Rivers is a STUD

[McBoog]

Rivers played on knee with ACL 'totally gone'

 

Don't doubt that his team mates don't love this kid... even if you don't!

[Menudo]

Rivers played on knee with ACL 'totally gone'

 

Don't doubt that his team mates don't love this kid... even if you don't!

 

It was weird, I didn't see him jawing with fans after that game was over.

 

 

I do admire the heart and determination that he has shown. Now, he just needs to mature into a leader.

[Menudo]

Real men play without an ACL for years............

 

 

 

Hines Ward is a teacher. He has taught defensive backs to be wary of his presence lest they find themselves laid out like a felled tree by one of his savage blocks. He has taught his employers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, to ignore the NFL actuarial tables that reflexively dismiss the potential of a six-foot, 205-pound wide receiver with one ACL who can't run all that fast or jump all that high. He has taught fans that a man can average 100 catches and 1,165 yards over three seasons while conducting himself like a thorough professional and remain, for all intents and purposes, a complete unknown in the world's most hyperpublicized sport.

 

But perhaps Ward's most important lesson was taught during the first week of training camp. The pupil was rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, and the lesson was simple: volume is important. If they can't hear you, your authority is diminished, if not altogether neutered. If they can't hear you, you don't exist. And, significant for the purposes of their profession, if they can't hear you, they can't run the damned play.

 

This lesson was made necessary when Ward and Roethlisberger first shared a huddle. In fact, it was the first time Roethlisberger stuck his head into a huddle with the Steelers' first-team offense. The big, strapping, young quarterback, the team's No.1 pick and No.1 hope for the future, reached that mass of bodies, dropped his eyes to the ground and muttered something nobody could decipher.

 

The linemen, huge men who despise hot training-camp workouts almost as much as they despise hotshot, big-money rookie quarterbacks, shook their pachydermal heads and rolled their eyes.

 

"What the hell'd he say?" one sputtered.

 

"Speak up, rook," said another.

 

Roethlisberger tried again, and this time he transmitted enough information for his teammates to undertake their assignments. When he reached the sideline after completing a series, Ward, a former Georgia quarterback, was waiting for him.

 

"You got 10 guys out there who need to know what they're doing."

 

Roethlisberger nodded.

 

"You need to have confidence in the huddle."

 

Roethlisberger nodded.

 

"Even if you don't, act like you do."

 

Roethlisberger nodded.

 

And what of Roethlisberger now? He's the mayor of Pittsburgh, 4-0 as a starter, the talk of the NFL. During pregame stretching, he's like a cricket in a jar, jumping around between teammates, shaking hands, hugging, wishing each guy a good game.

 

Is this the same guy who entered that training-camp huddle with his tongue tied in a trucker's hitch? The same guy who needed Ward to call him aside to explain the meaning of the word "audible"? Asked to describe Ward's influence, Roethlisberger sounds like an evangelist asked to attest to his faith. "There are no words to describe how valuable Hines has been to me."

 

And Ben's presence in the huddle? Ward smiles and says, "You ought to hear him. Loud and clear."

 

It is early in the fourth quarter of the Steelers' 24-20, Week 6 win at Dallas, and Ward is heading out of bounds after catching an 11-yard pass. He is hit, clearly late, and as he lifts himself off the ground he looks over his shoulder for a flag. No flag. He turns and addresses a heckler in the stands, then congenially taps Cowboys cornerback Terence Newman, who made the hit, on the helmet. As a TV camera zooms in on Ward, it reveals a surprising sight: He is smiling, wide as can be, his pudgy cheeks nearly consuming his face. He is not arguing, scowling or woofing in wronged defiance. We are not conditioned to expect such responses.

 

This is who Ward is, though, a man who manages to play a savage game with a sense of dignity but without sacrificing his own savage nature. He plays from snap to whistle as if his job were riding on every pattern or block. He also abides by the archaic notion that the team matters: what's good for the whole is good for the Hines. If he can help his rookie passer improve – a scary proposition, given the kid's first four starts – he is also helping himself. How hard is that? And his teammates say that if he ever finishes a play without a smile, they'll be calling for a stretcher. "He's got to be in serious pain if he's not smiling," says tight end Jerame Tuman.

 

The smile is sometimes used as psychological warfare, a nonverbal you-can-hit-me-but-you-can't-hurt-me message sent for the benefit of tacklers. But more often than not, it's simply what it is: an outward sign of happiness, somehow spontaneous and continuous at the same time.

