Awards Edition
Saturday, April 16, 2011
3
Sports Story, Daily (100,001 & Above) Second Place San Jose Mercury News
THE SHOO-IN
It’s clear legendary 49er receiver Jerry Rice deserves induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame By Daniel Brown
“It’s Joe Montana,” Miller said.
dbrown@mercurynews.com
Then he sat back down.
Two snapshots, one at hello and one at goodbye, demonstrate why Jerry Rice will be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame today in one of the least surprising announcements in sports history.
Rice also needs no elaboration. The committee could pick a number, any number. His 22,895 receiving yards put him 4.4 miles (7,687 yards) ahead of the next guy on the list, Isaac Bruce. Rice also has 208 touchdowns 50 of that total is former Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith (175), who also is a lock for a Hall of Fame spot today.
Click! There’s Rice as a 49ers rookie in 1985, and he’s dropping footballs as if they’re greased bowling balls. Rice flubs so many in one early-season game that Ronnie Lott silently vows to watch how the kid handles himself in the locker room. Lott nds Rice sitting alone, crying. “When I saw that, I knew we had something special,” said Lott, a Hall of Fame defensive back for the 49ers. “It’s the guys who don’t care that you worry about.”
With Rice, statistics tell only half the story. And the other half is way more fun. Rice’s life story reads like a collection of fables. He was born in dinky Starkville, Miss., be-
Rice’s dad was a no-nonsense bricklayer who demanded that all six of his sons serve an apprenticeship. (Rice was the youngest boy; he had two younger sisters). During shifts that could last from 5 a.m. to sundown in the sizzling Southern heat, Rice would stand on the scaffold or the second story of an apartment building while dad tossed bricks from below. If Rice dropped one, the cost of the brick was deducted from his paycheck. “Some like to say that’s where my great catching hands for football came from — I’m not so sure,” Rice wrote in his autobiography. “Brick-catching requires hard
Click! There’s Rice on the verge of retirement at age 42, having turned the NFL record book into a chapter of his personal biography. He’s racked up more yardage than a frequent flier and caught more touchdown passes than Hall of Famers Lynn Swann, Raymond Berry and Charlie Joiner combined. Lott bumps into Rice and commends his friend for an amazing career. “Still not perfect,” Rice tells him. “I still haven’t played that perfect game.”
generate much national attention. Still it proved big enough. John McVay, now 79, was there at the precise moment that Rice came onto the 49ers’radar screen — technically a television set in a Houston hotel room. The 49ers were in town for an Oct. 21, 1984, game against the Oilers. But the night before, head coach Bill Walsh was flipping channels when he happened across the action at Mississippi Valley State. Walsh watched for a while, mesmerized by a wiry receiver named Rice. He promptly summoned McVay and public relations Director Jerry Walker into his room. “Bill had such an unbelievable eye for talent — it’s actually spooky,” recalled McVay,a longtime 49ers executive. “He kept saying over and over again that Jerry looked super. “Bill would say, ‘Look at the way he moves. Look at his concentration. Look at the way he uses his hands.’ I saw it, too, but only because I was sitting at the hands of the master.” The biggest knock against Rice as an NFL prospect was his lack of foot speed. He was timed at 4.6 seconds in the 40-yard dash, which made him a tortoise
“Snowboards” Sports Photo, Daily (100,001 & Above) First Place, by Robert Gauthier, Photographer, Los Angeles Times
“I’ll never forget those two meetings,” Lott says now. “That humility, that drive, that determination — those things say more about Jerry Rice than any catch he ever made.”
fore moving to even dinkier Crawford (pop. 445). He ran four miles down a dirt road road each day to get to B.L. Moor School. There were only 20 kids in his sophomore class, so one day when Rice decided to skip out and loiter in the corridor. It didn’t take long for the principal to crack the case.
Rice will get his turn at the podium today in South Florida, shortly after a 44-person selection committee makes the easy call to include him in the Hall of Fame class of 2010.
As the story goes, the principal tried to confront Rice, but the kid fled the scene like a startled hummingbird. It’s the first documented case of Rice being as fast as the situation required.
The decision-making process will be brief, perhaps as short as when longtime football writer Ira Miller stood before the assembled group, cleared his throat and made the case for 49ers quarter back Joe Montana.
The next day, when the vice principal caught up to him, he whipped Rice six times and ordered him to report … to the football coach. Rice fit in quickly, thanks to his principal-eluding speed, his sturdy body and strong hands, the result of his summer job working for his father, Joe.
Two snapshots, one portrait.
hands and an aggressive approach; catching a football requires soft hands to cradle. Regardless, the hand-eye coordination had to help me down the road.” Rice played well at Moor High School, but the venue was hardly a showcase for his talents. The stadium, such as it was, seated about 100 people and had light poles on just one side of the field. The only college to recruit him was Mississippi Valley State, a Division I-AA school in Itta Bena with an enrollment at the time of 2,500. Rice Rice thrived there, too, catching 112 passes for 1,845 yards and 28 touchdowns as a senior. His coach, Archie “Gunslinger” Cooley, was fond of saying that Rice “can catch a BB on a dead run at night.” Mississippi Valley State was too small to
in a field of 4.4-second hares.
But Walsh and McVay noticed something else about Rice’s alleged lack of speed: Nobody ever caught him. Rice was always one step ahead, regardless of the distance or how many defensive backs were in pursuit. “To get an accurate 40 time on Jerry,” McVay says now, “you’d have have somebody chasing him.” The 49ers owned the last pick of the first round in 1985, but they bundled their three top choices and traded them to the New England Patriots for No. 16 and used that spot to grab Rice. Arguably the greatest coup on draft day history hardly looked that way at the start. The bricklayer’s son from the dirt roads of Mississippi had a hard time adjusting to SanFrancisco. Rice has said that he stepped off the plane, he wanted to get Continued on Page 15
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