Nearly 14 years ago, in January of 1985, I travelled to Ireland in the company of Sugar Ray Leonard. In the midst of one of his many early retirements, Leonard was dabbling in the management end of the boxing game, and his hot property at the time was Shawn O'Sullivan, an engaging young Canadian who had won the welterweight silver medal a few months earlier at the Los Angeles Olympic Games.

In an attempt to capitalise on O'Sullivan's Irish heritage, it had been determined that his third professional win would come against a somewhat shop-worn Maryland journeyman named Marvin McDowell, who had been disinterred for the occasion, in a basketball arena in Cork.

O'Sullivan and matchmaker J D Brown had arrived in Ireland some days earlier. Leonard, his then-wife Juanita, and the rest of his party met me in Boston, and we flew overnight to Shannon and thence to Cork on an Aer Lingus commuter flight. Accompanying us were a pair of imposingly large gentlemen with somewhat grandiose titles: Ollie Dunlap, whose business card identified him as Leonard's chief of staff, and James Anderson, the chief of security.

Anderson, the bodyguard, was a former New Jersey policeman who had moved to Hollywood and carved out a lucrative niche for himself as a sort of minder to the stars.

The fight itself was something of an anticlimax. McDowell, who had been imported to Ireland for the purpose of losing to O'Sullivan, almost immediately opened up a frightful cut, and the referee was within an ace of stopping it when O'Sullivan did enough to be awarded a dubious second-round TKO. O'Sullivan would go on to notch 11 wins before champion-to-be Simon Brown beat him half to death in Toronto the following year and effectively ended his career, while Leonard himself returned to the ring in 1987 and defeated Marvellous Marvin Hagler in that year's Fight of the Century.

James Anderson continued in his role as Leonard's security chief for several more years, before being engaged as head minder for the pop group Boyz II Men, and worked that detail until just a few months ago, when he re-entered the boxing world as chief of security for the new and, presumably, reformed version of Mike Tyson.

In the meantime, he has carved out a new claim to fame. Media types have now begun referring to him as "Jamal Anderson's father."

After a 176-yard, three-touchdown game against the St Louis Rams two weeks ago, a national network announcer described Atlanta running back Jamal Anderson as "the best player in the NFL nobody knows," but with each week, that evaluation becomes more inaccurate.

Anderson fils had quietly recorded back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons (the benchmark separating a good running back from a very good one) over the past two seasons, and this year, with 966 yards, stands on the verge of that plateau with seven regular season games left to play.

Moreover, he has accomplished it with a team that has suddenly emerged as a bona fide contender. Rank outsiders going into the season, the Falcons are 7 to 2 and tied for the top spot in the NFC West with mighty San Francisco going into this weekend's clash in Atlanta.

The Falcons-49ers game is already sold out, the first time that's happened at the 71,000-seat Georgia Dome since a game against Dallas over four years ago - "and 30,000 people were cheering for the Cowboys at that game," pointed out Anderson.

Although he grew up with film stars and boxing champions parading through his home, Jamal Anderson never wanted to be anything but a football player.

"It was always football," said his father from Tyson's training camp in Phoenix last week. "Jamal never had a boxing glove on his hand in his life."

Ollie Dunlap recalled an occasion when he and Sugar Ray Leonard attended one of Jamal's games in a Pee-Wee league for boys under-12. "He was 11-years-old, but even then you could see he was a man among boys," said Dunlap. "He just ran over people."

Although he was a high school star in California, Anderson wound up playing his college ball at Utah, not exactly a football powerhouse, and he wasn't selected until the seventh and final round of the 1994 NFL draft. He was the 24th running back selected that year.

("And I can tell you what each and every guy taken ahead of me has done every week since," he says with a grin now.)

He arrived at the Falcons' training camp to find himself pencilled in as the fifth-string running back on the depth chart. He promptly took a grease pencil and drew an arrow "promoting" himself to the top spot. In actuality, it took him a couple of years to achieve that station, but bear in mind that seventh-round draft choices aren't even expected to make the roster.

In last week's 41-10 rout - on the road - against New England, Anderson had another 100-yard, two-touchdown game, including one in which he broke into the clear and found himself facing Ted Johnson, the Patriots' $5 million middle linebacker, whom he deftly dispatched with an old-fashioned stiff-arm on his way into the end zone.

Jamal's emergence into nascent super-stardom has been so abrupt that many football fans are surprised to learn that he has been in the league for five hard-working years. Handsome, bright, and articulate, he grew up surrounded by the trappings of fame, but says he never sought advice from the pantheon of celebrities who passed through his family living-room.

"Well, maybe lessons in life," he said. "I watched how they interacted with different people. Just seeing how they handled their success was the best advice I could have gotten."

"But I think it was a very important part of who is is now," said his father.

James Anderson will not be among those at the Georgia Dome this Sunday. He and Tyson will be travelling to New York, where next Tuesday the former heavyweight champion will officially announce his January 16th Las Vegas comeback bout against Frans Botha.

"No matter what Jamal does in the NFL, he's never going to get too big for his britches," promised his dad, "because of the people he grew up knowing. No matter how big he gets, he knows he'll still be pretty small potatoes compared to people like Ali and Ray. I think that's helped keep him humble. It's why he has his feet on the ground."