Why?
Jerry Rice’s mother, Eddie B., wondered.
When he was as young as 11, Rice would leave the family’s small home on the unpaved Mississippi road and run past sometimes bemused neighbors on porches, ignoring the dust blowing into his eyes, nose and hair. Some days, he would run for about 45 minutes, all the way into Crawford, the hamlet with a population of about 500 and a Main Street one block off U.S. Highway Alternate 45.
In Crawford, Rice was drenched as he met friends and talked. After he ran back home, he was beyond drenched, appearing as though he had dived into a river and then rolled in the dust.
Years later, Jerry would remember Eddie B. shaking her head. This kid, Jerry. Good kid. But …
“My mom would wonder why I was doing it,” Rice recalled years later, as a writer visited him in Mississippi during the San Francisco 49ers’ offseason.
Well, then, why?
“I don’t know why,” he said then. “It was not like I thought I was going to make it to the pros or anything. For some reason, I had to go out there and train hard. I had no interest in football then. None.”
Why is he doing it?
The question still dogs Rice, though the meaning has evolved. On Thursday, it continued to be either overtly stated or implied in virtually everything brought up as media members gathered at the Broncos’ headquarters to hear him on a conference call, the day after Denver announced his signing.
Consider that as early as 1995, his musings about retirement after a 49ers Super Bowl victory were not shocking. He was 32 then, and already the stories about him were honing in on the point that with his legendary conditioning and workout regimen, he was beginning to taunt the NFL’s best shutdown corner – Father Time.
Football, he said at the time, “has been good to me, but everything has to end. When everything starts to slow down, when I’m not as explosive, when I don’t have that fire in me, I will break away and let go.”
It is a decade later. At 42, Rice still hasn’t let go. His one-year deal with the Broncos comes with no promises – not even of a roster spot. The potential for an ignominious, rather than triumphant, exit from the game for the NFL’s best-ever receiver seems very real.
So why? Why do it?
Fun farewell
His answers Thursday, in effect, seemed to come down to this, at least for public consumption: he would miss the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. And if the Broncos’ 2005 season turns into a Rice farewell tour, as long as it doesn’t become a distraction, he wouldn’t mind. And that’s more about Rice saying farewell, rather than the fans waving him into the sunset.
“The reason why is that I still love the game,” Rice said Thursday. “I enjoy it. For so many years, I keep telling people, there was so much pressure on me and I had to set a certain standard, and I had to carry that standard. I had a lot of weight on my shoulders and I had blinkers on. I couldn’t hear the crowd, I couldn’t hear people chant my name. I couldn’t see little kids in the stands. I was so focused on what I had to do.
“And the last couple of years, I’m not the focus of attention. The ball is not coming my way every down, and I’m going to enjoy the game, and I’m having fun.”
But this is a man who had such ambivalence about his fanaticism for the sport that he used to snatch his helmet away from his son, Jerry Jr., on the field after games and insist that he didn’t want his namesake to take up football. It was as if Rice regretted the hold the game had on him, yet he couldn’t walk away from it.
Why?
“I think it’s just the enjoyment of it, of having people come up to you and say, ‘Hey, you brought so much excitement to my life today and I really enjoy what you’re doing,”‘ he said Thursday. “And when you have kids come up to you and ask you for your autograph and all that, I take a lot of pride in that. And the competition. I feel that it’s not going to be hard to walk away from this game. But I want to get everything I can out of this game. You can’t retire from football and all of a sudden say, ‘Look, maybe I should have played another year,’ and try and come out of retirement. When I walk away, I’m done.”
Coincidentally, the 49ers quarterback who worked so well with a younger Rice, Joe Montana, was in Denver Thursday on business. Like Rice, Montana didn’t quit when the 49ers considered him expendable and anointed Steve Young the starter, and Montana had productive seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs. So he identifies with Rice, and can help answer the “why.”
“I played the game since I was 8 years old,” Montana said. “You know that when you finish in the NFL, that you will never play the game again. No one can explain to you the rush that you feel of the excitement and the fun on Sunday afternoon. It’s impossible. You just can’t put it into words. And to know that it is going to be over at some point, you want to play as long as you can.
“My situation was a little different than Jerry’s in that I was in a position where I thought I could still play. … I would have stayed in San Francisco had I been afforded an opportunity to compete. I wasn’t going to sit behind someone who I felt I was better than, by someone giving him the job. If he earned it, fine, I would have taken what came my way. But I wasn’t going to just let that happen.”
Montana’s point about Rice also was that you’re either the quarterback or you generally don’t play at all. So the transition from being the showcase receiver, to being rotated in and out and being the third, fourth or fifth wideout isn’t as jarring.
“Even as a starter,” Montana said, “a wide receiver, you don’t play every down. This enables him to play a little bit longer.”
Oldest of the greatest
But while wide receivers can compensate for the inevitable drop-off in speed with craftiness – and nobody ever has denied Rice’s intelligence and football acumen – it also is a position at which anything on the downhill side of 30 is ancient. While receivers such as Steve Largent, Charlie Joiner, James Lofton, Cris Carter, and Art Monk all were effective in their late 30s, none played past his 40th birthday. Joiner, now a Kansas City assistant coach, came the closest, retiring at age 39 after his 18th season, a 34-catch year with the 1986 Chargers.
As stunning as Rice’s workout routine is, none of those “ancient” receivers was a slacker in the conditioning department, either. And at Rice’s age – soon to be 43 – they all were retired.
Of that group, Carter had what seemed to be the toughest time leaving the game, retiring and going into broadcasting after his 73-reception season with Minnesota Vikings in 2001. (Rice had 30 catches last season.) But Carter put aside his career with HBO long enough to come back late in the 2002 season with the Miami Dolphins before quitting again. When he retired for good, he was 37.
“For me it was so different, I had so many things going on,” Carter said. “That made it easy. I never wanted to be a backup player. It wasn’t like another 200 balls were going to make my career.
“Jerry’s different. He’s a different cat. That’s why he’s the best of all time. He wants to play. He loves to compete. He loves training. Me? I didn’t want to train like that anymore.”
Though he effectively made the transition to television, Carter continued to have regrets – and thus can identify with Rice’s refusal to quit.
“There’s nothing in life that can replace playing on Sunday,” Carter said. “There’s nothing. No gig. Nothing.”
Does Carter believe Rice still can be effective?
“Of course he can, in the right system, doing things that suit his ability,” Carter said. “But there’s the intangible of having him in the locker room, around the young receivers, around a guy like Ashley Lelie. I think it will be invaluable to have a guy like Jerry around him for a year. … To me, there’s no fourth receiver better than Jerry Rice.”
The issue, though, is whether Rice can live with that role.
“It’s finally evolved into that, and I’m sure he understands that,” Carter said. “Several years ago, I would have thought there would be a question about that, but not now.”
Another former Rice teammate during the glory years, tight end Brent Jones, was downright gushing.
“I actually think it’s great,” Jones said. “The guy is unbelievable, and I don’t think he’d be out there if he didn’t think he could do it. I think there’s the obvious component of player-coach-mentor, but I also think he’s going to surprise some people because people are underestimating him because of his age. And I think it’s a win-win.”
Jones said he believes Rice will be able to live with a backup role.
“You’re going to always want the ball, you’re always going to want to make an impact,” Jones said. “That’s what makes Jerry Rice great. Jerry Rice could be 95, and he would think the same way. But I also think that over the course of several years, Jerry has matured and I think he understands the mentoring thing.
“He wants to go out the way he wants to. You can see his eyes sparkle when he talks about the game and the opportunity. That’s who he is.”
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