 

"I'm having fun," Ward says. "I'm in the NFL, I'm catching the ball and this dude is trying to take my head off. Yet I'm still here. That's why I'm smiling. I got up. I'm surviving. I'm living my dream."

 

Unbridled joy and wronged defiance usually originate from the same place, somewhere in the past. The roots of Ward's joy are in Forest Park, Ga., where he was raised mostly by his mother, Kim Young He Ward, a Korean who moved to the United States with her newborn son and her husband, U.S. Army infantryman Hines Ward Sr. The Wards divorced soon after moving to America, and Kim Young He's inability to speak English caused the courts to deem her unfit to provide for her son. Hines lived with his father until he was 8, when his mother – with the help of English classes – regained custody.

 

Hines Ward Sr. gradually receded from view while Kim Young He worked two and three jobs, sometimes 16 hours a day. During the day she worked cleaning details for Delta Airlines at nearby Hartsfield International. She picked up extra hours as a maid in hotels and trailer parks. At night she crossed the street from their apartment complex and worked as a grocery clerk until the store's 2 a.m. close. She worked so she could afford a home to raise her son. She did that and more. On the morning of his 16th birthday, she proudly rousted Hines from bed and ushered him to his present, a 1990 Ford Escort. "I'm following in her footsteps," says Ward. "She worked for everything she has. That's why I played my first two years basically for free. I gave everything to her. Her life was hard. This is just football."

 

While Kim Young He worked three jobs in Forest Park, Hines played three positions – quarterback, tailback and wideout – at Georgia. His versatility was a godsend in college but a deterrent to the NFL. He was a classic tweener; no one knew how to fit him in. Things got worse when a doctor examining his left knee at the combine looked up and said, "Damn, son, you have no ACL."

 

"That's great," Ward said. "Then I can't tear it."

 

"No, that's not great," the doctor said.

 

The ACL lost its life somewhere in Forest Park, the fatality stemming from a bicycle accident when Hines was 9. It caused his already iffy, what-position-does-he-play stock to drop more. The Steelers took him in the third round in 1998, and he spent his rookie year on special teams. The next year he became a starter and tied for the team lead with 61 catches. But the Steelers kept drafting receivers: Troy Edwards No.1 in 1999, Plaxico Burress No.1 in 2000. Ward took it personally.

 

"Every time they try to get rid of me, I prove them wrong," he says. "I'm still here. Sometimes I think I'm being taken for granted. It's like, all right, Hines, go block all the linebackers. Plax, go deep."

 

Cowboys coach Bill Parcells calls the Steelers' receiving trio of Ward, Burress and Antwaan Randle El the best in the league. But it was Ward he sought out before their game to tell him, "You're a helluva football player." At the Pro Bowl last year, Titans coach Jeff Fisher repeatedly told Ward, "You know, we always got a place for you down in Tennessee." Steelers coach Bill Cowher calls Ward "a self-made star, the most complete receiver in the NFL." He caught 94 passes in 2001, a team-record 112 in 2002 and 95 last year. He led the AFC in catches (43) through the first six games for the rejuvenated 5-1 Steelers. Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Marvin Harrison, Torry Holt ... Hines Ward? Cowboys defensive lineman Greg Ellis says, "He's a pro's pro. He's tough, he's smart, he plays the game the right way. He's the epitome of an NFL player."

 

Which is why a recent SI poll of NFL players highlights the Ward Paradox. Despite his jocular attitude and self-made status, he was voted the second-dirtiest player in the NFL, and right now he can't decide whether to be offended, flattered or, as a third option, insulted that Patriots safety Rodney Harrison won the vote by a safe margin.

 

"I'm not a dirty player, but it's unheard of to have a wideout on a list of dirtiest players," he says. "A wideout? That's crazy." Ward, sitting on a bench near the Steelers' practice field, motions in the direction of the room behind him, where most of the team's linemen are grunting and flexing their way through weight workouts. "Look, a six-foot, 205-pound guy is the second-dirtiest player in this league? Come on. I'm going to block you 'til the whistle blows, and if that's dirty, I'm a dirty player."

 

Ward has been fined by the NFL just once in his seven-year career, for taunting after he flattened Browns safety Earl Little with a block in a game three years ago. The Steelers threw a pass into the flat, and Ward caught Little with a perfect shot. Ward stood over the unconscious Little and enjoyed the moment a bit too much. He immediately apologized, but he says, "Two plays before, he tried to take my head off, then looked at me and said, 'You Chinese bitch.' "I've heard that stuff all my life," Ward says. "Usually it doesn't bother me. But if you're going to talk stuff and try to take me out, I'm coming at you. Cleanly and fairly. But I'm coming."

