Johnette Howard and Christine Brennan
Chris--
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StumbleUponYou know sports are getting crazy when the Olympic movement looks tainted by wretched excess and the Super Bowl is actually providing the inspirational story of the week.
Have you been following St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner this year?
It's hard to remember another athlete who went from nowhere to his sports' summit in a single season, as Warner has. There was Fernando Valenzuela during his rookie season with the L.A. Dodgers. And Boris Becker when he won Wimbledon at age 17 as an unknown wild-card entry. Barry Sanders was a supermarket stock boy and backup running back at Oklahoma State who won the Heisman Trophy his first and only year as a starter.
The only NFL example that Warner keeps getting compared to is Johnny Unitas.
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, people there still talked about how badly the Steelers erred when they drafted Unitas and cut him before he'd even played a preseason game or broke training camp with the team. Pittsburgh already had Jim Finks and Ted Marchibroda at quarterback then. Unitas had no other NFL takers, so he played semi-pro football with a Pittsburgh sandlot team named the Bloomfield Rams. Baltimore signed him for the next season, 1956, and he was on his way to a Hall of Fame career.
But even Unitas didn't have the season for the ages that Warner had this year while winning the NFL Most Valuable Player award and leading the Rams to the Super Bowl. Unlike Unitas, Warner wasn't even drafted out of college, though he had sent highlight tapes of his best games to every NFL team. Warner did wrangle an invitation to the Green Bay Packers training camp in '94. But he was promptly cut. For the next three seasons, Warner didn't get another NFL invitation, so he played for the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League. St. Louis finally signed Warner before the '98 season, then thought so much of him (not) they shipped him overseas to play a year for Amsterdam in the NFL's European League.
Crass as it may seem, we both know NFL coaches would rather loan out their wives than loan their quarterbacks to someone. But the Rams' apathy about Warner didn't stop there. They signed another young quarterback, Trent Green, to a four-year, $16 million contract and installed Green as their starter. You probably know the rest: Green got hurt early this season. Warner got to play. Soon he was showing everyone why they loved him in Iowa.
(The people in Amsterdam probably loved Warner too. They just don't remember any of it. Between the legal drugs you can get there and the constant runs to the 7-11 for munchies, I'm confident any survey of Amsterdam football fans would show they've never seen a complete game. And if they do remember one, it's usually only later. Much, much later. As a flashback.)
But it's all ended well. Warner is now the hero of pluggers everywhere--every worker who never got a mailroom promotion, every cop who never made sergeant. His heroic loyal wife is constantly shown on TV clutching her heart or anxiously clasping her hands during games (she's the one with the k.d. lang early-career haircut.) And Rams coach Dick Vermeil is acting like he knew what he was doing all along, even if he didn't protect Warner in last season's expansion draft.
It's a great story, the kind the Olympics used to give us all the time.
Makes you want to watch Sunday's game just to see how it turns out.
--Johnette
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