017, the Raiders' Cooper had four catches for 58 yards. Last year he had just two catches against the Dolphins, for 18 yards -- and Howard actually matched that with two interceptions.

Honestly, though, in terms of "talent realized,'' the Dolphins cannot match Cooper's Cowboys, thus the 22-point spread. And heck, if you look at the list of kids who came out of Amari's old neighborhood? One assembled list of South Florida kids who've made an NFL name for themselves: Teddy Bridgewater, Isaac Bruce, Antonio Brown, Kelvin Benjamin, Elvis Dumervil, Frank Gore, Al Harris, T.Y. Hilton, Steve Hutchinson, Michael Irvin, Andre Johnson, Chad Johnson, Willis McGahee, Mike McKenzie, Bryant McKinnie, Lamar Miller, Dan Morgan, Santana Moss, Antrel Rolle, Samari Rolle, Asante Samuel, Sean Taylor, Stephen Tulloch, Jonathan Vilma.

When Amari was with the Raiders, one of the other receivers was Johnny Holton, a childhood friend of Cooper’s who grew up in Coconut Grove and attended "The Barnyard.'' Cooper, Bridgewater and Artie Burns all attended Northwestern High. As a youth football player, Amari joined guys like Devonta Freeman and Duke Johnson to travel to area colleges to envision what they'd be in for.

Not all the Coconut Grove memories are joyful; Amari has spoken before how challenging it sometimes was for his family to find shoes to wear. But the football memories, which the Cowboys hope continue today, linger on ... and one of them is stashed for safekeeping in Amari Cooper's phone.