 

On Monday afternoon of the Steelers' bye week, a day after they'd beaten the Cowboys, Ward walked down an empty hallway toward the film room at the team's headquarters. Down another hallway came Roethlisberger, headed for the same place. Pure serendipitous coincidence. They sat down, maybe the only two players in the building on a day off, and watched the previous day's game.

 

They watched every play – runs and passes – and Ward stopped the action repeatedly so he could quiz Roethlisberger: what did you see? Ben would explain himself and then Ward would tell him what he saw. Like football's version of The Newlywed Game, sometimes their answers matched, sometimes they didn't. Back and forth, the two men spent more than an hour in serious study.

 

Ward talked and talked and talked. Roethlisberger talked too, but mostly he learned. He learned Ward's tips for picking up coverages faster by reading where the defensive backs line up, and he learned how he might cut down on his scrambling by detecting those coverages before the ball is snapped. Says Roethlisberger, "He does most of the talking, and I try to soak it up."

 

Ward laughs when he hears this. "Ben probably hates me. I'm in his ear, I'm a nagger, I know."

 

But there is a reason. Ward has developed this crazy idea over the past month. He thinks he and Roethlisberger and the rest of the Steelers can be something special now. He sees the possibilities, and he will be heard – loudly, clearly, often.

 

Inside every good teacher lives a bit of a nag.

[tonorator]

do you think playing on a bum knee hurt his effectiveness?

[McBoog]

It was weird, I didn't see him jawing with fans after that game was over. i.e. in your face Rivers, you lost! I do admire the heart and determination that he has shown. compliment??? Now, he just needs to mature into a leader. i.e. right back in his face!

 

Back-handed compliment? His team loves him. You don't have to!

 

It is funny how a good father, solid player that loves the game and his creator (he does not swear) has been villianized like a Packman or TO.

 

I can provide links, but I'm sure your mind is already made up. When he ran the scout team when Breeser was hear, he used to talk up the Charger starting D. It was funny as sh!t if you ever got to see a practice. He has fun playing football. Sorry you think he is such a criminal. At least he hasn't shown up with a body or kilos of drugs in his trunk yet!

 

Sheesh!

[fballfreak]

Rivers played on knee with ACL 'totally gone'

 

Don't doubt that his team mates don't love this kid... even if you don't!

How can any fan of the game not be impressed of what he did yesterday he's got guts and gained a lot of respect after his perfomance kudos he's a trooper.

 

:thumbsup:

[Menudo]

Back-handed compliment? His team loves him. You don't have to!

 

It is funny how a good father, solid player that loves the game and his creator (he does not swear) has been villianized like a Packman or TO.

 

I can provide links, but I'm sure your mind is already made up. When he ran the scout team when Breeser was hear, he used to talk up the Charger starting D. It was funny as sh!t if you ever got to see a practice. He has fun playing football. Sorry you think he is such a criminal. At least he hasn't shown up with a body or kilos of drugs in his trunk yet!

 

Sheesh!

 

There you go McBoog, defending all Chargers as if they are your own kids.

 

I've never compared him to a criminal, or compared him in anyway to a Pacman Jones or T.O. That is just your being hyper-sensitive. Your continued drivel about him not cursing and how much his teammates love him (as if you know what goes on behind closed doors ) is a little ridiculous. I don't hate Phillip Rivers, but, he did act like a jerk during the Colts game. 90% of non-Chargers fans at the Huddle, and even the most respected Chargers fan at the Huddle were in agreement that he needs to stop the antics. However, I'm sure we are all wrong, and you are right.

 

P.S. Remind us all again that he doesn't swear.

[HowboutthemCowboys]

90% of non-Chargers fans at the Huddle, and even the most respected Chargers fan at the Huddle were in agreement that he needs to stop the antics. However, I'm sure we are all wrong, and you are right.

 

P.S. Remind us all again that he doesn't swear.

if you're a non-Charger fan you need to " KEEP YO MOUTH SHUT"!!

[AtomicCEO]

Rivers >>> Montana

[isleseeya]

i am impressed how he gutted it out yesterday for sure

 

 

But He has to control his mouth and emotions ...the really great ones , the professional QB's dont "jaw " or act like he has too many times in his young career already ...

[xtra]

i am impressed how he gutted it out yesterday for sure

But He has to control his mouth and emotions ...the really great ones , the professional QB's dont "jaw " or act like he has too many times in his young career already ...

If hes jawing back in forth having fun and the fans he jawed with havent complained,I dont see the big deal.

