So often it is the tragedies, big and small, that command the bold type and epic headlines in sport. It’s natural, for that’s where human drama intrudes on fantasy, where games are interrupted by real life.
It’s the story of Dwight Gooden, of Jose Canseco and Lawrence Phillips, as well as Steve Howe and Todd Marinovich and J. R. Rider and JaMarcus Russell. Individuals blessed with marvelous gifts end up bobbling and dropping them, shattering them to pieces.
Such reports are presented as cautionary tales. And we see that the fall can be so much more devastating than the rise was exhilarating.
Every so often, though, comes along someone who treats his gifts with respect and dignity — someone who takes complete possession of the blessings and cultivates them into practical perfection, turning concept into performance action and intangible potential into tangible reality.
Has anyone done this better than Jerry Rice?
Take your time.
Give up?
Rice entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday as maybe the greatest football player who ever put on pads. He was that exceedingly rare athlete that used every play, during every game and practice, to compete as if his job — or his life — were at stake.
He’s without question the greatest wide receiver ever to take the field. The NBA had Michael Jordan, the NHL had Wayne Gretzky and the NFL had Jerry Rice. They were three of a kind, with parallel careers, matchless and vastly superior to their contemporaries.
Rice not only endured but prospered. He was and remains the standard to which all wideouts should aspire. His name is printed throughout the league’s record book and his face is on its cover.
The most eternally impressive thing about Rice, though, was his complete and utter devotion to mining his every last molecule of talent.
As someone who unfailingly presented his best, at all times, Rice exhausted the possibilities. He performed precisely as coaches and teammates and fans would wish. He took his prodigious gifts and spit shined them, repeatedly, obsessively, because he truly enjoyed football and, more to the point, he delighted in being the best.
Even then, he never got complacent. He never rested.
Oh, the new receiving stars — the Cris Carters and Eddie Browns and Al Toons and Herman Moores and Sterling Sharpes — would come and go, none ever approaching the level of Rice, much less reaching it. Rice caught more touchdowns than Tim Brown and Andre Reed combined, more passes than the cumulative totals of Hall of Famers Lance Alworth, John Stallworth and Paul Warfield.
Yet there were and are plenty of receivers with greater gifts. Randy Moss is longer and faster, Terrell Owens bigger and stronger, Joey Galloway quicker and more shifty. Talented as he was, Rice never was the most talented.
But nobody put it together and kept it together with such consistency and panache. He was the most exquisite blend of speed, quickness, skill, desire, precision and courage — somehow economical and extravagant at once.
Underneath it all was a pure and purposeful vanity that drove him to such incredible heights. Rice was too vain to permit embarrassment. If he complained or sulked — and at times he did — it was because underperformance or feeling underutilized wounded his pride.
It also meant, on some level, that he had failed. How could he be Jerry Rice if he made a mistake or if too few passes came his way? His failure was the team’s failure. And being affiliated with even the tiniest hint of failure was profoundly mortifying to Rice.
So he sweated details peculiar and mundane. He reveled in the dirty work because he understood its intrinsic value and the lessons it imparted. He was investing in himself. The famed work ethic was learned habit from his bricklayer father, Joe Nathan Rice, who evidently believed task and perspiration was the proper way to greet a Mississippi sunrise.
Jerry equated labor with sacrifice. And sacrifices worth making, in his mind, led to rewards worth having. He kept his body tight, his mind tough and his soul hungry.
That’s how a man who wasn’t good enough to be recruited to a powerhouse college program and was thought by many to be too slow to make an impact in the NFL became the NFL record-holder for holding the most NFL records.
If there were a Super Hall of Fame, Rice would go in on the first ballot, unanimously. No player ever has provided a more emphatic answer to the question: How great could he have been?
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