[Pope Flick]

I admire the effort for sure, but question whether or not it was a selfish move. One look at his stats and the score and one has to respectably wonder if it wouldn't have been better for the Bolts to go with Volek.

 

Just sayin'.

[pig devilz]

i have alot of respect for the guy after yesterdays game...tough, determined, accurate thrower

especialy on the long ball...just his being on the field, setting an example, helped keep the Chargers in the game

and brought out alot of fight from his team mates...

i wouldn't call him a "Stud" yet, but he could grow into one...

 

at least he keeps his trash talk on the field...the pressers i've seen with him, he is very respectable.

he's a tough football player that needs to focus and direct that fire into his game...if he can,

it will only make him better...

[AtomicCEO]

accurate thrower

especialy on the long ball...

 

umm... didn't he sail a lot of short passes and come up 15 yards short on the long ball?

 

He should have taken himself out of the game and let a QB with two legs play.

[Chief Dick]

Dude definitely had stones I didn't think he had.

 

And as far as his effectiveness, he drove the Chargers into the 10 yard line 4 times yesterday, so I think that question can be put to bed. You can't blame Rivers for some stupid-ass play calling near the goal-line.

 

While I don't admire his mouth, you gotta admire his heart.

[pig devilz]

umm... didn't he sail a lot of short passes and come up 15 yards short on the long ball?

 

He should have taken himself out of the game and let a QB with two legs play.

yesterday, yes you are right on that.

i was talking in general for the year...and more specificaly about the Colts game

before he injured his right knee....

 

i'm mixed on him coming out of the game...the INT by Asante was due in large part to him

not being able to plant and in some part to pressure by Vrabel...the INT led to a Patriot TD.

 

on the other hand, his field leadership is much greater than Volek's, imo, and the Chargers

needed that also or it would have been game, set and match early in that game...

[Savage Beatings]

Rivers >>> Montana

 

Hannah?

[wildcat2334]

I admire the effort for sure, but question whether or not it was a selfish move. One look at his stats and the score and one has to respectably wonder if it wouldn't have been better for the Bolts to go with Volek.

 

Just sayin'.

 

+1

 

I think a healthy Volek was the better choice

 

Volek> 1 legged Rivers

[bushwacked]

While I don't admire his mouth, you gotta admire his heart.

 

McBoog or Rivers?

[Randall]

LT would hurt his team by playing but Rivers didn't? LT said a 100% back up was better than he is at 50%.

 

Being tough but hurting your team isn't a good idea. Favre has done it too.

 

It is tough but I think Volek would have played better.

[CarryTheRock]

Dude definitely had stones I didn't think he had.

 

And as far as his effectiveness, he drove the Chargers into the 10 yard line 4 times yesterday, so I think that question can be put to bed. You can't blame Rivers for some stupid-ass play calling near the goal-line.

 

While I don't admire his mouth, you gotta admire his heart.

Exaaaaactly. What's sad is there is a huuuuge Steelers related article pasted into this thread. Now that, my friends, was not called for.

 

I tease Menudo....I tease...

[peepinmofo]

I admire the effort for sure, but question whether or not it was a selfish move. One look at his stats and the score and one has to respectably wonder if it wouldn't have been better for the Bolts to go with Volek.

 

Just sayin'.

 

Couldnt agree more. He might have the heart needed to win in the NFL, but I think Id rather have a healthy Volek than a gimpy Rivers. If we were talking about Manning, Brady, or any other stud QB, Id rather have a gimpy stud, but cmon... This is Rivers. He is far from a stud. Im sure the coaches had a say in him playing as well, but IMO he shouldnt have played. At least not the whole game.

[isleseeya]

If hes jawing back in forth having fun and the fans he jawed with havent complained,I dont see the big deal.

 

Dont know any other QB that went out of his way doing that ? not sure its necessary or really makes sense ...QB should be more cerbrial and that whole scene with him and cutler was ridiculous

[Bronco Billy]

I would have been more impressed if he had found a way to get the ball into the endzone to finish a couple of drives. He looked tentative all game, and he appreared to be looking for outs way too early in plays - probably because of his injury. The seemed to really limit the SD O, which appears to have cost them any real chance they had to win the game. In short - he played pretty much like a one legged QB, and it hurt the team.

 

It took guts to go out there & play, no doubt. It would have taken more guts (and some brains) to admit he couldn't get the job done & see what Volek could do in his place when he found that his injury was affecting his play so much.

[Hugh 0ne]

McBoog or Rivers?